by Edward Lucas
In the minibus came the thunderbolt: ‘Mr Simm – you are under arrest on suspicion of treason.’ Simm was familiar with handcuffs, but not with the sensation of being handcuffed. He started sweating, as he was searched for poison or other incriminating evidence. ‘I will speak. You won’t,’ continued the arresting officer. He produced a pile of papers, at the top of which were three pieces of evidence. One was from Simm’s KGB file, showing that he had promised cooperation in the Soviet era. Another was a picture of Simm making a phone call (in fact to his case officer’s pager) from a public telephone in the coastal resort of Pärnu. The arresting officer then informed him Kapo knew that Antonio was a Russian intelligence officer called Sergei Yakovlev. Simm cracked: ‘It had to happen sometime,’ he mumbled, ‘I didn’t expect you would come so soon.’ The prisoner and his captors went directly to Simm’s home. They found cipher pads (presumably used in radio messages), lists of dead-letter boxes and piles of classified papers (Simm claims that these were not for espionage, but material for a book of memoirs that he was planning to write). Simm also gave details of the memory cards he used to transfer information. The interrogation that followed by Estonian and foreign counter-espionage officers remains secret. But Simm appears to have put up little resistance. He pleaded guilty at his trial in February 2009 and has contested only the authorities’ attempts to seize his property.
A big puzzle in this is that an inviolable rule of Russian spycraft is that a second source, run by a separate case officer, must back up any important agent. The people involved are not (in espionage jargon) ‘inter-conscious’. They may know that their behaviour and intelligence product is being compared with a rival, but they do not know who, where, or how. This provides a powerful cross-check. If a source is tempted to embellish his material, it will stand out. If a case officer takes a short cut or exaggerates a difficulty, his report will be compared with that of a counterpart. This technique helps to deal with everything from fiddling expenses to a full double-cross. So where was the other Russian spy? The answer to this question depends on whether Simm’s prime target was Estonia, the Baltic states in general, or NATO as a whole. Matching his access to NATO documents would not be too hard, in an alliance of (now) twenty-eight members. Finding a similarly highly placed agent in Estonia, however, would be harder. Plenty of rumours surround this: according to one, Russia had another agent in the heart of Estonia’s security establishment, whose codename was Kask (silver birch). If this agent existed, what happened to him? He clearly was not prosecuted. I can find no convincing trace of a senior Estonian (or Latvian or Lithuanian) official having defected, disappeared, retired prematurely or emigrated mysteriously. Perhaps the evidence for prosecution was insufficient. Perhaps the person concerned made a full confession, switched sides, or decided to brazen out any enquiry. My own hunch is that the parallel agent was in a big West European NATO country and was unearthed around the same time but eased into discreet early retirement to avoid embarrassment. This agent could well have been run out of Brussels by one of the Russian intelligence officers later expelled from the Russian mission to NATO.13
Shortly after the excitement of Simm’s capture, another scandal broke: Simm had been not only a spy for the Russians but for the Germans. This aspect of his life is shrouded in secrecy. A handful of leaks to the German magazine Der Spiegel have painted a sanitised version of his cooperation, claiming that it dated from his days as a policeman, rather than in the Defence Ministry, and concerned chiefly Russian organised crime, rather than intelligence matters.14 Yet fragmentary clues suggest a darker picture. According to other officials in a position to know, Simm’s cooperation with the German BND spy service was deep and long-lasting, stretching at least up to Estonia’s membership of the European Union and NATO in 2004, and possibly even longer. In retrospect, the BND’s misbehaviour is less of a puzzle. After Estonia restored its independence, the absence of good ties with German intelligence was conspicuous. Some countries such as France were annoyed that the British had got their feet under the table so quickly and hurried to catch up. Sweden and Finland were the quickest to regularise their activities, with ‘declared’ intelligence liaison officers taking up postings at the new embassies in Tallinn. America too built up a large CIA station, which enjoyed correct if sometimes aloof relations with its Estonian counterparts. As well as with these countries, Jüri Pihl, head of Kapo from 1993 to 2003, recalls the excellent ties that his service built up with partner agencies in Austria, Norway, and later the Czech Republic and Poland.
Germany was the notable exception. The Baltic region had historically been Berlin’s shared backyard with Moscow. Relations with Russia, on everything from energy to migration, were vital. It is easy to see that senior German politicians would find it annoying that devious and interfering spooks from London were hooking up with a bunch of zealous and youthful Estonians, to the detriment of far more important East–West relations. Though Germany’s intelligence cooperation with Estonia was cool, its interest in what the spy agency there was cooking up with the British was keen. Simm declines to discuss this in detail, reverting only to his formulaic ‘I helped lots of people’. I can reveal, having heard it from multiple sources, that Germany apologised officially to Estonia in 2008, shortly after Simm’s arrest. If the BND had recruited and run an agent there in the late 1980s or early 1990s, when Russian organised crime was a serious problem for Germany, and the Estonian constitutional authorities were in no state to provide effective help, few would object. Continuing clandestine operations after 1992 was another matter. Estonia is not just a friendly country. It is one to which, since the Nazi–Soviet pact, Germany owes a historic debt. Most Germans would be horrified at the idea of running hostile intelligence operations against Israel. Those officials in charge of Simm (and presumably of other agents in the Baltics and Central Europe) may have neglected to consider Germany’s other historical baggage. It is easy to see why Berlin was interested in burgeoning Anglo-American defence cooperation with a new country in Germany’s Baltic backyard. But running a senior official there as a secret agent was no way to slake that curiosity.
Simm’s importance as a BND agent grew just as Germany’s relationship with Russia was intensifying. The friendship between Gerhard Schröder (federal chancellor from 1998 to 2005) and Mr Putin was notorious. It culminated in the German leader taking a retirement job as chairman of the board of a joint Russian–German gas pipeline, built on the Baltic seabed against the strenuous objections of the other littoral states, who saw it as a direct attack on their energy security. Some officials close to the case suggest that Simm was run on the direct instructions of the security coordination office in the Federal Chancellery under Mr Schröder, and against the judgement of the BND chiefs, whose attitudes to Russia were considerably more hawkish (and to Estonia, more friendly). That is hard to prove: everyone involved declines any kind of comment. All Simm will say is that he turned to the Germans as a ‘protection’ against the Russians. This suggests strongly that he was recruited by the BND after 1995, not before.
What is clear, however, is that Simm’s cooperation with Russia and Germany overlapped. That raises an interesting question. Did the SVR know that Simm was working for the BND? And did the BND know that he was working for the Russians? The former is more likely. The BND has long been something of a laughing stock among other secret services, because of the degree of Russian (and now Chinese) penetration. In Cold War Berlin in the 1980s, a senior intelligence officer from an English-speaking service told me derisively: ‘If we want Gorbachev to know something and take it seriously, we give it to the BND and tell them it’s top secret. It’ll be on his desk in the Kremlin the next morning.’ Little suggests that security has improved since then.
It is possible that Simm told the BND that he was under pressure from the Russians in the hope that they would rescue him were he exposed. At least one senior official close to the case says that Simm indeed played this card when he was arrested. The BND responded
quickly by saying that Simm was a former agent, not a current one, and that the Estonians were welcome to try him for spying for Russia. At any rate, the Estonians have gone to great lengths to conceal evidence of Simm’s work for the BND. No questions to Simm on this subject were permitted during my face-to-face interviews, and he was also deeply reluctant to address the subject on the phone, or via intermediaries. ‘If I tell you that, I will be dead in my cell tomorrow,’ he said dramatically. In another interview he said elliptically, ‘I had to make sure that the pigs were fed but that the wolves did not go hungry.’ One reason for Estonia’s unwillingness to raise Simm’s BND connection was that it would have required another criminal trial. Another was the excellent relations that now exist between Estonia and Germany under Angela Merkel. The normally ultra-cautious Germans showed strong support in the crucial meetings that decided Estonia’s application to join the euro zone in 2009 and 2010. Some have suggested, plausibly, that this was a quid pro quo for Estonia’s willingness to hush up the unpleasant question of Simm’s work for the BND. The prime minister, Andrus Ansip, is fond of saying: ‘What is good for Germany is good for Estonia.’ But the result of the Simm case has been to dent trust – not only in Estonia – that Germany is an honest partner for its smaller neighbours in NATO and the EU.
The overlap raises a still more intriguing question: whether Russia knew that Simm was spying for the BND, and if so whether it tried to exploit this. It would certainly explain its remarkably unpleasant treatment of its once-prized agent in the final year of his service to them, which is only really consistent with a case officer who actively wants his source to be exposed. If the SVR did know – perhaps from Simm, perhaps from a source in Germany – that it was dealing with a double agent, then an elegant way of ending the affair would be to stage this denouement. Simm was of no further use to the SVR. Antonio himself needed to be recalled to Russia before he was arrested. Under interrogation, Simm would certainly mention his BND link, in the hope of invoking powerful outside help. Any outcome would then be good for Russia. Perhaps Estonia would hush the whole affair up, in which case it would spare the SVR’s blushes. It would certainly have a private or public spat with Germany, weakening NATO and underlining the isolation and fragility of the Baltic states’ security arrangements.
This is an elegant but not wholly convincing explanation of Russian sloppiness towards Simm. Anyone considering treachery naturally worries about how he will be treated. A reputation for callous carelessness does not help. Simm’s treatment damages the SVR brand. A better explanation is that Antonio himself was recruited by the Americans and helped set up Simm’s prosecution. This fits rather more of the facts. It would explain, for a start, the mysterious disappearance of Antonio following his clumsy and revealing phone call to Simm’s mobile. It is hardly likely that its spycatchers would succeed in nailing Simm but fail to gain the much bigger prize of a fully fledged Russian illegal. It is interesting to speculate when the double-dealing started: was Antonio already under Western control when he made his clumsy pitch to the Lithuanian? It would be nice to imagine that the Western intelligence services were using the Russian illegal for their own purposes, testing weaknesses in NATO members’ security and gaining a revealing picture of the SVR’s wish-list, sources and methods. Perhaps not only Simm but also other Russian agents run by Antonio have now been rounded up.
At any rate, the official story of simple SVR sloppiness looks incomplete. Retrospective analysis of intelligence operations is always skewed by their outcomes: the successful ones appear to have been run brilliantly; the failed ones look doomed from the start. But in all of intelligence history, it is hard to find an example of an illegal blown solely because of bad tradecraft. They normally trip up on one of two fronts. One is a spouse or lover who becomes suspicious of a pattern of activity that only he or she is in a position to notice. The other is penetration. But Antonio did not have a woman in his life. Rumours swirl around Tallinn and other cities about his whereabouts now, and the means used to recruit him. He was supposedly detained in Turkey around the time of Simm’s arrest, but has not been heard of since. One version is that the Western secret services planted child pornography on his computer, and told him that he would face a lengthy sentence in a Spanish jail unless he cooperated. Another account is that he was offered a large sum of money for his help, which he initially spurned. He returned to Moscow in a panic and alerted his controllers – only then to think better of his decision and slip out of Russia to the West where he then defected.
A final puzzle is the relationship between the Simm case and the American illegals such as Anna Chapman and Donald Heathfield. According to the Russian authorities, a senior SVR officer, Aleksandr Poteyev, defected to the United States in June 2010. In June 2011 a military court in Moscow sentenced him in absentia to a 25-year jail term on charges of treason and desertion. Aged 58 at the time of his trial, Mr Poteyev was a decorated intelligence veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, who was then posted first to Washington, DC and then to New York in the early 1990s to service the illegals network. During that posting, he appears to have been spotted by the CIA as a potential recruit, with the initial approach being made via his daughter, who worked for an American academic exchange outfit in Moscow. A decisive psychological nudge – according to Russian news reports – came with a CIA-staged burglary at his flat.15 This supposedly underlined the weakness of the Russian state and the omnipotence of the Americans.
From 2000 Mr Poteyev worked as deputy director of the North America division of the S-Department (dealing with illegals). It is hard to imagine a more useful asset for the CIA, at least from a counter-espionage point of view. Mr Poteyev was able not only to give details of the identities of his agents in North America, but also to keep an eye on their missions, tasking and intelligence results.16 According to Russian news reports (which as officially sanctioned leaks must be taken with a Siberian salt mine’s worth of scepticism), Mr Poteyev was able to evade a lie detector test and also get his daughter and son outside Russia before he himself defected. He is said to have feigned illness, travelled to Belarus on a false passport provided by the Americans, and then to Kiev, where he was exfiltrated to Frankfurt. A text message to his wife read: ‘Mary, try to take this calmly: I am leaving not for a short time but for ever . . . I did not want this but I had to. I am starting a new life. I shall try to help the children.’ If true, the whole episode reflects sloppiness by the SVR’s once-fearsome internal counter-intelligence.
Mr Poteyev’s recruitment would have been the third blow to Russian espionage in North America in twenty years. The Mitrokhin archive, when analysed in the early 1990s, produced details of many illegals planted in the United States and Canada in the Soviet era. Almost all of them appeared to have become inactive when followed up by the FBI: they had settled into a quiet suburban routine, with the undemanding long-term tasks that would be needed only in time of war. (One illegal in Europe was provided with a carefully constructed false identity in order to get an unremarkable job at a car factory. His sole intelligence-gathering task was to inform Moscow of any sign of its switching to military production). The second blow came with the defection of Sergei Tretyakov, the deputy head of the SVR station based at the Russian mission to the United Nations. He was passing secrets to the United States from 1997 until his defection in 2000.17 His duties also included some support for illegals’ networks. Mr Tretyakov died, apparently of choking on a piece of meat, on 13 June 2010, on the eve of the spy scandal. Nobody has alleged foul play, although the coincidence is certainly striking. On top of that came the reported breach from Mr Poteyev.
Making sense of all this is tricky. The all-embracing conspiracy in which one side masterminds every twist and turn of a story is rarely a satisfactory explanation. History suggests that real answers to intelligence puzzles invariably include large doses of incompetence and misjudgement. Assuming that Antonio did indeed defect to America, Simm’s career in the Defence Ministry still remai
ns mystifying. Why did he rise so quickly? Why did nobody note his KGB past? The truth is, I fear, that Simm had developed an unofficial relationship with Kapo, which was concerned about the growing Russian interest in Estonian defence, the scope for provocations and penetrations, and the weakness of the ministry in dealing with the threat. Soon after Simm’s arrival, Kapo picked up his sloppy behaviour. But instead of having him fired, it made him the agency’s unofficial eyes and ears, providing a stream of gossip, innuendo and other information. Kapo felt it had the weaknesses of the ministry under excellent scrutiny. And so they did – except the one that mattered. This theory is denied by all concerned, but I believe it to be true. As I shall argue in the conclusion, our complacency towards the mediocre is Russia’s deadliest weapon.
Conclusion
Simm’s treachery exemplifies the central point of this book: the need to defend an open society at its weakest points, against people who appear to be no threat to it. Annoying though it may be to NATO’s security officials charged with protecting the thousands of documents that Simm passed on to his handlers, the transfer of these papers did little lasting damage to the alliance. Nor did he manage to crack the innermost secrets of Estonian intelligence cooperation with countries such as Britain and America. Though he did give Russia a damagingly accurate inside view of the Estonian elite, even that country’s greatest fans could not call that a geopolitical earthquake. The real cause for alarm about Simm and Antonio is the same reason as for Donald Heathfield and Anna Chapman. Rather than the secrets they may have stolen, it is the vulnerabilities they exposed that matter. Catching spies is hard enough. But when they use weaknesses that are intrinsic to our society, the real question is how many more are playing the same tricks now, and may do so in future. Nothing has changed to stop other Russian agents such as Ms Chapman – perhaps much better trained and more determined – following the same path into the heart of Western business, social and financial life. Nor have we any idea how many more Herman Simms may lurk in the fifty-plus generation that holds top jobs in the new member states of the EU and NATO, but conceals dark secrets from earlier careers in communist-run countries.