The Estonian Spymasters

“We caught four moles in the last five years,” Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves told me after a recent security conference in Tallinn. “That means one of two things. Either we’re the only country in the EU with a mole problem, or we’re the only country in the EU doing anything about it.”

The note of self-congratulation was nothing new for the famously garrulous Ilves, but it also happened to be entirely warranted. His small Baltic state, long one of the Kremlin’s main targets, was having an “I told you so” moment. For the past decade, Russian warplanes have routinely violated its airspace, Russian military forces have used counterterrorism exercises as a pretext for mock-invading its soil, and a notorious series of cyberattacks in 2007 that almost certainly originated from Kremlin-backed hackers degraded its digital infrastructure. 

In turn, Estonia has proved itself more prepared to stand up to