by Edward Lucas
His descent to treason began, according to him and to Estonian officials, during a summer holiday in the Tunisian resort of Sousse in July 1995. A familiar figure approached him in the street. It was Valeri Zentsov, a former official in the Soviet Estonian KGB. Casually dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, he introduced himself, pressing Simm to join him for a vodka. This meeting was no coincidence: when an intelligence officer pitches to a potential agent, every aspect is worked out in advance. What are the target’s weaknesses? What happens if he threatens to report the encounter to his authorities? What mixture of bribery, threats and flattery will work best? That the Russians had identified Simm, and knew his movements well enough to approach him when he was on holiday, in between jobs, and following the end of his relationship with a much younger girlfriend, suggests a thorough knowledge of the comings and goings of Estonian society. Simm himself believes that a Russian mole elsewhere in the defence or security establishment had ‘spotted’ him as a likely prospect. That may well be true. Yet it is also possible that the story is in whole or in part a fake. No external corroboration for it exists. The real truth may be that Simm needed not to be recruited, but just reactivated.
Zentsov greeted him (at least according to Simm’s version of events) with pleasantries. Simm recalls:
I knew it was not a chance meeting. I thought we might be observed. But I was afraid my career would be over if I said no. Also I thought about the future – who would help me? My salary was low.
Simm claims that the approach came at a time when he had survived bruising encounters with organised crime gangs in Tallinn. He recalls:
I wore a bullet-proof vest . . . Life was cheap . . . a killer cost just $300 . . . Russian intelligence has more than 500 poisons, for ladies and for men. If they could find me in Tunisia they could find me anywhere. Who could I trust?
Zentsov assured Simm that Russia had no hostile intentions to Estonia, dismissing the (then only occasional) outbursts from Moscow as a mere ‘political game’. But he said his superiors were worried that NATO would use the small country as a base for an attack on Russia. That concern, Simm says, was a hallmark of Russian demands for intelligence over the next thirteen years. ‘Even at the last meeting, they were worried about NATO bases in Estonia.’
The natural thing for a patriotic Estonian to do – even a nervous and unemployed one – would be to listen politely and then report this encounter immediately to the authorities. Simm did not, apparently because Zentsov threatened to expose his collaboration with the KGB in the 1980s. Yet the threat was matched by an appeal to Simm’s self-importance, and his dislike of Estonia’s young, pro-Western, English-speaking security elite. He says elliptically of his decision to commit treason:
It was a very hard question right until the end. But there had to be a little balance. I know the Russian mentality. They needed information because if they believed they were being attacked, they would attack Estonia.
Traitors typically salve their consciences with the idea that they are playing a great role in geopolitics. Simm seems to have been no exception. The Russian also played skilfully on Simm’s troubled psyche, presenting himself as a similarly apolitical colleague. ‘He was a patriot and I was a patriot,’ Simm says, without irony. Zentsov stressed a common disdain for politicians, bemoaning the sleaze and abuse of power of the Yeltsin era, while also undermining Simm’s view of Estonian statehood. Did he know, asked Zentsov, that Estonia’s pre-war military leader, General Johan Laidoner, had worked for Soviet intelligence? And that the country’s then president Konstantin Päts had been on the Kremlin payroll too? Most Estonians would regard these ideas not just as fanciful but outrageously insulting. President Päts died in a Soviet mental hospital in 1956, where he was incarcerated because of his persistent belief that ‘he is a president of Estonia’. Laidoner died in a Soviet prison in 1953. Comparably absurd allegations would be to say that Winston Churchill was a Soviet agent, that FDR took money from the Nazi Party, and that General Douglas MacArthur had been in the pay of Chinese intelligence during the Korean War. But they chimed with Simm’s weakness for conspiratorial explanations.
With a classic mix of money, blackmail and flattery, the pitch worked. Simm agreed to cooperate with Russian intelligence, not as traitor but (he insists) as an officer, with a clandestine rank, salary and pension. That played on a grudge: that the Defence Ministry had never given him the military rank – equivalent to his position as a police general – that he believed he had been promised on joining. Simm claims he also insisted that he would never work against Estonia’s interests (as defined by him). The offer and promise alike were delusions, but Simm’s value for the SVR was all too clear: a trusted, well-connected source, in the heart of the country’s burgeoning defence establishment. Running the new agent was easy. With his KGB background obscured by his status as a ‘military pensioner’, Zentsov had no difficulty in visiting Estonia, though most of the contact with Simm took place in third countries.bp
Everyone involved in Simm’s rise through the Defence Ministry bureaucracy is eager to blame someone else. But the new recruit’s experience at the outset was of profound disappointment. Used to the established bureaucracy of the police force, he found only empty desks, bare walls, intrigues and chaos. He was also unconvinced about the whole idea of defending Estonia by military means. British advisers, he recalled, told him that resistance to a Russian attack would last ‘just four hours’ – the time it would take for tanks to get from the border town of Narva to Tallinn.
Simm’s initial haul of Estonia’s defence information was correspondingly scanty. Estonia in 1995 had practically no armed forces, slender military relationships with other countries, and seemingly scant chance of joining NATO. The biggest target for the Russians was Western intelligence cooperation, about which Simm could make only informed guesses. What he could offer were insights into the Estonian elite: who was up, who was down, who was facing a financial or marital problem; who was being trained in what specialism by which friendly country, how deeply, where and when. In one security exercise, supposedly to help the ministry get ready for NATO membership, he grilled staff with sixty questions covering private hobbies, plus possible weaknesses ranging from sex and alcohol to cars. Although he did not have access to the full ‘confessionals’ of Kapo’s counter-intelligence interviews, in which senior officials have to explain the details of any sexual or other entanglements that could make them vulnerable to blackmail, he would have had a good idea about their conclusions. His knowledge of crisis management plans was also damaging. The Estonian elite is small, with perhaps two hundred people in the key decision-making roles. Many have served in senior positions in several different ministries or agencies – defence, interior, security, the police, the diplomatic service and intelligence. Many of them are trained to stand in for colleagues in an emergency. These carefully made plans were laid bare to Russia. Should it want to decapitate Estonia in future, it knows where to strike.
Simm’s tradecraft instructions were straight out of the Soviet KGB’s playbook. He placed films, and later memory sticks, into small juice cartons of a particular brand and colour and threw them away in rubbish bins in designated parks. Each dead-letter box was used once only. By his own estimate, he met Zentsov sixteen times in ten different countries. But here arises one of the big mysteries of the case: the exchange of information. Simm insists, in multiple interviews, that the relationship with Zentsov was not a one-way street: 40 per cent of information flowed from him to Zentsov, 60 per cent the other way round. But what was that incoming information? And what did Simm do with it? During my interviews with Simm, the Estonian minder resolutely kept that subject out of bounds, and Simm himself subsequently claimed to be too scared to discuss it when we spoke on the phone.
That is rather tantalising. If he truly passed on information, Simm would inevitably be quizzed about its source. Any intelligence service would wish to double-check it. Any counter-intelligence agency would be deeply alarm
ed by a senior official meeting a known spy from a hostile country; it would allow such contact to continue only under the closest scrutiny. Simm claims that he would have liked to confide in British or American intelligence but was too scared to do so. ‘I did consider telling someone,’ he says, while insisting: ‘But I used that material and passed it on.’ But what material, and to whom? Whether Simm’s claim of a ‘two-way street’ is self-delusion, mischief making, or a fragment of a bigger story remains one of several unsolved puzzles. Others are even more intriguing.
Zentsov was an old-style spy: a hardened KGB veteran from Soviet-occupied Estonia. While he was guiding Simm into the heart of the Defence Ministry, a new Russian intelligence presence was developing in the region, in the form of Antonio Graf, a plump, bearded man from Madrid. Apart from his slightly exotic middle names (de Jesus Amorett) he cut an unremarkable figure in the Baltic states. A Portuguese citizen, born in Brazil and working in Spain, he was one of thousands of consultants and go-betweens getting to know the continent’s new eastern frontier lands. Until 1989, West European businesses had been almost wholly ignorant of the markets and suppliers behind the Iron Curtain. Dealing with the communist bureaucracy involved marathon negotiating sessions, best conducted with strong government support. Shortage of hard currency made customers stingy; NATO controls on the export of sensitive products meant that the deals that looked most promising were probably illegal. When communism collapsed, most businesses were initially deeply sceptical about the new markets. Would bills be paid? What was the work ethic? Could the communists come back? Would civil war and chaos spread from the Balkans? What about organised crime? And corruption? Even the most basic data about household income, family structure, education levels, property rights, currency regulations and the like were unknown.
So Antonio (as he was known to his many acquaintances and contacts) sounded completely plausible in his many trips to the Baltic states, which seem to have started in the mid 1990s. He assiduously collected information about business conditions and the political and economic outlook, apparently spending some years building his ‘legend’ as a regular and credible visitor before engaging in any spying. His mission seemed anodyne and convincing. One contact recalls:
He told me that he was representing Portuguese businesses. He said: ‘It appears you guys are going to join the European Union – we want to know more about your countries.’
People who met him recall nothing suspicious, and little that was even distinctive, except possibly his odd choice of tipple: a revolting mixture of Campari and tonic. Anyone suspicious about his motives or background would have found it hard to check them. Spain and Portugal, and their languages, were all but unknown in the Baltic states in the 1990s. If his Spanish sounded faintly accented, that would be because he was Portuguese. If a Portuguese speaker noticed a stray syllable, the answer was that he was born in Brazil – which from a Baltic point of view could have been the far side of the moon. The idea that he was in fact a Russian intelligence officer named Sergei Yakovlev, working under an elaborately constructed illegal identity, would have seemed paranoid fantasy.
When Zentsov retired, it was Antonio who took over as Simm’s case officer. Relations were poor from the start. Zentsov had excellent tradecraft and good people skills. Antonio did not. He was already known to Simm as a postman, handling the huge amounts of classified material that the Estonian was passing to the Russians. They had met once at a suburban railway station outside Tallinn. But Yakovlev was a curious choice of case officer for a source of Simm’s importance. He appears to have broken several cardinal rules of Soviet spycraft. The cost of establishing a fully fledged illegal in a NATO country is considerable. Creating an identity for Antonio involved obtaining the birth certificate from Brazil, using that to obtain a Portuguese passport, and then establishing a convincing pattern of activity that would take him to the Baltic states when necessary. In the austere world of the KGB, his only task would have been to run Simm: meeting him in carefully chosen locations either with proper clandestine preparation, or openly in a way that fitted both men’s natural pattern of activity.
But the Russian was clearly being used for other purposes too. A good illustration of his approach comes from Ivar Tallo, a distinguished Estonian official who has helped make the country a world leader in ‘e-government’ – putting public administration online. Mr Tallo recalls meeting Antonio rather reluctantly in 2001, as a favour to a friend and colleague in high office. That was nothing unusual: foreign visitors were flooding into the Baltic states as the reborn countries’ economic and political importance grew. Senior officials could not possibly meet them all, and a persistent Portuguese consultant would be quite likely to be farmed out to someone less important. At any rate, Mr Tallo chose an expensive Italian restaurant in Tallinn, on the reasonable assumption that he would at least get a decent meal in exchange for his time. Two more meetings followed. Antonio quizzed Mr Tallo on Estonia’s politics and economics, showing no particular interest in his specialty of e-government or associated questions of cyber-security. At the third meeting he suggested formalising the cooperation on a commercial basis. He suggested that Mr Tallo set up a company offering political and economic forecasts, for which his clients in Portugal would be prepared to pay handsomely; to underline the point he pressed an envelope of cash on Mr Tallo as an advance payment. The Estonian politely declined. He did not want to be obligated to the persistent Portuguese and found the offer of money slightly disconcerting. Truthfully, he explained that he was simply too busy to take up the offer. His interest was in e-government, not business information. Antonio never contacted him again.
The approach is straight out of an intelligence playbook. First hook the fish, then reel him in. Money creates a relationship, then an obligation. At some point the material asked for becomes less anodyne and more sensitive. Before the victim is fully aware of what has happened, he is enmeshed. Then comes the offer of still more money for really interesting information, and perhaps the threat of exposure in the case of non-cooperation. Mr Tallo was never close to that danger, and reported the encounter to the Estonian authorities as soon as news of the spy’s real identity broke. Fatefully, Antonio tried a similar approach with a senior Lithuanian public figure a few years later, arousing the interest of that country’s then formidable counter-intelligence service.bq It remains unclear where else he tried his persuasive tactics, and with what result. As late as 2010, Latvia’s spycatchers were still following up leads dating from his regular trips to Riga. Yet Antonio was failing in his primary duty: to run Russia’s key Estonian source securely and efficiently. Simm instantly distrusted his new case officer, referring to him as a soplyak – a derogatory Russian word for an incompetent beginner that translates roughly as ‘snotnose’ or ‘wet behind the ears’.
After a botched first meeting with Simm in Cyprus, distrust turned to loathing. Simm says his case officer was ‘lightweight and arrogant’: snooty, rude and worst of all careless. The Russian was greedy too. ‘When we met I would eat a small fish dish. He would have steak and red wine,’ Simm recalls in a characteristically petulant aside. He assumed that Antonio was fiddling his expenses and doubted that the Russian was a fully trained illegal; his cushy job, Simm suspected, stemmed from connections not talent. That is consistent with the theory that nepotism is rife in Russian intelligence (a theory also supported by the way the lightly trained Ms Chapman gained a plum posting in the West). In his last meeting with Zentsov, Simm had complained about the new man, only to be told that Antonio was the best available: the SVR, Zentsov maintained, had only a couple of illegals in all of Western Europe.
A more tough-minded agent might have gone on strike at this, demanding a serious handler. Astonishingly, given the risks he was taking for the SVR, Simm settled for a stipulation that meetings with his case officer should be held only outside Estonia. Communication between the agent and source was simple. Simm continued to hand over his material via dead drops, using a more s
ophisticated digital camera, flash drives and memory cards, sometimes concealed in a pill container with a false bottom. He received, in cash, a ‘salary’ of €1,000 a month, plus expenses. The two men met fourteen times in total, mostly in the Baltic region but sometimes farther afield. By Simm’s account, only Germany, Norway and Britain were off limits. They arranged their sessions via a Prague-registered pager account, with simple numeric codes to send and receive messages. The number could be dialled from a public phone box. In retrospect, that might seem sloppy too. A central principle of spycraft is to make the source do nothing unusual. That would mean exchanging messages through means that seem like random variations in ordinary life: for example by using particular combinations of coloured ties, shirts and scarves. That would be necessary for Western spies operating in a police state like Russia; in the open environment of the European Union, Russian spymasters may have considered such precautions unnecessarily elaborate.