by Edward Lucas
Simm’s productivity rocketed as Estonia joined NATO. He was party to the inner counsels of the alliance, attending scores of security-related meetings in Brussels and elsewhere. His own clearance was impeccable. ‘The Americans checked me, the UK people checked, the Norwegians, Germans, Denmark, Finland – all services checked me,’ he recalls. A big area of Russian interest was cryptographic security. Simm duly provided details of NATO’s top-secret Elcrodat network, a heavy-duty encrypted communications network used for secure messaging and scrambled voice traffic. During the Cold War, with a military conflict a real possibility, such a breach would have been catastrophic. But in peacetime, with the Soviet threat long gone, it is more embarrassing than damaging: most of the secrets that Elcrodat carried were non-secrets before and after they were fed into the system. Moreover, a key principle of cryptographic security is that if one encryption key is compromised, another can be used in future. An analogy is the combination to the lock on a safe: knowing it is useful only if something valuable is inside; and once the breach is known, the combination can be changed.
In short, it would be wrong to overstate the effect of Simm’s treachery on the overall balance of power between Russia and NATO. In an alliance of more than two dozen countries, security is never as tight as it seems. Among other NATO members are countries such as Greece, which have in the past proved leaky on issues of interest to Russia, and more recently Bulgaria. Given the activity of the GRU and SVR stations in Brussels and elsewhere, it is a fair bet that Russia was receiving plenty of other information about NATO too. Simm may have been a big source, but he was certainly not the only one. By Simm’s own account, he gave his SVR handler only ‘two or three things that were really important’ (he declines to say what they were). Paradoxically, Simm’s biggest betrayal in this regard may have been to reveal that NATO (at least at the time that Simm was spying) itself had so few secrets about Russia. When the alliance expanded eastwards, it did not draw up formal contingency plans to defend its new members, on the grounds that this would be provocative to Russia, and also unnecessary, as Russia was a friendly country.br America, with the support of Germany and other countries, explicitly barred MC-161, the top-secret NATO committee that draws up the threat assessment, from considering any potential military dangers from the East. When Poland protested about this in 2007, NATO chiefs reluctantly agreed that a threat assessment could be drawn up – but only for an invasion from Belarus, a country roughly a third of Poland’s size. NATO military commanders also quietly engaged in what they called ‘prudent planning’ – sketchy desktop exercises about how in an emergency the alliance might respond to a Russian threat.
All this would have been interesting for Russia – and valuable in the (almost inconceivable) event that it planned a military attack on the new member states of NATO. But it was not what the spymasters in Moscow wanted to hear. Their interest was in portraying the West as aggressive and intrusive, justifying the xenophobic rhetoric and paranoid worldview that allowed them keep a tight grip on power and its spoils. Consistent with that would be secret bases in NATO’s new members, with plans to attack Russia. Yet the harder that Simm’s taskmasters urged him to find evidence of nefarious NATO intent, the less successful was his search: the secrets he was seeking simply did not exist.
Simm also provided Russia with damaging insights into the weakness of NATO’s counter-intelligence efforts. These are severely hampered by political constraints: in particular Germany dislikes the idea of hunting Russian spies inside the alliance, and puts pressure on NATO Office of Security to soft-pedal investigations and not to act on the results. Details of that were most interesting for Russia’s spymasters. Simm attended two NATO counter-intelligence conferences, according to the damage control report. The German magazine Der Spiegel asserts that:
At the conference held in the Dutch town of Brunssum in 2006, a CDbs containing the names of all known and suspected Russian NATO spies, as well as detailed information on double agents, was distributed to attendees. [Antonio told Simm that] the CD ‘landed directly on Putin’s desk’ and ‘caused quite a stir’ in Moscow . . . For the coup, Simm received a €5,000 bonus and was reportedly promoted to major-general.10
Simm’s other betrayals were more clearly damaging. The sixty-point security questionnaire he circulated inside the ministry, ferreting out officials’ hobbies, weaknesses and guilty secrets, would have been valuable information for a Russian intelligence officer looking for other potential targets. But even more interesting than this kind of information may be the rules that govern its collection. In the run-up to Estonia’s admission to NATO, Simm obtained the alliance’s procedures for issuing security clearances. An application is submitted, and either rejected, accepted, or (sometimes for a reason, sometimes at random) referred for further investigation. No explanation is offered. This basilisk-like stance is essential in preserving the integrity of the system. If you don’t know what to lie about, it is much harder to lie about anything. NATO at the time was dealing with many clearance applications from officials in the former Soviet bloc, and had decided that it would be unreasonable to say that former membership of the Communist Party was an automatic bar. For applications from Western Europe, such political activity, except possibly as a temporary student affectation, would have been an instant bar. NATO decided that a key disqualification for applicants from behind the old Iron Curtain would be attendance at a Higher Party School. These elite courses in the communist system’s internal university were attended by the ambitious and brainy, and thus a prime recruiting ground for the KGB. For a Russian spymaster trying to work out how an agent could penetrate NATO, that would be most useful information: those with Higher Party School education should either not bother to apply for a clearance, or else should see if this part of their past could be concealed.
Another use for Simm concerned Estonia’s help for Georgia and Ukraine, which for much of the last decade had hopes of joining NATO. The alliance was publicly cautious about their chances, which eventually flopped at a disastrous NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008. But a strong lobby in America had tried hard to boost their chances, not least by helping them reorganise their defence, security and intelligence services along Western lines. It soon became clear that advice from Estonia (and to some extent the other Baltic states) was particularly effective. American and British advisers knew the theory, but not the practice. Estonia had first-hand experience in judging which parts of Soviet administration were incorrigible, and which could be successfully transformed. An influential cabal of advisers in Georgia gained the nickname of the ‘Estonian kitchen’, after a senior Russian official complained publicly ‘we know this kitchen’. Russia could not stop the burgeoning cooperation between Tallinn and Tbilisi. But thanks to Simm it knew a lot about it.
Simm was also useful in keeping an eye on the relationship between Estonia’s intelligence agency and its NATO counterparts. The most sensitive operations were run on a purely bilateral basis. But NATO wish lists and some intelligence obtained did cross Simm’s desk. Clearly, the SVR was thrilled with their agent. As well as receiving a medal in 2006, Simm also met a senior officer – he believes a deputy director – of the SVR, in a carefully staged meeting in the western Czech spa town of Karlovy Vary. The two men walked in a park together, with Antonio keeping a discreet distance. This is standard practice in Russian spycraft when a source becomes particularly important: it allows the service to be sure that the case officer has indeed recruited the person he claims, and provides a check against embellishment, or the use of a double agent.
But long-term espionage operations, when successful, contain the seeds of their own destruction. Information obtained must be used, or the effort to obtain it is pointless. And using it creates clues for the other side. If you regularly see your opponent is forewarned, you wonder why and start taking measures to plug the leak. Simm’s case was no exception.
Indeed unease had been growing for years in Western capitals about Russian pene
tration of NATO. Initially, at the end of the Cold War, the guard had dropped. The prospect of a Soviet conventional assault on Western Europe, giving a few panicky days to decide between nuclear war and surrender, had shaped thinking for a generation, but with the military threat gone, and Russian forces in retreat from their former empire, thinking about security relaxed. That led to blunders – for example in the NATO operation in Yugoslavia in 1998, when a French officer at the alliance’s HQ, Pierre-Henri Bunel, leaked its military plans to Belgrade (and was jailed for it). As NATO tried to befriend Russia and treat it as a partner, it became easier for Russian spies to pitch to NATO officials: passing on a bit of information was no longer treason, it was just oiling wheels that were already turning. Russian espionage attempts played skilfully on jealousies and rivalries within the alliance. Some of those recruited by the Russians resigned quietly when caught, rather than face prosecution: nobody at the top in NATO wanted to seem too hawkish or provocative when the message from their political masters was to promote reconciliation and trust. That was annoying for NATO’s spycatchers. So too was the difficulty of screening officials from new members of the alliance (though attention focused on countries such as Hungary and Bulgaria, rather than the Estonians, who were seen as star pupils). But more troubling than all this were the agents the spycatchers could not find. Russia was clearly devoting considerable resources to penetrating the alliance, at a time when NATO’s counter-intelligence services had neither the capability, nor the political backing, to deal with it.
Similar worries were soon to be felt even more sharply at the top of British and American security establishments. Western human and electronic sources inside the Russian defence and security establishment suggested that huge quantities of documents, as well as details of cryptographic security and of high-level policy discussions on issues such as cyber-warfare and missile defence, were making their way into Russian hands. This was far more than the piecemeal collection of small leaks, gossip and chance disclosures that could be expected from normal espionage activity: the explanation could only be a major breach. Close scrutiny of the evidence suggested that the leak was in some way connected with the Baltic states. The finger of suspicion pointed either at a senior official in the region, or to one posted to Brussels. At the same time Western intelligence appears to have had a separate lucky break, recruiting a source in the heart of the SVR, closely involved in the illegals programme. The information was initially fragmentary and incomplete. But it still marked a breakthrough – the biggest, perhaps, since Vasily Mitrokhin’s archive – in finding Russia’s most elusive spies in the West. The spycatchers’ net was beginning to close at two ends: one around the blundering Antonio and his colleagues, and the other around the disgruntled Simm.
At this stage, Western spy chiefs took no action. It was more important to identify the leak than to try to catch the traitor. Once they knew the person or people involved, the time would then come to decide whether to prosecute, to hush the matter up, or to try some ruse in return. This reflects a paradoxical feature of counter-intelligence: that the seemingly most difficult business, of identifying a suspected spy, is in practical terms the least demanding. Collecting the evidence, especially if a prosecution is planned, is far trickier. The surveillance needs to be comprehensive but invisible, and must be conducted against targets trained to spot it. The slightest slip may end in disaster. Simm’s watchers knew that it would be all too easy for Russia to bundle their quarry into the back of a van and spirit him across the border. For MI6 to rescue Oleg Gordievsky under the noses of the KGB had been a hugely complex and risky operation. For the Russians to do the same from a Western country is easy. Antonio could board a plane from Madrid and never be seen again. Without enough evidence, you cannot stop a suspect escaping. But gathering the evidence is just what may prompt him to escape.
The spycatchers of the CIA’s counter-espionage division and a tiny group of trusted foreign partners took enormous care not to show their hand. Their aim first was to hunt down the prize catch of a Russian illegal, based on the tentative clues available. Where was he based? How had he gained his illegal identity? What was he up to? Who were his agents? Who was his controller? Would it perhaps be possible to ‘turn’ him and run him as a double agent within the SVR? Patience and subtlety would bring a reward: haste and carelessness would mean catastrophe. Then Antonio’s blunder forced the pace; the Russian’s attempt to solicit information from the Lithuanian alerted that country’s counter-intelligence service. Initially, they found the Hispanic-seeming visitor a puzzle. Was he perhaps a Western intelligence officer on an undeclared mission? Or from Israel’s Mossad? Or from China? The initial hypothesis was that he might be from the intelligence service of neighbouring Belarus. Then they observed him meeting Simm. That seemed to explain the affair: the mysterious visitor was clearly being run by those clever Estonians. But enquiries in Tallinn drew a blank. Discreetly, the Americans and Lithuanians compared notes and over a weekend in April 2008 separately briefed their Estonian counterparts: Simm, the most trusted official in the Defence Ministry, was a Russian spy.
A nerve-wracking period of ultra-discreet observation and analysis followed, involving at its peak counter-espionage officers of more than a dozen countries. One avenue was electronic: trying to snoop into the Russian’s computer in Madrid. Another was the paper trail: discreetly checking up on his documentation and aliases. A third was to obtain his DNA and compare that with databases of other known agents. Only a handful of people in Estonia knew the truth: their tricky task was to maintain absolutely normal relations with a man they once trusted, but now detested. An operational headquarters for the spy-hunt was established at a CIA base in a converted riding stable in Antaviliai, 20km outside Vilnius.11
Simm claims that ‘one and a half years’ before his arrest he had picked up signs in NATO that the information he was passing to Moscow was attracting attention in the West. He sensed a change of atmosphere in Tallinn. And he believed (rightly) that he and Antonio had been under observation at a meeting in the Latvian capital, Riga. He says he tried, but failed, to make discreet contact with a Western secret service, presumably with an offer to be a triple agent: for whatever reason, this approach was rebuffed. In January 2008 Antonio reported to Moscow that his source was ‘in a panic’.12 At the penultimate meeting in Stockholm later that year, Simm began to suspect that his Russian handlers were hanging him out to dry. While continuing to urge Simm to seek a job in Estonia’s foreign intelligence service, Antonio responded to his tales of woe with a blunt ‘that’s your problem’. He turned down his agent’s request for emergency exfiltration to Russia, and informed him that the colonel’s rank he had been promised when recruited was no longer available, let alone the major-general’s rank to which he believed he had been promoted. The system, Antonio explained blandly, had changed.
The disillusion was not sudden. Simm claims that he wanted to stop spying as early as 2005. After stepping down as the National Security Authority in 2006, he had worked as an adviser on special projects, such as organising NATO meetings in Tallinn, and handling Estonia’s contribution to the war in Afghanistan. He had made this career move – he says – without consulting Antonio, who had been furious when he heard. In his final meeting with Antonio in June 2008, Simm gave him a blunt message to pass to Moscow: ‘that I was retired, had no access, was not working’. He received no response, returning to Tallinn crestfallen and worried. Far from facing a comfortable retirement as a general in the SVR, he was a mere paid traitor, and a clapped-out one at that. His access to important secrets was gone; he was on the brink of retirement, and at risk of discovery. On 16 September 2008 Antonio then inexplicably compounded the danger by telephoning him on his mobile phone and cancelling a meeting, claiming to be ill. Simm’s phone was already tapped by the spycatchers of Kapo, which had secretly opened a criminal case on 26 May 2008, and had been collecting the evidence necessary for a treason trial. The trap was ready to be sprung.
/> The Rõõmu (pleasure) shopping centre in Keila is like many others in small-town Estonia. The supermarket boasts a good selection of wines (Estonians are fond of beefy New World reds), automatic checkouts (Estonians like gadgets) and a well-stocked cake shop. On 19 September 2008 Simm and his wife headed there to collect a three-kilogram kringel (iced cinnamon pastry) they had ordered to celebrate his mother-in-law’s upcoming birthday. As the couple emerged from the building carrying their shopping, they looked like any married couple preparing for a comfortable and untroubled family weekend. In the bustle of a Friday afternoon, neither of them noticed a black VW minibus parked discreetly near by, or the ambulance waiting around the corner in case Estonia’s most-wanted man violently resisted arrest, collapsed, or took poison. The Kapo officerbt who placed them there was a seasoned veteran of the service’s toughest operations against Russian organised crime. But this arrest was to be the most important event of his career. It had been meticulously planned, in close cooperation with counter-espionage officers from friendly foreign services. Simm’s treachery was humiliating: a flawless arrest and prosecution would go some way to redress the balance. ‘We wanted it quiet, no conflicts and the goal was immediate cooperation,’ recalls the Kapo officer. The first moments would be crucial: ‘You cannot rewind if you make a mistake.’ Showing his badge, he approached his target: ‘I need a couple of words.’ Simm seemed unbothered: he knew the Kapo officer and assumed it was some minor query to do with security at the ministry. In a few seconds, Simm was sitting in the minibus, with his wife whisked away to a nearby car, where she was told ‘just wait quietly’. She assumed it was a mistake: her husband had not worked full-time in the Defence Ministry since April.