Jobbik MEP’s Russian spy story
September 24th, 2014Index runs a lengthy fact-finding story to underpin the suspicion that Jobbik’s leading foreign affairs expert is a Russian secret service operative. He denies the charges and has threatened to sue the author and the news site.
On Index, András Dezső presents evidence that the Hungarian counter-espionage service is right in suspecting Jobbik MEP Béla Kovács of spying for Russia, and that the Hungarian authorities were right to ask the European Parliament to suspend his immunity (see BudaPost, May 20 and 26). The evidence is indirect, but Dezső believes that it is convincing. Kovács met his Russian wife in the late seventies in Japan, where she was (and according to Index still is!) married to a Japanese nuclear industry engineer, a graduate from Moscow University. During those years, his wife made frequent expensive trips abroad which she could not have afforded from her own means. Kovács’s father was told by Hungarian secret service operatives at that time that she was “a Soviet courier”. The journalist suggests that Kovács, later a Moscow graduate himself, must have known that it was inconceivable at that time for a Soviet citizens to lead such a lifestyle unless they were in the service of the KGB. Upon his return to Hungary he joined Jobbik and gave the radical right-wing party lavish financial support, running into the millions of Forints. The Index journalist believes that he was personally responsible for turning the radical right wing party into a supporter of Russian foreign policy. He starts his story by revealing that Mr Kovács was an adopted child and was the unrecognised son of a Russian officer stationed in Hungary.
Mr Kovács has dismissed the allegations as outright lies and is threatening to sue Index for moral reparation. The only concrete allegation he specifically denies, however, is the story of his birth. He says his mother was a gang rape victim, and the perpetrators were Hungarian speakers.