The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  The French embassy in Moscow was also a major KGB target. During the early 1960s both the ambassador, Maurice Dejean, and the air attaché, Colonel Louis Guibaud, were seduced by KGB swallows after elaborate “honeytrap” operations directed by the head of the Second Chief Directorate, Oleg Mikhailovich Gribanov, with the personal approval of Khrushchev. Dejean was beaten up by a KGB officer posing as the enraged husband of the swallow, a Moscow ballerina who had seduced him. Guibaud was confronted with the usual compromising photographs of his sexual liaison. Both seductions, however, failed as intelligence operations. In 1962 Guibaud shot himself with his service revolver. The following year, a defector revealed Gribanov’s plan to compromise Dejean, who was recalled to Paris before serious KGB blackmail had begun. De Gaulle welcomed the ambassador home with the now celebrated reproof, “Alors, Dejean, on couche!”26 The KGB files noted by Mitrokhin reveal for the first time that a third French diplomat in Moscow was successfully targeted by Gribanov. A female member of the embassy staff, codenamed LOUISA, was seduced by a male swallow, confronted with photographs of her seduction and persuaded to work as a Soviet agent. Once back in Paris in the early 1960s, however, she broke off contact with the KGB.27

  The most successful French recruitment in Moscow recorded in the files seen by Mitrokhin was that of the businessman Franáois Saar-Demichel (codenamed NN) in the 1960s.28 After fighting in the Resistance, Saar-Demichel had served briefly in the DGER and its successor, the SDECE, before leaving in 1947 to begin a business career. In 1954 he won an exclusive, and lucrative, contract to import Soviet wood pulp for French paper manufacture. A year later, during a visit to Moscow, he was recruited by the SCD as a KGB agent. Acting on instructions from the Centre, Saar-Demichel used his Resistance connections to make contact with some of de Gaulle’s leading supporters and contributed almost 15 million francs to the Gaullist cause during the final years of the Fourth Republic.29

  After the change of regime and de Gaulle’s election as President of the Republic, Saar-Demichel succeeded in gaining an entrée to the êlysée and supplied regular reports on his meetings with Soviet leaders during business trips to Moscow. According to Constantin Melnik, security adviser to the first prime minister of the Fifth Republic, Michel Debré, “More than any other political movement, Gaullism was swarming with agents of influence of the obliging KGB, whom we never succeeded in keeping away from de Gaulle.” The most important of them may well have been Saar-Demichel. His reports were designed by the Centre to reinforce de Gaulle’s belief that Soviet leaders were guided not by Communist ideology but by traditional Russian interests, and to persuade him that they were genuinely anxious for an understanding with France:

  My Soviet interlocutors [nowadays] make much less use of Marxist-Leninist phraseology… They are very open to dialogue and make a clear distinction between propaganda statements and discussions based on precise facts… The dead weight of ideology is fading away, particularly among the new generation. Faced with this transformation of public opinion, the leadership is making no attempt to put a stop to it.30

  During his visits to Moscow, Saar-Demichel also provided the Centre with regular reports on de Gaulle’s foreign policy. He claimed that after the signature of the cooperation treaty between France and West Germany in January 1963, which had been badly received in Moscow, de Gaulle had said privately, “We extended our hand to the Germans so that we could at least be sure they were not holding a knife in theirs.”31

  AS WELL AS collecting intelligence, the Paris residency continued to be energetically engaged in active measures. In its annual report for 1961, the residency proudly reported that it had been responsible for inspiring 230 articles in the press, 11 books and pamphlets, 32 parliamentary questions and statements, 9 public meetings and the circulation of 14,000 copies of 10 posters and flysheets.32 In addition to André Ulmann (DURANT), editor of La Tribune des Nations,33 the residency’s agents of influence included at least two socialist politicians, GILBERT and DROM.34 GILBERT (later GILES), who was reported to be “close” to the future president, Franáois Mitterrand, was recruited by the Czechoslovak StB in 1955 under the codename ROTER. KGB contacts with GILBERT began a year later.35 DROM was first cultivated by the KGB in 1959, recruited as an agent in 1961 and paid a monthly retainer of 1,500 francs for the next twelve years.36

  The Paris residency’s most ambitious active measure during de Gaulle’s decade as President of the Fifth Republic was to fund a new news agency, the Centre d’Information Scientifique, Économique et Politique, founded in 1961 by Pierre-Charles Pathé, a newly recruited KGB agent codenamed PECHERIN (later MASON). The journalist son of the millionaire film magnate who had founded Pathé newsreels, he had first come to the residency’s attention two years earlier after publishing a naively pro-Soviet Essai sur le phénomäne soviétique:

  The cruelties of Stalinism were only childhood illnesses. The victory of the Soviet Union is that of a correct vision of the march of history. The USSR, this laboratory of new ideas for the most advanced development of society, will overtake the gigantism of the United States.

  From 1961 to 1967 the KGB paid Pathé 6,000 francs a month to publish a weekly newsletter (codenamed OBZOR) from his center, which was sold by subscription but sent free of charge to opinion-formers in politics, business, journalism and diplomacy.37

  The main purpose of the active measures implemented by Pathé and the Paris residency’s other agents of influence during the early Fifth Republic was to damage Franco-American relations, encourage a Franco-Soviet rapprochement and distance France from NATO.38 Saar-Demichel reported progress on all three fronts. His finest hour as a KGB agent came during a visit to Moscow to negotiate the sale of the French SECAM color system to Soviet television in March 1965, when he told his controller that de Gaulle wished to visit the Soviet Union in the following year. De Gaulle, he claimed, attached no importance to Franco-Soviet ideological differences and had told him:

  Russia was, is, and would continue to be a great power in Europe. The outstanding qualities of the Russian people remained the same whatever the ideology of the Communist government, but at the present time Communist ideology acted as a bond which held together this vast multinational federation. However, it was not ideology but reasons of state which played the main role.

  As for the reunification of Germany, to which the Soviet Union was resolutely opposed, de Gaulle wished to postpone it as long as possible: “The later, the better.” A doubtless exultant Centre passed on Saar-Demichel’s message to the Central Committee.39

  It remains unclear whether, as the KGB believed, the êlysée had asked Saar-Demichel to sound out Moscow on the question of a state visit—or whether, knowing de Gaulle’s wishes, he took the initiative himself. The Centre, however, claimed much of the credit for de Gaulle’s decision to distance France from NATO and improve relations with the Soviet Union.40 In March 1966 France withdrew from the integrated NATO command. Three months later de Gaulle made a triumphal state visit to the Soviet Union. The KGB had, in reality, little influence on either decision. Ever since the United States and Britain had rejected his proposal early in the Fifth Republic to join with France in a three-power directorate at the head of NATO, de Gaulle had been increasingly inclined to distance himself from it. His attempt to use the Soviet Union as a counterweight to American influence in Europe went back to his wartime years as leader of the Free French, when Roosevelt and Churchill had failed to treat him as an equal. “Ah, Monsieur le Secrétaire Général,” he told Brezhnev during his visit to Moscow, “how happy we are to have you to help us resist American pressure—just as we are pleased to have the United States to help us resist pressure from the Soviet Union!” But if—contrary to the private boasts of the Centre—KGB active measures did not determine de Gaulle’s foreign policy, they played at least a minor role in reinforcing his conviction that the Soviet Union was a traditional great power with an increasingly thin Communist veneer. His report to the French cabinet on his state vis
it to Russia concurred with the views expressed by Saar-Demichel. The Soviet Union, de Gaulle declared, was “evolving from ideology to technocracy:

  I did not talk to anyone who told me, “I am a Communist militant or a party leader”… If one leaves aside their propaganda statements, they are conducting a peaceful [foreign] policy.41

  KGB active measures may have had a somewhat greater, though doubtless not decisive, influence on the evolution of French public opinion. According to opinion polls after de Gaulle’s state visit, 35 percent of French people held a favorable opinion of the Soviet Union (as compared with 25 percent two years earlier) while only 13 percent were hostile. Those with favorable opinions of the United States fell, partly as a consequence of the Vietnam War, from 52 percent in 1964 to only 22 percent at the beginning of 1967.42

  After the apparent successes of the previous few years, the Paris residency saw little purpose in continuing to fund Pathé’s Centre d’Information Scientifique, Économique et Politique, on which it had spent 436,000 francs since 1961. The center closed and its newsletter ceased publication. Pathé continued, however, to work as an agent of influence, writing regular articles in national newspapers under the pseudonym “Charles Morand.” From January 1967 to June 1979, he received a total of 218,400 francs in salary, plus 68,423 francs for expenses and bonuses.43 In 1969 Pathé was one of the organizers of the Gaullist-dominated Mouvement pour l’Indépendance de l’Europe, which the Centre regarded as a potentially valuable means of destabilizing NATO.44

  KGB PENETRATION OF the French intelligence community continued during the 1960s. Mitrokhin’s notes record that at least four French intelligence officers and one former head of department in the Sñreté Générale were active KGB agents during the period 1963-6, but give few details.45 In the years after de Gaulle’s resignation in 1969, the quality, though not the quantity, of the KGB’s French recruits seems to have declined. The total number of agents run by the Paris residency rose from 48 in 1971 to 55 in 1974; in 1974 the residency also had 17 confidential contacts.46 However, the files seen by Mitrokhin contain no indication that the 1974 agents included any senior civil servants or intelligence officers. The KGB had also lost the services of DROM, one of its two leading agents within the Socialist Party. In 1973 he was given “substantial funds” to pay off his debts. Shortly afterwards, however, DROM was reported to be in contact with the DST.47

  The best indication of the main strengths of the KGB’s French agent network in the mid-1970s is a list of thirteen “valuable agents” of the Paris residency who, with Andropov’s personal approval, were given substantial New Year gifts in 1973, 1974 and 1975. In each of these three years JOUR was given a bonus of 4,000 francs; ANDRÉ, BROK and FYODOR received 3,000 francs; ARGUS, DRAGUN, DZHELIB and LAURENT 2,000 francs; NANT and REM 1,500 francs; BUKIN-IST, MARS and TUR 1,000 francs.48 Two reservations need to be registered about this list. First, it does not include the residency’s most important ST agent, ALAN, who was paid on a different bonus system.49 (The same may apply to some other Line X agents.) Secondly, three of the agents who received the New Year bonuses were foreign officials stationed in Paris who provided intelligence chiefly on non-French matters. DZHELIB was a staff member of an Asian embassy, who provided ciphers and other classified documents;50 REM was a Canadian in the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, who acted as an agent-recruiter;51 BUKINIST worked in a Middle Eastern embassy.52 The eleven French recruits selected for New Year gifts in 1973-5 do, however, give an important insight into the Centre’s and Paris residency’s perception of their main French assets.

  The most highly rated French agent in the mid-1970s was also the longest-serving: JOUR, the cipher clerk in the Foreign Ministry (codenamed ELITA) recruited thirty years earlier, who was singled out for the largest bonus. During the period 1968-73 he provided intelligence on the cipher machines in the French embassy in Moscow and at NATO headquarters which enabled the Sixteenth (SIGINT) Directorate to decrypt a probably substantial amount of diplomatic traffic. In 1973 JOUR was posted to a French embassy abroad, where contact with him was maintained through dead letter-boxes.53 Intelligence provided by JOUR probably assisted the bugging of the new teleprinters installed in the Moscow embassy between October 1976 and February 1977. All, remarkably, were left unguarded for forty-eight hours during their journey by rail to Moscow. The bugs secretly fitted to the teleprinters during this period transmitted to the KGB the unenciphered text of all incoming and outgoing embassy telegrams for over six years.54 The head of the bugging operation, Igor Vasilovich Maslow, was awarded the Order of Lenin and later promoted to head the Sixteenth (SIGINT) Directorate.55

  Until 1983, thanks to JOUR and Maslov, the Centre had far better information on French policy to the Soviet Union than that of any of France’s NATO allies. JOUR simultaneously continued to talent-spot other Foreign Ministry cipher and secretarial personnel. In 1978-9 he cultivated “L” (identified only as a member of the ministry “support staff”), obtained his private address, carried out a background check on his home and facilitated his recruitment by a residency operations officer.56 During the period 1978-82 no less than six cipher personnel at the Quai d’Orsay were under active KGB cultivation.57

  A majority of the most highly rated French agents in the mid-1970s (six of the ten who received New Year bonuses in 1973-5: ANDRÉ,58 BROK,59 ARGUS,60 NANT,61 MARS62 and TUR63) were journalists or involved with the press: a clear indication that, whatever the real effectiveness of KGB disinformation campaigns against French targets, the Centre regarded active measures as one of the main strengths of the Paris residency. Of the three other most valuable French agents, FYODOR held a major position in a foreign policy institute and provided documents on the USA, NATO and China;64 LAURENT was a scientist in a NATO aeronautical research institute;65 and DRAGUN was a businessman and agent-recruiter. 66 LAURENT and DRAGUN were probably Line X (ST) agents. Pathé (MASON), one of the leading agents of influence in the 1960s, had declined in importance and did not figure on the list of most valuable agents in 1973-5. His career, however, was to revive during the second half of the decade.

  The Centre’s probably exaggerated confidence in the agents of influence run by the PR Line of the Paris residency led it to undertake an ambitious series of active measures throughout the 1970s. According to KGB files, ANDRÉ, a senior journalist, “had access to President Georges Pompidou,” who had succeeded de Gaulle in 1969, and to some of his senior ministers, including Pierre Messmer, who became prime minister in 1972, and Foreign Minister Maurice Schumann.67 Reports from the Paris residency claimed that ANDRÉ was used to pass to Pompidou’s office “slanted information” calculated to increase the President’s suspicion of the United States.68 In this, as in most influence operations, it is difficult to estimate the level of success. Given ANDRÉ’s access to the highest levels of the Pompidou administration, it is difficult to believe that he was simply ignored. It is equally difficult to credit, however, that he had more than—at best—a marginal influence on French foreign policy. The Centre’s reports to the Central Committee tended to claim more credit than it probably deserved for provoking, or worsening, tension within the Atlantic Alliance.

  The limitations of KGB active measures in influencing French policy were clearly illustrated by the failure of the LA MANCHE (“English Channel”) operation, designed to sow distrust between Pompidou and the British prime minister, Edward Heath, to persuade the President to maintain de Gaulle’s veto on British entry into the European Community.69

  Though the journalist ARGUS appears to have had no direct access to Pompidou, he was in even closer contact than ANDRÉ with Messmer. According to reports from the Paris residency he had regular discussions with the Prime Minister during the campaign for the March 1973 general election and continued to advise him afterwards. The main aim of the KGB disinformation channeled through ARGUS was to damage the electoral prospects of the Gaullist-led ruling coalition by sowing distrust between the Gaullists and their allies. ARGUS f
alsely alleged to Messmer that Michel Poniatowski, general secretary of the Independent Republicans, and the Reformist Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber had secretly agreed to cooperate in undermining the position of Gaullist candidates. On KGB instructions, ARGUS also planted similar disinformation in the press. Other active measures devised by Service A to damage “Atlanticist” (pro-American) candidates included planting false reports that the campaigns of Servan-Schreiber and the Christian Democrat leader, Jean Lecanuet, were being financed by American money. In Servan-Schreiber’s constituency of Meurtheet-Moselle, letters were posted to local notables purporting to come from a neo-Nazi group in the FRG which called on all those “with German blood flowing in their veins” to vote for Servan-Schreiber.70 While such operations may well have impressed the Centre, it is difficult to believe that they had a significant influence on French voters. Though the vote of the left increased at the general election, the Gaullist-led coalition retained a comfortable majority of seats.