Ex Russian Spy Flees To Nato Country That Captured Him Dealing Another Embarrassing Blow To Moscow

TALLINN, Estonia — “The Russians have no idea,” Alexander Toets, the head of Estonian counterintelligence, tells me with a laugh. “They have absolutely no idea they are here. You can be the one to tell them.” Toots was referring to the defection of a Russian spy in Estonia. But Artem Zinchenko is not just any spy. He was the first Russian military intelligence agent arrested by Estonia, in 2017, and then exchanged to Moscow a year later for an Estonian citizen in Russian custody. Zinchenko has now sought asylum from the very NATO country that exposed him and jailed him for spying against it. Zinchenko’s defection has not been publicly disclosed by either side until now, which should be considered a humiliating blow not only to the Kremlin but also to his one-time masters in the GRU, as the former Soviet military intelligence service is still known. In early October, the Estonian government granted Yahoo News unprecedented access to Zinchenko. Over the course of four hours he offered his autobiography, thoughtful and unrepentant, detailing his supporting role in the mostly invisible shadow game between Russian espionage and Western efforts to thwart it. Estonia, once occupied by the Soviets, is now at the forefront of countering Russia’s intelligence gathering and provocations on NATO soil. As Zinchenko said, his decision to defect was motivated both by the Kremlin’s brutality at home and abroad and by what he saw as Estonia’s humanity towards him, an enemy agent. His cautionary tale is also an indictment of the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer whose spy apparatus has been weakened amid the war in Ukraine, according to British intelligence. Once a highly secretive and effective spy agency, the GRU has in the past decade come under intense international scrutiny due to a series of compromised or failed operations. Chief among these are the hacking and leaking of Democratic Party emails before the 2016 US presidential election and the failed 2018 assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal, another defector from its ranks, in Salisbury, England. The GRU now reportedly has a firmer grasp of Russia’s faltering but gruesome campaign in Ukraine, where Zinchenko has relatives fighting on the front lines on behalf of Kiev against the masters he once served. The story continues The war, in fact, is why this GRU spy left Russia. I’m sitting at a long wooden table in the heavily fortified headquarters of the Kaitsepolitseiamet (KaPo), as Estonia’s FBI is known. It is October 3rd and I have just arrived from New York in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, at the request of Toots, who did not disclose in advance the reason for my visit due to security concerns, claiming only that it would be worth the my trouble “We’ve never had a case like this before,” says Toots, updating me on Zinchenko. “I don’t think anyone has.” The headquarters of the Defense Police Service (KaPo) in Tallinn, Estonia. (Kapo) He’s right about that. No one has ever had such a case, at least as far as is publicly known. The history of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras is full of elaborate, almost improbable tales of defectors and double agents, sometimes even triple agents, spies who worked for one or more governments at the same time for love or money or the simple thrill of it all. leading a secret life. There are those who have access to state secrets, some immeasurably valuable, who betrayed their country for ideological reasons or, as they often rationalize betrayal to themselves, purely pragmatic. And now there’s a historic first: the enemy spy who returned to the people who caught him and set him free. “Many Russian service officers are anti-war,” says Toots. “They consider it a crime against Russia and the Russian people. We would be more than happy to engage with anyone else looking for a new place to live.” When did Zinchenko decline? “Very recently.” The exact date is withheld from me. Toots prefers not to say whether KaPo facilitated Zinchenko and his family’s flight to Estonia, but invites me to ask him when he arrives, which will be anytime. My next two questions are more challenging. Did KaPo recruit Zinchenko while he was in custody in Estonia and play him back to Moscow under the guise of a spy swap in order to allow him to gather information about Tallinn from Russia? Toots won’t answer that either. But in some ways it is a moot point. It is clear that he turned Zinchenko philosophical in some way about the year he was suspected and then his prisoner. There is little other explanation for how the Russian felt comfortable approaching Toots, the man who captured him, to ask if Toots could now become his protector. Artem Zinchenko is in custody in Estonia. (Bonnet) Finally, how can we be sure that Zinchenko has not been sent here again by the GRU, perhaps in a psychological operation designed to cloud Western perceptions of Putin’s weakness or internal dissent in Russia? At this question, Toots laughs again and shrugs as if to say, “Anything is possible in this job.” However, I am left with the strong impression that he is sure of Zinchenko’s good faith. Talking to Toots is kind of like that — playful and frustrating. At 52, he could easily be billed as Estonia’s George Smiley, the veteran British spy and spy for novelist John le Carré, whose professional highlight is blackmailing his Soviet nemesis, ‘Karla’, into defecting. In his 15 years on the job, Toots’ quarries tend to be agents of Moscow. Zinchenko was the 10th to exhibit in nine years. Five GRU spies have since been arrested. Will there be more? there will always be more. Like Smiley, Toots trapped a Russian spy who was a colleague and friend, a KaPo employee who was secretly working for the Russians. Alexei Dressen was arrested as he and his wife, Victoria, were about to board a plane from Tallinn Airport to Moscow with a thumbs-up full of classified information. Unlike Smiley, a peaceful relic of Homburg and 1970s England standards, Toots could easily be mistaken for a suburban high school teacher. There is an onomatopoeic quality to his surname, pronounced touts. He has a close haircut, an athletic build (he runs many miles a day) and I’ve never seen him in anything but a polo shirt. He is callous and unaffected, almost to a fault, as if to act otherwise in the role would be a dereliction of duty and an affront to the courtesy he extends to all members of his morally dubious profession, whichever side they may be on. Toots speaks fluent Russian and is given to quoting proverbs and popular expressions in the language. One of the favorites: “Chaos is characteristic of Russian culture. There always needs to be a shepherd. otherwise it’s anarchy.” Now he is the shepherd of Zinchenko. Toots shows me the February 2018 video of the handover at the Piusa River Bridge at the Koidula border crossing in southern Estonia, across from the Russian city of Pskov. Zinchenko is being exchanged with Raivo Susi, an Estonian businessman convicted of espionage in Russia. The scene lacks the Hollywood drama one expects from these circumstances: the dark no-man’s land where two returnees from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain walk past each other at Checkpoint Charlie. Estonian Raivo Susi, second from left, and Russian Artem Zinchenko, second from right, in a prisoner exchange at a border crossing in Estonia on February 10, 2018. (KaPo via AP) In the video, Toots meets his Russian counterpart, a middle-aged officer of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB, at the ski pass. They shake hands and exchange wishes before mutual orders are given to their men. Susi is pulled out of a Volkswagen minivan by FSB guards in balaclavas. Toots personally accompanies Zinchenko, wearing a parka and carrying only a small blue briefcase, in the custody of the Russian government. There are homecoming hugs and polite goodbyes. Now the former Russian spy is back in Estonia, standing in front of me. Zinchenko is very thin, wearing a turtleneck and probably in the same parka he wore when he passed through Pskov, with short, wispy hair combed forward over his forehead. It could go for a lab technician on his lunch break, or a computer programmer up all night coding, confined to some halogen-bathed basement in Eastern Europe. He appears older than his 35 years, although his manner is that of a younger man, tentative and halting. He is visibly nervous as he and Toots have a friendly conversation in Russian. I shake hands with Zinchenko. He apologizes for his English, which is better than he lets on, even if sometimes I speak too fast for his ear and have to repeat myself. The first thing he volunteers is why he is here. “The awful situation that took place on February 24,” he says, referring to the start of Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine. “It’s the worst case scenario that I could even imagine in my head, and it wasn’t just because my relatives live there, but also because of the sheer number of innocent victims.” Zinchenko and Yahoo News reporter Michael Weiss in Tallinn. (Harrys Puusepp for Yahoo News) Like many Russians, Zinchenko has extended family members living in Ukraine fighting the Russian invasion. Was he worried that he would be called up, per Putin’s recent mobilization order, and thus have to fight against one of them on the front lines? No. He decided to leave Russia long before that decree of September 21. Since I had been invited to Tallinn weeks before this, but Zinchenko defected “very recently”, I would put the event sometime in the mid to late summer. How did he get away? His moves don’t…