At any rate, the official story of simple SVR sloppiness looks incomplete. Retrospective analysis of intelligence operations is always skewed by their outcomes: the successful ones appear to have been run brilliantly; the failed ones look doomed from the start. But in all of intelligence history, it is hard to find an example of an illegal blown solely because of bad tradecraft. They normally trip up on one of two fronts. One is a spouse or lover who becomes suspicious of a pattern of activity that only he or she is in a position to notice. The other is penetration. But Antonio did not have a woman in his life. Rumours swirl around Tallinn and other cities about his whereabouts now, and the means used to recruit him. He was supposedly detained in Turkey around the time of Simm’s arrest, but has not been heard of since. One version is that the Western secret services planted child pornography on his computer, and told him that he would face a lengthy sentence in a Spanish jail unless he cooperated. Another account is that he was offered a large sum of money for his help, which he initially spurned. He returned to Moscow in a panic and alerted his controllers – only then to think better of his decision and slip out of Russia to the West where he then defected.
A final puzzle is the relationship between the Simm case and the American illegals such as Anna Chapman and Donald Heathfield. According to the Russian authorities, a senior SVR officer, Aleksandr Poteyev, defected to the United States in June 2010. In June 2011 a military court in Moscow sentenced him in absentia to a 25-year jail term on charges of treason and desertion. Aged 58 at the time of his trial, Mr Poteyev was a decorated intelligence veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, who was then posted first to Washington, DC and then to New York in the early 1990s to service the illegals network. During that posting, he appears to have been spotted by the CIA as a potential recruit, with the initial approach being made via his daughter, who worked for an American academic exchange outfit in Moscow. A decisive psychological nudge – according to Russian news reports – came with a CIA-staged burglary at his flat.15 This supposedly underlined the weakness of the Russian state and the omnipotence of the Americans.
From 2000 Mr Poteyev worked as deputy director of the North America division of the S-Department (dealing with illegals). It is hard to imagine a more useful asset for the CIA, at least from a counter-espionage point of view. Mr Poteyev was able not only to give details of the identities of his agents in North America, but also to keep an eye on their missions, tasking and intelligence results.16 According to Russian news reports (which as officially sanctioned leaks must be taken with a Siberian salt mine’s worth of scepticism), Mr Poteyev was able to evade a lie detector test and also get his daughter and son outside Russia before he himself defected. He is said to have feigned illness, travelled to Belarus on a false passport provided by the Americans, and then to Kiev, where he was exfiltrated to Frankfurt. A text message to his wife read: ‘Mary, try to take this calmly: I am leaving not for a short time but for ever… I did not want this but I had to. I am starting a new life. I shall try to help the children.’ If true, the whole episode reflects sloppiness by the SVR’s once-fearsome internal counter-intelligence.
Mr Poteyev’s recruitment would have been the third blow to Russian espionage in North America in twenty years. The Mitrokhin archive, when analysed in the early 1990s, produced details of many illegals planted in the United States and Canada in the Soviet era. Almost all of them appeared to have become inactive when followed up by the FBI: they had settled into a quiet suburban routine, with the undemanding long-term tasks that would be needed only in time of war. (One illegal in Europe was provided with a carefully constructed false identity in order to get an unremarkable job at a car factory. His sole intelligence-gathering task was to inform Moscow of any sign of its switching to military production). The second blow came with the defection of Sergei Tretyakov, the deputy head of the SVR station based at the Russian mission to the United Nations. He was passing secrets to the United States from 1997 until his defection in 2000.17 His duties also included some support for illegals’ networks. Mr Tretyakov died, apparently of choking on a piece of meat, on 13 June 2010, on the eve of the spy scandal. Nobody has alleged foul play, although the coincidence is certainly striking. On top of that came the reported breach from Mr Poteyev.
Making sense of all this is tricky. The all-embracing conspiracy in which one side masterminds every twist and turn of a story is rarely a satisfactory explanation. History suggests that real answers to intelligence puzzles invariably include large doses of incompetence and misjudgement. Assuming that Antonio did indeed defect to America, Simm’s career in the Defence Ministry still remains mystifying. Why did he rise so quickly? Why did nobody note his KGB past? The truth is, I fear, that Simm had developed an unofficial relationship with Kapo, which was concerned about the growing Russian interest in Estonian defence, the scope for provocations and penetrations, and the weakness of the ministry in dealing with the threat. Soon after Simm’s arrival, Kapo picked up his sloppy behaviour. But instead of having him fired, it made him the agency’s unofficial eyes and ears, providing a stream of gossip, innuendo and other information. Kapo felt it had the weaknesses of the ministry under excellent scrutiny. And so they did – except the one that mattered. This theory is denied by all concerned, but I believe it to be true. As I shall argue in the conclusion, our complacency towards the mediocre is Russia’s deadliest weapon.
Conclusion
Simm’s treachery exemplifies the central point of this book: the need to defend an open society at its weakest points, against people who appear to be no threat to it. Annoying though it may be to NATO’s security officials charged with protecting the thousands of documents that Simm passed on to his handlers, the transfer of these papers did little lasting damage to the alliance. Nor did he manage to crack the innermost secrets of Estonian intelligence cooperation with countries such as Britain and America. Though he did give Russia a damagingly accurate inside view of the Estonian elite, even that country’s greatest fans could not call that a geopolitical earthquake. The real cause for alarm about Simm and Antonio is the same reason as for Donald Heathfield and Anna Chapman. Rather than the secrets they may have stolen, it is the vulnerabilities they exposed that matter. Catching spies is hard enough. But when they use weaknesses that are intrinsic to our society, the real question is how many more are playing the same tricks now, and may do so in future. Nothing has changed to stop other Russian agents such as Ms Chapman – perhaps much better trained and more determined – following the same path into the heart of Western business, social and financial life. Nor have we any idea how many more Herman Simms may lurk in the fifty-plus generation that holds top jobs in the new member states of the EU and NATO, but conceals dark secrets from earlier careers in communist-run countries.