Hungary 'Plots Ukraine Invasion'
Arrests and tit-for-tat expulsions as Kyiv exposes spy ring controlled from Budapest – Fact or Fiction?
“Leave your phone outside and sit down,” Mosoly beckoned to Kiss, pointing at the only chair in his sparsely furnished office in the catacombs beneath Buda Castle.
“I’ve just come from The Boss,” Mosoly said curtly. “He wants us to reconnoitre enemy territory, their bases, air defence batteries, and so on, and find out if the natives would be amenable to a Hungarian invasion. I mentioned your name.”
Kiss gulped, his cheeks flush with the two pints of spritzer he downed before coming to the Spymaster’s office. The Boss had been talking about the enemy for months, he recalled. “We must occupy Brussels,” he keeps saying. Kiss has heard that Brussels is nice. Lots of great orgies. A friend of The Boss famously got caught escaping from one down a drainpipe during a police raid.
“But I don’t speak French,” Kiss muttered.
“French? What are you babbling on about, man? You are going to Ukraine, and only to the villages where they speak Hungarian, in Transcarpathia. You have to recruit some agents who will map out the region’s military strength, check what weapons can be bought on the black market, and find out how the locals might greet our lads when they rock up in their tanks. Will there be hugs and kisses? Will they bring out their best pálinka?
“Yes, comrade, I mean Commander,” Kiss stammered, his eyes fixed on the large map of Greater Hungary on the wall and a modest-sized portrait of The Boss in his younger, debonair days. “I’ll get on it right away.”
Mosoly inspected the lieutenant. Kiss is not the sharpest tool in the box, he thought, but he comes from the village where The Boss hails from, so he can be trusted. But, just in case, Mosoly added: “Mum’s the word, old man. Don’t get caught and don’t let those arseholes from the CIA or MI5 find out. It would be a bit awkward.”
The Hungarian secret service hired two agents, a man and a woman, who had both served in the Ukrainian military. One of them from the border town of Berehove. According to Ukrainian intelligence, the agents did as instructed, mapping out military bases in the region and asking questions about locals’ attitude to a potential Hungarian incursion.
Last week the Ukrainians announced that they had arrested the pair and charged them with high treason. They published a tape of a phone call allegedly between one of the accused spies and his handler in Budapest, the spy speaking Hungarian with a Slav accent.
At this point in the tale, the reader would expect a sentence along the lines “Budapest vehemently denies it”.
But that’s the thing, Budapest has not denied the allegation that its secret service has been tasked with scoping a possible incursion into a country supported by Nato. Peter Szijjarto, the Hungarian Foreign Minister, accused Ukraine of spreading propaganda by going public with details of the operation before giving the full facts to the Hungarian authorities. He did not say the allegations were untrue.
Szijjarto expelled two Ukrainian diplomats described as spies. Ukraine responded by kicking out two Hungarian diplomats. On the day this tit-for-tat was happening, Hungarian anti-terror units staged a spectacular raid in the middle of Budapest, dragging a former Ukrainian diplomat out of a car and promptly deporting him. This alleged spy, whose wife runs a restaurant in Budapest, had been hiding in plain sight. He has not been charged with any crime.
Viktor Orban accused his usual enemies of a provocation. “Hungarians are deciding now on Ukraine’s EU membership. This is clearly not to the liking of Brussels and Kyiv,” he wrote on Facebook. The “decision” he was referring to – a hate campaign against Ukraine masquerading as a referendum – will have no bearing in years to come if and when Ukraine’s EU membership comes up for a vote in member states.
Hungarian media briefed by the security services allege that Ukrainian spies had been waging an intelligence war in the country for some time, and that such actions have intensified recently. Earlier this month, it was reported that two Ukrainian spy drones had been observed and one of them shot down over Tokaj, the country’s most famous wine region. If true, were the Ukrainians surveilling the oligarchs who own the vineyards, or the air defence installation near by?
In February parliament was informed by the security services of a Ukrainian plot to discredit Orban by documenting his family’s awe-inspiring wealth. It was referring to a YouTube video entitled The Dynasty (A Dinasztia) made by the independent media group Direkt36, which I highlighted at the time. I enclose a link at the end of this piece.
Who knows where the truth lies? The facts are that Transcarpathia used to belong to Hungary, about 70,000 ethnic Hungarians are estimated to live there still. Hungarian nationalists grow misty-eyed whenever they contemplate the prospect of regaining the lands lost under the Trianon Treaty of 1920.
Would the Hungarian government be so crazy as to plot an invasion, pitting its feeble armed forces against the might of Ukraine, whose soldiers have kept Russia at bay for 3 years? Probably not, and this is where this story becomes most troubling. Russian officials have floated the idea of partitioning Ukraine, sharing slivers of territory with Hungary and Poland.
Perhaps Hungary’s leaders are speculating on such a scenario, hoping a grateful ally will hand them territory on a plate for services rendered. It happened before, not so long ago. Chunks of Romania, Yugoslavia, Slovakia and of course Transcarpathia found their way back to the motherland during the Second World War. They were lost again a few years later, alas, when Hungary’s friend Adolf Hitler died.
The most baffling question in this saga is why the Hungarian secret services would want to pick a fight with their Ukrainian counterparts. We know Ukrainian spies are good at their jobs because every once in a while an ammo plant in distant Siberia mysteriously blows up, a ship laden with Russian military gear catches fire in the middle of the Mediterranean, or a gas pipeline explodes somewhere under the Baltic.
The annals of espionage have fewer Hungarian entries, the last name dating back to 1898, though he was among the best. Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, illegitimate scion of Hungary’s most sumptuous aristocratic family, was an officer in the French army and passed high-octane secrets to the German Reich. He may have facilitated France’s collapse early in the First World War.
Like all good spies, Esterhazy got away with it. Though tried in 1898, he was found not guilty and he eventually lived out a peaceful life in, of all places, Harpenden. Someone else, slightly more Jewish, was sent to jail in his place. That unfortunate man’s name was Captain Alfred Dreyfus.
Ps: “Mosoly” means “smile” in Hungarian. Apologies to John le Carré.
https://imrekaracs.substack.com/p/how-the-orbans-got-rich
Hilarious Imre, if it were not also slightly worrying :)
This is good stuff. More people should read it. Keep it up