Assassination-style secret service plot targeted Tisza Party—but police refuse to investigate

An operation clearly modelled on a classic spy‑style covert action sought to destroy the Tisza Party from the inside – yet the police have opened no investigation into the core of the case.

A data leak and the “Henry” approach

Last November, outrage erupted when the personal email addresses of almost 200,000 Tisza supporters were revealed. The government then blamed the Tisza Party itself for carelessness, while Péter Magyar spoke of a Russian‑style hacking attack. Now, the investigative outlet Direkt36 has exposed a recruitment attempt so close to a secret‑service operation that it could have come straight from a thriller: an agent, operating under the codename “Henry”, endeavoured to penetrate the Tisza’s inner circle and, with the help of technically skilled insiders, to build secret back‑doors into the party’s IT systems.

According to Direkt36’s findings, as reported by the Telex news site, Henry tried to recruit two computer engineers who had worked for, or were closely associated with, the Tisza Party. Their role was to prepare these back‑doors so that Henry and his network could move in and out at will and quietly siphon data, while leaving no trace on the logs. The operation ultimately failed when the Tisza engineers, alarmed by Henry’s advances, banded together and tried to turn the tables on him.

A suspicious tip‑off

Shortly afterwards, Hungary’s elite investigative arm, the National Bureau of Investigation (NNI), received an anonymous report claiming that the same two IT staff were preparing to film child‑sexual‑exploitation material using a modified belt and then upload it to the internet. The tip‑off was unusually detailed, including specific information about the engineers’ movements, which raised red flags even among the NNI’s cyber‑crime specialists. What is more, the report was preceded by a formal alert from the Internal Security Service (the civilian “Államvédelmi Hivatal”, or ÁH) under Minister Antal Rogán, instructing the police that the forthcoming allegation must be treated as a matter of urgency.

The case was pushed forward with such speed that there was no time for proper background checks. Just seven days after the anonymous tip, police executed home searches on the two IT professionals, but found nothing on their digital devices to support the allegations.

Secret‑service orders to the police

Although the Hungarian legal order formally separates the police (NNI) from the secret services (ÁH), in this instance the ÁH appears to have issued direct instructions to the NNI – including what to focus on during the searches. In particular, the ÁH signalled that the investigators should pay close attention to a modified belt, which the two Tisza engineers had altered in order to expose the agent Henry and his handler.

The engineers, using the pseudonyms “Gundalf” and “Buddha”, had tried to trap Henry. Gundalf, then just 19 and working for the Tisza Party, was first approached by Henry on 9 February 2025 and coyly cultivated as a potential insider. Gundalf appeared to go along with the approach, but instead contacted his older colleague, Buddha, and the pair decided to unmask the agent. They transformed an ordinary belt into a covert device, embedding a hidden camera capable of recording both images and sound, hoping to gather decisive evidence of Henry’s activities.

At the ÁH’s explicit request, the NNI then redirected the investigation towards possible misuse of a “military or technical device” – the belt, as defined by an NNI expert – effectively turning the table on the whistleblowers.

Who is Henry? The police does not investigate

What the police have not opened an inquiry into is the central question: who exactly is Henry, whose orders he was following when he tried to recruit both the 19‑year‑old Gundalf and the older Buddha, and why. Nor are officers investigating a possible link between the November data leak and the undercover operation that ran from February to July. Yet Henry’s messages to Gundalf leave little room for ambiguity: he describes himself as working for a large, all‑seeing organisation, and says that several teams have been infiltrating the Tisza at central command, because the party is now seen as a far greater threat than hitherto reckoned by the “top brass”.

One of Henry’s associates, known only as “Mos4ik”, even claimed to have exposed Evely Vogel, a former partner of Péter Magyar, saying in an April message that she and her team had secretly worked for his network before being uncovered. Mos4ik also spelled out the ultimate goal of the operation: to gain total control over the Tisza’s IT architecture by installing back‑doors everywhere, thus securing a bird’s‑eye view of all party data.

​Why was the police involved?

The deeper puzzle remains: why bring in the police at all if the two engineers had already been under surveillance using methods that more closely resemble a secret‑service operation than a normal criminal investigation? The answer, according to Direkt36, lies in Hungary’s national‑security law, repeatedly criticised by the European Court of Human Rights. That legislation allows anyone to be monitored on the mere authorisation of the Justice Minister, but does not empower the secret services to carry out house searches; that power remains with the police. In this case, the police’s role was apparently to provide the legal veneer for what those inside the NNI – as Direkt36’s sources suggest – already recognised as a covert intelligence operation targeting a political rival.

Péter Magyar: Orbán-gate

“The end is here. A false world has fallen apart. The Hungarian secret services, following direct orders from Orbán and his government, worked on Tisza to prepare for a government change. This case is the Orbán-gate, reminiscent of the worst Communist era— even more severe than the American Watergate scandal that resulted in President Nixon’s resignation,” said Péter Magyar, head of the Tisza Party, about the issue.

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