American admission: the aim was to overthrow Orban + video

After the remarks of US Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suggested that the CIA had influenced the domestic politics of other countries by funding foreign media and journalists, former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson has claimed that the US State Department had blatantly interfered in Hungary's 2022 parliamentary election campaign, with a view to toppling PM Viktor Orban.

A man crosses the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) seal in the lobby of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on August 14, 2008. AFP PHOTO/SAUL LOEB (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) Fotó: AFP/SAUL LOEB

"Orban is a rare voice in the European Union... because he is conservative, because he is religious, and because he doesn’t want to open his borders to the illegal flow of immigrants into the country”, former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson told the Judging Freedom online show. "Therefore, you have the US and several European countries working actively to get rid of him,” he added.

"In the United States, we got all outraged in 2016 over alleged Russian interference in out elections”, but "we were directly interfering” in 2022 Hungarian election, in which PM Viktor Orban was reelected. Asked if the US intervened to block Orban, Larry C. Johnson said the goal was indeed to defeat him, which America was trying to do by funding Orban's opponents. Asked whether the CIA was in a position to influence the outcome of elections in other countries, Mr Johnson said that it was the US State Department, not the CIA, that had intervened. "We didn’t even go for the covert route, we were just open about the opposition,” he said.

The statement is all the more interesting in light of the fact that a few days ago the US right-wing news portal The Epoch Times published a video of US Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talking about how the United States influences the domestic politics of other countries.

He said that the US keeps foreign journalists on its payroll to spread US propaganda.

America owns media outlets around the world and has thousands of journalists on its payroll, he said. And the funding is handled by the CIA through the State Department's Agency for International Development (USAID).

Kennedy's statement may also be supported by the fact that foreign interference and the existence of "dollar media" (i.e. media otulets funded from the US) have recently been confirmed by the Hungarian National Security Service. The secret services launched an investigation after it emerged that money from the US had been used to influence Hungary's parliamentary elections, which could have damaged the country's sovereignty. It turned out that the Hungarian left wing's election campaign may have received millions of dollars through the US organization Action for Democracy (AD), led by David Koranyi. Mr Koranyi is known to have worked as an advisor to former socialist PM Gordon Bajnai and Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony. Hungary's national security services have also established that AD has several links to the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

According to a frequently repeated claim by various sources, “the NED is essentially the formalized presence of the CIA abroad.” Allen Weinstein, who helped set up NED, stated in 1991 that "a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” 

NED ceased its active operations in Hungary at the end of the 1990s, when Hungary's accession to NATO became certain. In 2014, the organization's leadership assessed that the political situation in Hungary had become so worrying that they began to intensively think about resuming their activities in the country. If the organization decides to re-establish a presence in Hungary, it will not open an office in Hungary, but rather seek Hungarian partners through which it can pursue its objectives.

Whatever the outcome, it is an irrefutable fact that the US organization Action for Democracy has received millions of dollars in funding for the Hungarian Left's 2022 parliamentary election campaign, part of which was channeled to the opposition's government-critical media, namely a company called Oraculum 2020 Kft, the publisher of an online media group by the name EzaLenyeg.

Another player in the story is the DatAdat group, linked to former prime minister Gordon Bajnai, which conducted the Hungarian Left’s election campaign. The icing on the cake is that back when he was intelligence minister, Adam Ficsor, one of the owners of DatAdat, was recommended by the US embassy for the International Visitor Leadership Program, the State Department’s professional exchange program in Washington. (This was revealed by a diplomatic document published by WikiLeaks.) The recommendation was received by the US State Department, the CIA and the Department of Defense.

Mr Ficsor later stepped down as minister. According to the Hungarian Index news portal, he did so precisely because of his participation in the International Visitor Leadership Program. One thing is certain, however: DatAdat group and Oraculum 2020 also made huge profits from the left's failed campaign. 

Cover photo: Illustration