Communists Still At the Heart of EU/NATO Affairs
20 March 2009
The Cold War may have ended nearly 20 years ago, but we are still a long way from being cleansed of former Soviet-trained communist collaborators working in the West.
At least two current European Commissioners were educated in the Soviet Union – Siim Kallas of Estonia and Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania. Despite coming new to the EU, and from two of its tiniest and newest members, between them they have controlled the EU budget and the (pathetic) fight against corruption for the last five years.
Several other Commissioners were once communists and remain sympathisers to the hard left agenda. Until he was replaced recently, Peter Mandelson was one of them.
Cleansing former traitors and collaborators remains a top priority for the eastern end of the EU and, by implication, for all other members as well.
This continuing threat has been highlighted by recent events in Estonia.
Last week an Estonian official who passed Nato and other defence and diplomatic secrets to Russia was jailed for more than 12 years, ending what investigators called “the biggest ever spy scandal in Nato history”. For many years he worked in the Estonian Ministry of Defence and, amongst other things, was in charge of issuing security clearances. He almost certainly nodded through other Russian agents.
Since the Berlin Wall came down he continued to hold high off in the Estonian civil service, under successive governments. His access to secrets and policy at the highest levels continued up to his arrest in September 2008. It is inevitable that much information about policy developments and decisions being made in Brussels found their way straight to Moscow.
Herman Simm, now 61, studied in the Leningrad police academy before joining the Estonian Ministry of Defence. He handed over more than 2000 pages of information to his handlers in Russia’s SVR Foreign Intelligence Service, according to documents linked to the investigation. He was responsible for handling all of his country's classified information at Nato, giving him access to every top-secret graded document from other NATO alliance countries.
A German official described the Russian penetration of Nato via Mr Simm as a ‘catastrophe’. He was not a relic from the days of Kim Philby. He was at the cutting edge of one of Nato’s most important new strategic missions: to defend the alliance against cyber-attack. He even headed government delegations in bilateral talks on protecting secret data flow. And he was an important player in devising EU and Nato information protection systems.
Estonia has been described as “Nato's most IT-savvy nation”. That is undoubtedly why Estonia in particular has been lobbying hard to put cyber-defence on the Nato agenda, and had set up a Cyber Defence centre in Tallinn which was supposed to help the Alliance as a whole. That project has now been compromised.
Worse, no-one now knows how and where to start again to rebuild Nato’s electronic defences against cyber-attack. They have to start again on the assumption the Russians, and others, know everything that was planned up to September 2008, and maybe are still being fed current information.
To respond to, or comment on this Email, please email ashley.mote@btconnect.com
Friday 20 March 2009
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