Deception (51 page)

 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//files/22/66/45/f226645/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 Republic of Estonia on the Ferry
Estonia
in 1994, Final Report.' Available at
http://www.riigikogu.ee//files/22/66/45/f226645/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 and 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 MI
6
; 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'.