Deception (39 page)

For a man who prided himself on his personal grooming, Simm cut a sorry figure: pasty-faced, ill-shaven and with a faint whiff of sweat. Only his oily quiff of silvering hair seemed to have survived the indignities of his imprisonment. He claimed, belligerently, that he was expecting his lawyer, not an author. His first words to me set the tone: ‘So, you work for MI
6
.' Lecturers at his courses in security at Chicksands, he maintained, had told him that all leading British foreign-affairs journalists are in the spooks' pay. I countered that if so, I would not need to be asking him all these questions, as I would know everything already. He grudgingly accepted that. But the multi-dimensional battles of wits in the many hours that followed were the most challenging of my thirty years in journalism. My object was simple: to get from Simm the real story. The minder's job was to forestall any detailed discussion of classified information, procedures or intergovernmental cooperation. Simm's agenda was partly self-aggrandisement and partly to get money for his wife.
⁹
Distinguishing fact from fiction in his account was hard. It featured confident, conspiratorial and eccentric assertions on everything from the prevalence of homosexuality in Britain to Freemasonry in Estonia. He habitually overstated his own role and denigrated that of others. Checking his veracity is hard. A lot of the material is secret. Some events are long ago. Other people involved have their own reasons for keeping silent, or can simply contradict Simm's version: after all, who will believe the word of Estonia's most-hated prisoner? Repeatedly and without exception, he skirted over any personal wrongdoing. He portrayed himself partly as a victim of the machinations of great-power politics; but also (quite contradictorily) as a man of destiny, who made the world safer by keeping everyone informed.

His descent to treason began, according to him and to Estonian officials, during a summer holiday in the Tunisian resort of Sousse in July
1995
. A familiar figure approached him in the street. It was Valeri Zentsov, a former official in the Soviet Estonian KGB. Casually dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, he introduced himself, pressing Simm to join him for a vodka. This meeting was no coincidence: when an intelligence officer pitches to a potential agent, every aspect is worked out in advance. What are the target's weaknesses? What happens if he threatens to report the encounter to his authorities? What mixture of bribery, threats and flattery will work best? That the Russians had identified Simm, and knew his movements well enough to approach him when he was on holiday, in between jobs, and following the end of his relationship with a much younger girlfriend, suggests a thorough knowledge of the comings and goings of Estonian society. Simm himself believes that a Russian mole elsewhere in the defence or security establishment had ‘spotted' him as a likely prospect. That may well be true. Yet it is also possible that the story is in whole or in part a fake. No external corroboration for it exists. The real truth may be that Simm needed not to be recruited, but just reactivated.

Zentsov greeted him (at least according to Simm's version of events) with pleasantries. Simm recalls:

 

I knew it was not a chance meeting. I thought we might be observed. But I was afraid my career would be over if I said no. Also I thought about the future – who would help me? My salary was low.

 

Simm claims that the approach came at a time when he had survived bruising encounters with organised crime gangs in Tallinn. He recalls:

 

I wore a bullet-proof vest . . . Life was cheap . . . a killer cost just $
300
. . . Russian intelligence has more than
500
poisons, for ladies and for men. If they could find me in Tunisia they could find me anywhere. Who could I trust?

 

Zentsov assured Simm that Russia had no hostile intentions to Estonia, dismissing the (then only occasional) outbursts from Moscow as a mere ‘political game'. But he said his superiors were worried that NATO would use the small country as a base for an attack on Russia. That concern, Simm says, was a hallmark of Russian demands for intelligence over the next thirteen years. ‘Even at the last meeting, they were worried about NATO bases in Estonia.'

The natural thing for a patriotic Estonian to do – even a nervous and unemployed one – would be to listen politely and then report this encounter immediately to the authorities. Simm did not, apparently because Zentsov threatened to expose his collaboration with the KGB in the
1980
s. Yet the threat was matched by an appeal to Simm's self-importance, and his dislike of Estonia's young, pro-Western, English-speaking security elite. He says elliptically of his decision to commit treason:

 

It was a very hard question right until the end. But there had to be a little balance. I know the Russian mentality. They needed information because if they believed they were being attacked, they would attack Estonia.

 

Traitors typically salve their consciences with the idea that they are playing a great role in geopolitics. Simm seems to have been no exception. The Russian also played skilfully on Simm's troubled psyche, presenting himself as a similarly apolitical colleague. ‘He was a patriot and I was a patriot,' Simm says, without irony. Zentsov stressed a common disdain for politicians, bemoaning the sleaze and abuse of power of the Yeltsin era, while also undermining Simm's view of Estonian statehood. Did he know, asked Zentsov, that Estonia's pre-war military leader, General Johan Laidoner, had worked for Soviet intelligence? And that the country's then president Konstantin Päts had been on the Kremlin payroll too? Most Estonians would regard these ideas not just as fanciful but outrageously insulting. President Päts died in a Soviet mental hospital in
1956
, where he was incarcerated because of his persistent belief that ‘he is a president of Estonia'. Laidoner died in a Soviet prison in
1953
. Comparably absurd allegations would be to say that Winston Churchill was a Soviet agent, that FDR took money from the Nazi Party, and that General Douglas MacArthur had been in the pay of Chinese intelligence during the Korean War. But they chimed with Simm's weakness for conspiratorial explanations.

With a classic mix of money, blackmail and flattery, the pitch worked. Simm agreed to cooperate with Russian intelligence, not as traitor but (he insists) as an officer, with a clandestine rank, salary and pension. That played on a grudge: that the Defence Ministry had never given him the military rank – equivalent to his position as a police general – that he believed he had been promised on joining. Simm claims he also insisted that he would never work against Estonia's interests (as defined by him). The offer and promise alike were delusions, but Simm's value for the SVR was all too clear: a trusted, well-connected source, in the heart of the country's burgeoning defence establishment. Running the new agent was easy. With his KGB background obscured by his status as a ‘military pensioner', Zentsov had no difficulty in visiting Estonia, though most of the contact with Simm took place in third countries.
^bp

Everyone involved in Simm's rise through the Defence Ministry bureaucracy is eager to blame someone else. But the new recruit's experience at the outset was of profound disappointment. Used to the established bureaucracy of the police force, he found only empty desks, bare walls, intrigues and chaos. He was also unconvinced about the whole idea of defending Estonia by military means. British advisers, he recalled, told him that resistance to a Russian attack would last ‘just four hours' – the time it would take for tanks to get from the border town of Narva to Tallinn.

Simm's initial haul of Estonia's defence information was correspondingly scanty. Estonia in
1995
had practically no armed forces, slender military relationships with other countries, and seemingly scant chance of joining NATO. The biggest target for the Russians was Western intelligence cooperation, about which Simm could make only informed guesses. What he could offer were insights into the Estonian elite: who was up, who was down, who was facing a financial or marital problem; who was being trained in what specialism by which friendly country, how deeply, where and when. In one security exercise, supposedly to help the ministry get ready for NATO membership, he grilled staff with sixty questions covering private hobbies, plus possible weaknesses ranging from sex and alcohol to cars. Although he did not have access to the full ‘confessionals' of Kapo's counter-intelligence interviews, in which senior officials have to explain the details of any sexual or other entanglements that could make them vulnerable to blackmail, he would have had a good idea about their conclusions. His knowledge of crisis management plans was also damaging. The Estonian elite is small, with perhaps two hundred people in the key decision-making roles. Many have served in senior positions in several different ministries or agencies – defence, interior, security, the police, the diplomatic service and intelligence. Many of them are trained to stand in for colleagues in an emergency. These carefully made plans were laid bare to Russia. Should it want to decapitate Estonia in future, it knows where to strike.

Simm's tradecraft instructions were straight out of the Soviet KGB's playbook. He placed films, and later memory sticks, into small juice cartons of a particular brand and colour and threw them away in rubbish bins in designated parks. Each dead-letter box was used once only. By his own estimate, he met Zentsov sixteen times in ten different countries. But here arises one of the big mysteries of the case: the exchange of information. Simm insists, in multiple interviews, that the relationship with Zentsov was not a one-way street:
40
per cent of information flowed from him to Zentsov,
60
per cent the other way round. But what was that incoming information? And what did Simm do with it? During my interviews with Simm, the Estonian minder resolutely kept that subject out of bounds, and Simm himself subsequently claimed to be too scared to discuss it when we spoke on the phone.

That is rather tantalising. If he truly passed on information, Simm would inevitably be quizzed about its source. Any intelligence service would wish to double-check it. Any counter-intelligence agency would be deeply alarmed by a senior official meeting a known spy from a hostile country; it would allow such contact to continue only under the closest scrutiny. Simm claims that he would have liked to confide in British or American intelligence but was too scared to do so. ‘I did consider telling someone,' he says, while insisting: ‘But I used that material and passed it on.' But what material, and to whom? Whether Simm's claim of a ‘two-way street' is self-delusion, mischief making, or a fragment of a bigger story remains one of several unsolved puzzles. Others are even more intriguing.

Zentsov was an old-style spy: a hardened KGB veteran from Soviet-occupied Estonia. While he was guiding Simm into the heart of the Defence Ministry, a new Russian intelligence presence was developing in the region, in the form of Antonio Graf, a plump, bearded man from Madrid. Apart from his slightly exotic middle names (de Jesus Amorett) he cut an unremarkable figure in the Baltic states. A Portuguese citizen, born in Brazil and working in Spain, he was one of thousands of consultants and go-betweens getting to know the continent's new eastern frontier lands. Until
1989
, West European businesses had been almost wholly ignorant of the markets and suppliers behind the Iron Curtain. Dealing with the communist bureaucracy involved marathon negotiating sessions, best conducted with strong government support. Shortage of hard currency made customers stingy; NATO controls on the export of sensitive products meant that the deals that looked most promising were probably illegal. When communism collapsed, most businesses were initially deeply sceptical about the new markets. Would bills be paid? What was the work ethic? Could the communists come back? Would civil war and chaos spread from the Balkans? What about organised crime? And corruption? Even the most basic data about household income, family structure, education levels, property rights, currency regulations and the like were unknown.

So Antonio (as he was known to his many acquaintances and contacts) sounded completely plausible in his many trips to the Baltic states, which seem to have started in the mid
1990
s. He assiduously collected information about business conditions and the political and economic outlook, apparently spending some years building his ‘legend' as a regular and credible visitor before engaging in any spying. His mission seemed anodyne and convincing. One contact recalls:

 

He told me that he was representing Portuguese businesses. He said: ‘It appears you guys are going to join the European Union – we want to know more about your countries.'

 

People who met him recall nothing suspicious, and little that was even distinctive, except possibly his odd choice of tipple: a revolting mixture of Campari and tonic. Anyone suspicious about his motives or background would have found it hard to check them. Spain and Portugal, and their languages, were all but unknown in the Baltic states in the
1990
s. If his Spanish sounded faintly accented, that would be because he was Portuguese. If a Portuguese speaker noticed a stray syllable, the answer was that he was born in Brazil – which from a Baltic point of view could have been the far side of the moon. The idea that he was in fact a Russian intelligence officer named Sergei Yakovlev, working under an elaborately constructed illegal identity, would have seemed paranoid fantasy.