'The Netherlands’ most significant spy of the modern era'

Dutch spy Raymond Poeteray, for four or five years, had been passing highly confidential EU and NATO intelligence to Russia.

Last year, Poeteray, then a consular official with the Dutch ministry of foreign affairs, was arrested at an airport en route to Bangkok with four USB sticks of classified information in his luggage.

Poeteray once “passed to Moscow information gathered during EU fact-finding missions in the former Soviet republic of Georgia at a time when relations between the two were fraught,” and, later, handed over fresh data from sensitive Dutch peacekeeping missions in both Afghanistan and Kosovo.

“These were no windy diplomatic dispatches bound for the obscurity of the archives: the information he provided was military and political, sourced on the ground, and always dangerously current.

In addition – in true John le Carré fashion­– Poeteray gave the Russians detailed and compromising information about the private lives of seven of his diplomat colleagues, making them potentially vulnerable to blackmail, although it’s unclear if any of them was ever approached.”

The three judges who sentenced him to 12 years in prison for spying described Poeteray as “the Netherlands’ most significant spy of the modern era” who had “damaged the interests not alone of the Dutch state but also of its allies.”