Deception (41 page)

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 penetration 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 MI
6
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,
20
km 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 officer
^bt
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.

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