Expert: Authorities had to be sure before acting in Oleg Bessedin case
Authorities had to be absolutely certain before acting to detain Oleg Bessedin, suspected of being a Russian agent, as weak evidence followed by acquittal would be much more damaging, security expert Erkki Koort said.
While Bessedin was detained on Tuesday, his known activities date as far back as 2002. This long timeline underscores the importance of careful, deliberate investigation.
Speaking to "Terevisioon," Koort said it is very difficult for security agencies to arrest people with minimal evidence.
"If the evidence against Bessedin had been weak and he had been acquitted in court, the damage would have been much greater. So the Internal Security Service and the State Prosecutor's Office took a very solid approach," Koort said.
In addition to this approach, Koort noted that the authorities were already aware of Bessedin's views during the Bronze Night riots of 2007. Furthermore, in 2010, he was first mentioned in the Internal Security Service's (ISS) yearbook. From then on, he became a regular feature in the yearbook's pages.
"Whenever a spy is caught, people come forward saying this was all known about long ago, and that he was actually doing it. In fact, the ISS and the State Prosecutor's Office have now revealed that the actions which Bessedin is currently detained for relate to the years starting from 2002."
There are two important points here. First, based on public information, we currently do not know when he began cooperating [with Russian secret services]. The fact that a person shares the Kremlin's views does not always mean they are cooperating with the Kremlin's intelligence services," Koort noted.
The second point, he explained, was the challenge of documenting such matters, as it is simply time-consuming.
"Having worked at the ISS myself, I know you can spend three years working on a case only in the third year to find that this is either unprovable or a dead end. A lot of this type of seemingly pointless, from a Ministry of Finance perspective, work, is done because at the start of a process where you don't actually know whether you'll be able to prove if the person has started cooperating, or just holds certain views."
As for the case against Bessedin specifically, the ISS and the prosecutor's office have said that, by the time he was detained, they had established the fact of his cooperation, meaning he was even being given instructions on what to do and how to do it.
For Bessedin, this meant posing as a journalist.
"This is a person who used journalistic cover, and I won't say whether he was ever a real journalist. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has already accused Estonia of harassing independent journalists. However, in reality, Russia skillfully exploits categories like journalist or volunteer legal defender, or [KOOS party leader] Aivo Peterson, who has called himself a politician," Koort noted.
The ISS on Tuesday detained Bessedin on suspicion of activities counter to the Republic of Estonia and of violating international sanctions. By the order of the Harju County Court, he was on Wednesday remanded into custody for two months.
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Editor: Andrew Whyte, Urmet Kook
