“There is no bigger giveaway than this! The leaders of Action for Democracy have admitted: that money for the left-wing campaign came from George Soros!”
A video with this text appeared on the Facebook page of Megafon influencer, Stefi Déri on 2 February, and thanks to the more than 1.5 million HUF (3,7k €) spent on her ad, it has already appeared roughly 1.5 million times in the news feed of the platform's users, according to Meta's data. And that's just one of Megafon’s videos on the same topic.
The pro-government Megafon has also funded the distribution of 13 other videos on Facebook since the beginning of February about the leaders of the US organization Action for Democracy (A4D) and the Hungarian opposition, spending a total of 6.7-7.4 million HUF (17k-19k €).
The Megafon videos in question are almost identical in their content and feature four people:
The four of them are said to have openly admitted in the footage used for the video that the US billionaire philanthropist George Soros is one of the main sponsors of A4D, which also supports the Hungarian opposition.
The footage was not found by the Megafon influencers. The first article about the leaked footage was published by a Hungarian right-wing, pro-government news outlet, Mandiner shortly after the videos appeared on an English-language X-profile called MagaBabe on 31 January. The Mandiner article was then used as the basis for the "big expose" of Soros' role in A4D's activities in Hungary, and the news flooded the entire Hungarian pro-government press.
Already after the release of the recordings in early February, A4D informed the press in a statement that their "informal conversations" had been "recorded by secret service methods" in August 2023, and then published in a "manipulative edited" form, but they did not reveal any more details about the recordings.
However, in an article in the New York Times on Thursday, March 7, Korányi gave some very specific details about the circumstances surrounding the making of the recordings.
Korányi, Marton, and Clark told the New York Times that they had been the victims of a hoax: they had been duped into talking about the donors, investors, and activities of Action for Democracy in Hungary during 2023 in a way that had been used to discredit some Hungarian civil society actors in the past.
According to the article, all three were contacted by a man named George Koufis, who introduced himself as an investor, or, in the case of Marton, a "results-oriented wealth and investment manager", based in Switzerland, interested primarily in green energy investment opportunities in Central and Eastern Europe. (The Swiss phone number and the email address “Koufis” used to contact the three members of A4D no longer exists.)
Koufis first contacted Wesley Clark last April, whom he met in Prague and Amsterdam to discuss issues concerning the region. He introduced himself to Kati Marton as a friend of Clark's. The result was a private Zoom call, where the conversation quickly turned to Hungary. Marton had no regrets, but had no idea that the details of the conversation would be made public, he told the New York Times.
Kati Marton back in 2018, at the Committee To Protect Journalists (CPJ) International Press Freedom Award ceremony. Photo by Dia Dipasupil / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP
Dávid Korányi recalled to the New York Times that he had a bad feeling about Koufis from the beginning. Nevertheless, he agreed to a Zoom call, which finally took place on 28 August. Here Korányi did indeed talk about the fact that, as a donor, Action for Democracy's activities could be supported under the laws governing the organization without the identity of the donor being disclosed.
Korányi makes no mention of Soros in the recordings that were eventually published, only in the context of the statements by Kati Marton, Wesley Clark, and Eric Koch, which are presented as if the A4D director were talking about hiding Soros' role as a donor.
Dávid Korányi - Photo by Action for Democracy
Koch, by the way, claims to have been coerced into speculating about Soros's connection to A4D. The US communications consultant told the New York Times that he had only worked for A4D for a few weeks in 2022 and had no information about the organization's financial background. When the man who approached him and traveled to Amsterdam at his own expense last August asked him about A4D, he told him so, but he pressed the issue until Koch said he suspected Soros was the biggest donor behind the organization.
Wesley Clark does not talk specifically about the connection between Soros and A4D in the footage, instead, he just repeats the widely known fact that Soros has been channeling funds to the Central and Eastern European region through the Open Society Foundations since the 1990s. Clark is talking specifically about Ukraine before the question is asked in a distorted voice on the recording, "Are there many more Americans or others who individually support the opposition in Hungary?", to which Clark says, "Not as many as I would like to see. No one like George."
The impostor, who introduces himself under a pseudonym, organizes private conversations, secretly records them, and then publishes the recordings is reminiscent of the methodology of previous smear campaigns when secretly recorded videos were edited and posted on an anonymous social media page, from where they started to circulate in the Hungarian pro-government press and on social media platforms.
In 2022, a private intelligence firm called Black Cube, founded by former Israeli intelligence agents, created fake profiles and job ads on LinkedIn to target Hungarian civilians with fake job interviews. The short snippets of video footage taken from these were then given huge publicity in government-biased propaganda media before the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary elections. One of the targets was Orsolya Jeney, former director of Amnesty International in Hungary, who spoke about the attacks against her in detail in 444’s documentary about black campaigns.
Orsolya Jeney had been approached with a job opportunity a year and a half earlier when she was preparing to return to the labor market after maternity leave. Hours of video teleconferences were recorded, and excerpts taken out of context were published in the '22 campaign, and the government media covered the story for weeks, even Zoltán Kovács, the government spokesman, distributed the footage. Black Cube's role was later confirmed when a LinkedIn researcher said that the fake LinkedIn profiles were created by the company. These and Black Cube's LinkedIn profile have since been removed from the platform for apparent violation of their rules.
But this was not the first time that Black Cube had been used in campaigns against Hungarian civilians. Before the 2018 election campaign, András Siewert, an activist for Migration Aid, was lured to a meeting in Vienna and then used the audio recordings made there to create defamatory material. Suspicious at the time, András Siewert himself recorded the meeting and made it public. Far-right pro-government publicist Zsolt Bayer wrote articles about the material produced by Black Cube, and even Viktor Orbán referred to it in the 2018 election campaign.
Despite the eerily similar methods, there is no evidence so far that the latest A4D footage was also obtained by Black Cube. The New York Times has asked the company about this, but Black Cube did not respond to a request for comment.
The very fact that the footage released on X and widely disseminated by the pro-government media is the result of a manipulative operation is reason alone to treat with restraints what the videos and their various versions try to suggest.
However, neither the New York Times article nor Action for Democracy's previous statements answer the question of whether George Soros is indeed funding A4D.
A spokesperson for the Open Society Foundations (OSF) told the New York Times that Action for Democracy was not, nor has it ever been an OSF-funded organization. But that simply means that no money has ever flowed through OSF to Action for Democracy. Indeed, under US law, as already mentioned, NGOs like Action for Democracy are not obliged to disclose the names of their donors, and the organization has not denied or confirmed that the US philanthropist is in any way on that list, despite the allegations.
We have contacted Dávid Korányi by email regarding this question and will update this article as soon as we receive a response.
Update 12/03/2024, 11:23 am. We have received Dávid Korányi's answers: he revealed that he did not record the conversation with the man named "George Koufis", so at this point, it is not possible to compare the published recordings with the original, unedited conversation. However, Korányi stressed that he spent "a very large part of the conversation, as originally requested, analyzing the energy market in Central and Eastern Europe", as this was what his interlocutor was officially interested in. "When I talk about 'investment', for example, it is in this context (the unstable renewable energy market in Central and Eastern Europe, especially in Poland and Hungary) and not about Action for Democracy's activities and donors," he explained. As for the donors and the allegations about the role of George Soros, Korányi stressed that Action for Democracy's donors "are never publicly communicated, mainly to protect them from vile and dishonest attacks by the Hungarian and other propaganda media”. He added that A4D "also works in many countries outside Europe where revealing the identity of donors could pose physical risks".
Translated by Benedek Totth
