Russians Among Us by Gordon Corera

Author:Gordon Corera
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-12-23T16:00:00+00:00

18

Decision Time

IN MOSCOW, ALEXANDER Poteyev was growing nervous. A decade of clandestine meetings and the passing of secrets shredded your nerves. He had become worried the spy-catchers were on his tail. The relentless spy fever led by Putin and instituted by men like Alexander Zhomov at the FSB had been growing around him, the news filled with talk of arrests. And Poteyev had his own reasons to worry. He had been an enormously productive asset for the West. He had known the details of all illegals across the Americas and even though Directorate S was heavily compartmented, he had also picked up leads about other illegals operating globally (including the role of people like Metsos supporting them). He had shared these with his American handlers. As time had passed, Poteyev’s intelligence proved so important that it was used widely and not just in the United States by the FBI. Some was shared with allies in a carefully protected way. This was because he had insight into illegals operating in their countries who posed serious national security risks. And this meant that in some cases action had to be taken.

The full tally of which cases were linked to Poteyev remains hazy, officials unwilling to confirm his role and cautious of revealing too much. But there was one case—one of the most important involving illegals in the 2000s—whose discovery set off alarm bells in Moscow and whose link to Poteyev has not previously been disclosed.

Herman Simm had just bought some cake at a shopping center and was walking back to his car when he was surrounded on September 19, 2008. The cake was for his stepmother and he had driven with his wife to a shop just outside the Estonian capital, Tallinn, to get it. Simm, just over sixty years old with a tough, rugged face that suggested he had seen much, was an important man. At one point, he had been head of the Baltic state’s police force but more recently had been a senior security officer assigned by Estonia to NATO. That meant he was privy to some of the alliance’s most important secrets. He was also a long-term SVR agent who had been inflicting massive damage on NATO. He had handed over thousands of pages of secrets and had seen almost all the traffic between the European Union (EU) and NATO, including details on secret codes used by the alliance. NATO officials said the damage was comparable to what Aldrich Ames inflicted on the CIA.

Simm had been tracked down through his handler—an SVR officer called Sergei Yakovlev who worked under illegal cover in Spain posing as a Portuguese businessman called Antonio de Jesus Amurett Graf. He was running a network in the Baltics. Simm had been placing memory sticks in trash cans to be picked up by the Russians as well as meeting Yakovlev in different countries. A call was intercepted between the pair in September, three days before Simm’s arrest. At the time it was reported the investigation had begun in May 2008 and that the United States had been involved.

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