TALLINN, Estonia – Chinese military intelligence has recruited an Estonian national working for a NATO research institution focused on maritime and underwater research, The Daily Beast reported.
The spy, Tarmo Kõuts, famous in the Estonian scientific community for his research, was sentenced last week and sentenced to three years in prison. The Baltic intelligence services had warned for years about China’s growing threat, but the conviction was the first of its kind. To date, Estonia’s counterintelligence service, known internally by its acronym KAPO, has been praised for its success in capturing spies recruited and led by Russia.
According to Aleksander Toots, KAPO’s deputy director and Tallinn’s top counterintelligence officer, Kõuts was recruited in 2018 by the China Intelligence Bureau of the Central Military Commission’s Staff Department – as the military intelligence agency is known. from Beijing – along with an alleged accomplice who is yet to be tried in court. Both were arrested on September 9, 2020, without publicity or discussion of the case in the Estonian media.
Kõuts pleaded guilty to intelligence activities against the Republic of Estonia on behalf of a foreign state. The accusations were at one point following the betrayal. He was sentenced to three years in prison.
Kõuts was recruited in China, said Toots, who spoke exclusively with The Daily Beast and Estonia. Delphi newspaper: “He was motivated by traditional human weaknesses, such as money and the need for recognition.”
Toots added that Kõuts has received cash payments from its Chinese operators, as well as paid trips to various Asian countries, with luxury accommodation and meals at Michelin-starred restaurants. The intelligence agencies that managed it worked under the cover of a think tank. Inna Ombler, the prosecutor handling the case, confirmed that Kõuts earned 17,000 euros – just over $ 20,000 – for his espionage, which the Estonian government has since confiscated.
Kõuts, who received his doctorate in environmental physics in 1999, worked for years at the Maritime Institute of the Technical University of Tallinn, where he specialized in geophysics and operational oceanography. His research has led marine scientists to successfully predict a harmful winter storm, with rapidly rising sea levels in Estonia in 2005. Kõuts was also part of a scientific research group that received the National Marine Prize. Science from Estonia in 2002 because it found the best location for a seaport on the island of Saaremaa. Although it was officially designed to accept cruise ships, the port had to be able to accommodate NATO ships.
Since 2006, Kõuts has become directly involved in the national defense sector. He has been appointed a member of the Scientific Committee of the Estonian Ministry of Defense, which oversees the country’s military research and development initiatives. As part of that secondment, he also became a member of the Scientific Committee of the NATO Underwater Research Center based in La Spezia, Italy and even served, from 2018 to 2020, as vice president of that organization, which it is now known as the Center for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CEMR). According to its website, CMRE “conducts relevant, state-of-the-art scientific research in ocean science, modeling and simulation, acoustics and other disciplines”.
Kõuts’ public Facebook account shows that he checked in Lerici, Italy – from La Spezia – in April 2018, the year of his recruitment by China. His role at the NATO center gave Kõuts direct access to confidential military information from Estonia and NATO. At the time of his arrest, he had a state secret permit, as well as a fourteen-year-old NATO security clearance. During the three years, Kõuts worked for the Chinese military intelligence services, limited his espionage to observations and anecdotes about his higher-level work, but did not transmit, according to Toots, any confidential military information.
“The fact that he had such security clearances was one of the reasons why we decided to end his collaboration. [with the Chinese] so early, ”Toots said. Perhaps it would have saved him from a much stricter sentence that would have followed if he had been accused of treason, which would have been if Kõuts had transmitted state or NATO secrets.
Indeed, the largest espionage violation NATO has ever had was an Estonian one, just four years after the Baltic state joined the military alliance. In 2008, KAPO arrested Herman Simm, head of the Department of Defense’s Security Department. Simm’s mission was to coordinate the protection of state secrets, issue security clearances and act as a liaison between the Estonian Ministry of Defense and NATO. He worked for Russia’s foreign intelligence service, SVR, throughout his term. Simm was sentenced to twelve and a half years in prison and, in addition, had to pay 1.3 million euros – $ 1.8 million worth of dollars today – in damages. He was released from prison at Christmas 2019.
Since that scandal, Estonia has become one of the most important Russian spy captures. “I am constantly amazed,” said Toomas Henrik Ilves, the former president of Estonia. “We must be the only country that the Kremlin seems to be interested in, because we are the only ones who catch all their agents. What makes us so special? ”
Unlike other NATO members, this Baltic country tends to call those it captures ashamed. He also rarely spies on his own captured property. A widely publicized exception to this rule was the case of Eston Kohver, a KAPO officer who was captured in 2014 by the FSB, Russia’s internal security service, on the Estonian side of the Estonian-Russian border while conducting a cross-border ban. . smuggling. Kohver was traded, Spy Bridge-style, in 2015 for Aleksei Dressen, a Russian agent whom the FSB recruited from its own ranks of KAPO years earlier.
Aleksander Toots oversaw both counterintelligence investigations that led to the arrests of Simm and Dressen. And despite his pedigree in trapping agents from neighboring Estonia and the former occupier of power, Toots now sees a growing threat from the east.
For the past three years, KAPO and Välisluureamet, Estonia’s foreign intelligence service, have sounded the alarm about the growing threat of Chinese espionage. Last year, Välisluureamet warned that Estonians who traveled to China were likely to influence operations and recruitment. “For this purpose, Chinese special services can use various methods and pretexts, such as making first contact or job offers on the Internet. At home, Chinese special services can operate almost without risk, ”Välisluureamet explained in the annual security assessment. Politicians, civil servants and scientists holding political or defense-related licenses have been named as possible recruitment targets.
KAPO added that it first detected an increase in interest in Chinese intelligence services after Estonia joined the EU and NATO in 2004, but that interest has intensified recently. The conclusion of the Chinese counter-espionage, Estonian, is particularly interested in “decisions on global issues, whether it is the Arctic, climate or trade.”
Tarmo Kõuts’ recruitment fits exactly that category, as his scientific research has focused heavily on the maritime impact of climate change, and some of his scientific work has focused directly on the Arctic region.