Kati Marton, a Hungarian-born American writer, thought she was talking to a friend of General Wesley Clark, former NATO commander in Europe. The man, who had sent him a resume in which he described himself as a “results-oriented wealth and investment manager” living in Switzerland, said he was exploring green energy opportunities in Eastern Europe.
Marton didn’t mind that he steered the conversation to Hungary, something she was familiar with, having written three books about the country, including “Enemies of the People,” an account of her parents’ imprisonment in 1955 and their subsequent escape from Budapest. .
Today, more than half a year after what he thought would be a private Zoom call, Marton believes he has discovered what was really going on: an elaborate dirty tricks operation aimed at ensnaring and smearing critics of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor . Orbán.
On January 31, fragments of a surreptitiously recorded video of Ms Marton’s conversation with the alleged investor appeared on social media platform X, on an account called MagaBabe.
The account, which also posted secret recordings of General Clark and others duped by the operation, says it is run by “A good Christian girl from the south looking for a good Christian man.” MagaBabe’s post, which primarily reproduces material encouraging former President Donald J. Trump, was quickly trumpeted by Orban’s media machine in Hungary.
Just hours after the video excerpts appeared, Mandiner, a news site owned by a media foundation controlled by Orban loyalists, cited them as evidence that Marton and others it labeled “black belt” agents of the Hungarian-born financier. George Soros was plotting to overthrow the Hungarian government.
“MagaBabe dropped an atomic bomb,” Mandiner said of the recordings, a jumble of disconnected clips.
In some of the clips, the alleged investor, whose voice has been electronically distorted to prevent his identification, can be heard pressuring Marton and General Clark to say that Soros is financing Orban’s opponents. “Yeah. Don’t even say that,” Marton says in one clip. In another, when General Clark talks about Soros’ work in Ukraine instead of Hungary, the video cuts and resumes with the investor urging him to talk about the Americans who give money to support the Hungarian opposition. “No one like George,” says the general.
Origo, another outlet owned by the same foundation, claimed that the videos had “uncovered the opposition’s falsehoods” and exposed their links to foreign money.
“It’s totally Kremlin style. We’re back in the ’50s,” said Marton, who chairs the advisory board of New York-based Action for Democracy, which supports activists in Hungary and elsewhere. “They have put me in the same role as my parents, as an enemy of the people.”
The MagaBabe account that posted the videos “is not authentic at all,” said Brian Liston, an analyst at Recorded Future, a cybersecurity firm. A post that claimed to be a photo of the user behind her, he said, was actually a photography of a Swedish model.
The first point of contact for the person who deceived Mrs. Marton was General Clark. They exchanged emails starting last April and then met for dinner in Prague and Amsterdam to talk about Eastern Europe. MagaBabe posted a partial recording of what General Clark said.
“It was very, very subtle,” the general recalled. “It seemed genuine.”
A telephone number in Switzerland and an email address used by the alleged investor are no longer operational.
Fragments of conversations with Marton and General Clark posted on Platform all of former communist Eastern and Central Europe.
Hungary has also supported conservative causes abroad, such as sponsoring an annual meeting in Budapest of CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Committee, an American political group with ties to Trump’s MAGA movement. Orban will fly to the United States this week to visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
However, as recounted by the Center for Fundamental Rights, a government-funded Hungarian group that sponsors CPAC events in Hungary, the MagaBabe videos demonstrated that “the express goal of the American left is to overthrow the Hungarian national government already.” Viktor Orban. The center’s director declined to be interviewed.
A new Hungarian state agency called the Office for the Defense of Sovereignty also quickly appeared on the recordings. The office was created under recently passed legislation aimed at punishing interactions considered subversive between foreigners and Hungarians. The European Union’s executive arm says the legislation violates democratic values and fundamental rights such as freedom of association.
Tamas Lanczi, head of the office, told Mandiner that the videos pointed to possible crimes that needed to be investigated. Lanczi declined to be interviewed.
“We are not in Russia yet. We don’t fall out of windows,” said Lukács Csaba, managing director of Magyar Hang, a conservative weekly critical of Orban, referring to mysterious accidents suffered by critics of President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia. “But we are getting closer to that step by step.”
Agoston Mraz, director of the Nezopont Institute, a group that conducts opinion polls for Orban’s government, scoffed at such complaints.
“Hungarians do not live in a dictatorship,” Mraz said.
He noted that the government was still facing scrutiny from the media, which in February forced the resignation of Hungary’s president, an Orban ally, after revelations that he had pardoned a man convicted of covering up pedophilia at a state children’s home.
The Hungarian government’s International Communications Office did not respond to a request for comment.
Marton said the operation against her and others involved with Action for Democracy, such as General Clark, who also serves on its advisory board, had the hallmarks of Black Cube, an Israeli private intelligence company that, according to the platform LinkedIn networks, has used their services. to catch the Hungarian activists.
LinkedIn has said it has removed several accounts linked to the company and misused to attack activists in Hungary.
Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn, said Black Cube had “leveraged honeypot profiles, fake jobs, and fake companies to engage in human intelligence or reconnaissance operations” against “targets with access to organizations of interest and/or concern” to its customers.
A LinkedIn researcher, Mona Damian, said in November that these targets included people selected “as part of a campaign to discredit NGOs in Hungary.”
Black Cube did not respond to a request for comment.
Eric Koch, an American communications consultant, said he had been contacted on LinkedIn last summer by a man who said he was seeking advice for Polish law firms.
Given an all-expenses-paid trip to the Netherlands in August to discuss possible collaborations, Koch met the man in an Amsterdam hotel conference room and then took him out to dinner and plied him with wine.
Koch said the man “harassed” him for information about funding for Action for Democracy. Koch worked for the group for a few weeks in New York in 2022, but said he knew nothing about its finances.
After returning home, he put the encounter behind him, until MagaBabe published heavily edited segments of a video secretly recorded in Amsterdam in which, after repeated prodding, he speculated that Soros was funding the organization.
“Action for Democracy admitted that George Soros is its main supporter,” stated a headline a few days later in Magyar Nemzet, a pro-government Hungarian outlet.
A spokesman for Mr Soros’ organization said: “Action for Democracy is not and has never been a beneficiary of the Open Society Foundations, nor does the Open Society Foundations fund political parties in Hungary.”
The main goal of the operation targeting Mr. Koch appears to have been to add substance to a conspiracy theory outlined in a declassified November 2022 report about foreign interference by Hungary’s National Information Center, an arm of its intelligence apparatus. intelligence.
The report detailed an alleged network of subversive intrigue involving Soros, Action for Democracy, the National Endowment for Democracy (described as the CIA’s “overseas soft power arm”) and a host of other actors, in mostly Americans, including General Clark and Mrs. Marton.
David Pressman, the US ambassador to Hungary, said: “We have been paying attention to Hungary’s use of a component of its intelligence services to target US citizens,” adding that he “could not comment on the provenance” of the videos. recent. The MagaBabe recordings, he said, represented “the first time we’ve seen this type of activity take place on American soil” in relation to Hungary’s “alleged opponents.”
In the summer of 2021, Jeney Orsolya, former head of Amnesty International’s Budapest office, was contacted via LinkedIn by a woman who claimed to be recruiting for a leadership position in Budapest at a new organization.
But Orsolya realized months later that there was no job and no new group when, shortly before the April 2022 Hungarian elections, Magyar Nemzet published an edited video of her “job interviews” and distorted what she had said under the title “Former director.” of Amnesty: The Human Rights Organization acts as part of the opposition.”
“This is not just about being deceived, but a meticulously planned operation to trap me and other people for government propaganda against non-governmental organizations and civil society,” Ms. Orsolya said.
It was just a preview of what was to come with MagaBabe.
The main target of that operation appears to have been David Koranyi, a dual Hungarian-American citizen who is the New York-based executive director of Action for Democracy.
He said a man contacted him last year claiming to be an investor named George Koufis, the same name used by the person who had entrapped General Clark and Mrs. Marton.
“I had a bad feeling about this guy,” Koranyi recalled in a telephone interview. But she accepted a Zoom call and offered an innocuous account of American Action for Democracy’s status as a legally registered charity that is not required to reveal donor names.
His call took place on August 28, but short video excerpts, edited to make it appear that he was suggesting that he was hiding financing from Mr. Soros, appeared on MagaBabe’s X account only in late January, just as the new Office of Hungary’s Defense of Sovereignty was beginning its work.
“The timing is not a coincidence. They wanted to wait until it was up and running because they wanted something to investigate,” Koranyi said.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from San Francisco.
