Edward Lucas - Deception

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.phpand http://www.estoniaferrydisaster.netInterviews 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).

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.xlsgive 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.

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’.

Edward Lucas is a senior editor at the Economist . He has been covering Eastern Europe since 1986, with postings in Berlin, Moscow, Prague, Vienna and the Baltic states. He is the author of The New Cold War (2008), published in more than fifteen languages.

The New Cold War

Copyright © 2012 by Edward Lucas

This electronic edition published in June 2012

All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

Published by Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York

A Division of Bloomsbury Publishing

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Lucas, Edward. Deception : the untold story of East-West espionage today / Edward Lucas. — 1st U.S. ed.