TALLINN, Estonia – China’s military intelligence has recruited an Estonian national who works at a NATO research institute dedicated to naval and submarine research, The Daily Beast has learned.
The spy, Tarmo Kõuts, known in the Estonian scientific community for his research, was sentenced to three years in prison last week. The Baltic country’s intelligence services had warned for years about the growing Chinese threat, but the conviction was the first of its kind. So far, Estonia’s counterintelligence service, known domestically by its acronym KAPO, has been praised for its success in capturing spies recruited and led by Russia.
According to Aleksander Toots, the deputy director of KAPO and Tallinn’s best counterintelligence agency, Kõuts was recruited in 2018 by the Chinese Intelligence Bureau of the Joint Staff Division of the Central Military Commission – as Beijing Military Intelligence is known – along with an alleged accomplice. it has 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 conducting intelligence activities against the Republic of Estonia on behalf of a foreign state. The charges were a long way from treason. He was sentenced to three years in prison.
Kõuts was recruited into Chinese territory, said Toots, who spoke exclusively to The Daily Beast and Estonia’s Delphi newspaper: “He was motivated by traditional human weaknesses, such as money and the need for recognition.”
Toots added that Kõuts received cash payments from his Chinese handlers and paid for travel to several Asian countries, with luxury accommodation and dinners at Michelin star restaurants. The intelligence services that served him operated under the cover of a think tank. Inna Ombler, the prosecutor handling the case, confirmed that Kõuts made € 17,000 – just over $ 20,000 – for his espionage, which the Estonian government has since confiscated from him.
Kõuts, who obtained his PhD in environmental physics in 1999, worked for many years at the Maritime Institute of Tallinn University of Technology, specializing in geophysics and operational oceanography. His research led marine scientists to successfully predict a damaging winter storm with a rapidly rising sea level in Estonia in 2005. Kõuts was also part of a scientific research group that received the Estonian National Science Prize in 2002 for finding the best location for a seaport on the island of Saaremaa. Although officially designed to accept cruise ships, the port had to be able to receive NATO ships.
From 2006, Kõuts became directly involved in the national defense sector. He was appointed to 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 Submarine Research Center in La Spezia, Italy, and even served as Vice President of that organization, now known as the Center, from 2018 to 2020. for maritime research and experiments (CMRE). According to its website, the CMRE conducts “relevant, state-of-the-art scientific research in ocean science, modeling and simulation, acoustics and other disciplines.”
Kõuts’s public Facebook account shows that he checked in to Lerici, Italy – from La Spezia in April 2018, the year of his recruitment from China. His role in the NATO center gave Kõuts direct access to the confidential military intelligence of Estonia and NATO. At the time of his arrest, he had a state secret permit and a 14-year NATO security clearance. In the three years that Kõuts worked for Chinese military intelligence, he limited his espionage to observations and anecdotes about his top work, but he did not yet pass on confidential military information, according to Toots.
“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, ”said Toots. It might have saved him from a much more severe punishment that would have followed had he been charged with treason, which he would have been had Kõuts passed on state or NATO secrets.
Indeed, the largest espionage breach NATO has ever had was an Estonian, just four years after the Baltic state joined the military alliance. In 2008, KAPO arrested Herman Simm, the head of the Department of Defense Security Department. Simm’s job 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 had worked for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, throughout his tenure. Simm was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison and also paid € 1.3 million – $ 1.8 million in today’s dollar value – in damages. He was released from prison on Christmas 2019.
Since that scandal, Estonia has become one of the main Russian spy catchers. “I am constantly amazed,” said Toomas Henrik Ilves, the former president of Estonia. “We must be the only country the Kremlin seems interested in, as we are the only ones to capture all of their agents. What makes us so special? “
Unlike other NATO members, this Baltic country tends to name and shame those it captures. It also rarely trades spies for its own captured assets. A much publicized exception to this rule was the case of Eston Kohver, a KAPO officer who was arrested in 2014 by the FSB, Russia’s Internal Security Service, on the Estonian side of the Estonian-Russian border while conducting an operation to combat cross-border smuggling. . Kohver was traded, Bridge of Spies-style, in 2015 for Aleksei Dressen, a Russian agent who recruited the FSB from KAPO’s own ranks years earlier.
Aleksander Toots oversaw both counterintelligence investigations that led to the arrests of Simm and Dressen. And despite his pedigree of trapping agents from Estonia’s neighbor and the former occupying forces, Toots now sees a growing threat from further east.
Over the past three years, KAPO and Välisluureamet, Estonia’s foreign intelligence agency, have raised the alarm about the growing threat of Chinese espionage. Last year, Välisluureamet warned that Estonians traveling to China were susceptible to impacting operations and recruitment. “To this end, Chinese special services can use various methods and pretenses, such as making the first contact or offering job vacancies via the Internet. At home, Chinese special services can operate with virtually no risk, ”explained Välisluureamet in their annual security environment review. Politicians, civil servants, and scientists who hold political or defense-related powers have been cited as potential recruiting targets.
KAPO added that it first discovered an increase in interest from Chinese intelligence services after Estonia joined the EU and NATO in 2004, but recently that interest had increased. The Chinese, the Estonian counterintelligence concluded, are particularly interested in “decisions about global issues, be it the Arctic, climate, or trade.”
Tarmo Kõuts’s recruitment fits right into that category as his scientific research focused heavily on the maritime impact of climate change and some of his scientific papers focused entirely on the Arctic.