Black Cube in Hungary

Black Cube in Hungary
Type	Undercover sting operation against NGOs, with doctored recordings released before an election
Date	December 2017 – March 2018
Location	Budapest, Vienna, Amsterdam, London and New York
Participants	Black Cube (attributed by Politico on the evidence of a former employee and a person with knowledge of the firm's work)
Victims	Migration Aid; Civil Liberties Union for Europe; the Budapest office of the Open Society Foundations; the Hungarian Helsinki Committee; the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union
Cause	Run-up to the Hungarian parliamentary election of 8 April 2018
Outcome	Recordings published in Magyar Idők and the Jerusalem Post and used in Viktor Orbán's campaign. Black Cube would neither confirm nor deny involvement

Black Cube in Hungary refers to an undercover operation in 2017–18 in which people using false identities and fake companies secretly recorded staff of NGOs linked to George Soros. Edited extracts were published by the pro-government daily Magyar Idők and the Jerusalem Post in the three weeks before Hungary's April 2018 election, and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán used them in his campaign. Politico later attributed the operation to the Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube.

Between December 2017 and March 2018, Hungarian NGOs and people connected to George Soros were approached by agents using false identities who secretly recorded them. Politico reported in July 2018 that the agents worked for Black Cube. It relied on a former Black Cube employee and a person with knowledge of the company's inner workings, one of whom confirmed that at least one person who met and recorded a target was a Black Cube employee. Earlier reporting by Index.hu and The Observer had described the operation and identified the operatives as probably Israeli, but did not name the firm.

Approaches

The operatives met their targets in hotels and upscale restaurants in Budapest, Vienna, Amsterdam, London and New York. They presented themselves as investors or businesspeople, through companies that did not exist. LinkedIn accounts and websites shown to targets were deleted soon after the meetings, and most phone numbers were disconnected within weeks.

Reported approaches

#	Target	Cover used	Details	Ref
1	András Siewert, director of Migration Aid	"Grigori Alexsandrov", chief executive of a supposed British firm, Smart InnoTech, with a female colleague	First contact in December 2017. Siewert suspected a recruitment attempt and reported it to Hungary's counter-intelligence service (AH) on 3 January 2018. Meetings in Vienna, including on 12 February 2018, where the man asked about ties to Soros, suggested organising demonstrations rather than handing out aid, and offered a biometric database of migrants. Migration Aid recorded both meetings and photographed the pair
2	Balázs Dénes, director of the Berlin-based Civil Liberties Union for Europe	"Ali Mahmoud Alrabie" of Orion Ventures Capital, a supposed Bahraini fund	Flown to Amsterdam for a meeting in mid-January 2018. The fund's website stopped working afterwards. A recording of Dénes became the lead story in the Jerusalem Post
3	Two NGO leaders	"Anna Bauer", once presenting herself as working for "Tauro Capital"	A former Black Cube employee told Politico that both names were covers the firm had created for earlier projects, saying it is common for the firm to "reuse infrastructure"
4	A former chief financial officer of Soros Fund Management	"Pierre Remy", inviting her to a conference in Hong Kong	The recorded meeting was used by Zsolt Bayer in Magyar Idők to claim that 2,000 people worked for Soros in Hungary
5	The Budapest office of the Open Society Foundations, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union	Not specified	Named by Index.hu as further targets of the same group

Politico found that business cards given to Dénes carried a Warwick Street, London address that Black Cube had used for fake companies in other operations, including in emails to an actress who had accused Harvey Weinstein. Index.hu said that the man calling himself Alexsandrov had used the name "Novak" in another case. It estimated that the operation, with up to four people at meetings plus researchers and infrastructure staff, cost several hundred thousand dollars.

Publication and use in the campaign

The recordings began appearing in the Jerusalem Post and Magyar Idők three weeks before the election. On 19 March 2018 Magyar Idők published an article by Zsolt Bayer that used snippets of the Migration Aid meetings, credited to an "undercover investigative journalist", to claim that the group sought to profit from migration. Index.hu, which obtained a tape of the whole meeting, called the claim a slander. The Observer reported that the recordings were "often doctored". It said Orbán seized on the Soros figure, saying the government knew the names of 2,000 members of the "Soros mercenary army". Government spokesman Zoltán Kovács called the idea of an undercover sting a "cheap argument" and "fake news", and denied any government involvement. Orbán's Fidesz party won the election of 8 April 2018 in a landslide.

The Wall Street Journal later reported that Csaba Csontos of the Open Society Foundations said the editing of the recordings was crude.

Black Cube's response

Black Cube told Politico: "It is Black Cube's policy to never discuss its clients with any third party, and to never confirm or deny any speculation made with regard to the company's work". It said it "always operates in full compliance of the law in every jurisdiction". The Times of Israel described the firm as denying involvement in the Hungarian campaign. Who commissioned the operation has not been established. Index.hu wrote that "who hired them remains unknown", while noting which party benefited.

See also

• Black Cube
• Viktor Orban
• Black Cube in Slovenia
• Black Cube and the Iran nuclear deal