Laas Leivat
The first ESTO (at the time known as Estonian World Festival) was held in Toronto in 1972. Some 20,000 Estonians joined in a call for Estonia’s freedom in City Hall Square. Reports from Soviet occupied Estonia dismissed it as a typical “fascist-organized” event.
A few months later, as members of the executive at a closed meeting of the Toronto Estonian Veteran’s Association were perusing a freshly published book of the ESTO, someone remarked derisively that the book was nothing more than a “family album”. That comment, word for word, was read two weeks later by Toronto readers of Kodumaa (Homeland) that attributed it to a “secret, conspiratorial meeting of Nazi collaborators”. Kodumaa was a KGB-affiliated monthly tabloid sent free to Estonians in the West.
Who was it that had ties to Soviet officials to inform them of the remark? Someone attending the private meeting? Someone else who heard about the comment?
KAPO’s (Estonian Security Police) annual report this spring published accounts of some Estonians, who were tasked by the KGB to penetrate the ex-patriot community. The most dramatic case described the activities of agent “Skvortsov”, the code name of one Juhan Tuldava (a.k.a. Arthur Juhan Haman Janis Jugans, Arturo, Harry Quecke) who was sent to Sweden in 1955 to join nationalistic groups as a freedom-fighting defector from the USSR.
The son of a pre-war Estonian diplomat, Haman (1922-2003) was exiled with his mother and sister by the occupying Soviets in 1941 to the Kirov oblast, where he graduated from the pedagogical institute with honours. In Kirov he was recruited by the security services to infiltrate nationalistic groups in Estonia. He was returned to Tallinn in 1949, working as a Russian language teacher and developed friendships with former foreign ministry workers and the local intelligentsia. As an informant in Soviet-occupied Estonia among people with nationalistic tendencies he was commended by the KGB as a cautiously vigilant, fully qualified, highly committed agent who was totally capable of gaining the trust of targeted individuals.
Haman also worked for the KGB in Riga, sending letters via sailors of Western ships to Western intelligence agencies with the aim of being contacted and recruited. Spy services very seldom react to offers from “walk-ins” and Haman’s attempts to make himself available went unanswered.
After special KGB training, he was secretly smuggled into Sweden via Finland in 1955. After successfully passing the vetting of Swedish police, he was hired as a correspondent for the Associate Press news agency. On the side he graduated from Stockholm University, gained his doctorate, was lauded for his scholarly research and invited to give lectures. (Pikemalt Eesti Elu 6. juuli 2018 paberlehes)
