Deception by Edward Lucas Read Free Book Online

describes his ability to deal with organised crime as ‘zero’. It was the steely young officers of his service (including one who later masterminded Simm’s arrest) who cleaned up organised crime in post-Soviet Estonia, not the then oafish and bungling officers of the uniformed police. In 1995 Mr Savisaar – then the Interior Minister in a coalition government – again crossed swords with Simm. He recalls a ‘somewhat theatrical’ red uniform ordered just for the force’s most high-ranking officers. ‘Like something out of an operetta,’ he says disdainfully. Simm was loyal, almost fawning. ‘Every morning he was sitting in my secretary’s office eager to report – but he could not cope.’ For a few months Mr Savisaar pondered how to dismiss his unwelcome subordinate. Then he summoned him and spoke of a ‘serious problem’, while laying his hand on a large file labelled ‘Herman Simm’ which was actually full of old newspaper. To his relief, Simm immediately resigned. ‘I was a little surprised that he then got a job at the Defence Ministry,’ says Mr Savisaar drily. bn
    To be fired twice by a hate-figure is a strong recommendation. The hawkish officials of the defence and security establishment had long loathed Mr Savisaar, seeing him as a cynical and greedy machine politician with unhealthily close ties to the Kremlin. If Simm was their enemy’s enemy, his foibles were irrelevant. Behind the scenes, some did worry. Security officials at the Foreign Ministry made a point of refusing to let him see diplomatic telegrams. The Defence Ministry’s internal counter-intelligence service clashed with Simm on occasion, but its efforts to constrain his unorthodox habits were undermined by a conspiratorial and bungling approach: it once attempted to put several senior figures in the ministry under surveillance, supposedly as an exercise. It was easy for the self-assured Simm to arrange for such jumpy and troublesome junior officials to be fired, transferred or ignored.
    Simm was a happy man as his career peaked. From his bleak and humble upbringing in the Stalinist era, he had made a successful career not only in the Soviet system, but in the one that had replaced it. On 20 November 2006 a press release marking his retirement (one of several documents mentioning him still on the Estonian Defence Ministry’s website in mid 2011 ) 8 gives a ghostly reminder of the esteem in which he was then held. It praises the organisation he built up as ‘effective and efficient’; and notes that he signed agreements on the protection of classified information with nearly twenty countries. The Defence Minister added that without doubt Simm had shown ‘excellent professionalism’. He also received praise from the then director of the NATO Office of Security, Wayne Rychak. Yet had any of his colleagues known the truth, they would have arrested him on the spot – for nearly thirteen years the avuncular, dependable Simm was an agent of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service.
    Simm was one element in the human minefield left behind in the former Soviet empire amid the collapse of communism. The nature of these devices varied widely. One kind were former dissidents, often now in influential positions, who had been protected from their own countries’ secret police by their KGB connections. Some also had sincerely cultivated ties with the Soviet authorities in the belief that Mr Gorbachev’s reforms offered the best chance of bringing change to their own stagnating societies. Another component was people who feared German hegemony in Europe, or who were sceptical of American intentions. Such feelings – as in Simm’s case – were sometimes compounded with jealousy at the rise of smooth young Atlanticist types to senior positions. A big latent category was officials from the old regime with undeclared KGB or