Journalists, elected officials, advisors, diplomats… They all assiduously frequented the Elysée. Their other point in common? They were Kremlin spies. The KGB and its successors recruited these “moles” by banking on ideology, ego, sometimes compromise, often money. They had to report everything they saw. On special occasions, they were sent to poison the “Château”. Revelations on Russian penetration within French power, up to the Presidency of the Republic, from General de Gaulle to Emmanuel Macron.
EPISODE 1 – Russian spies at the heart of the Elysée, our revelations: how the DGSI protects presidents
EPISODE 2 – “André”, the KGB spy at the newspaper “Le Monde”: the last secrets of an elusive agent
EPISODE 3 – A KGB spy alongside General de Gaulle? Investigation into the Pierre Maillard affair
EPISODE 4 – A KGB agent in the Assembly: our revelations about Jacques Bouchacourt, alias “Nym”
Pierre Sudreau is one of the KGB’s favorites. In the Mitrokhine archives, this former minister of General de Gaulle is frequently cited. “Via Pierre Sudreau, the ideas were transmitted to Giscard and his entourage according to which American leadership in NATO and the strengthening of the military positions of the FRG are a threat to peace and to the political and economic interests of France” , write the Soviet spies stationed in France, in a note dated 1980. Or again: “On May 29, 1980, on the basis of ideas prepared by the A service [NDLR : le KGB]Pierre Sudreau spoke at the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Assembly, on the result of the high-level Franco-Soviet meeting in Warsaw.”
On several occasions, this deputy mayor of Blois is mentioned as “used for active measures”, an expression of Soviet jargon which means the dissemination of the positions of the USSR, through propaganda, disinformation or the falsification of documents. Also in 1980, Pierre Sudreau was “used for active measures on disarmament issues”, according to the Mitrokhine archives. The argument circulates “to Jean François-Poncet, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, via Sudreau”, indicates the same note. In these passages, the parliamentarian is described as “close to Giscard and François-Poncet”.
That same year, 1980, the deputy mayor published The Strategy of the Absurdpublished by Plon. In this essay, largely taken from The Sequencea work published in 1965, Sudreau advocates general nuclear disarmament, the end of military services. “The suicide of the Northern Hemisphere is inevitable if leaders continue to approach the future with the recipes of the past,” he writes. Concerning France, he considers that “we must anticipate a possible failure of deterrence and take other courage.” The East-West confrontation is described as a “quarrel between spoiled children”. The KGB comments on the opus as a “resumption of Soviet ideas”.
According to correspondence in the National Archives, this book earned him an invitation to a conference in Moscow by Yuri Zhukov, deputy of the Supreme Soviet, president of the USSR-France association and editorialist at the Pravda. According to journalist Thierry Wolton, this official is sometimes commissioned for “intoxication operations” in France. “In 1970, when Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Zhukov went around Paris to assert that the writer had a Nazi past,” relates the author of France under influence.
Pierre Sudreau was Minister of Reconstruction, then of Education.
/ © Bouchard / Wikimedia Commons
A thwarted national destiny
Pierre Sudreau has long been a singular figure of the Fifth Republic. Coming from a family of industrialists, he was preparing for his history exam when the Second World War broke out. This early resistance fighter joins the Brutus network; in 1943, he was arrested, tortured then deported to the Buchenwald camp, where he spent a year. At the Liberation, he was appointed sub-prefect at the age of 26. A prestigious administrative career followed, as ministerial advisor, deputy director of Sdece, the secret services, from 1946 to 1947, then prefect. Back in power, General de Gaulle made him Minister of Reconstruction in 1962. Alas, the two men became angry four years later, when Sudreau had been Minister of National Education for six months. The President of the Republic wants to reform the Constitution to modify the voting method for the presidential election, Sudreau is against. He resigns. When he was elected deputy for Loir-et-Cher in 1967, he was careful not to join the Gaullist ranks, to which he preferred the Democratic Center of Jean Lecanuet. In the National Assembly, he chairs the Association of former resistance fighters and deportees.
Several times afterwards, the chosen one will flirt with a national destiny, from which he will always evade. In 1965, he was solicited by the Democratic committee but stepped aside in favor of Lecanuet. In 1969, he was widely cited as Prime Minister in the event of Alain Poher’s victory. But it is Pompidou who wins. According to Christiane Rimbaud, author of Pierre Sudreaua biography of the elected official, the deputy mayor will refuse to be opening minister of Pompidou, then minister of National Education in 1974, a direct proposal from President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and likewise, minister of Foreign trade in 1976. In 1988, the last missed appointment, Pierre Bérégovoy asked him to become Minister of State in the Rocard government. Again, no. “I understood that they wanted to play me against Michel Rocard, which I did not want,” he explained to Christiane Rimbaud.
Pierre Sudreau has intrigued French counter-espionage for a long time. In Counter-espionagehis Memoirs, published in 1998, Yves Bonnet, director of the DST between 1982 and 1985, cautiously evokes these suspicions. He reveals that the elected official “frequents and welcomes diplomats from the GDR into his home”. “Everything happens as if Pierre Sudreau, a great resistance fighter, former minister of General de Gaulle, was an agent of Soviet influence,” he adds. The senior official sees him as an ally of Soviet “disinformation”, which he describes in these terms: “It calls on carefully chosen relays, quite easily identifiable but difficult to denounce because of their identity”. A means of action on which counter-espionage can only engage “with the most extreme caution”, he notes. Because, in the absence of financial transactions, “it is very rare that we can formally establish collusion, let alone guilt.” In this case, the Mitrokhine archives show that the KGB was convinced that it had found support in Pierre Sudreau.
“An honest man, a patriot, he is not suspect”
Spy, agent of influence or simple ideological ally? The Sudreau case is sparking debate among Russian intelligence experts. “He was suspected of being an agent of influence or at the very least of ‘disinformation'”, summarize Raymond Nart, Jean-François Clair and Michel Guérin, former deputy directors of counter-espionage, in The DST on the front of the Cold War. “Pierre Sudreau maintained surprisingly close relations with Gerhard Schramm, charge d’affaires of the GDR in Paris, as well as with his successor, Werner Fleck,” they confirm. These three commissioners even make the link between his resignation from the government, in October 1962, and these suspicions. “The explanations provided by the person concerned regarding his forced departure did not convince informed circles,” indicate Nart, Clair and Guérin. In France under influence, Thierry Wolton notes that after being charged by de Gaulle with “parallel diplomacy” missions with the USSR, Sudreau continued to behave as a “good friend” of the East after his departure from the government. “Was he just a useful idiot or should we rather place him in the category of confidential contacts of the KGB? I have no answer to this question”, he asks himself today ‘today.
One day, Yves Bonnet tried to speak about the Sudreau case to François Mitterrand, in his office at the Elysée. The president retorted: “I know Sudreau well. He is an honest man, a patriot, he is not suspect.” Pierre Sudreau died on January 22, 2012.
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