The accused sent a letter with “highly confidential information” about the embassy and its staff to the Russian military attaché in Berlin, Sergei Chukhrov.

A former guard at the British Embassy in Berlin, who passed highly confidential information to Russia and received money for his betrayal, was sentenced in a London court to 13 years and two months in prison.

David Ballantyne Smith, 58, spent more than three years collecting classified information, including a secret ministerial letter to then-prime minister Boris Johnson and other confidential documents. Reuters writes about it.

Judge Mark Wall said Smith was driven by his anti-British and pro-Russian views.

“I am convinced that you committed these crimes with the intention of helping Russia… Your motive for helping them was to harm British interests. You were paid by the Russians for your treason,” the judge said.

Smith pleaded guilty to eight counts under the Official Secrets Act relating to his actions between 2020 and 2021. But the judge said his subversion began two years earlier.

Nick Price, head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s Special Crime and Counter-Terrorism Unit, said Smith was driven by “greed and hatred of our country”.

“That hatred was palpable and drove him to what can be called truly abhorrent behaviour,” he said outside court.

UK Security Minister Tom Tugendhat called Smith a traitor. “He betrayed us all and put our embassy and our country at risk. I am grateful to Mi-5 and their strange officers, the police and our German partners that he was brought to justice and convicted,” Tugendhat wrote.

Details of the case against David Smith

Prosecutor Alison Morgan previously said Smith sent a letter containing “highly confidential information” about the embassy and its staff to Major General Sergei Chukhrov, Russia’s military attaché in Berlin, in November 2020.

The letter, written on British embassy letterhead, contains the names, home addresses and phone numbers of embassy staff and includes documents authored by the British embassy’s chief Russian affairs officer, Morgan said.

The discovery of the letter prompted British and German authorities to launch a joint investigation, which Judge Wall described as a “special operation”.

Initially, this involved impersonating an Mi-5 officer as “Dmytro”, a Russian national who was providing aid to Britain. Later, Smith was approached by “Irina”, who told him that she needed help because someone “gave information to the British, and this information could harm Russia.”

In a hidden camera recording shown in court, “Iryna” asks Smith if he can help and if he will see her again, to which he replies: “I need to talk to someone, and then as soon as that person can confirm something, I’m ready to meet again.”

Smith was arrested the day after meeting with “Irina” in August 2021. During a search of his home in Potsdam, Germany, a USB drive was found containing several photos of embassy staff and diplomatic passports.

He also videotaped a number of confidential documents, including a November 2020 letter marked “secret” from then trade secretary Liz Truss and business secretary Alok Sharma to Boris Johnson.

Smith told the court he was ashamed of what he had done and said he took down the documents after drinking “seven pints of beer” and that it “seemed like a good idea at the time”.

But the judge rejected Smith’s claims that he felt remorse, saying: “Your remorse is nothing more than self-pity.”

“If you were truly repentant, you wouldn’t have lied to me under oath at that hearing the way you did. You were a security guard at the embassy. It’s not a position of authority, but it does place a high level of trust and responsibility on you. It was your job to keep the embassy safe and the safety of its personnel,” the judge added.

As The Guardian writes, after the arrest, the police found a large flag of the Russian Federation and a life-size soft toy Rottweiler in a Russian military cap in the apartment of the guard in Potsdam.

On the inside of a locker at the British Embassy was a caricature of Russian President Vladimir Putin in military uniform holding former German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Nazi uniform by the neck, along with the words in German: “Russia, please free us again.” There was also a dictionary of Russian obscene words.

Smith stopped withdrawing cash from his checking account in early February 2021 when he took a photo of a white envelope containing five €100 bills and sent it to his wife on Telegram, then deleted the message.

A search of Smith’s home turned up a further €800 in €100 notes, bringing the total paid to him to at least €1,300, although prosecutors believe this is “just the tip of the iceberg”. The judge said that “surprisingly, there are no documents to record the amount he received. “You were paid by the Russian authorities for your treason. I consider these payments to be a significant factor in increasing your responsibility for your actions,” the judge told the accused.

Russian spies in Europe

As reported, according to Western intelligence services, Germany has the largest number of Russian spies in Europe working under the guise of diplomats. Russian agents are found even in government offices of the country. For example, at the end of August, it became known about two officials from the Ministry of Economy of Germany, who are suspected of espionage for the benefit of Russia. And in October, the head of Germany’s National Cyber ​​Security Agency, Arne Schoenbom, was fired due to suspicions of connections with Russian intelligence.

The other day it became known that an employee of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) of Germany, detained for espionage for the benefit of the Russian Federation, had to transfer to Moscow the coordinates of the HIMARS installations in Ukraine. As a reward for the transfer of these data, the agent managed to transfer a “six-figure sum”. It was this money that was found in his possession during the detention.

Earlier, the head of the British Mi-5 counterintelligence, Ken McCallum, said that during the war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, the strongest blow in modern history was dealt to the Russian intelligence network abroad. He noted that more than 600 employees of Russian embassies around the world were expelled, of which more than 400 were most likely spies. 23 Russian spies who worked under diplomatic cover were expelled from Great Britain alone, the head of MI5 said.