The summer of 2018 was a dramatic point in the history of the Hungarian foreign intelligence agency, the Information Office (IO, or IH in Hungarian). Events took place that shed light on unprecedented power struggles within the government.

The IH had previously been under the supervision of János Lázár, who led the Prime Minister’s Office for years. However, in the fourth Orbán government, formed after the 2018 election, the office got a new overseer. Lázár was ousted from the government, and the office was put under the supervision of Péter Szijjártó, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

The twists and turns began when, during the handover, Szijjártó summoned István Pásztor, the director-general of the IH, and his two deputies, Gábor Diczházi and Csaba Demcsák, to the ministry’s headquarters on Bem Square. Although the expected purpose of the meeting would be to remove the IH leadership, much more happened.

As Pásztor and his two deputies set out from the IH’s Budakeszi Road office towards Bem Square, a foreign ministry security department official called the Information Office to inform them that a task force of about thirty people would soon arrive, and they should be allowed entry and granted access to any documents.

“They essentially arrived with an open order, allowing them to fully act against the IH and look into all records,”

said a source familiar with the details, noting that the team members raiding the foreign intelligence came from various bodies under the Ministry of Interior. This team then spent weeks at the IH headquarters, during which they interrogated staff, searched archives, and seized computers. During the investigation, interior ministry officials were even given their own rooms. Meanwhile, the dismissed IH leaders could not even return to their offices; in some cases, personal belongings were only returned much later.

The task force officially claimed to have been sent to the IH because Péter Szijjártó, who had assumed political oversight of the intelligence service, had ordered a full audit going back several years. The foreign ministry’s then-administrative state secretary, Csaba Balogh, personally appeared at the IH headquarters, as did Tamás Vargha, the newly appointed state secretary responsible for civilian intelligence. He was the one who announced the immediate dismissal of the director-general of the IH and his deputies during a leadership assembly session and also issued the order that everyone must cooperate with the investigation.

However, instead of conducting a general, overarching investigation, the interior ministry task force was actually looking for very specific information. Among other things, they were particularly interested in IH documents related to the economic activities of government-aligned business figures, including certain members of the Orbán family.

Special attention was paid to uncover documents related to the former company of the Prime Minister’s son-in-law, István Tiborcz. The company, Elios Zrt, was involved in street lighting and public lighting projects. Previously, under János Lázár’s supervision, the IH had spied on investigators from the European Union’s Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) when they visited Hungary to investigate Elios’s allegedly corrupt tenders.

Ultimately, the interior ministry team did not find what they were looking for, possibly because information collected by the IH in sensitive cases like Elios’s was not officially documented. In any event, according to an intelligence source, the interior ministry team not only failed to locate the most sought-after documents and data, but the IH officers they interrogated remained silent and “refused to betray their superiors.”

According to Miklós Ligeti, the legal director of Transparency International Hungary, if these events “truly unfolded in this way, they cannot fail to constitute crimes, likely multiple ones.” According to the lawyer, who previously worked at the Ministry of Interior, the surveillance of a foreign authority could theoretically be justifiable. However, if no proper documents emerge during a subsequent internal audit, this clearly indicates illegal activities (as surveillance operations have to be properly carried out with permits, and gathered information must be officially stored, all according to the law.)

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The episodes of the summer of 2018 clearly demonstrated the serious distrust that had developed between certain powerful government figures during those years. Although the audit was officially ordered by Szijjártó and the foreign ministry, the team conducting it mostly consisted of people from various national security agencies overseen by the Ministry of Interior. The interior minister, Sándor Pintér, had had conflicts with János Lázár in previous years.

However, according to multiple sources familiar with the events, the operation may have been initiated from Viktor Orbán’s inner circle to determine what information the IH had collected about the business activities of the Prime Minister’s family members. They also wanted to uncover the general activities of the IH under Lázár’s supervision. Following the review, Viktor Orbán personally appeared at the IH, where he sharply criticized the intelligence service’s work in previous years.

The raid, nearly unprecedented in Hungary’s post-1989 intelligence history and kept secret until now (along with the political maneuvers behind it and the questionable legality of the surveillance), was revealed by Direkt36 based on interviews with Hungarian national security sources and government politicians familiar with the events.

We sent detailed questions to Viktor Orbán’s spokesperson and to the Hungarian national security bodies and ministries involved — we contacted János Lázár through the Ministry of Construction and Transport, which he is currently heading as minister — but none of them has responded officially. An OLAF spokesperson replied that they could not provide any information on their investigations or security measures.

Lázár’s intelligence service

János Lázár, the most powerful minister in Viktor Orbán’s government until 2018, oversaw the Information Office for six years. The office was placed under his supervision in 2012; initially he ran it as a state secretary, but later he became a minister heading the Prime Minister’s Office (or chief of staff, essentially).

János Lázár oversaw IH before 2018 – Source: Lázár’s Facebook page

The Information Office is a civilian intelligence agency established in 1990 as the legal successor of the Interior Ministry’s Department III/I. Its primary task is foreign intelligence — colloquially known as espionage: acquiring sensitive foreign information to aid the political and economic decision-making of the Hungarian government.

As head of the Prime Minister’s Office, Lázár was also responsible for EU affairs, which impacted the activities of the IH. According to multiple sources familiar with the internal workings of the foreign intelligence service, under Lázár, the IH began to allocate increasingly serious resources to espionage against European Union institutions. Practically an entire department was developed within the IH for this purpose. One of the most common methods was gathering information through Hungarian citizens working within the EU institutional system, either with their cooperation or through their surveillance without their knowledge.

This interest extended to the activities of OLAF, which investigates abuses involving EU funds.

“The IH placed almost every EU delegation visiting Hungary under surveillance, including OLAF missions,”

claimed a former intelligence officer. The IH became particularly active when this EU body’s investigators arrived in Hungary to probe public lighting projects, many of which were controversially awarded to Elios Zrt, a company then partly owned by István Tiborcz.

The OLAF investigators conducted four fact-finding missions to gather information on the tenders financed partially with EU funds. According to a source familiar with the missions, these visits took place on October 7–9, 2015; May 23–28, 2016; January 9–13, 2017; and March 26–29, 2017. OLAF investigators of Hungarian nationality participated in these missions, joined by an Italian inspector during the second visit.

“The OLAF officials, for example, talked extensively on the phone about the Elios case, and these conversations were tapped, which the Information Office then sifted through,” explained a source familiar with the matter. During their stays in Hungary, the investigators were not only wiretapped but also physically followed as part of IH operations. Secret recordings were made of both their official and private meetings, according to several sources familiar with Hungarian intelligence activities who spoke to Direkt36.

It seems that the Hungarian intelligence operation did not go unnoticed by the EU investigators. They noticed they were being followed and sometimes decided to play games with the surveillance team hounding them. For instance, they would make movements that clearly indicated they were aware of being followed. Reports of the surveillance operatives being exposed even made their way back to IH. In fact, one intelligence officer learned about the spying on OLAF officials only when it became apparent that their surveillance teams had been compromised. Several EU officials confirmed to Direkt36 that reports had also reached Brussels about the physical surveillance and secret wiretapping of not just the OLAF officials conducting investigations in Hungary but other EU bureaucrats as well.

There were multiple instances where EU officials attending meetings in Hungary received conspicuously suspicious questions from their Hungarian counterparts. For example, during official meetings, they were asked what type of mobile phone they used. In one instance, a European official who attended meetings with an old “dumb phone” from the 2000s was persistently interrogated by the Hungarians, almost desperately, about whether they had a smartphone and why they hadn’t brought it along. An EU bureaucrat recalled this episode.

These unexpected questions, entirely unrelated to the topics of the meetings, immediately raised suspicions because smartphones can provide much more information through surveillance than older devices that are primarily used for calls and SMS.

“An EU member state should normally be a friendly environment. The system isn’t designed to handle situations where a member state becomes a hostile environment,”

an EU official remarked.

OLAF launched its investigation into the public lighting projects involving Elios in early 2015 after Hungarian outlets, including Direkt36, reported irregularities. Direkt36 uncovered how high-value public tenders were tailored to fit Tiborcz’s former company and published a secretly recorded audio proving that, in at least one instance, there had been prior consultation between Elios and the representatives of a municipality before the tender was announced.

OLAF ultimately concluded that numerous irregularities occurred in the tenders awarded to Elios. The EU body recommended that Hungary be required to repay €40 million (HUF 13 billion at the time) in EU funding, but the government avoided doing so by covering the amount from the national budget — using Hungarian taxpayers’ money to pay for the projects.

János Lázár may have had a personal interest in monitoring this investigation. Elios’s first major public lighting project was in Hódmezővásárhely, the city where Lázár was mayor at the time. This project provided Elios with the references it later used to win numerous other public lighting tenders. During the OLAF investigation, Lázár and Tiborcz maintained a personal relationship; for instance, in November 2017, they were photographed dining together in a downtown restaurant.

OLAF did not respond to questions about its investigations or the surveillance of its staff. “OLAF is legally bound to protect the confidentiality of its investigations, so we cannot discuss any details of the investigations in question,” the agency’s spokesperson wrote, adding that they could not comment on their security measures either. We also contacted the Hungarian OLAF inspectors concerned, but they declined to comment.

The “White Paper” Cases

The task force searching for OLAF-related and other surveillance files included members from several national security agencies. These included the Constitution Protection Office (AH, or CPO), responsible for counterintelligence; the Special Service for National Security (NBSZ, or SSNS), handling the technical aspects of surveillance; and the National Protective Service (NVSZ, or NPS), which operates as the internal security arm screening law enforcement agencies. All these services were overseen by interior minister Sándor Pintér, as were the police units involved in the operation. The Counter-Terrorism Center (TEK), led by Orbán’s former bodyguard and considered the most loyal to the Prime Minister, also participated in the preparation of the raid.

According to a former high-ranking national security officer, one of the leaders of the IH immediately tried to seek help from one of interior minister Pintér’s closest confidants upon being confronted with the raid, hoping that negotiations with him could stop the operation. However, the response to the approach was that they had no influence over the events. (In response to a question from Direkt36, the individual in question denied that an IH leader had contacted them regarding the raid taking place at the agency.)

Another source familiar with the raid’s details suggested that the directive to search the IH likely came not from Pintér but from Orbán’s inner circle. A third source said the IH headquarters was occupied “apparently with Orbán’s approval.”

The official explanation for the raid was that Péter Szijjártó had ordered a due diligence – Source: the Foreign Minister’s Facebook page

The interior ministry task force wasn’t just looking for information about OLAF surveillance; they sought records on any cases where the IH, under Lázár’s leadership, might have gained insight into the activities of domestic political and economic actors.

“It was as if they wanted to double-check what Lázár had been up to while overseeing the IH,”

said a former intelligence officer still in contact with current officials. Another former officer suggested the unprecedented action against the IH was also due to suspicions that sensitive information had been collected without the Prime Minister’s knowledge.

Despite their efforts, sources familiar with the 2018 raid said the interior ministry task force found very little of what they were seeking. Even though they occupied the intelligence agency’s building for weeks and conducted thorough searches, they came up empty-handed.

“They read through every file and took many things out… They checked everything,”

said an intelligence source. For example, NBSZ staff in the task force were charged with extracting potentially deleted data from computers and other electronic devices. They also attempted to break into the IH’s secure internal communication phone system (Secfone), copy the server, and decrypt past communications — all unsuccessfully.

The lack of findings wasn’t primarily due to extremely good security measures and encryption. “The IH knew not to document everything,” said a former intelligence officer. Another source familiar with the raid said the information on OLAF surveillance was part of so-called “white paper” cases.

In Hungarian secret service jargon, a “white paper” means that surveillance findings are summarized for political leadership not in an official, registered, and headed document but in an unofficial document outside the regular filing system.

“It was no secret within the IH that there were white paper cases; it was standard practice,”

said a former officer.

Sources well-acquainted with Hungarian intelligence services disagreed on when “white paper” use became common. A veteran former officer said that from the early 2010s, the names of important government-aligned figures began to be omitted from officially registered surveillance records if they were linked to sensitive matters. Instead, the uncensored version would be delivered to supervising politicians on unheaded white paper.

According to Miklós Ligeti of Transparency International Hungary, such practices suggest various criminal offenses.

“If there was no authorization for the surveillance, it raises suspicions of unauthorized data acquisition or secret use of covert means. If there was authorization but documents were later destroyed, it suggests public record forgery. And those approving such actions could be guilty of abuse of office,”

Ligeti explained.

None of the sources were aware of any criminal reports being filed over missing records, nor of anyone being held accountable. The IH’s former leaders are in diplomatic service to this day: István Pásztor is currently consul general in New York; Csaba Demcsák is ambassador in Zagreb; and Gábor Diczházi is ambassador in Ramallah. After a four-year absence, János Lázár evidently regained Orbán’s trust and has been serving as Minister for Construction and Transport since 2022.

In the fall of 2018, one of Szijjártó’s closest aides explained the dismissal of the three intelligence chiefs to Direkt36 by stating they had failed to hand over certain documents.

“When we asked them to show specific materials about their previous work, they couldn’t do it. So they were fired,”

a foreign ministry official said, though the official didn’t mention the raid at the time.

Ligeti also raised the suspicion that the agencies conducting the IH review and raiding its premises may themselves have broken the law if no criminal proceedings were initiated over the irregularities they uncovered. “If a state official becomes aware of suspected crimes at the IH through their position and fails to initiate proceedings, it also raises suspicions of abuse of office,” Ligeti said.

Sources familiar with the raid confirmed no criminal reports were filed, and prosecutors were not involved in the audit. Direkt36 queried all involved parties about whether any criminal reports had been filed but received no reply.

Orbán’s Centralized Intelligence

Even before the 2018 raid at the IH, Orbán signaled significant changes aimed at giving him, as Prime Minister, direct oversight of intelligence activities.

“There will also be a unified intelligence center here, which will allow Hungary to conduct better information and intelligence activities in this intense international competition,”

Orbán announced in a May 2018 radio interview. This institutional change routed all intelligence information directly to the Prime Minister through the newly established National Information Secretariat (NIÁT) within the Prime Minister’s Office.

After the weeks-long audit of the intelligence agency in the summer of 2018, the Prime Minister personally visited the agency’s headquarters on Budakeszi Road in the fall. There, in the IH’s so-called theater room, he held a closed briefing for the leadership. “He gave a tough, critical speech. The essence of it was that the IH had not been doing what it should have, was completely off track, and needed to return to the correct course,” said a source familiar with the details of the audit. In the fall of 2018, Orbán also appointed his trusted longtime foreign policy and national security advisor, József Czukor, as director-general of the IH (Czukor had already previously led the IH in the early 2000s.)

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The centralization continued in 2022, when civilian intelligence agencies were removed from the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and placed under the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office led by minister Antal Rogán (the current strongest minister of Orbán’s government who is also in charge or propaganda activities.) A National Information Center (NIK), dubbed as a “super intelligence agency”, was also established under the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office to channel all intelligence data into one place. In the spring of 2024, Orbán appointed Marcell Bíró as a new national security advisor with expanded powers.

This is not the first instance in which Direkt36 uncovered surveillance activities suggesting unlawful practices. In 2021, as part of the international Pegasus Project, Direkt36 revealed that from 2018, the Hungarian state targeted and surveilled journalists, lawyers, opposition politicians, and officials using the Pegasus spyware.

Cover picture: Somogyi Péter (szarvas) / Telex