How ‘MagaBabe’ and a Fake Investor Targeted Critics of Viktor Orban
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 her a CV describing himself as a “results-oriented wealth and investment manager” living in Switzerland, said he was exploring green energy opportunities in Eastern Europe.
Ms. Marton didn’t mind when he steered the conversation to Hungary, something she knew about, having written three books about the country, including “Enemies of the People,” an account of her parents’ capture in 1955 and the subsequent flight from Budapest.
Today, more than six months after what she thought would be a private Zoom call, Ms. Marton thinks she has figured out what was really going on: an elaborate dirty tricks operation aimed at entrapping and vilifying critics from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor. Orban.
On January 31, excerpts from a surreptitiously recorded video of Ms. Marton’s conversation with the alleged investor surfaced on the 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 operated by “A good Christian girl from the south looking for a good Christian man.” MagaBabe’s post, which primarily posts material cheering on former President Donald J. Trump, was quickly trumpeted by Mr. Trump’s media machine. Orban in Hungary.
Just hours after the video clips emerged, Mandiner, a news site owned by a media foundation controlled by Mr. Orban loyalists, cited them as evidence that Ms. Marton and other people it labeled as “black belt” agents of the Hungarian-born financier. George Soros conspired to overthrow the Hungarian government.
“MagaBabe dropped an atomic bomb,” Mandiner said of the recordings, a jumble of disjointed fragments.
In some clips, the alleged investor — whose voice has been electronically distorted to prevent identification — can be heard prompting Ms. Marton and General Clark to say that Mr. Soros is funding opponents of Mr. Orban. “Yes. Don’t even say that,” Ms. Marton says in one clip. In another video, when General Clark speaks about Mr. Soros’s work in Ukraine instead of Hungary, the video pauses and resumes, with the investor urges him to talk about Americans giving money to support the Hungarian opposition. “No one like George,” says the general.
Origo, another channel owned by the same foundation, claimed the videos had “blown away the opposition’s lies” and exposed its ties to foreign money.
“It’s completely Kremlin-esque. We are back in the 1950s,” said Ms. Marton, chairman of the New York-based advisory board Action for democracy, which supports activists in Hungary and elsewhere. “They 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 after which claimed to be a photo of the user behind it, he said, actually was a picture from a Swedish model.
The first point of contact for the person who fooled Mrs. Marton was General Clark. They exchanged emails starting in April last year and then met for dinners in Prague and Amsterdam to talk about Eastern Europe. MagaBabe posted a partial recording of what General Clark said.
“He was very, very subtle,” the general recalled. “He seemed sincere.”
A telephone number in Switzerland and an email address the alleged investor used are no longer active.
Excerpts from the conversations with Ms. Marton and General Clark released on the 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, a U.S. political group linked to Trump’s MAGA movement. Mr Orban is flying to the United States this week to visit Mr Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
But in the stories of the Center for Fundamental Rights, a government-funded Hungarian group that sponsors Hungary’s CPAC events, MagaBabe’s videos proved that “the stated goal of the American left is to overthrow the Hungarian national government and Viktor Orban throw.” The center’s director declined to be interviewed.
Also quickly jumping on the scene was a new Hungarian state agency called the Office for the Defense of Sovereignty. The agency was established under recently passed legislation aimed at punishing interactions between foreigners and Hungarians deemed subversive. The That is what the executive branch of the European Union says the legislation violates democratic values and fundamental rights such as freedom of association.
Tamas Lanczi, the head of the agency, told Mandiner that the videos pointed to possible crimes that needed to be investigated. Mr Lanczi declined to be interviewed.
“We are not in Russia yet. We are not falling out of the window,” says Lukacs Csaba, director of Magyar Hang, a conservative weekly critical of Mr. Orban and citing mysterious accidents that have befallen critics of President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia. “But we are getting closer step by step.”
Agoston Mraz, director of the Nezopont Institute, a group that conducts opinion polls for Orbán’s government, scoffed at such complaints.
“Hungarians do not live in a dictatorship,” Mr. Mraz said.
He noted that the government is still dealing with media scrutiny, which in February forced the resignation of Hungary’s president, an ally of Mr. Orbán, after revelations that it had pardoned a man convicted of covering up of pedophilia in a state children’s home.
The Hungarian government’s International Communications Office did not respond to a request for comment.
Ms Marton said the operation against her and others involved in Action for Democracy, such as General Clark, who is also on the advisory board, bore the hallmarks of Black Cube, an Israeli private intelligence firm that the networking platform LinkedIn says has its services used. to trap Hungarian activists.
LinkedIn said it has removed a number of accounts linked to the company that have been misused to attack activists in Hungary.
Microsoft, The owner of LinkedIn, says Black Cube had used “honeypot profiles, fake jobs, and fake companies to engage in reconnaissance or human intelligence” operations against “targets with access to organizations of interest and/or concern” to its clients.
A researcher for LinkedIn, 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 was contacted on LinkedIn last summer by a man claiming to be seeking advice for Polish law firms.
After an all-expenses-paid trip to the Netherlands in August to discuss possible collaborations, Mr. Koch met the man in a conference room at an Amsterdam hotel and was then taken to dinner and sipped wine.
Mr Koch said the man “slandered” him for information about Action for Democracy’s funding. Mr. Koch worked for the group in New York for a few weeks in 2022 but said he knew nothing about its finances.
After returning home, he left the meeting behind him — until MagaBabe posted heavily edited clips of a video secretly recorded in Amsterdam in which, after repeated prodding, he speculated that Mr. Soros was funding the organization.
“Action for Democracy has admitted that George Soros is its main supporter,” a spokesperson claimed head a few days later in Magyar Nemzeta pro-government Hungarian outlet.
A spokesperson for Mr Soros’ organization said: “Action for Democracy is not and has never been a beneficiary of the Open Society Foundations, nor do the Open Society Foundations fund political parties in Hungary.”
The main purpose of the operation against Mr Koch appears to have been to add substance to a conspiracy theory outlined in an article. released November 2022 report on foreign interference by Hungary’s National Information Center, a branch of its intelligence apparatus.
The report details an alleged web of subversive intrigue involving Mr Soros, Action for Democracy, the National Endowment for Democracy – described as the CIA’s “soft power arm abroad” – and a host of other, mainly American, actors , including General Clark and Mrs. Marton.
David Pressman, the US ambassador to Hungary, said: “We have been paying attention to Hungary’s use of an element of its intelligence services to target US citizens,” adding that he “couldn’t comment on its origins.” of the recent videos. The MagaBabe shootings, he said, represented “the first time we have seen this kind of activity taking place on American soil” in relation to Hungary’s “perceived adversaries.”
In the summer of 2021, Jeney Orsolya, the former head of Amnesty International’s Budapest office, was contacted via LinkedIn by a woman claiming to be recruiting for a leadership position in Budapest at a new organization.
But there was no job and no new group, Ms Orsolya realized months later, when, shortly before the Hungarian elections in April 2022, she Magyar Nemzet posted an edited video of her ‘job interviews’ and misrepresented what she had said under the headline “Former Director of Amnesty: The human rights organization acts as part of the opposition.”
“This is not just about me being fooled, but about a carefully planned operation to frame me and other people for government propaganda against non-governmental organizations and civil society,” Ms Orsolya said.
It was just a taste of what was to come with MagaBabe.
The main target of that operation appears to have been David Koranyi, a dual Hungarian and American citizen New York 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 ensnared General Clark and Mrs. Marton.
“I had a bad feeling about this man,” Mr. Koranyi recalled in a telephone interview. But he agreed to a Zoom call and offered an innocuous account of Action for Democracy’s U.S. status as a legally registered charity not required to release the names of donors.
Their call took place on August 28, but short video clips, edited to appear to suggest he was hiding funding from Mr Soros, only appeared on MagaBabe’s sovereignty began its work.
“The timing is no coincidence. They wanted to wait until it was operational because they wanted to investigate something,” Mr Koranyi said.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from San Francisco.