TALLINN, Estonia – Chinese military intelligence recruited an Estonian citizen who worked at a NATO research institution focused on maritime and submarine research, the Daily Beast found.
Spy Tarmo Kõuts, known in the Estonian scientific community for his research, was sentenced last week and sentenced to three years in prison. The Baltic country’s intelligence services have warned for years about the growing Chinese threat, but the conviction was the first of its kind. So far, Estonia’s counterintelligence service, known internally by the acronym KAPO, has been praised for its success in catching spies recruited and directed by Russia.
According to Aleksander Toots, KAPO’s deputy director and senior Tallinn counterintelligence officer, Kosuts was recruited in 2018 by the China Intelligence Bureau of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Central Military Commission – as the agency is known. Beijing military intelligence agency – 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.
Kouts pleaded guilty to carrying out intelligence activities against the Republic of Estonia on behalf of a foreign state. The charges were of treason. He was sentenced to three years in prison.
Kouts was recruited in Chinese territory, said Toots, who spoke exclusively to The Daily Beast and Estonia’s Delfi 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, as well as paid trips to various Asian countries, with luxurious accommodations and dinners in Michelin-starred restaurants. The intelligence agents who dealt with him were operating under the cover of a think tank. Inna Ombler, the prosecutor in charge of the case, confirmed that Kosuts won € 17,000 – just over $ 20,000 – for his espionage, which the Estonian government has since confiscated from him.
Kouts, who obtained 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 led marine scientists to successfully predict a damaging winter storm with the rapid rise in sea level in Estonia in 2005. Kõuts was also part of a scientific research group that received the Estonian National Science Award in 2002 for find the best location for a sea port on the island of Saaremaa. Although officially designed to receive cruise ships, the port needed to be able to receive NATO ships.
As of 2006, Kõuts started to act directly 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 detachment, 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 is now known as the Center for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE). According to its website, CMRE “conducts relevant and cutting edge scientific research in ocean science, modeling and simulation, acoustics and other disciplines”.
The public account of Kuts on Facebook shows that he checked in to Lerici, Italy – from La Spezia – in April 2018, the year of his recruitment by China. His role at the center of NATO gave Köuts direct access to Estonia and NATO’s confidential military intelligence. At the time of his arrest, he had a secret state license, as well as a fourteen-year-old NATO security clearance. In the three years that Kõuts has worked for Chinese military intelligence, he has limited his espionage to observations and anecdotes about his high-level work, but has yet to transmit, according to Toots, any classified military information.
“The fact that he has such security clearances was one of the reasons why we decided to stop his collaboration [with the Chinese] so soon, ”said Toots. This could have saved him from a much stricter sentence that would have occurred if he had been accused of treason, which would have been if Kosuts had passed on state or NATO secrets.
In fact, NATO’s biggest espionage violation has ever been in Estonia, just four years after the Baltic State joined the military alliance. In 2008, KAPO arrested Herman Simm, head of the Security Department at 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 worked for Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, for his entire term. Simm was sentenced to twelve and a half years in prison and, in addition, he had to pay € 1.3 million – $ 1.8 million in the current dollar amount – for damages. He was released from prison on Christmas 2019.
Since that scandal, Estonia has become one of the top Russian spy hunters. “I am always surprised,” said Toomas Henrik Ilves, former president of Estonia. “We must be the only country in which the Kremlin seems to be interested, since we are the only ones to arrest all of its agents. What makes us so special? “
Unlike other NATO members, this Baltic country tends to name and shame those it captures. It also rarely exchanges spies for its own captured assets. 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 an operation to ban the smuggling border. Kohver was negotiated, Bridge of Spies-style, in 2015 for Aleksei Dressen, a Russian agent that the FSB recruited from within KAPO’s own ranks years earlier.
Aleksander Toots oversaw both counterintelligence investigations that led to the arrest of Simm and Dressen. And despite his pedigree in arresting agents from Estonia’s neighbor and former occupying power, Toots now sees a growing threat coming from the east.
Over the past three years, KAPO and Välisluureamet, Estonia’s foreign intelligence service, have warned of the growing threat of Chinese espionage. Last year, Välisluureamet warned that Estonians traveling to China were susceptible to influencing operations and recruitment. “To this end, Chinese special services can use various methods and pretexts, such as establishing the first contact or job offers over the internet. At home, Chinese special services can operate almost without risk, ”explained Välisluureamet in his annual assessment of the security environment. Politicians, civil servants and scientists with political or defense-related qualifications were identified as possible recruitment targets.
KAPO added that it first detected an increase in interest from Chinese intelligence services after Estonia joined the EU and NATO in 2004, but recently that interest has intensified. The Chinese, Estonian counterintelligence concluded, are particularly interested in “decisions on global issues, be it Arctic, climate or trade”.
Tarmo Kõuts’ recruitment fits exactly into this category, as his scientific research has focused heavily on the maritime impact of climate change and some of his academic work has focused directly on the Arctic region.