Shortly after the excitement of Simm’s capture, another scandal broke: Simm had been not only a spy for the Russians but for the Germans. This aspect of his life is shrouded in secrecy. A handful of leaks to the German magazine Der Spiegel have painted a sanitised version of his cooperation, claiming that it dated from his days as a policeman, rather than in the Defence Ministry, and concerned chiefly Russian organised crime, rather than intelligence matters.14 Yet fragmentary clues suggest a darker picture. According to other officials in a position to know, Simm’s cooperation with the German BND spy service was deep and long-lasting, stretching at least up to Estonia’s membership of the European Union and NATO in 2004, and possibly even longer. In retrospect, the BND’s misbehaviour is less of a puzzle. After Estonia restored its independence, the absence of good ties with German intelligence was conspicuous. Some countries such as France were annoyed that the British had got their feet under the table so quickly and hurried to catch up. Sweden and Finland were the quickest to regularise their activities, with ‘declared’ intelligence liaison officers taking up postings at the new embassies in Tallinn. America too built up a large CIA station, which enjoyed correct if sometimes aloof relations with its Estonian counterparts. As well as with these countries, Jüri Pihl, head of Kapo from 1993 to 2003, recalls the excellent ties that his service built up with partner agencies in Austria, Norway, and later the Czech Republic and Poland.
Germany was the notable exception. The Baltic region had historically been Berlin’s shared backyard with Moscow. Relations with Russia, on everything from energy to migration, were vital. It is easy to see that senior German politicians would find it annoying that devious and interfering spooks from London were hooking up with a bunch of zealous and youthful Estonians, to the detriment of far more important East–West relations. Though Germany’s intelligence cooperation with Estonia was cool, its interest in what the spy agency there was cooking up with the British was keen. Simm declines to discuss this in detail, reverting only to his formulaic ‘I helped lots of people’. I can reveal, having heard it from multiple sources, that Germany apologised officially to Estonia in 2008, shortly after Simm’s arrest. If the BND had recruited and run an agent there in the late 1980s or early 1990s, when Russian organised crime was a serious problem for Germany, and the Estonian constitutional authorities were in no state to provide effective help, few would object. Continuing clandestine operations after 1992 was another matter. Estonia is not just a friendly country. It is one to which, since the Nazi–Soviet pact, Germany owes a historic debt. Most Germans would be horrified at the idea of running hostile intelligence operations against Israel. Those officials in charge of Simm (and presumably of other agents in the Baltics and Central Europe) may have neglected to consider Germany’s other historical baggage. It is easy to see why Berlin was interested in burgeoning Anglo-American defence cooperation with a new country in Germany’s Baltic backyard. But running a senior official there as a secret agent was no way to slake that curiosity.
Simm’s importance as a BND agent grew just as Germany’s relationship with Russia was intensifying. The friendship between Gerhard Schröder (federal chancellor from 1998 to 2005) and Mr Putin was notorious. It culminated in the German leader taking a retirement job as chairman of the board of a joint Russian–German gas pipeline, built on the Baltic seabed against the strenuous objections of the other littoral states, who saw it as a direct attack on their energy security. Some officials close to the case suggest that Simm was run on the direct instructions of the security coordination office in the Federal Chancellery under Mr Schröder, and against the judgement of the BND chiefs, whose attitudes to Russia were considerably more hawkish (and to Estonia, more friendly). That is hard to prove: everyone involved declines any kind of comment. All Simm will say is that he turned to the Germans as a ‘protection’ against the Russians. This suggests strongly that he was recruited by the BND after 1995, not before.
What is clear, however, is that Simm’s cooperation with Russia and Germany overlapped. That raises an interesting question. Did the SVR know that Simm was working for the BND? And did the BND know that he was working for the Russians? The former is more likely. The BND has long been something of a laughing stock among other secret services, because of the degree of Russian (and now Chinese) penetration. In Cold War Berlin in the 1980s, a senior intelligence officer from an English-speaking service told me derisively: ‘If we want Gorbachev to know something and take it seriously, we give it to the BND and tell them it’s top secret. It’ll be on his desk in the Kremlin the next morning.’ Little suggests that security has improved since then.
It is possible that Simm told the BND that he was under pressure from the Russians in the hope that they would rescue him were he exposed. At least one senior official close to the case says that Simm indeed played this card when he was arrested. The BND responded quickly by saying that Simm was a former agent, not a current one, and that the Estonians were welcome to try him for spying for Russia. At any rate, the Estonians have gone to great lengths to conceal evidence of Simm’s work for the BND. No questions to Simm on this subject were permitted during my face-to-face interviews, and he was also deeply reluctant to address the subject on the phone, or via intermediaries. ‘If I tell you that, I will be dead in my cell tomorrow,’ he said dramatically. In another interview he said elliptically, ‘I had to make sure that the pigs were fed but that the wolves did not go hungry.’ One reason for Estonia’s unwillingness to raise Simm’s BND connection was that it would have required another criminal trial. Another was the excellent relations that now exist between Estonia and Germany under Angela Merkel. The normally ultra-cautious Germans showed strong support in the crucial meetings that decided Estonia’s application to join the euro zone in 2009 and 2010. Some have suggested, plausibly, that this was a quid pro quo for Estonia’s willingness to hush up the unpleasant question of Simm’s work for the BND. The prime minister, Andrus Ansip, is fond of saying: ‘What is good for Germany is good for Estonia.’ But the result of the Simm case has been to dent trust – not only in Estonia – that Germany is an honest partner for its smaller neighbours in NATO and the EU.
The overlap raises a still more intriguing question: whether Russia knew that Simm was spying for the BND, and if so whether it tried to exploit this. It would certainly explain its remarkably unpleasant treatment of its once-prized agent in the final year of his service to them, which is only really consistent with a case officer who actively wants his source to be exposed. If the SVR did know – perhaps from Simm, perhaps from a source in Germany – that it was dealing with a double agent, then an elegant way of ending the affair would be to stage this denouement. Simm was of no further use to the SVR. Antonio himself needed to be recalled to Russia before he was arrested. Under interrogation, Simm would certainly mention his BND link, in the hope of invoking powerful outside help. Any outcome would then be good for Russia. Perhaps Estonia would hush the whole affair up, in which case it would spare the SVR’s blushes. It would certainly have a private or public spat with Germany, weakening NATO and underlining the isolation and fragility of the Baltic states’ security arrangements.
This is an elegant but not wholly convincing explanation of Russian sloppiness towards Simm. Anyone considering treachery naturally worries about how he will be treated. A reputation for callous carelessness does not help. Simm’s treatment damages the SVR brand. A better explanation is that Antonio himself was recruited by the Americans and helped set up Simm’s prosecution. This fits rather more of the facts. It would explain, for a start, the mysterious disappearance of Antonio following his clumsy and revealing phone call to Simm’s mobile. It is hardly likely that its spycatchers would succeed in nailing Simm but fail to gain the much bigger prize of a fully fledged Russian illegal. It is interesting to speculate when the double-dealing started: was Antonio already under Western control when he made his clumsy pitch to the Lithuanian? It would be nice to imagine that the Western intelligence services were using the Russian illegal for their own purposes, testing weaknesses in NATO members’ security and gaining a revealing picture of the SVR’s wish-list, sources and methods. Perhaps not only Simm but also other Russian agents run by Antonio have now been rounded up.