One day in mid-January, Balázs Dénes, the Hungarian executive director of a Berlin-based NGO, travelled to Amsterdam to meet Ali Mahmoud Alrabie, from a Bahraini company called Orion Ventures Capital. Alrabie’s fund was interested in supporting projects that helped refugees, he said, and paid for Dénes to fly to Amsterdam to discuss potential collaboration. Alrabie was a friendly, jovial interlocutor and was keen to hear all about Dénes’s NGO, Civil Liberties Union for Europe.

Dénes tried to follow up the meeting with requests for more information. But Alrabie did not respond. Soon after, the website of Orion Ventures Capital, which described the fund as a “leading boutique investment firm based in Bahrain”, stopped working. The company, apparently, does not exist, and Alrabie is almost certainly an invented persona.

Subsequent events show that Dénes was one of many people targeted by what appears to be a coordinated, expensive and sophisticated sting operation. The fake meetings apparently had the aim of collecting compromising material on Hungarian civil society activists, and feeding into the talking points of the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who convincingly won re-election for a third consecutive term last Sunday in parliamentary elections.

Q&A Why is Hungary going after George Soros? Show Hide The Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has used scaremongering tactics about migrants and refugees as the cornerstone of his politics in the past few years, but in classic populist style he has also required a shadowy, nefarious overlord to target. In Orbán’s case, that figure has been George Soros, who perfectly fits the bill as both insider and outsider in Hungary. Soros was born György Schwartz to a family of Hungarian Jews in 1930, but his father changed their surname to make it more Hungarian. His family split up and lived under assumed identities to escape the Holocaust, and Soros left Hungary in 1947 to study in London. He later emigrated to the US, making billions as an investor and hedge fund manager. His Open Society foundations have donated billions to promoting civil society and human rights, particularly in the former Communist countries of central and eastern Europe. Soros is a favoured target of rightwing governments worldwide, including in Israel. Hungarian officials have used criticism of Soros by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to deflect allegations of antisemitism around their own anti-Soros campaign. However, at times, the rhetoric appears to borrow heavily from antisemitic tropes. In a March speech in which he accused the political opposition of being “Soros candidates”, Orbán referred to his enemies as “not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money”.



Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images Europe

Orbán ran his campaign almost exclusively on the threat posed to Hungary by migration. He has accused the Hungarian-American billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, a favoured bogeyman of right-wing governments across the world, of fomenting a plot to bring “tens of millions” of migrants to Europe and erode its Christian heritage and national boundaries.

The sting operation, which took place over several months in the lead-up to the election, targeted a number of individuals who are, or were, employed by Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF), or else worked for organisations that received grant money from the OSF, like Dénes.

It involved meetings in London, New York, Vienna and Amsterdam. Leaked, often doctored, recordings of the conversations were immediately jumped upon by Orbán-friendly media as proof of the existence of a Soros plot against Hungary.

The Observer spoke to several people who had been targeted by companies apparently all linked to the same undercover operation over the past four months. Some of them did not wish to be named publicly, but all reported a similar series of events: an email approach offering an all-expenses-paid trip to meet an apparent sympathiser, followed by a meeting in which the interlocutors were friendly, but asked bizarre and provocative questions.

Two weeks before Dénes flew to Amsterdam, András Siewert, who runs the Hungarian NGO Migration Aid, went to Vienna to meet Grigory Aleksandrov, who claimed to be from a company called Smart InnoTech that offered technological solutions to migration issues. Aleksandrov, like Alrabie, was chatty and inquisitive, and as well as offering lucrative opportunities for collaboration asked numerous questions about the work of Migration Aid, and any political contacts it might have.

Although many of those who attended the meetings said they began to become suspicious over the lines of questioning, there was also an appreciation that they were dealing with experienced deception artists.

“These were hardcore pros who knew how to direct the conversation and put me at ease,” said Dénes. The sham companies involved had sharply designed websites, and their employees had Linkedin accounts. Another person who attended a similar meeting said they met an interlocutor who spun a convincing, emotional tale of how his own family had been subjected to political repression during his childhood, which had spurred him to help refugees.

However, once the small talk out of the way, the questioning became increasingly pointed. Siewert said “Grigory Aleksandrov” asked repeated questions about Migration Aid’s political links, as well as links to any Soros foundations. Siewert, unlike most of the other organisations targeted, said he has never applied for any external money, including Soros money, and that Migration Aid relies on donations alone for its humanitarian work.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Orbán ran his campaign almost exclusively on the threat posed to Hungary by migration. Photograph: Bernadett Szabo/Reuters

Aleksandrov then asked whether he might not consider organising demonstrations, rather than simply distributing aid. He also offered technology to set up a database of refugees waiting in the “transit zone” along Hungary’s southern border.

Siewert said Aleksandrov had a clear Israeli accent; Dénes said Alrabie was “pale-skinned Middle Eastern, probably Israeli or Arab”. Another person who attended a meeting in a European city said the interlocutor was “definitely Israeli”.

The first public sign of the sting came in mid-March, when an article appeared in the Jerusalem Post quoting a recording of Dénes saying his work involved launching public campaigns and mobilising EU countries to lobby against aspects of Hungarian legislation. There was no indication in the article of how the recording was obtained or made.

Almost immediately, there was a response from the Hungarian government, which seized on the Israeli article as “proof” that the Soros network was lobbying against Hungary internationally. “The Berlin lieutenant has been caught red-handed,” wrote Orbán’s spokesman, Zoltán Kovács, in a blog post. “How on earth is a so-called NGO engaged in political decision-making, and working to influence one government using the help of another government? That’s completely and fully against the law,” he later told the Observer.

Whoever was doing the leaking then provided other recordings to a source much closer to the Hungarian government. Journalist Zsolt Bayer, an associate of Orbán and founding member of his Fidesz party, wrote articles using other leaked recordings in the government-friendly paper Magyar Idök.

Bayer posted audio from Siewert’s meetings with Aleksandrov, as well as a heavily edited recording of Tracie Ahern, former chief financial officer of Soros Fund Management, who said there were “something like 2,000 people” working for OSF, during a meeting with an apparent sympathiser in New York. The figure was meant for OSF globally, but was spun by the Hungarian media to be about employees in Hungary.

The figure was immediately seized on by Orbán himself, who said the government knew the names of 2,000 members of the “Soros mercenary army” who were working to “bring down the government”.

Kovács said the idea that the recordings were made as part of an undercover sting operation was a “cheap argument” and “fake news”. He denied any government involvement in the affair. Bayer did not return calls, and a source at the Jerusalem Post declined to say how the newspaper received the recording, though did say the paper had rejected Hungarian government requests to hand it over.

The sophisticated operation, spanning multiple countries and involving numerous fake identities and companies, matches the modus operandi of a number of corporate intelligence firms that have received negative publicity in recent months.

There are numerous companies who provide similar services, a corporate intelligence source said, and there is no hard evidence about which company or government might be behind this particular sting operation.

While the tradecraft involved suggests operatives with an intelligence background, the sting was not carried out flawlessly. Siewert said he was so suspicious when he received the initial approach from Aleksandrov that he reported it to the Hungarian intelligence service AH and informed it he thought he was being set up.

In an interview at Migration Aid’s office, an apartment in Budapest’s seventh district stacked with cardboard boxes of donated clothes and toys, Siewert said Aleksandrov raised suspicion because his company had little online footprint, and he spelled his own surname in three different ways in emails.

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Due to his suspicions, Siewert secretly recorded the meetings himself. After partial recordings were released by Hungarian media, Siewert released the full audio himself, to show he said nothing untoward. He also took clandestine photos of the man pretending to be Aleksandrov, and his female assistant, which he posted online. Dénes said the man he met, Alrabie, was a different person to the man in Siewert’s photographs.

Siewert was coy about revealing to what extent the meetings he held with Aleksandrov in Vienna were coordinated with the AH, but has made public a document showing he did, indeed, report the approach to the service prior to attending the meeting. The document raises the intriguing possibility that part of Hungary’s intelligence apparatus was, or is, investigating a sting operation that appears to have been carried out with the aim of buttressing the Hungarian government’s talking points.

One of Orbán’s major campaign promises was to introduce a so-called “Stop Soros” legislative package targeting civil society, and on Tuesday the prime minister used a post-election press conference to say that passing the bill is a top priority for the new government. Keeping the anti-Soros rhetoric high, a government-linked magazine last week published a list of so-called “Soros agents” active inside Hungary, including journalists and civil society activists.

The “Stop Soros” law, when passed, will subject foreign funding for migration-related activities to a 25% tax and will require organisations to undergo vetting to check if they are a national security threat. “After the law is passed they’ll need ‘evidence’, and it’s quite possible that they’ll use these recordings for that purpose,” said Dénes.