Deception

by Edward Lucas

  37 He was interviewed by Bower in the Red Web documentary. Algirdas Vokietaitis, the Lithuanian émigré who made the first contact with the Western secret services in Stockholm in 1943, moved to America, where he was a notable instructor in photography.

  38 Two lengthy KGB archive documents (in Estonian) give a thorough picture of the activities of American, British, French, German and Swedish espionage in the Baltics. Dated 4 January 1956 http://www.esm.ee/public/projektid/5/2.osak55.html and 20 February 1957 http://www.esm.ee/public/projektid/5/dokumendid/dok454.html

  39 ‘Spies caught and exposed’, Izvestia, 7 March 1957 https://dlib.eastview.com/browse/doc/13972020

  40 This link (in Swedish) gives an account of the story and of a filmed version of Hallisk’s life. http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/1.3727/verklighetens-ramona

  41 Ininbergs gives an excellent account of this little-known history.

  42 The mission was dogged by bad luck. The three men were dropped a hundred miles from their supposed destination. One of their supply containers was found by a peasant who gave it to what he thought were real partisans, but who were in fact a phoney group run by the KGB (what happened to the peasant is not known, but can be imagined). ‘Broken promises reward Lithuania’s forgotten heroes’ by Edward Lucas, Independent, 9 September 1991.

  43 Interviewed in the Red Web documentary.

  44 Interviewed by Tom Bower, Independent Saturday Magazine, 22 September 1990.

  45 A partial account of this remarkable story (in Czech) is in Československobritské Zpravodajské Soupeřen (Czechoslovak–British Intelligence Rivalry) by Dr Prokop Tomek, Úřad dokumentace a vyšetřovánízločinů komunismu (Institute for the Documentation and Research of the Crimes of Communism, 2006. http://aplikace.mvcr.cz/archiv2008/policie/udv/securita/sbornik14/sbornik14.pdf

  46 Along with Hallisk, van Jung and others, they featured in an Estonian documentary, Külalised (The Visitors) in 2002. I am grateful to the producers for providing me with a copy of their film, which deserved a wider audience. http://www.allfilm.ee/web/index.php?lang=en&page_id=111&file_id=1052&cat_id=116

  10 THE UPSIDE DOWN WORLD

  1 I draw heavily here on The Main Enemy: the Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB by Milt Bearden and James Risen (Random House, 2003). The ‘Gavrilov’ backchannel is discussed on p. 184.

  2 Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War by David Murphy and Sergei Kondrashev (Yale University Press, 1999).

  3 ‘Death of a Perfect Spy’ by Elaine Shannon, Time, 24 June 2001 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/,8816,164863,0.html

  4 This article gives a good indication of what the West was trying to buy – and by implication what it would obtain by other means if necessary. ‘US Is Shopping as Soviets Offer To Sell Once-Secret Technology’ by William Broad, New York Times, 4 November 1991 http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/4/world/us-is-shopping-as-soviets-offer-to-sell-once-secret-technology.html

  5 The KGB cannily tried to revive the story of ‘Red Web’ to derail the Baltic independence movements in the late 1980s. The aim was to contrast the frankness of Gorbachev’s approach to history with the silence of the West about its use of fascist collaborators in the post-war era, and the cynical and incompetent behaviour of the CIA and SIS. In November 1987 the KGB brought its greatest trophy, Kim Philby, to Riga, and filmed him in a meeting with Lukaševičs, purportedly (and quite possibly truly) the first time that the two men had met. Philby’s lizard-like face lights up as he discusses Operation Jungle with his host (who spoke fluent English, having been posted to London, under a pseudonym, as a reward for his efforts). The initial aim was to demoralise the Baltic independence movements by highlighting the past. The Soviet authorities then made the material, and former KGB officers, and surviving partisans, available to Mr Bower. In the West, SIS – never before the subject of an unauthorised and unflattering exposé – was furious, telling retired officers that they risked their pensions if they talked to Mr Bower. He short-circuited the ban by talking to CIA veterans and pensionless émigrés. But the tide of history was running too strongly, and Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians were in no mood to believe Soviet propaganda of any kind, even when it was true. Mr Bower, quite unfairly, was assumed to be a Kremlin stooge.

  An early example of KGB propaganda is Polymany s polichnim: sbornik faktov spionazhom protiv SSSR (Caught red-handed: a collection of facts about espionage against the USSR), State Publishing House for Political Literature, Moscow, 1963. See also KGB, Stasi ja Eesti luureajalugu (KGB, Stasi and Estonian intelligence history) by Ivo Juurvee http://rahvusarhiiv.ra.ee/public/TUNA/Artiklid_Biblio/JuurveeIvo_KGB_Stasi_TUNA2008_2.pdf

  6 The Friends: Britain’s post-war secret intelligence operations by Nigel West (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988).

  7 A gripping account of his defection comes in his autobiographical Tower of Secrets (Naval Institute Press, 1993).

  8 The journalist David Satter, then the Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times, gives a vivid account of his attempt to meet dissidents in Estonia in 1977.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘you are trying to tell me that someone arranged for you to meet me in Tallinn?’ Several of them nodded their heads yes. ‘Show me some identification,’ I said. ‘No, we don’t show any identification,’ said the sandy-haired man, shaking his head firmly. ‘I’m glad to hear that,’ I said, ‘because for a moment it occurred to me that you might actually be the dissidents, but if you won’t identify yourselves, it only proves to me that you’re the KGB.’ The superficial politeness that had prevailed up until that point disappeared. The tall, solemn member of the group leaned over the table. ‘I spent twelve years in the camps,’ he said. ‘My friends have spent six, seven, and eight years in the camps. You’re not going to treat us like a bunch of niggers.’

  Stung by the rebuke, Satter resolved to trust his hosts, who gave every appearance of being terrified by KGB surveillance and of making elaborate precautions to avoid it. Only when he returned to Moscow did he find out that the entire meeting had indeed been a charade staged to find out more about his own views and contacts. The real Estonian dissidents had waited in vain for their visitor. ‘Never Speak to Strangers: A memoir of journalism, the Cold War, and the KGB’ by David Satter, The Weekly Standard, 6 August 2007 (vol. 12, no. 44) http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/00/00/13/932plsuu.asp. Satter’s article ‘The Ghost in the Machine’ in the Financial Times on 5 April 1977 was none the less a remarkable event, which not only shocked Western Sovietologists who thought the Baltic struggle for independence was over, but also boosted spirits in the region.

  9 See https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2010-featured-story-archive/colonel-penkovsky.html Penkovsky passed his messages in a park to a British diplomat’s wife wheeling a pram.

  10 Next Stop Execution (Macmillan, 1995) is one of Mr Gordievsky’s many books.

  11 ‘Cold War Spy Tale Came to Life on the Streets of Moscow’ by Matt Schudel, Washington Post, 20 April 2008 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/4/19/AR2008041902071_pf.html

  12 Bearden/Risen, p. 382.

  13 Paul Goble, then at the CIA, deserves special mention here. His blog has been essential reading http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com

  14 ‘Transitional Justice in the Former Yugoslavia’ http://ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-FormerYugoslavia-Justice-Facts-2009-English.pdf

  15 Entitled Lähtealused Eesti eriteenistuste väljaarendamiseks (Guidelines on the development of Estonia’s special services), it is still classified and my requests to view it have been politely rejected. See Eesti nähtamatud mehed (Estonia’s invisible men) by Toomas Sildam and Kaarel Tarand, Postimees, 20 January 1997 http://www.postimees.ee/luup/97/2/top.htm

  16 Interview with the author, March 2011.

  17 ‘ Riigikogu (Estonian Parliament) Committee of Investigation to Ascertain the Circumstances Related to the Export of Military Equipment from the Territory of the Republi
c of Estonia on the Ferry Estonia in 1994, Final Report.’ Available at http://www.riigikogu.ee/public/Riigikogu/Dokumendid/estcom_eng.pdf

  18 See ‘Death in the Baltic, the MI6 Connection’ by Stephen Davis, New Statesman, 23 May 2005 http://www.newstatesman.com/200505230019 and this report (in Swedish) by the judge Johan Hirschfeldt ‘Transport of military material on the MV Estonia in September 1994’ http://www.estoniasamlingen.se/textfiles/Fo_2004_6.pdf

  19 ‘ In der Bermuda Dreieck der Ostsea’ (‘In the Bermuda Triangle of the Baltic Sea’), Der Spiegel, 23 December 1999 http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/,1518,57520,0.html I am grateful to Jutta Rabe for her help.

  20 I was the managing editor and major shareholder of the Baltic Independent, which in late 1994 merged with the Baltic Observer to become the Baltic Times www.baltictimes.com

  21 A particular puzzle concerns the fate of the captain, Arvo Piht, and several other survivors. They include Lembit Leiger (chief engineer), Viktor Bogdanov (ship’s doctor), Kaimar Kikas (navigation officer), Agur Targama (fourth engineer), Tiina Müür (manager of the duty-free shop) and Hannely Veid and Hanka-Hannika Veide (dancers). All eight were seen by multiple witnesses leaving the vessel on the same life raft and were recorded as rescued in multiple lists compiled on shore. In several cases (including Captain Piht and the twins) their families received phone calls informing them that their relatives were safe – in the twins’ case using a nickname known only to close friends and family. The twins’ parents say they have received phone calls from their daughters; they believe they were until recently living in San Diego. Captain Piht’s rescue was also reported in the New York Times, in an article by Richard Stevenson on 1 October 1994 http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/1/world/investigators-cite-bow-door-in-estonian-ferry-s-sinking.html

  In the confusing aftermath of a disaster, many mistakes happen, not least in record-keeping; bereaved parents’ grief can render them delusional. The idea that eight people could be abducted from Sweden as part of an international cover-up of a botched smuggling operation will strike many as outrageously implausible. I am not endorsing any particular theory and I am aware that some people speculating about the ‘real’ story of the Estonia are bigots and nutcases. Among the many sites dealing with the tragedy are http://members.tripod.com/mv_estonia http://www.elaestonia.org/eng/index.php and http://www.estoniaferrydisaster.net Interviews with the Veide parents (in Estonian) can be found here http://www.epl.ee/artikkel/22560 (in which one of the supposedly dead twin daughters is said to have phoned) and http://www.parnupostimees.ee/?id=268822 (with the San Diego reference).

  11 THE TRAITOR’S TALE

  1 I cannot find independent confirmation of this but Bo Kragh, a banker and government adviser at the time, terms the claim ‘very plausible’. Suitcases of cash crossing the Baltic Sea in those days were not unusual.

  2 This and some other quotes come from Riigereetur (State Traitor) a film about the Simm case, originally in Estonian. It is available with English subtitles here as The Spy Inside http://www.javafilms.fr/spip.php?article427

  3 In the 1990s, even Russian course members (from the GRU) took part in courses there. However this has ceased due to some clumsy attempts by those invited to spy. The museum at Chicksands is well worth visiting. http://www.army.mod.uk/intelligence/about/default.aspx

  4 Its full name is the Kaitsepolitseiamet. www.kapo.ee/eng

  5 A brief account of Scott’s meetings with Simm comes in Spionimängud (Spy Games) by Virkko Lepassalu (Pegasus, Tallinn, 2009), pp.106–109.

  6 These and other details come from discussions with serving officials who prefer not to be mentioned in print.

  7 Interview with Mr Savisaar, March 2010.

  8 http://www.mod.gov.ee/en/1252 Other documents such as www.mod.gov.ee/files/kmin/img/File/palgad_2003.xls give his 2003 annual salary of 233715.95 Estonian kroons (in those days about £10,00); another shows him as one of the participants on the ‘Higher National Defence Course’ http://www.mod.gov.ee/et/i-krkk

  9 He has been bankrupted by a lawsuit brought by the Estonian state to recover some of the costs of his betrayal. The sum involved, €1.28m (around $1.8m at the then exchange rate), is to pay for new cryptographic equipment and other security fittings. After some haggling, I agreed to pay his wife €2,00 for the exclusive rights to her side of the story. My original plan was to use this as a personal appendix to a book wholly devoted to her husband’s betrayal and arrest. In the event, I decided that her story was not sufficiently distinctive to deserve special treatment and that the Simm case was best covered in a wider geographical and historical context. But I have paid her none the less.

  10 ‘New Documents Reveal Truth on NATO’s “Most Damaging” Spy’ by Fidelius Schmid and Andreas Ulrich, Der Spiegel, 30 April 2010 http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/,1518,691817-3,0.html

  11 Details of this base, and another one in Poland, were leaked in 2009, with the accusation that they had been secret prisons for terrorism suspects. In 2002 America did press all three Baltic states to cooperate in the extraordinary rendition of terrorists, saying that their NATO chances would be blighted if they declined. Estonia said no, arguing that the torture, deportation and illegal imprisonment in its own history made it impossible to compromise in such a way. Estonian officials also worried, in retrospect rightly, that any such cooperation would not remain secret for long. The American presence in Lithuania, which dated from 2004, was remarkably conspicuous. The location was known to Vilnius taxi drivers and the supposedly secret building had been rewired at 110 volts. http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cia-secret-prison-found/story?id=9115978

  12 This is by Simm’s account: I presume it is a detail he gleaned during his interrogation.

  13 http://www.rferl.org/content/NATO_Expels_Two_Russians_Over_Estonia_Spy_Scandal/1619004.html

  14 See for example ‘Russian top spy was paid also by the BND’, Der Spiegel, 12 December 2008. http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-62603838.html; and ‘ Spion für Russland: Es ist ein Dauerritt auf Messers Schneide’ (‘A Spy for Russia: It is a Long Ride on a Knife-Edge’); http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/,1518,704117,0.html; and Weisser Ritter (White Knight) http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-70228790.html

  15 ‘ Poteyevi shpionili vsei semyei’ (‘The whole family spied on Poteyev’), 16 November 2010 http://www.rosbalt.ru/moscow/2010/11/16/790436.html

  16 See ‘ Deshevniy predatel’ (‘Cheap Traitor’), 4 May 2011, by Yelena Ovcharenko and Basil Voropaev, originally from Izvestiya, but available at http://www.chekist.ru/article/3650

  17 A lively account of his life and defection comes in Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War (Penguin, 2007). Like all defectors’ books, it should be taken with a degree of scepticism.

  CONCLUSION

  1 Quoted in The United States and Germany in the era of the Cold War, 1945 to 1990 , A Handbook: Volume 1 : 1945 –1968, ed. Detlef Junker (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 98; Dulles’ book War or Peace (1950) is available online http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=34046074

  2 Committee on Banking and Financial Services, Hearing on Russian Money Laundering, 21 September 1999, testimony by R. James Woolsey http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/3516.html2

  3 ‘No more Western hugs for Russia’s rulers’ by Mikhail Kasyanov, Vladimir Milov, Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Ryzhkov, Washington Post, 20 February 2011; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/2/20/AR2011022002548.html

  4 Cohen and Jensen, ‘Reset regret’.

  Footnotes

  a An official of the pre-war royalist government, his side had lost out to the communists in the internecine strife in wartime Yugoslavia. There (as in much of Eastern Europe) the Second World War had been a fight between not two sides, but three. The Nazis had battled with communist partisans and the royalist Chetniks, who loathed each other as much as they hated the invaders. When the Germans lost, the communists (who had enjoyed strong backing from Britain a
nd America as well as from the Soviet Union) won their civil war against the much weaker royalists, and labelled them as fascist collaborators.

  b Based since 1995 in a green-glazed ziggurat on the southern bank of the Thames, the Secret Intelligence Service is informally called MI6; semi-official names include ‘the Friends’ or more formally ‘Other Whitehall Agencies’. Its employees usually refer to ‘the Office’; outside contacts may coyly call it ‘the Firm’.

  c An untranslatable Russian word derived from sila (force). It could be rendered as ‘men of power’ or more colloquially as ‘the hard men’. It chiefly refers to the veterans of the Soviet-era KGB and members of its successor organisations. But it also includes those with a background in the armed forces and in the quasimilitary Interior Ministry (MVD) as well as prosecutors and other agencies with the powers to snoop, bug and punish.

  d In inches she would be 35–24–35.

  e Putin studied international law at Leningrad State University. He graduated in 1975 and joined the KGB immediately afterwards.

  f Unfortunately the Russian word on the button means ‘overload’; the correct term for ‘reset’ would have been Perezagruzka.

  g The ‘West’ is a wobbly concept that defies precise description. It includes Anglosphere countries such as Australia and New Zealand (and in many cases Japan), which are not ‘western’ in any geographical sense. In this book I use it broadly to mean in economic and political terms the thirty-four member countries of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, a rich-country club that promotes good governance. In a security context I use it to mean NATO and its allies, which would include, for these purposes, Sweden and Finland.

  h An arcane distinction is sometimes drawn between counter-espionage (active and offensive measures, such as distracting, impeding, expelling or recruiting the officers of a hostile foreign service) and counter-intelligence (more general preventative measures such as screening and surveillance, aimed at finding leaks and plugging them).