âWhen we met I would eat a small fish dish. He would have steak and red wine,â Simm recalls in a characteristically petulant aside. He assumed that Antonio was fiddling his expenses and doubted that the Russian was a fully trained illegal; his cushy job, Simm suspected, stemmed from connections not talent. That is consistent with the theory that nepotism is rife in Russian intelligence (a theory also supported by the way the lightly trained Ms Chapman gained a plum posting in the West). In his last meeting with Zentsov, Simm had complained about the new man, only to be told that Antonio was the best available: the SVR, Zentsov maintained, had only a couple of illegals in all of Western Europe.
A more tough-minded agent might have gone on strike at this, demanding a serious handler. Astonishingly, given the risks he was taking for the SVR, Simm settled for a stipulation that meetings with his case officer should be held only outside Estonia. Communication between the agent and source was simple. Simm continued to hand over his material via dead drops, using a more sophisticated digital camera, flash drives and memory cards, sometimes concealed in a pill container with a false bottom. He received, in cash, a âsalaryâ of ⬠1 , 000 a month, plus expenses. The two men met fourteen times in total, mostly in the Baltic region but sometimes farther afield. By Simmâs account, only Germany, Norway and Britain were off limits. They arranged their sessions via a Prague-registered pager account, with simple numeric codes to send and receive messages. The number could be dialled from a public phone box. In retrospect, that might seem sloppy too. A central principle of spycraft is to make the source do nothing unusual. That would mean exchanging messages through means that seem like random variations in ordinary life: for example by using particular combinations of coloured ties, shirts and scarves. That would be necessary for Western spies operating in a police state like Russia; in the open environment of the European Union, Russian spymasters may have considered such precautions unnecessarily elaborate.
Simmâs productivity rocketed as Estonia joined NATO. He was party to the inner counsels of the alliance, attending scores of security-related meetings in Brussels and elsewhere. His own clearance was impeccable. âThe Americans checked me, the UK people checked, the Norwegians, Germans, Denmark, Finland â all services checked me,â he recalls. A big area of Russian interest was cryptographic security. Simm duly provided details of NATOâs top-secret Elcrodat network, a heavy-duty encrypted communications network used for secure messaging and scrambled voice traffic. During the Cold War, with a military conflict a real possibility, such a breach would have been catastrophic. But in peacetime, with the Soviet threat long gone, it is more embarrassing than damaging: most of the secrets that Elcrodat carried were non-secrets before and after they were fed into the system. Moreover, a key principle of cryptographic security is that if one encryption key is compromised, another can be used in future. An analogy is the combination to the lock on a safe: knowing it is useful only if something valuable is inside; and once the breach is known, the combination can be changed.
In short, it would be wrong to overstate the effect of Simmâs treachery on the overall balance of power between Russia and NATO. In an alliance of more than two dozen countries, security is never as tight as it seems. Among other NATO members are countries such as Greece, which have in the past proved leaky on issues of interest to Russia, and more recently Bulgaria. Given the activity of the GRU and SVR stations in Brussels and elsewhere, it is a fair bet that Russia was receiving plenty of other information about NATO too. Simm may have been a big source, but he was certainly not the only one. By Simmâs own
A more tough-minded agent might have gone on strike at this, demanding a serious handler. Astonishingly, given the risks he was taking for the SVR, Simm settled for a stipulation that meetings with his case officer should be held only outside Estonia. Communication between the agent and source was simple. Simm continued to hand over his material via dead drops, using a more sophisticated digital camera, flash drives and memory cards, sometimes concealed in a pill container with a false bottom. He received, in cash, a âsalaryâ of ⬠1 , 000 a month, plus expenses. The two men met fourteen times in total, mostly in the Baltic region but sometimes farther afield. By Simmâs account, only Germany, Norway and Britain were off limits. They arranged their sessions via a Prague-registered pager account, with simple numeric codes to send and receive messages. The number could be dialled from a public phone box. In retrospect, that might seem sloppy too. A central principle of spycraft is to make the source do nothing unusual. That would mean exchanging messages through means that seem like random variations in ordinary life: for example by using particular combinations of coloured ties, shirts and scarves. That would be necessary for Western spies operating in a police state like Russia; in the open environment of the European Union, Russian spymasters may have considered such precautions unnecessarily elaborate.
Simmâs productivity rocketed as Estonia joined NATO. He was party to the inner counsels of the alliance, attending scores of security-related meetings in Brussels and elsewhere. His own clearance was impeccable. âThe Americans checked me, the UK people checked, the Norwegians, Germans, Denmark, Finland â all services checked me,â he recalls. A big area of Russian interest was cryptographic security. Simm duly provided details of NATOâs top-secret Elcrodat network, a heavy-duty encrypted communications network used for secure messaging and scrambled voice traffic. During the Cold War, with a military conflict a real possibility, such a breach would have been catastrophic. But in peacetime, with the Soviet threat long gone, it is more embarrassing than damaging: most of the secrets that Elcrodat carried were non-secrets before and after they were fed into the system. Moreover, a key principle of cryptographic security is that if one encryption key is compromised, another can be used in future. An analogy is the combination to the lock on a safe: knowing it is useful only if something valuable is inside; and once the breach is known, the combination can be changed.
In short, it would be wrong to overstate the effect of Simmâs treachery on the overall balance of power between Russia and NATO. In an alliance of more than two dozen countries, security is never as tight as it seems. Among other NATO members are countries such as Greece, which have in the past proved leaky on issues of interest to Russia, and more recently Bulgaria. Given the activity of the GRU and SVR stations in Brussels and elsewhere, it is a fair bet that Russia was receiving plenty of other information about NATO too. Simm may have been a big source, but he was certainly not the only one. By Simmâs own
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