Thread by @michaeldweiss

🧵Will add my own thoughts to the Morozov affair. I've interviewed two Russian agents unmasked and captured by KaPo. In both cases, I spoke at length to Estonia's counterintelligence chief, Alexander Toots, about his methods.

https://twitter.com/IlvesToomas/status/1747947264578854987

First, anyone who suggests KaPo arrests someone on a lark without sufficient evidence or out of some sense of chauvinistic malevolence toward Russians is laughably misinformed about how this service conducts itself.

KaPo almost always manages to obtain guilty pleas and/or convictions from the agents it arrests for a very good reason: they're guilty.

Second, there is a fundamental misapprehension on this platform (quelle surprise!) as to how espionage works. Not all spies volunteer themselves. Some are compromised and coerced into spying, with money used less as a douceur and more as a cudgel to keep them going.

Estonia has a perfect case precedent, in fact: Denis Metsavas, an ethnic Russian born and raised in Tallinn. He joined the Estonian Army and wanted to faithfully serve his country as a patriot. However, he traveled to Russia often (like Morozov) and was honeytrapped by the GRU.

Worse than honeytrapped: they threatened to try Metsavas for rape if he didn't agree to spy his native country on behalf of his ancestral Motherland.

So Metsavas went along. The GRU ran him for ten years, tasked him with stealing NATO intelligence when he was promoted to Estonia's Defense HQ, paid him (not very much), and then even recruited his Russian father as a courier to keep him on the hook.

Here is Metsavas's story, which I found heartbreaking to report. Toots and KaPo did, too. In case you're wondering, they let me have access to him because they felt sorry for him and believed he was a tragic figure who wanted to atone publicly: theatlantic.com/international/…

Now here is the case of Artem Zinchenko, an ordinary Russian student from St. Petersburg who thought working for the GRU (or any Russian intelligence service) would be cool and satisfy his familial pedigree. (Zinchenko's grandfather was in SMERSH.) news.yahoo.com/exclusive-ex-r…

Zinchenko, a businessman, did penny-ante stuff for the GRU; mostly surveilled Estonian military installations and brought back publicly available literature on Estonia's economy, etc.

He was caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced, then traded back to Russia in 2018 in a swap. What happened next?

Russia (re-)invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Out of disgust at the "totalitarian" nature of his homeland, Zinchenko defected. Where did he go? Only back to Estonia, escaping St. Petersburg with the help of.... Alexander Toots, the very man who had exposed his espionage.

I interviewed Zinchenko in KaPo headquarters in 2022.

To my knowledge, this is the first example in history of a Russian spy snared and adjudicated in a Western country who, after being repatriated, seeks protection from the very spycatcher who ended his career. Which rather speaks well of Toots' professionalism, doesn't it?

Indeed, a constant refrain from agents in KaPo's custody is that they are treated with far more humanity and empathy in Estonia than they would ever be treated in Russia under similar circumstances. They confide in Toots because he earns their trust and respect.

And he is good at what he does because he sees them not as cogs in a machine but as human beings -- shortsighted, manipulated, venal, frail, but also worthy of dignity.

In short, it is doesn't mean much that Morozov is, by most accounts, a very nice man who hobnobbed with academics and analysts and seasoned Russia watchers for years. Or that he opposed Putin and certainly didn't seem like someone who'd ever go to work for Putin's spy agencies.

Your friend couldn't be a spy? Sure he could. Mark Zborowski fooled Trotsky and his son, Lev Sedov (who paid for that deception with his life). The shades of Alexander Kutepov or Sidney Reilly might tell you all about their overzealous anti-Bolshevik chums...

Or you could ask Alexander Toots himself, whose own colleague and onetime boss at KaPo, Aleksei Dressen, turned out to be... a Russian spy. ekspress.delfi.ee/artikkel/12008…

The agent blackmailed into service has even more incentive to behave as an opponent to the regime he works for than does the willing or enthusiastic agent. Officers of the GRU, SVR and FSB are well-trained to get people to do things they would never dream of doing.

This applies even more so if their targets for recruitment are Russians with family still living in Russia or deep personal attachments to the country.

We possess ample literature on how Russians in the diaspora are hounded or exploited by the Russian state, treated (broadly speaking) as either enemies to be dealt with or accomplices to be seconded. See @AndreiSoldatov and @irinaborogan's superb book "The Compatriots."

See, too, the GRU curricular module I obtained -- taught by faculty at the Military University in Moscow within the last decade -- on how compatriot/diasporic organizations can be used to advance state interests and prosecute RIS influence operations: newlinesmag.com/reportage/insi…

Morozov will have his day in court and a fair verdict will be rendered. But I do urge people who are asserting, with no evidence, that this allegation simply can't be true and he must be the victim of some sinister Baltic conspiracy rooted in "Russophobia" to take more care.

Estonian counterintelligence doesn't work the way they imagine it does. Neither does Russian espionage. /END