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chief in Harju County, the area around the capital, Tallinn. That was one of the hottest beats in Estonian policing: as well as dealing with endemic organised crime, toxic waste spills and smuggling, his patch included a Soviet nuclear submarine training base at Paldiski, which was still out of the control of the Estonian authorities and had become a magnet for organised crime. Simm supervised the withdrawal of Soviet nuclear fuel elements and the handover to the constitutional authorities. Two months later, he became the top police officer for the whole country, where he showed a courtier-like ability to ingratiate himself with the powerful and the up-and-coming. In interviews with dozens of former associates, the adjective that comes up repeatedly is ‘helpful’. One not particularly close colleague was startled when Simm, having learned of his upcoming wedding, offered the services of a patrol car and two police officers to direct the traffic and organise parking.
    In 1995 , Simm moved to the Defence Ministry, initially to a low-key job as head of the analysis bureau, where he stood out as an efficient bureaucrat. The then Defence Minister, Andrus Öövel, said proudly that hiring a former police chief for the young ministry was like ‘winning the lottery’. 2 Few worried when Simm then added to his portfolio the handling of classified documents. It was an unpopular job: Estonia was plagued by scandals involving missing, supposedly secret, papers. Too many items were classified and the rules for safeguarding them were onerous and badly drafted. Simm’s bureaucratic habits, honed in the Soviet era, helped him sort out the chaotic paper flows inside a still half-baked bureaucracy. Estonia’s foreign friends, keen to see order prevail over chaos, quickly talent-spotted the new official as someone worth cultivating. Britain’s government (noting that his orientation was more towards Germany and Finland than to the Anglophone world) paid for him first to learn English at an intensive course at the Foreign Office language school and then to study security policy and practice at Chicksands in Bedfordshire, the citadel of Britain’s Defence Intelligence Service. 3 On his return, he was a natural choice to oversee the ministry’s move to NATO’s security standards. His efforts received high marks: drills and tests showed Estonia’s ability to handle secrets to be first class – and indeed better than in some old members of NATO.
    Once Estonia joined NATO in 2004 , Simm, by now the ministry’s top security official, became a still more regular visitor to its Brussels headquarters. Although slightly handicapped by his stilted English – notably better suited to meetings than social events – his affable manner marked him out as one of the more welcome newcomers. Officials there remember an assiduous networker who used slightly heavy-handed flirtatiousness to good effect when dealing with female colleagues. He was prone to self-importance, seemed to feel that he was under-appreciated in Estonia, and liked to display a vocal anti-Russian streak. At home he oversaw security clearances, promotions and transfers for the country’s most important defence and security posts. He recommended people for courses in other NATO countries, and signed off on their requests to take part.
    In Brussels, NATO saw nothing unusual. Simm met every criterion for the alliance’s top-secret clearance. A similar clearance at home was issued and checked regularly by Estonia’s Kapo (Security Police). 4 But Simm’s record would have repaid closer scrutiny. Why, for example, had Sweden denied him a visa in the mid 1970 s? His background, the result of a brief post-war liaison between a middle-aged lawyer and a young woman, then brought up by aunts, and having multiple marriages and partnerships in adult life, could have suggested personality flaws of the kind a canny intelligence