A new book by two investigative reporters has stirred Lithuania’s political waters with revelations about the inner workings of the country’s main intelligence agency and the current president’s election campaign.
The Whistleblower and the President, by Birutė Davidonytė and Dovydas Pancerovas (of Laisvės TV), was published in February and became an instant bestseller, repeating the success of the pair’s previous book Cabinet 339 about Lithuania’s former prime minister.
The book has caused a storm in the public sphere, leading to calls to initiate a parliamentary investigation. Here is the gist of the controversy.
The Whistleblower…
The book describes the behind-the-scenes of the 2019 election campaign of President Gitanas Nausėda and the work of the State Security Department (VSD).
The authors rely for much of their narrative on the testimony of a high-ranking official in the VSD, “the Whistleblower”. He claims that in July 2018 he was summoned by the department’s deputy director Remigijus Bridikis and handed several sheets of paper with lists of names, purportedly of people in Gitanas Nausėda’s campaign team and potential financial backers.
The Whistleblower was verbally instructed to check the names on the lists, somewhat against the accepted procedure. He alleges in the book that the request came from the would-be president’s own campaign and that the VSD chief, Darius Jauniškis, agreed to do it in order to ingratiate himself with the front-running candidate. Once elected, Nausėda would be in charge of his re-appointment.
The Whistleblower referred the matter to the parliamentary National Security and Defence Committee (NSGK), but no investigation into the activities of the VSD was launched. Nor did the Prosecutor General’s Office open an investigation, although the story was leaked to the media. The Whistleblower eventually lost his job at the VSD, purportedly due to an internal restructuring that scrapped his department.
The story has been known and discussed in late 2019, but this is the first time that the Whistleblower himself has been interviewed, as well as other eyewitnesses, politicians, and former employees of the President’s Office.
Following the book’s publication, MPs Vytautas Bakas and Raimundas Lopata announced that they would support the launch of a parliamentary inquiry during the spring session. Such an inquiry would shed light on the details revealed in the book, and President Nausėda would also have to testify.
According to the politicians, the inquiry would allow them to find out whether the intelligence institutions operate in a transparent manner and are not subject to political interference.
... and the President
In addition to the activities of the intelligence institution, The Whistleblower and the President describes the workings of Nausėda’s election campaign and the beginning of his presidency: funding and the search for supporters, the working atmosphere in the presidential office, the high turnover of staff, the influence of his wife Diana Nausėdienė.
Much focus is given to Nausėda’s favourable attitude towards the so-called Big Family Defence March of May 2021 that started off as an anti-LGBT initiative but later evolved into an anti-vaxx movement and escalated into a riot in August 2021. The possible explanations suggested by Pancerovas and Davidonytė include Nausėda’s purported Christian-democratic convictions and attempts to find supporters amid frictions with the conservative-led government.
One of the questions raised in the book is whether Nausėda’s campaign funding was completely transparent. Officially, his campaign spending was half that of his rivals, while achieving similar levels of exposure. The book hypothesises that business clients of Nausėda’s former employer, SEB Bank, were solicited to become his supporters, and that a former employee of SEB Bank was involved in the funding campaign.
The authors of the book also claim that Nausėda’s election campaign was supported by representatives of Birių Krovinių Terminalas (Bulk Cargo Terminal), a partially Belarusian-owned company that loads fertilisers at the Klaipėda Port. After becoming president, Nausėda allegedly attempted to block sanctions on Belarusian fertiliser exports.
The book also includes testimonies of former presidential staff members and advisers, and extracts from correspondence in messaging apps. It also reveals small details about daily operations in the President’s Palace, for example, how the first lady asked the president’s legal team to take action against public criticism of her statements.
What have critics said?
Nausėda’s spokespeople and the president himself have criticised the book but have not commented on concrete allegations.
“I have stopped reading fairy tales 20 years ago,” was Nausėda’s much-quoted comment on the book when it came out. “In any case, I leave it to the readers to draw their own conclusions. All I can say is what I said before.”
He also suggested that the authors were bought by his political opponents, without going into more details.
Darius Jauniškis, director of the VSD, insisted that the intelligence agency checked all presidential campaigns and was not specifically tasked with looking into Nausėda’s team.
MPs Bakas and Lopata stated that they would seek a parliamentary investigation into the allegations made in the book.
Shortly after the book’s publication, the political observer and analyst Marius Laurinavičius gave the identity of the Whistleblower, claiming he is Tomas Gailius. Gailius himself has neither confirmed nor denied it and has not spoken publicly yet.
According to Laurinavičius, contrary to how things are described in the book, Gailius had ambition to become the head of the VSD and was interested in discrediting the intelligence chief Darius Jauniškis. Laurinavičius based his claims on two unnamed sources within the VSD.
Moreover, Laurinavičius linked Gailius to the so called “Statesmen Clan” (Valstybininkų klanas), a purported network of politicians, diplomats and high-ranking civil servants that allegedly tried to influence Lithuanian politics in the 1990s and 2000s.
Subsequently, MP Dainius Gaižauskas, a member of the opposition Farmers and Greens Union, announced that his group would initiate a parliamentary inquiry into the “Statesmen Clan”.
Newsletter
Every Friday morning.
