Who would have thought that President-elect Barack Obama would be confronted with a major problem in NATO even before taking office ? With a membership of 26 European and North American countries, the original treaty was signed nearly 60 years ago by 12 countries that emerged victorious from World War II.
Apart from the United States, members were, less than more, anti-Marxist. Since then, NATO has expanded to 26 members, including Germany, Spain and much of the former Soviet Union.
After the fall of communism, many states formerly controlled by Moscow sought to join NATO and it became more of an economic, social, police and military training organization than a defensive martial alliance.
President George W. Bush has given the alliance a new lease on life -- troops went to Afghanistan and Darfur, a U.S. missile shield was planned against rogue nuclear weapons (possibly from Iran), and drug-, weapon- and people-smuggling were high on the list of issues to be tackled.
Much of what NATO does is secret ; it must be since it holds all of the military strategy and tactics of the Pentagon and our 25 allies. But this belief fell apart this month when Estonia, the tiny country on the Baltic Sea with just more than a million people, announced that two top government officials, a husband and wife team, had betrayed NATO's most intimate secrets to Russia.
And this major espionage scandal is top secret in Europe.
If NATO were considered successful under President Bush, the other shoe has since dropped and its darkest side is now visible in Estonia. Within NATO, when it comes to accessing secrets, small countries are treated exactly the same as the great powers.
The result : Russia, which always rejected NATO, has found that a detour through Estonia was the perfect way to stab into the heart of NATO.
With the help of a top-ranking husband and wife team of idealists, Herman and Heete Simm, Russia was a winner. And it is possible that every other enemy of the United States obtained all the active military information it needed.
Herman Simm, 61, was Estonia's equivalent to another nation's head of countersecurity and its liaison with NATO counter-and-ongoing positive intelligence. His wife, Heete, is a lawyer and was the top-ranking female police officer in the country until they both were arrested.
The Simm operation may have begun during the past five years or already may have been well established in the early 1990s, during Russia's Boris Yeltsin regime. The relationship developed as if the Cold War had never been lost by Moscow. According to investigators, Herman Simm used an altered radio, which looked like a relic of yesteryear, to exchange intelligence with his Russian contact.
The graying and debonair Simm used this antique for years to transfer up-to-date information to Moscow. The data sent were believed to include details of the controversial missile-defense shield on Russia's borders, European planning on the defense of Kosovo, Russia's war with Georgia, weapons shipments and troop movements to Afghanistan, NATO ship movements in the Baltic Sea and plans to counter cyber-warfare. A top government official described the leaks as a "catastrophe."
Prior to his arrest, Herman Simm held various high, well-paid positions at the Interior and Defense ministries and on the Police Board, including as its director-general, a post comparable to the office of national chief of police. As head of the Security Department, Simm was tasked with coordinating the protection of state and NATO secrets.
At the time of his arrest, the public prosecutor sequestered all Simm family assets, as well as seven properties, including farmland, a beautifully renovated farmhouse, an apartment in the capital and a villa by the sea.
Between 2001 and 2006, Simm regularly traveled abroad to negotiate agreements on the protection of classified information with NATO and EU member countries. Simm, who traveled on a diplomatic laissez-passer, also participated in the development of intelligence security with NATO and the European Union, where he invited other states to check their security systems with him.
In November 2006, Herman Simm resigned as head of the state secret protection department but continued to work as adviser to the minister of Defense, retaining access to classified information.
There is speculation that Heete Simm may have been his "controller." For now, several teams of investigators from the EU and NATO have flown to Tallinn to evaluate the scope of this intelligence fiasco.
Currently, Herman Simm is talking to Estonian and NATO security officials but refuses to make any comment to the media or the courts as to his actions.
For NATO, it is now important above all "to decipher the handwriting of the Russians," as is said in Brussels, or "how far to walk back the cat," as other counterintelligence officers might say.
Regardless, the case will lead to far-reaching consequences for our newly elected president. Can we trust and, even more important, can we afford the NATO alliance?
In 2009, do we need NATO ? After all, as one top intelligence official in Washington said, "It must be assumed that the Russian intelligence service still has a few more Simms in the alliance."
Dateline D.C. is written by a Washington-based British journalist and political observer.
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