Viktor Orbán’s (temporary) retreat in his battle with Ferenc Gyurcsány?

Some of my readers and I don’t see eye-to-eye on the government’s decision to release two secret service documents that deal with Ferenc Gyurcsány’s controversial speech of 2006. They are convinced that this move is a fantastic coup against the opposition and that if the united opposition had any sense whatsoever it would drop the subject as soon as possible. Anything, they claim, that has to do with the speech is political poison.

I see it differently. Even if the two documents had substantiated the government’s claim that Gyurcsány was complicit in the leak, the political gain for Fidesz would have been minimal. But the documents didn’t support their claim. Moreover, since Gordon Bajnai and Ferenc Gyurcsány knew not only about the two released documents but about others that contradict Eduardo Rózsa-Flores’s assumptions, questions were bound to arise about a half forgotten story. And in that story Fidesz was very much involved.

The release of the documents raised the possibility that someone would slip up. And indeed Lajos Kósa did. Only half a year ago he denied that he knew anything about the tape prior to its publication. So did Tibor Navracsics and Viktor Orbán. And now here in black and white was a detailed description by Flores of how the tape ended up in his hands and went from him via an intermediary to Lajos Kósa. Confronted with the document and pressured by Antónia Mészáros, Kósa cracked. He admitted that they have been lying about their knowledge of the tape and their own role in making it public. Fidesz politicians who in the last eight years have talked incessantly about Ferenc Gyurcsány’s lies are found to be liars themselves. It was time for damage control.

I can only imagine what Lajos Kósa got from Viktor Orbán after that interview. He must have been ordered to correct his “mistake,” which he did this morning on Magyar Rádió. While yesterday he admitted that he got hold of the tape from a fellow from Miskolc which he then distributed to the press, by today his story had been substantially edited. He denied any knowledge of the tape’s content before it was read on Magyar Rádió.

Sándor Pintér was also asked to do his best to squelch the growing scandal. After all, only Magyar Nemzet and Magyar Hírlap were talking about the sins of Ferenc Gyurcsány;  other publications started probing into the revelations of Fidesz’s involvement. And that probing went beyond the leak itself. People kept asking about Fidesz’s role in the preparation and organization of the disturbances themselves.

Pintér’s line of reasoning at a late afternoon press conference was interesting. While two days ago the big news was the source of the leak, i.e. whether Gyurcsány initiated the leak of his own speech or not, today Pintér claimed that “the circumstances of the leak are unimportant” because the unauthorized removal of the tape is not a crime. The important part of the story is the content of the speech, he emphasized. But then why did they release these documents that centered on the circumstances of the leak, circumstances that two days later were deemed unimportant? There is no good answer here.

In addition to Pintér’s feeble explanation Magyar Nemzet came up with one of its own. The argument goes something like this: Why the big fuss about the leak? Who really cares who was responsible? After all, we just heard from the former editor-in-chief of Népszabadság that J. Zoltán Gál, undersecretary in charge of the prime minister’s office, approached him to ask whether he would be interested in an edited version of a terrific speech his “boss” delivered. So, the argument goes, let’s not spend any more time on this trivial matter, especially when MSZP wanted to have it made public anyway. Another misguided argument. With this claim they only support Gyurcsány’s contention that his audience was enthralled and that he didn’t think there was anything in the speech one had to be ashamed of.

The most worrisome announcement that Sándor Pintér made at this press conference was that there is no other “final report” on Balatonőszöd. We are talking here about the report that both Gordon Bajnai and Ferenc Gyurcsány saw and that both claim contains some damaging material on Fidesz’s involvement in the affair that ended in violence on the streets of Budapest. That indicates that as things stand now the Orbán government is planning to eliminate in one way or another an important piece of evidence.  I’m sure that Bajnai cannot lay his hands on the document, but Gyurcsány may have a copy of it which, as he said, “landed on his desk.”

Source: szabadeuropa.shp.hu

Moreover, the Népszabadság article to which Magyar Nemzet referred also states that two days before the release of the tape Ferenc Gyurcsány sent an article to the paper entitled “Haladás vs. maradás” (Progress versus Backwardness) in which he pretty well told the reading public what he said in his Balatonőszöd speech. The editors asked him whether in light of the new developments he wanted to change anything in his text. His answer was “no.” Obviously even after the speech was released he saw no reason to change anything in the text.

As I said earlier, any party would have taken advantage of the opportunity the leaked tape offered Fidesz sometime in July-August of 2006. I don’t blame them. What on the other hand, a responsible democratic party cannot do is to systematically prepare a coup d’état. Unfortunately, it looks as if this is exactly what Viktor Orbán was doing. There are just too many signs pointing in this direction.

Finally, here is a new piece of information from Péter Zentai, today a journalist with HVG but at the time Magyar Rádió’s Berlin correspondent. Right after the Budapest siege one of the German television stations organized a round-table discussion on the Hungarian events. Zentai participated in this discussion, as did a British TV journalist. The British journalist insisted that the outbreak of violence couldn’t have been spontaneous because his television station and Sky TV had been approached by a Hungarian news station a week before the fateful weekend. They were invited to come to Budapest because “interesting things will happen.” Zentai was stunned and tried to air this story on Magyar Rádió. Even then, however, MR was partial to Fidesz, and one of the middle managers refused to report Zentai’s information from the British television journalist.

Bits and pieces of new information emerge day after day. Viktor Orbán seems far too eager to eliminate his arch-rival and thus keeps making mistakes.

Sloppy Hungarian journalism misleads the public

It was at the beginning of January that Sándor Pintér, minister of the interior, first mentioned rather casually in a television interview that he might release some of the secret service documents related to the leak of Ferenc Gyurcsány’s speech to the MSZP parliamentary delegation after their electoral victory in 2006.

Regular readers of Hungarian Spectrum are only too familiar with what happened. The newly reelected prime minister rather irresponsibly made a speech in front of almost 300 people that was sprinkled with obscenities and that contained passages which, if taken out of context, could be very damaging. Of course, the speech was leaked. Fidesz, then in opposition, picked out the most damaging couple of sentences from the fairly long speech (almost 18,000 words) and passed them on to the president of Magyar Rádió. The rest is history. Football hooligans attacked Magyar Televízió and another round of riots, fueled by Viktor Orbán and other Fidesz politicians, occurred a month later on the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution of 1956. Ferenc Gyurcsány became damaged goods.

Ever since that time wild speculations have been circulating about who leaked the speech. The most authoritative person in this case, Ferenc Gyurcsány himself, said several times in the last couple of years that there is strong indirect evidence that points to three prominent MSZP members. However, he refuses to divulge the names because he is–as he stated tonight on ATV–only 97% sure that the three people whom he has in mind are actually the ones who turned against their party’s chairman and their prime minister.

And now comes the latest incarnation of this rather tired story. Naturally, it is being resurrected with the national election in mind. Viktor Orbán will never forget what happened to him in 2002 when most opinion polls showed Fidesz about 10% ahead of the opposition parties–and yet he lost. This time Fidesz  is pulling out all the stops, which includes calling attention again to the Gyurcsány speech from 2006. But this time with a twist. The couple of documents Pintér released are only part of the pertinent material. He has not released the most important final report that, according to Gyurcsány and Bajnai, concluded that the Hungarian secret service agents who investigated the case didn’t have a clue who leaked the tape of the speech and in exactly what way it ended up in Fidesz hands.

The two documents are available on the website of the renamed secret service agency that originally investigated the case. One is pretty straightforward and contains nothing new. The second one is a summary report (összefoglaló jelentés) not of the investigation of the leak but of Eduardo Rózsa-Flores who three years later, in 2009, died in Bolivia where he wanted to foment a revolution against the Bolivian government. The report concludes that Rózsa-Flores was a right-wing extremist who was an opponent of the MSZP-SZDSZ government. Although the report is for the most part simply a collection of generalities about Flores’s politics, it touches on the question of the leaked speech. During a conversation with an undercover agent Flores gave details of how he ended up receiving the tape of the prime minister’s speech which he then passed on to Fidesz politicians. It was Flores’s theory that the leak was organized with the knowledge and blessing of Ferenc Gyurcsány who by creating a scandal wanted to divert attention away from the country’s grave economic situation. In brief, what the agents learned from Flores was no more than speculation. A wacky hypothesis offered by someone who couldn’t possibly know the details of the leak.

So, let’s see how the Hungarian media handled the news, starting with Népszabadság. It is normally one of the more reliable newspapers in Hungary, but this time I was amazed at the sloppiness of Gy. Attila Fekete. The headline reads: “Őszöd: Here is the secret service report.” That is really misleading because the “meat” of the story, Gyurcsány’s alleged role in leaking his own speech, is not in the interim report on Őszöd but in the final report on Rózsa-Flores whose surveillance came to an end when he was brutally killed in a hotel room in Bolivia. A brief editorial in the paper is to my mind outrageous. If this is all true, says the editorial, “we just shudder. We can barely comprehend it.” On the other hand, “if the story is not true then we have every reason to feel totally lost in our own country.” At this point I’m the one who is totally lost. What does this mumble jumble mean? Finally, the editors call on Gyurcsány to divulge who leaked the speech. “He indicated several times that he knows what happened. He must tell.”

Moreover, the great journalists at Népszabadság seem to think that the investigation of Őszöd ended on July 27 2009 and that all the information contained in the final report on Flores has been kept secret for four and a half years. This “final report” was written because Rózsa Flores was killed in Bolivia and therefore his surveillance ended. Őszöd was an entirely different matter; we still haven’t seen the secret service’s final report on the leak which was written in December 2009. Viktor Orbán for very good reason didn’t want to release that document: it contains nothing about either the culprits responsible for the leak or about Gyurcsány’s alleged complicity.

It’s no wonder that Klára Dobrev, Ferenc Gyurcsány’s wife, had some harsh words for Népszabadság. The editors didn’t check the facts; they didn’t question; they presented lies as facts. Népszabadság, according to Klára Dobrev, even managed to outdo Magyar Nemzet. “My friends, I believe that we have one fewer independent newspaper.” She thinks that the shift is due to the paper’s change in ownership. Heinrich Pecina, an Austrian businessman, acquired a majority stake in the paper. In an interview with Márton Galambos and Irén Hermann of Forbes he expressed his admiration for Viktor Orbán’s leadership, without which, in his opinion, Hungary would have ended up like Greece.

All the other online sites pretty much repeated as fact Rózsa-Flores’s theory. As Zsófia Mihancsik pointed out, it was only Origo that gave an accurate description of the two documents released by Sándor Pintér. Origo called Flores’s claim “a bombastic theory.” But since most online sites copy from each other, one can be sure that all the wrong conclusions will be reached regardless of what anyone says. For example, Gordon Bajnai who saw all the reports, including the unpublished final one, announced on his own website that the two released documents try to lead the public to wrong conclusions. Moreover, he claims, the present government deleted information even from these less relevant documents that would reflect badly on Fidesz politicians. He considers this latest Fidesz trick a manipulation of the election which he “finds illegal and unacceptable.” Since then, Gyurcsány gave his side of the story. One thing is sure: only facts can prove someone innocent or guilty and in these documents there is nothing that would prove that Rózsa-Flores’s theory has any merit whatsoever.

Who leaked Ferenc Gyurcsány’s speech in Balatonőszöd? Part II

I finished the first part of my story on the 2006 Budapest riots with some finger pointing. I shared József Debreczeni’s strong suspicion that it was Imre Szekeres and two of his close associates in the top leadership of the Hungarian Socialist Party who were responsible for passing the audio recording of Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány’s speech in Balatonőszöd to Fidesz politicians.

Some readers of Hungarian Spectrum suggested the very unlikely possibility that Gyurcsány himself leaked the recording, but there is far too much contrary evidence. We have enough information even today to allow us to more or less follow the path of the tape from MSZP headquarters to Fidesz.

Let’s start with what transpired a few hours before the release of the recording on September 17, 2006. Around 2 p.m. a man arrived on a motorcycle, handed Balázs Weyer, the editor-in-chief of  Origo, an envelope, and quickly disappeared. Weyer later stated that he couldn’t identify the man. As we know from Attila Rajnai, an investigative journalist who published an article about the case in Élet és Irodalom (May 25, 2007), while Weyer was playing soccer in the morning people from Magyar Rádió and RTL-Klub were looking for him. Their message was that they had something that would be the big news story of the day. But Origo was late with the news. Weyer got a CD of the entire three-hour meeting in mp3 form. At first he had no idea what it was all about or where and when it was recorded. All that took time to figure out. In the meantime he tried to ascertain what passages were worth publishing.  And before publishing the material, he phoned Emese Danks, the  Gyurcsány government’s spokeswoman at the time, asking about the authenticity and the details of the recording. She confirmed that they knew about the leak but for the time being they didn’t want to make any statement.

So, yes, Gyurcsány’s office knew about the CD, but I suspect that they found out about it only a few hours before the actual broadcast of the incriminating passages. Although József Debreczeni doesn’t mention it in his book, A 2006-os ősz, I distinctly remember reading an article which described the confusion that reigned in the prime minister’s office. They had no idea what speech was in question. They didn’t remember any unusual speech. Obviously to MSZP MPs it was just one speech among many. They didn’t attach any great significance to it.

Another copy was delivered, also by a motorcyclist, to Péter Uj, the editor-in-chief of Index. Earlier he received a telephone call at home from someone who didn’t introduce himself but who used the informal form of address. The person announced that he had important information for him. Where should the messenger to be sent? Uj thought it was a joke. But about an hour later, at four o’clock in the afternoon, the messenger arrived and handed him a package. At that very moment György Such, the president of Magyar Rádió, phoned him and told him to turn the radio on. To this day we have no idea who these messengers were. Certainly not employees of a professional messenger service. Attila Rajnai, the journalist, checked that aspect of the story thoroughly and came up empty handed.

However, later investigations revealed that prior to September 17  some of the incriminating parts of Gyurcsány’s speech had  already been circulating among right-leaning information specialists. E-mails went back and forth between eastern Hungary and Budapest. Someone also sent this material to a Hungarian, György T., working in Mexico at the time, on either September 12 or 13. He forwarded it to at least  twenty of his friends. Subsequently György T. returned to Hungary and told Rajnai that he had indeed sent the information on to others, but he refused to reveal the exact source of the message. He did, however, indicate that the man from whom he got the material was also sympathetic to right-wing politics.

In Fidesz circles the word was that “our friends in Debrecen were the first ones who learned about [the speech’s contents].” Rajnai talked to some information technologists in Debrecen who worked for the City Hall of Debrecen, but they refused to answer his questions. So, the investigative journalist lost the thread in Debrecen.

It seems that the Office of National Security, which was entrusted with investigating the case, got a bit farther. Debreczeni quotes from Ferenc Gyurcsány’s letter to Attila Mesterházy that outlined his suspicions about the three leading MSZP politicians who might have been responsible for the leak. “The Office of National Security questioned many people and performed many technical investigations…. A few things surfaced. For example, that the material got to Budapest from the Office of the Mayor of a Fidesz-led city on the Great Plains.” We are talking here about Debrecen and Lajos Kósa. That this was indeed the case is reinforced by our knowledge that the telephone calls announcing the arrival of the CDs came from Debrecen.

Debreczeni’s theory is that the approximate content and perhaps even the most damaging details of the speech were known to the Fidesz leadership already prior to July 22 when Viktor Orbán made his speech in Tusnádfürdő, Romania.  He called on the Hungarians to gather on Heroes’ Square on September 23 to fight “against the lies of the dictatorship.” It was a proclamation entitled “Good morning, Hungary!” However, Debreczeni continues, the complete audio recording arrived in  Debrecen’s City Hall only later.

To the best of our knowledge the intermediary in that transaction was Eduardo Rózsa-Flores! Familiar name? You may recall that in April 2009 he, a Bolivian by birth but a Hungarian citizen, tried to assassinate the Bolivian president. Soon after his arrival in the country he was killed by Bolivian commandos. I wrote about him twice: “The Hungarian far-right in Bolivia–Eduardo Rózsa-Flores,” and again a day later in a post entitled “The psyche of an ‘anarchist’: Eduardo Rózsa-Flores.”

A close associate of Rózsa-Flores was Zoltán Brády, editor-in-chief of Kapu, a far-right publication. After Rózsa-Flores’s death Brády gave an interview to MTI in which “he admitted that they–Brády and Rózsa-Flores–were the ones who leaked the speech in Őszöd…. However, he didn’t say where they got it from and to whom they passed it on.”

We do know where the recording ended up and, thanks to an interview with Brády on MTV, we even know that the source was one of the leading members of MSZP. On April 19, 2009, Brády was interviewed by Szilvia Krizsó on A szólás szabadsága (Freedom of speech) where the following dialogue took place:

Zoltán Brády: Eduardo managed to get that piece of evidence.

Krizsó Szilvia: But how?

ZB: He received it.

KSz: But from whom?

ZB: You don’t think that I will tell you that!

KSz: Of course, I do.

ZB: OK, I will tell you as much as that it was from the MSZMP, forgive me…

KSz: You mean MSZP.

ZB: MSZP, doesn’t matter, from the leadership of MSZP.

When Debreczeni inquired from Gyurcsány whether any surveillance was conducted against Imre Szekeres, or whoever X was, the answer was a definite no. After all, it would have been against the law. However, Rózsa-Flores was naturally under surveillance and there the Office of National Security encountered the names of some parliamentary politicians. One high-level national security officer came across, for example, the names of Viktor Orbán and László Kövér while investigating Rózsa-Flores’s highly suspicious activities. The investigators even opened separate files for them with the names of “Bajusz” (mustache) and “Ovi” (abbreviation of óvoda/kindergarten). More can be read about this in the October 11, 2011 issue of Heti Válasz, a pro-Fidesz publication.

The Office of National Security even placed an undercover agent in Rózsa-Flores’s circle, but before that person managed to find out the name of the MSZP politician who passed the copy of the recording to Rózsa-Flores, he died in Bolivia and his secret with him.