Hungarians have been gripped for the past week or so by a series of scandals in the closing stages of the election campaign. My Hungarian readers and viewers will already be familiar with the strange figure of Gundalf, aka Dániel Hrabóczki. For my readers in many other countries around the world, here is the story in a nutshell.
Last summer, the National Bureau of Investigation (NNI), the Hungarian equivalent of the FBI, raided a boat on the Danube, and a flat in the city, and detained two people, a 19 year old known as Gundalf, and a 38 year old known as Buddha. The action came in response to an ‘urgent tipoff’ alleging that the men were involved in producing and uploading child pornography. Strangely, for the NNI officers involved in the raid, officers from the Office to Protect the Constitution (AH), a Hungarian secret service directly under government control, insisted on taking part in the raid. No pornography of any sort was found, but what was discovered were a whole range of servers, containing information suggesting the two men were or had been cyber experts for the opposition Tisza party. You can read an excellent summary in English of the story here on the Direkt36 website.
We know all this, because police captain Bence Szabó from the cybercrime unit of the NNI spilt the beans in the 90 minute video you can watch on that link. Szabó alleged that the NNI had actually stumbled on an AH plot to cripple the Tisza party servers, and thereby destroy their chances in the upcoming election.
The government and its media responded by saying that the AH were just doing their job, to defend the state from the ‘attempts of Ukrainian intelligence’ to infiltrate the country. They even produced an edited extract of two ‘questionings’ or polite ‘interrogations’ of ‘Gundalf’, in which he appeared open to the suggestion made by his (presumably AH) interrogator, that there had been an attempt by Ukrainian intelligence to ‘recruit him’. The Prime Minister and the government media echo chamber presented the interrogation video as proof that Gundalf was in fact a ‘Ukrainian spy’.
The next twist in the story came on Monday morning, when the 444 news site broadcast a full interview with Gundalf, who turns out to be a harmless looking cyber enthusiast called Dániel Hrabóczki, who looks a bit like Harry Potter. (So far you will notice the references to JRR Tolkien’s and JK Rowling’s remarkable works of fiction.)
In the interview, young Hrabóczki explains that he never visited the Ukrainian embassy in Budapest, or the Estonian one, that he did spend 4 days in Kyiv once, but didn’t get up to any mischief, that he was not trained by NATO experts at a cyber security institute in Estonia (aged 16), and certainly was not recruited by anyone. Most interestingly, he says he spun the AH interrogators a web of lies, fully expecting the government to find ways to declassify what was supposed to be a top-secret investigation, and use it in their election campaign - just as it happened.
“This whole affair proves that the political commissars of the ruling party have completely infiltrated the Hungarian intelligence services and are controlling and exploiting the otherwise competent professionals who work there for political purposes,” he says in the interview.
The government is sticking to its position that the brave AH is just doing its job, defending Hungarian from those wicked Ukrainians (again).
Meanwhile Tisza Party leader Péter Magyar rang Hrabóczki to congratulate him on running rings round those in the state apparatus who are trying to discredit the Tisza party.
This morning - April 1st! - I woke up to a rather interesting post about the whole story by Ádám Nagy on Facebook. The video post - above - is based on an English translation of that post. Plus some other thoughts of my own from the last few days, on that hard nut we used to call ‘Truth’ (or ‘Pravda’ in Russian).
You can read the original post by Adam Nagy in Hungarian here.
Much to think about here.
