\n<\/p>\n
Kati Marton, a Hungarian-born American writer, thought she was talking with a friend of Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO\u2019s former commander in Europe. The man, who had sent her a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 describing himself as a \u201cresults-oriented wealth and investment manager\u201d living in Switzerland, said he was exploring green energy opportunities in Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n
Ms. Marton didn\u2019t mind when he steered the conversation to Hungary, something she knew about, having written three books about the country, including \u201cEnemies of the People<\/a>,\u201d an account of her parents\u2019 1955 jailing in and subsequent flight from Budapest.<\/p>\n Today, more than half a year 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 smearing critics of Hungary\u2019s prime minister, Viktor Orban.<\/p>\n On Jan. 31, snippets from a surreptitiously recorded video of Ms. Marton\u2019s conversation with the purported investor surfaced on the X social media platform, on an account called MagaBabe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The account, which also posted secret recordings of General Clark and others hoodwinked by the operation, says it is run by a \u201cGood Christian Girl from the South lookin for a Good Christian Man.\u201d The recordings on MagaBabe, which mainly reposts material cheering former president Donald J. Trump, was quickly trumpeted by Mr. Orban\u2019s media machine in Hungary.<\/p>\n Just hours after the video excerpts appeared, Mandiner, a news site owned by a media foundation controlled by loyalists of Mr. Orban, cited them as evidence that Ms. Marton and other people it labeled \u201cblack belt\u201d agents of the Hungarian-born financier George Soros were conspiring to topple the Hungarian government.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMagaBabe dropped an atomic bomb,\u201d Mandiner said of the recordings, a jumble of disjointed clips.<\/p>\n In some of the clips, the purported investor \u2014 whose voice has been electronically distorted to avoid identification \u2014 can be heard pushing Ms. Marton and Gen. Clark to say that Mr. Soros is funding opponents of Mr. Orban. \u201cYeah. Don\u2019t even say that,\u201d Ms. Marton says in one clip. In another, when Gen. Clark talks about Mr. Soros\u2019 work in Ukraine instead of Hungary, the video cuts out and resumes with the investor prodding him to talk about Americans giving money to support the Hungarian opposition. \u201cNone like George,\u201d the general says.<\/p>\n Origo, another outlet owned by the same foundation, claimed the videos had \u201cblown the lid off the falsehoods of the opposition\u201d and exposed its ties to foreign money.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt is totally Kremlin-esque. We are back in the \u201950s,\u201d said Ms. Marton, who chairs the advisory board of the New York-based Action for Democracy<\/a>, which supports activists in Hungary and elsewhere. \u201cThey have cast me in the same role as my parents, as an enemy of the people.\u201d<\/p>\n The MagaBabe account that posted the videos \u201cis not authentic at all,\u201d said Brian Liston, an analyst with Recorded Future, a cybersecurity company. One post<\/a> that claimed to be a picture of the user behind it, he said, was actually a photo<\/a> of a Swedish model.<\/p>\n The first point of contact for the person who duped Ms. Marton was General Clark. They exchanged emails starting last April and then met up for dinners in Prague and Amsterdam to talk about Eastern Europe. MagaBabe posted a partial recording of what General Clark said.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was very, very subtle,\u201d the general recalled. \u201cHe seemed genuine.\u201d<\/p>\n A phone number in Switzerland and an email address that the purported investor used are no longer operative.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Snippets of the conversations with Ms. Marton and General Clark released on the X platform revealed nothing beyond what has long been public knowledge \u2014 that Mr. Soros has, starting in the late 1980s, funded groups promoting democracy across formerly communist Eastern and Central Europe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Hungary has also supported conservative causes abroad, like sponsoring an annual gathering in Budapest of CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Committee, an American political group linked to Mr. Trump\u2019s MAGA movement. Mr. Orban is flying to the United States this week to visit Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago<\/a>.<\/p>\n Yet in the telling of the Center for Fundamental Rights, a government-funded Hungarian group that sponsors Hungary\u2019s CPAC events, MagaBabe\u2019s videos proved that \u201cthe American left\u2019s express goal is to overthrow the Hungarian national government and Viktor Orban.\u201d The center\u2019s director declined to be interviewed.<\/p>\n Also jumping quickly on the recordings was a new Hungarian state agency called the Office for the Defense of Sovereignty. The office was established under recently passed legislation aimed at punishing interactions deemed subversive between foreigners and Hungarians. The European Union\u2019s executive arm says<\/a> the legislation violates democratic values and fundamental rights like freedom of association.<\/p>\n Tamas Lanczi, the head of the office, told Mandiner that the videos pointed to possible crimes that needed to be investigated. Mr. Lanczi declined to be interviewed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe are not in Russia yet. We are not falling out of windows,\u201d said Lukacs Csaba, managing director of Magyar Hang<\/a>, a conservative weekly that is critical of Mr. Orban, referring to the mysterious accidents<\/a> that have befallen critics of President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia. \u201cBut we are moving step by step closer to that.\u201d<\/p>\n Agoston Mraz, director of the Nezopont Institute, a group that conducts opinion polls for Mr. Orban\u2019s government, scoffed at such complaints.<\/p>\n \u201cHungarians are not living in a dictatorship,\u201d Mr. Mraz said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He noted that the government still faced media scrutiny, which in February forced the resignation of Hungary\u2019s president<\/a>, an ally of Mr. Orban, after revelations that she had pardoned a man convicted of covering up pedophilia in a state children\u2019s home.<\/p>\n The Hungarian government\u2019s International Communications Office did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Marton said the operation against her and others involved with Action for Democracy, like General Clark, who also sits on its advisory board, bore the hallmarks of Black Cube<\/a>, an Israeli private intelligence company that the networking platform LinkedIn says has used its services to entrap Hungarian activists.<\/p>\n LinkedIn has said it has taken down a number of accounts linked to the company and misused to target activists in Hungary.<\/p>\n Microsoft, LinkedIn\u2019s owner, said Black Cube<\/a> had \u201cleveraged honeypot profiles, fake jobs and fake companies to engage in reconnaissance or human intelligence\u201d operations against \u201ctargets with access to organizations of interest and\/or concern\u201d to its clients.<\/p>\n A researcher for LinkedIn, Mona Damian, said in November that these targets included people selected \u201cas part of a campaign to discredit N.G.O.s in Hungary.\u201d<\/p>\n Black Cube did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n Eric Koch, an American communications consultant, said he had been contacted on LinkedIn last summer by a man claiming to be looking for advice for Polish law firms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Given an all-expenses-paid trip to the Netherlands in August to discuss possible collaborations, Mr. Koch met the man in an Amsterdam hotel conference room and was then taken to dinner and plied with wine.<\/p>\n Mr. Koch said the man \u201cbadgered\u201d him for information about funding for Action for Democracy. Mr. Koch worked for the group for a few weeks in New York in 2022 but said he knew nothing about its finances.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After returning home, he put the encounter behind him \u2014 until MagaBabe posted heavily edited segments from a video secretly recorded in Amsterdam in which, after repeated prodding, he speculated that Mr. Soros was funding the organization.<\/p>\n \u201cAction for Democracy Admitted That George Soros Is Its Main Supporter,\u201d claimed a headline a few days later in Magyar Nemzet<\/a>, a pro-government Hungarian outlet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A spokesman for Mr. Soros\u2019s organization said, \u201cAction for Democracy is not and has never been a grantee of the Open Society Foundations, nor do the Open Society Foundations fund political parties in Hungary.\u201d<\/p>\n The main purpose of the operation targeting Mr. Koch seems to have been to add substance to a conspiracy theory outlined in a declassified November 2022 report on foreign interference<\/a> by Hungary\u2019s National Information Center, an arm of its intelligence apparatus.<\/p>\n The report detailed a supposed web of subversive intrigue involving Mr. Soros, Action for Democracy, the National Endowment for Democracy \u2014 described as the \u201csoft power arm of the C.I.A. abroad\u201d \u2014 and a host of other, mostly American, actors, including General Clark and Ms. Marton.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n David Pressman, the American ambassador to Hungary, said, \u201cWe have paid attention to Hungary\u2019s use of a component of its intelligence services to target American citizens,\u201d adding that he \u201ccould not opine on the provenance\u201d of the recent videos. The MagaBabe recordings, he said, represented \u201cthe first time we have seen this kind of activity take place on U.S. soil\u201d in relation to Hungary\u2019s \u201cperceived opponents.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In the summer of 2021, Jeney Orsolya, the former head of Amnesty International\u2019s Budapest office, was contacted via LinkedIn by a woman who claimed to be recruiting for a leadership position in Budapest with a new organization.<\/p>\n But there was no job and no new group, Ms. Orsolya realized months later when, shortly before Hungary\u2019s election in April 2022, Magyar Nemzet posted an edited video of her \u201cjob interviews\u201d<\/a> and misrepresented what she had said under the headline \u201cFormer Director of Amnesty: The Human Rights Organization Acts as Part of the Opposition.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not just about me being fooled but about a meticulously planned operation to trap me and other people for government propaganda against nongovernmental organizations and civil society,\u201d Ms. Orsolya said.<\/p>\n It was just a foretaste of what would come with MagaBabe.<\/p>\n