Soon after the deadly Israeli attack that caused thousands of Hezbollah pagers to explode in September 2024, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government offered its assistance to Iran, the key sponsor of Hezbollah, considered a terrorist organization by the United States.
“Our secret service has already contacted your services and we will share all the information we have gathered during the investigation,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, by telephone, according to a copy of a Hungarian government transcript of the Sept. 30 call obtained and authenticated by a Western intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. “Every possible document will be shared with your services.”
Hungary was in the spotlight at the time because the Taiwanese company whose brand was on the devices had told reporters they were manufactured by a Hungarian company under a licensing agreement. Szijjarto was keen to stress to Araghchi that his country had not been involved in any way in the Sept. 17 attack in Lebanon that killed 12 people and wounded as many as 2,800 and that the pagers had not been made in Hungary.
But the call — and Szijjarto’s apparent readiness to curry favor with Iran’s foreign minister — pose uncomfortable questions about the Orban government’s relationship with Iran at a time when the Trump administration is locked in conflict with Tehran while at the same time the White House is providing support to Orban’s reelection campaign in a high-stakes election.
The call also jars with the Orban government’s official policy of support for Israel, frequently breaking with its European counterparts to back Israel in United Nations Security Council votes, and announcing it was withdrawing from the International Criminal Court in April 2025 during a visit to Budapest by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing an ICC arrest warrant.
Like President Donald Trump, Netanyahu has also given his public endorsement to Orban.
Vice President JD Vance arrived in Budapest on Tuesday, just days before Hungary’s April 12 election, to lend last-ditch support to Orban’s flagging campaign, in which the pro-Kremlin Hungarian premier is trailing his center-right rival Peter Magyar in polls. He is due to speak on Wednesday morning at a key Hungarian government-backed cultural foundation, the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, or MCC, which has become a hub for the MAGA and nationalist conservative movement.
Vance failed to mention any concerns about Russian interference on Tuesday while at the same time backing Orban in his claim that he faced interference in the election from Ukraine and Brussels, amid tensions over Orban’s blocking of a 90-billion-euro loan that the European Union is seeking to extend to Ukraine. The loan is critical for Kyiv’s ability to continue to defend itself against Russia’s invasion.
Orban’s government has been a bastion of support for the MAGA movement with Orban at the forefront of efforts to present a Christian nationalist front against migrants across Europe, while at the same time aligning himself with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Orban’s campaign has been racked by reports that his government colludes with Moscow, including reporting in The Washington Post, citing a European security official, that Szijjarto, the foreign minister, regularly telephoned his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov to give “live reports” during breaks in sensitive E.U. meetings.
That claim was further bolstered when several independent investigative outlets, including Hungary’s VSquare, last week published a leaked recording of a call between Szijjarto and Lavrov in which they coordinated on an effort to help Russian billionaires, companies and banks win reprieve from sanctions imposed by the E.U.
Szijjarto did not deny the recording but played down the contents of the call, saying that the journalists had “proved that I say the same publicly as I do on the phone.”
The transcript of the call between Szijjarto and Araghchi raises further questions about the political alignments of Orban’s government, especially given that Moscow has a long-standing alliance with Iran and has supported it in its war with the United States, providing targeting information for U.S. forces, including warships and aircraft in the Middle East, according to Western officials.
“I just wanted to tell you personally that our services have already contacted yours,” Szijjarto told Araghchi at the time, according to the transcript.
When Araghchi responded that he was “very grateful for you doing all this,” Szijjarto said: “Absolutely, absolutely.”
“If you need any further information or you wish to contact me then I am always at your service.”
“These pagers are not produced in Hungary, they have never been to Hungary and no Hungarian company has never been related with these pagers physically. So we don’t have anything to do with it!”
At the time, Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs echoed that position, posting on X that the Budapest company named as the manufacturer of the pagers was no more than “a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site in Hungary. It has one manager registered at its declared address, and the referenced devices have never been in Hungary.”
Kovacs also said that the Hungarian national security services were “cooperating with all relevant international partner agencies and organizations.” He did not however specify that these partner agencies included the Iranian security services. Kovacs did not respond immediately to a request for comment about the transcript.
A former White House official said that while it was not surprising that Hungary would seek to ameliorate possible tensions with Iran over the pager attack, the call clashed with Orban’s overt support for Israel.
“Hungary is one of the most supportive of Israel in its official policy. They are one of the only countries who consistently vote with the U.S. when the rest of Europe abstains,” the former official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “At a minimum this goes very strongly against their policy. I couldn’t imagine a British foreign secretary doing this.”
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