Government officials are not immune to a friendly visit from Pegasus

It was just a question of time before curious individuals would wade through the 300-odd telephone numbers and discover names they would never have imagined finding on a list of potential victims of the Orbán government’s illegal wiretapping. I’m talking about government officials who, for one reason or another, were suspected of possible antigovernmental activities or were simply not loyal enough to the regime.

So far, the most intriguing case is that of Attila Aszódi, a university professor at the Budapesti Műszaki és Gazdaságtudományi Egyetem (Budapest University of Technology and Economics), who for many years was involved, in various capacities, with technical matters related to the Paks Nuclear Power Plant. He always struck me as somebody who fervently believed that the world’s energy needs could not be met using only renewable energy sources and that therefore every effort had to be made to build more nuclear power plants. Unlike many others, he even believed in the necessity of Paks II and was ready to join the Orbán administration to oversee the construction project, which would be carried out by Rosatom, a Russian state company.

Aszódi didn’t have strong political attachments, and therefore, in May 2003, he accepted the post of ministerial commissioner offered to him by István Csillag, SZDSZ minister of the economy and transport in the Medgyessy government, to oversee the Paks Nuclear Plant. He held that job for a little over a year. Beginning in 2014, he once again became a government commissioner, this time under János Lázár in the Orbán government, and became the chief negotiator with the leadership of Rosatom.

By 2018, the Hungarian media was full of stories about the difficulties with the construction of the Paks II Nuclear Power Plant. Vladimir Putin was increasingly annoyed about the delays. At that point, Orbán decided that what Paks II needed was a separate ministry under an old Paks hand, János Süli, who became minister without portfolio responsible for the planning, construction, and commissioning of the two new blocks at Paks in April 2017.

Aszódi and his new boss rarely saw eye-to-eye. At the time of Aszódi’s dismissal, I wrote a post titled “Paks II power plant, a millstone around Viktor Orbán’s neck,” in which I noted that the clash between the two was pretty much inevitable because “Aszódi is very much of the academic who was in his element debating the benefits of atomic power in public forums” while “Süli is the kind of man who feels at home in a pub chatting with his former employees about the good old days.”

Attila Aszódi and János Süli

Thus, Aszódi’s firing seemed on the surface to be the result of the personal incompatibility between the minister and his undersecretary. Süli became tired of Aszódi’s objections to some of the decisions he made. Today, however, after the revelation that Aszódi’s government telephone number was found on the list of possibly compromised numbers, I’m inclined to revise my initial judgment on the matter. Although all media outlets emphasize that, as things stand now, there is no proof that any of the numbers was actually spied on, Direkt36 rightly emphasizes that those few telephones that were actually checked all showed signs of earlier penetration. Moreover, that the government would gather telephone numbers for no good reason is simply not a reasonable assumption.

A secret service probe using Pegasus or any other intrusive method surely had to be approved at the very highest level. I suspect that the idea may have come from Süli, who was probably suspicious of Aszódi, whose interest in the project was strictly scientific. As Aszódi said in an interview right after his dismissal, projects like Paks II are of very long duration spanning different governments, and therefore one cannot think about them in political terms. This may have been a naïve assumption on Aszódi’s part. Moreover, his openness with journalists and the interested public, in addition to his earlier position in the “enemy” government, most likely aroused suspicion on the part of Süli, who after his appointment as minister became an enthusiastic Fidesz supporter and a member of parliament after 2018.

The idea of some kind of investigation of Aszódi may have been born in the head of Süli, but surely he couldn’t have known anything about Pegasus, which the Hungarian government had just purchased. And even if he did, I don’t think that, merely on the basis of his say-so, the secret service would have obliged and would have begun working on Aszódi’s case. I suspect that the final OK came from higher up, perhaps even from Viktor Orbán, who was told by Süli that Aszódi’s constant caviling was responsible for some of the delays in the project. They may also have found his involvement with Paks before 2010 suspicious. As we know, Orbán and his team don’t tolerate any openness with their political “enemies.” Whether they found anything deemed suspicious or incriminating on the telephone that Aszódi had to turn in at the time of his dismissal we don’t know. They may well have, since any conversation with an expert outside of the Fidesz fold could have been flagged as compromising. And any conversation with a “green” politician, activist, NGO, or ordinary concerned citizen would probably have been seen as proof of turncoat behavior.

July 23, 2021

Blog posts by Eva S. Balogh also appear in Hungarian at https://ujnepszabadsag.com/