Few tycoons have such an aura of omnipotence and omniscience as George Soros. Still best known in Britain as "the man who broke the Bank of England" on Black Wednesday (September 16, 1992), when sterling was forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, Soros is also fêted for pumping billions into Eastern Europe before and after 1989. Now 80, the Hungarian-American financier shows no sign of flagging in his frenetic drive to give away a  fortune estimated at $14 billion. The Soros myth is fuelled by a steady stream of bestselling books and articles in liberal journals such as the New York Review of Books.

There is, however, a darker side to George Soros: he has a domestic agenda in the US that not only helped to put Obama into the White House but filled the administration with radical Soros supporters; a global political agenda which treats America and Israel as the main threats to peace; and a social agenda of drug legalisation, abortion and euthanasia. To describe Soros's agenda, which has so far cost more than $7 billion, as utopian would be no exaggeration.

Take, for example, Soros's campaign against Israel and the "Israel lobby" in the US. This includes a $100 million donation to Human Rights Watch, the largest single gift it has ever received, despite a record of vilifying the Jewish state so shocking that last year its founder Robert Bernstein denounced the organisation. It recently emerged that Soros had secretly funded the American lobby group J-Street, which was promoted by the White House to justify its policy of unilateral concessions by Israel. 

Soros is uniquely well connected in the Obama administration, which usually follows his policy prescriptions. Consider, for instance, Soros's support for the National Iranian American Council, which is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Trojan horse in the US. One of its board members, John Limbert, was until October Deputy Assistant Secretary for Iran at the State Department, which may be one of the reasons why US policy has failed to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Soros wants US policy to be subordinated to the United Nations. There, too, Soros has influence. One of his closest associates is Lord Malloch-Brown, formerly Deputy Secretary General at the UN and a Foreign Office minister, in the British Government. Malloch-Brown has sat on the boards of several Soros organisations and even lived in one of the billionaire's houses in Westchester County, outside New York. It is the same story in domestic policy. Melody Barnes, formerly head of the Centre for American Progress, is now Director of the Domestic Policy Council in the Obama administration. Soros is a major donor to the Centre.