TALLINN, Estonia: Chinese military intelligence recruited an Estonian national to work at a NATO research institution focused on maritime and underwater research, according to The Daily Beast.
The spy, Tarmo Kõuts, recognized in the Estonian scientific community for his investigations, was sentenced last week and sentenced to three years in prison. The Baltic intelligence services had warned for years of the growing Chinese threat, but the conviction was the first of its kind. So far, Estonia’s counterintelligence service, known nationally by its acronym KAPO, has been praised for its success in capturing spies recruited and led by Russia.
According to Aleksander Toots, deputy director of KAPO and head of counterintelligence in Tallinn, Kõuts was recruited in 2018 by the China Intelligence Office of the Joint Military Commission of the Central Military Commission – as the agency is known of military intelligence of Beijing, along with an alleged accomplice who has not yet been 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 charges were a betrayal. He was sentenced to three years in prison.
Kõuts was recruited into Chinese territory, said Toots, who spoke exclusively with The Daily Beast and Estonia Delphi daily: “He was motivated by traditional human weaknesses, such as money and the need for recognition.”
Toots added that Kõuts received cash payments from its Chinese managers, as well as paid trips to various Asian countries, with luxury accommodation and dinners at Michelin-starred restaurants. The intelligence agents who handled it worked under the cover of a think tank. Inna Ombler, the prosecutor who handled the case, confirmed that Kõuts earned 17,000 euros (just over $ 20,000) for his espionage, which the Estonian government has confiscated from him since then.
Kõuts, who received his doctorate in environmental physics in 1999, had worked for years at the Maritime Institute of Tallinn Technical University where he specialized in geophysics and operational oceanography. His research allowed marine scientists to successfully predict a detrimental winter storm with a rapid rise in sea level in Estonia in 2005. Kõuts was also part of a scientific research group that received the National Science Prize for Estonia in 2002 to find the best location for a seaport on the island of Saaremaa. Although it was officially designed to accept cruises, the port needed to be able to accommodate NATO ships.
From 2006, Kõuts became directly involved in the national defense sector. He was appointed a member of the Scientific Committee of the Ministry of Defense of Estonia, which oversees the country’s military research and development initiatives. As part of this assignment, 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 to vice president of that organization, now known as the Center for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CEMR). According to its website, the CMRE “conducts relevant and modern scientific research in ocean science, modeling and simulation, acoustics and other disciplines.”
Kõuts ’public Facebook account shows that he registered in Lerici, Italy, from La Spezia, in April 2018, the year of his recruitment for China. His role at the center of NATO gave Kõuts direct access to the confidential military intelligence of Estonia and NATO. At the time of his arrest, he had a secret state permit and a NATO security permit dating back fourteen years. In all three years, Kõuts worked for Chinese military intelligence, limited his espionage to observations and anecdotes about his top-level work, but, according to Toots, did not transmit any confidential military information.
“Having these security clearances was one of the reasons why we decided to end their collaboration [with the Chinese] so soon, “Toots said. It could 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 passed on state or NATO secrets.
In fact, the biggest espionage gap NATO has ever had was Estonian, just four years after the Baltic state joined the military alliance. In 2008, KAPO arrested Herman Simm, the head of the security department of the Ministry of Defense. 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 was working for Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, throughout his term. Simm was sentenced to twelve and a half years in prison and also had to pay 1.3 million euros – $ 1.8 million in current dollars – in damages. He was released from prison in Christmas 2019.
Since this scandal, Estonia has become one of the main captors of Russian espionage. “I am constantly surprised,” said Toomas Henrik Ilves, the former president of Estonia. “We have to be the only country that seems to be interested in the Kremlin, as we are the only ones that capture all its agents. What makes us so special?”
Unlike other NATO members, this Baltic country has a tendency to name and embarrass those it captures. He also rarely exchanges spies for his own captured property. A very publicizing 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 search. cross-border ban operation. smuggling. Kohver was traded, Spy Bridge-style, in 2015 for Aleksei Dressen, a Russian agent the FSB recruited within KAPO’s own ranks years earlier.
Aleksander Toots oversaw the counterintelligence investigations that led to Simm and Dressen’s arrests. And despite his pedigree in capturing agents from neighboring Estonia and formerly occupying power, Toots now sees a growing threat from the far east.
For the past three years, KAPO and Välisluureamet, Estonia’s foreign intelligence service, have sounded the alarm over the rising threat of Chinese espionage. Last year Välisluureamet warned that Estonians traveling to China were likely to influence operations and recruitment. “For this, Chinese special services can use various methods and pretexts, such as making first contact or job offers via the Internet. At home, Chinese special services can operate almost without risk,” explained Välisluureamet in the its annual environmental safety assessment.Politicians, civil servants, and scientists with political or defense-related authorizations were 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 recently that interest had intensified. Chinese counterintelligence, he concluded, is especially interested in “decisions on global issues, whether in the Arctic, climate or trade.”
Tarmo Kõuts ’recruitment fits exactly into this category, as his scientific research focused heavily on the maritime impact of climate change and some of his academic work focused on the Arctic region.