In an interview published on Thursday by the news website Delfi.lt, Dabašinskas said the operation was moved to Estonia after the SSD identified Russian intelligence officer Sergey Yakovlev's contacts.
"Information, collected by the SSD, about the Russian intelligence officer's contacts with Estonian Ministry of Defense officer Simm forced us to change the plans, and the operation was moved to Estonia where the most valuable Russian intelligence agent, who had access not only to Estonian and also NATO secrets, was located," Dabašinskas said.
In his words, Russian intelligence officer Yakovlev's "contacts in Lithuania and their contents were controlled, so we can say that no damage was done while revealing Lithuanian, NATO, and EU secrets."
"However, he managed to collect political, economic information, information about parties and their leaders you would not collect from public sources. But this information was not classified," Dabašinskas, a former aide to the Seimas Vice-Speaker Algis Čaplikas, said.
On 1 February, Estonia's President Toomas Hendrik Ilves signed a decree to award Dabašinskas with a 3rd degree Order of the Cross. The decision caused controversy in Lithuania. Lithuania's MEP Vytautas Landsbergis, former head-of-state, said he was astonished by the news about an honorable Estonian award to former Lithuanian security agent Dainius Dabašinskas as he believed that after slander in the wake of security officer Vytautas Pociūnas' death, Dabašinskas should have been removed from making decisions that are important to Lithuania. Landsbergis stressed the need to identify the person who proposed him for the Estonian presidential award.
Meanwhile Dabašinskas said in the interview he considered the award as "appreciation of the SSD team's operation for neutralizing a Russian Foreign Intelligence Service officer, who acted in many NATO member countries, and of long and thorough work."
Pociūnas died in the early hours of 23 August 2006 after falling out of a ninth-floor window of his hotel in Brest during a service trip. The Prosecutor General's Office has twice listed the death as an accident, but the pre-trial investigation was resumed by court order following demands by Pociūnas' relatives and public organizations. Homicide is among the versions now.
Dabašinskas' name was also mentioned in the conclusions of a parliamentary investigation into CIA prisons in Lithuania. It was stated that with the then Director General of the Lithuanian State Security Department Arvydas Pocius' knowledge, Dabašinskas allegedly had given U.S. officials unimpeded access to CIA-related aircraft on at least two occasions.
The parliament has proposed the Prosecutor General's Office to launch an investigation into whether actions by Mečys Laurinkus, Pocius, and Dabašinskas did not have signs of misuse of official power or excess of authority. The Prosecutor General's Office later concluded there was no basis for bringing them to criminal liability.
Simm, who was in charge of protecting state secrets at the Estonian Ministry of Defense, was detained in September 2008 and charged with having been revealing state secrets to Russia since 1995. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12.5 years in prison.
