One of the most important, yet least visible, areas of the intra-government power shift in Hungary after the 2022 elections was the oversight of the secret services. The secret services were brought almost entirely under the control of Antal Rogán (Head of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office, commonly known as the ‘propaganda minister’), and recently we have witnessed further changes in this area. Marcell Biró was appointed Chief National Security Advisor and Örs Farkas was promoted to State Secretary for Civilian National Security Services.
But why is it important to replace men in suits with men in suits? The changes exerted in mid-March not only brought changes in the personnel, but they also strengthened the role and powers of the Chief National Security Advisor. He became responsible for the National Information Centre (NIC), which plays a certain kind of supervisory role to the civilian national security services having access to their information, but it can also initiate its own operations. The intelligence services no longer write their own assessments and analyses independently to be received by the relevant members of the government. Instead, these documents first pass through an NIC filter, therefore at the end of the process the government receives material prepared by the NIC.
According to our sources familiar with the field, these changes can be explained from a professional point of view, since government information needs can be met if the so-called super-secret service, NIC, is supervised by the Chief National Security Advisor. This hierarchy ensures a faster and more direct flow of information between the client and the executive. This seems to be a rational reasoning, however, in the fifteenth year of the NER (System of National Cooperation created by Prime Minister Orbán), one can rightfully question whether the changes in staff actually reflect this professionalism or not.
The restructuring after the 2022 elections led to an expansion of Antal Rogán's "playground", but "checks and balances" still remained in the system to an extent that the oversight of the then newly created super-secret service remained with ex-police officer Károly Papp, who had clear ties to the Ministry of Interior and Sándor Pintér.
The Chief National Security Advisor and State Secretary for National Information (SSNI) was József Kovács, who, before his appointment as State Secretary, had led the Military National Security Service for six years, and had previously held staff officer and commanding officer positions in the Hungarian defence forces for more than 20 years. He was, according to our sources, very close to Viktor Orbán, and was one of the main architects of the Zrínyi 2026 programme (the content of which is unknown to the public), which provided the basis for the ongoing defence force development.
Now it seems that the "policeman" (Károly Papp) and the "soldier" (József Kovács) have gotten further away from the inner circle of trust. Neither of them has been eliminated from the system, both have had a soft-landing meaning that they have become members of the newly created Strategic Advisory Board led by Balázs Orbán, they continue to receive salaries that equal those of state secretaries, but this board is considered to be a governmental "hospice" institution.
Marcell Biró, unlike his predecessor, has had no experience in the field of national security and has not worked long in the areas which are designated for his position by law (such as defence, foreign- and domestic policy, national security, immigration, crime prevention, penal enforcement, disaster management or other law enforcement areas). He did work for a few months as State Secretary for Public Administration in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and then he was chief of staff to Sándor Pintér for a year. This experience is quite far from national security;therefore it is safe to say that the confidence in his person seems to have outweighed his relevant experience.
Back in 2018, when he was appointed Secretary of State, we wrote about Biró that he had no party career, but he was a bureaucrat in his whole life, so there is no chance of him outgrowing politically either Orbán or Rogán. Since then, he has moved up the ranks, the restructured position of Chief National Security Advisor almost equals a minister without a portfolio in ranks (it is not the same legally, of course), but there is still no reason to fear that he will grow into a powerful player in his own right.
We often see how in government circles money and trust go hand in hand, and this is also true regarding Biró's career. Until October 2021, Biró worked in Orbán's inner circle, he was head of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office as State Secretary, he was responsible for preparing government meetings, and even ministers had to go through him to get to the Prime Minister. From there, he was suddenly appointed to be head of the Supervising Authority of Regulated Activities for 9 years.
In order to see why trust and money go hand in hand, one just has to take a look at the Authority's website: 'The areas belonging to the Authority’s responsibility play a significant role in national economy, as the small and medium-sized enterprises operating in these areas, which are typically Hungarian-owned, generate annual sales of more than HUF 2,000 billion (...). The stable operation of the sectors supervised by the Authority is of particular importance from the viewpoint of state tax revenues, as the central budget receives a total of more than HUF 650 billion in taxes and contribution revenues from the activities supervised by the Authority."
Now, as Chief National Security Advisor, Biró has acquired extended responsibilities and powers. One important restriction remained though: according to the law, only the Prime Minister can give him a task, therefore, although he is part of Antal Rogán's ministry, even Rogán can only give him instructions through Orbán. Biró supervises, among other things, the NIC which is labelled as the super-secret service, determines the NIC's scheduled tasks and collects the government's information requests (which the NIC must then fulfil). He can submit proposals, attend government meetings, draft ministerial decrees must be sent to him, and, in the absence of the Prime Minister, he leads the Defence Council which consists of Propaganda Minister AntalRogán, Foreign Minister PéterSzijjártó, Minister of Defence KristófSzalay-Bobrovniczky and Interior Minister SándorPintér.
The same dilemma of inexperience versus trust was tilted in favour of trust when Örs Farkas, with zero experience, was appointed Deputy State Secretary for Civilian National Security Services in 2022. Although before the 2022 elections, Farkas was ranked 162nd on the Fidesz-KDNP list, according to VSquare, thanks to lobbying by Antal Rogán, he replaced former minister Judit Varga as MP in the parliament, and followed Károly Papp as secretary of state.
During his brief career as a government official, Farkas has had some bizarre moments. Since mid-March, Örs Farkas - who called George Clooney a Soros-agent - has been in charge of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the Information Office responsible for foreign intelligence, and the National Security Service, which provides technical services to the secret services (such as interceptions). He defines the tasks of these agencies, approves the internal rules of procedure and authorisation for the collection of secret information, supervises their lawful and professional operation, and approves the organisational and operational rules of the services, with the powers delegated to him by the Minister (Antal Rogán).
The Chief National Security Advisor also preside over a cabinet-secretariat-office trio. Their tasks are probably only partially known and deliberately broadly defined. The organisational and operational rules of the national security services are classified, and the position of the Chief National Security Advisor stands somewhere between the state administration and the secret services, so this is perhaps not so surprising.
For the time being, news surfaced only about the person of the Head of the National Security Office, who, according to Index, is Imre Porkoláb. The fact that the usual cabinet-secretariat structure has not been retained, but a separate National Security Bureau has been created, suggests that it is likely to have a special function. Porkoláb - for perfectly understandable reasons - is the government's favourite super-soldierG.I.Joe: well-educated, confident, speaks good English and he is the first Hungarian to study at Sandhurst, one of the world's top military academies. He also worked in the Pentagon, served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and most recently worked as Head of the Defence Innovation Research Institute. It was already rumoured previously that he is going to oversee the mission in Chad, a role he could also take on as head of the National Security Bureau, but at the end this role was not included in the revised organisational and operational rules of the Prime Minister's Office.
An interesting question to be answered is who heads the secretariat and, more importantly, the cabinet. The secretariat mainly performs administrative and coordinating tasks, but according to those familiar with the field, the cabinet should be the organisation that oversees the actual professional tasks of the secret service.
The previous Chief National Security Advisor, József Kovács, was the Secretary of State in the Cabinet Office and also the Secretary of the Defence Council. Now, Biró, compared to him, is essentially a beefed-up state secretary, with a higher salary, broader powers, and is no longer just secretary but Head of the Defence Council. The change introduced in the National Security Advisor’s post can be most simply summarised as follows: Kovács was more of an advisor than an important state official, while Biró, although nominally still an advisor, has in fact been given a strong state leadership position.
It is worth looking at the practices of some of the countries in the area, because there are also some weird solutions elsewhere, and the Slovakian one is even more unusual than the Hungarian one.
In Poland, the services have typically been overseen by a minister without portfolio since 1997, a position now held by Tomasz Siemoniak, who is one of the most experienced security and defence experts in the country, and a former defence minister in several governments. Under the President's Office, there is a team called BBN (National Security Bureau), which is responsible, among other things, for drafting national security strategies. There is no specific position of Chief National Security Advisor, the closest to it is the head of the BBN, Jacek Siewiera. He is not a real expert of the field, as he is a doctor and lawyer who graduated in Oxford. In Poland, national security is a shared responsibility between the government and the president's office, but it should be stressed that the portfolio is so important that there is no conflict on substantial issues, despite the sometimes sharp disagreement between President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
Romania’s history is quite burdened by secret service activity, which is perhaps the reason why there are several different organisations responsible for monitoring the services. Both the SRI, responsible for internal intelligence, and the SIE, responsible for external intelligence, are under the control of a joint parliamentary committee, which in theory exercises permanent civilian control. The opposition, however, has repeatedly criticised the rather formal nature of this control. In principle, the Parliament should debate and vote on the reports summarising the activities of the services every year, but this is often done in haste, without any real debate or scrutiny. A telling example is that in 2021, the SRI’s Annual Reports for 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 were adopted at the same time. Last but not least, the external legality control mechanism is provided by the Supreme Court of Cassation and Justice and the Prosecutor's Office of the Supreme Court of Cassation and Justice. External audit is carried out by the Romanian Court of Audit.
Slovakia has not been known for the modest operations of its secret services for the last thirty years. One example for this is that in the turbulent 1990s, during the government of VladimírMečiar, the Slovak Information Service (SIS) kidnapped the son of Mečiar's political rival Michal Ková. Here, it is rather the leadership of the secret service itself that is more politicised, not its supervision, although problems arise on that level as well, as the main supervisory body is the parliamentary special committee that monitors the activities of the SIS. It is usually led by an opposition MP, but most of the votes are typically in favour of the governing coalition. The committee can question the director of SIS on any issue, and it oversees the SIS budget.
Currently, the SIS reports directly to Prime Minister Robert Fico and is headed by controversial lawyer-turned-Smer politician Pavol Gašpar. Gašpar's appointment was only achieved by a sleight of hand after head of state Zuzana Čaputová indicated that she would leave the appointment of the new director-general to his successor. The coalition did not want to wait for this, they bypassed the President and appointed Gašpar as Deputy Director General of SIS, and then gave him the powers of acting Director General, so currently there is no Director chairing the agency.
It is a nice family story that Fico originally wanted to appoint Pavol's father, Smer MP and former police chief Tibor Gašpar, but he is currently subject to several investigations, in quite different cases. He was charged with perjury and lying under oath, and was also suspected of giving a bribe of EUR 60 000 to the police, but these cases have magically disappeared. The Gašpar family cases can be considered next level even from a Hungarian standpoint, and although Pavol's appointment is worrisome from a different angle than that of Farkas Örs, the unprofessionalism in the supervision of the secret services is a common feature of both countries.
This article was written in the framework of The Eastern Frontier Initiative (TEFI) project. TEFI is a collaboration of independent publishers from Central and Eastern Europe, to foster common thinking and cooperation on European security issues in the region. The project aims to promote knowledge sharing in the European press and contribute to a more resilient European democracy.
Members of the consortium are 444 (Hungary), Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland), SME (Slovakia), PressOne (Romania), and Bellingcat (The Netherlands).
The TEFI project is co-financed by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
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