The saga then took an even stranger turn: Hungarian intelligence officials told a parliamentary security committee in Budapest that Mr. Gyorkos had for years been under scrutiny for his role in a network of fringe extremists linked to and encouraged by Russia. So close was the relationship, the committee heard, that Russian military intelligence officers, masquerading as diplomats, staged regular mock combat exercises using plastic guns with neo-Nazi activists near Mr. Gyorkos’s home.
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But Andras Racz, a Russia expert at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, said it fit into a scatter-gun strategy of placing small bets, directly or through proxies, on ready-made fringe groups in an effort to destabilize or simply disorient the European Union.
Most of these bets fail, but reaching out to those on the margins costs little and sometimes hits pay dirt. That happened with Jobbik, a once-marginal far-right Hungarian group that is now the country’s leading opposition party — and a big fan of President Vladimir V. Putin, as is Hungary’s prime minister, Victor Orban.
