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
You have to imagine French counter-espionage searching the trunk of the car of someone close to General de Gaulle, then President of the Republic. The police search for – and find – documents classified as “top secret”, which are forbidden to take with you. The files relate to France’s withdrawal from NATO and the employment of its troops in Germany. Two subjects which fascinate the USSR in this year 1968. Pierre Maillard, the diplomat targeted by this astonishing cash, is precisely suspected of betraying France for the benefit of the Soviet secret services.
Between 1959 and 1964, he was the diplomatic advisor to the “general” at the Elysée. His office overlooked the main courtyard of the palace, allowing him to better observe the comings and goings, recalls the diplomat Jean-Paul Alexis in To the protocol of General de Gaulle. Between 1964 and November 1968, this “left-wing” man, laughs Jean Lacouture in his biography of de Gaulle, became… deputy secretary general for national defense (SGDN). That is to say number 2 of this Matignon service responsible for granting defense secret clearances and drawing up the minutes of the defense councils, the most sensitive government meetings. Clearly, the DST fears having allowed a mole to prosper at the top of the State. This would undoubtedly be the biggest espionage scandal ever seen in France.
This piece of confidential history of the Fifth Republic remained secret for fifty years. It is detailed in a “white note” from the Territorial Surveillance Directorate (DST), the ancestor of the DGSI, which L’Express was able to consult and authenticate from three sources. This document entitled “Note on the Maillard case” is unsigned and undated, as is customary within intelligence, but it is possible to place it between 1972 and 1975. It summarizes the elements collected by the police against Pierre Maillard , then ambassador to UNESCO in Paris. We learn that a very discreet investigation was launched from November 1967, with the prior agreement of the then Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou. It is justified by clandestine exchanges that the diplomat allegedly maintained with KGB agents in Paris, between 1956 and 1967. “These contacts were only known through telephone interceptions and therefore represent only a small part of the actual contacts “, notes the DST. The Deputy Secretary General for National Defense is then in turn stalked in the street, listened to on the telephone.
This investigation has everything to do with another affair that poisoned Franco-American diplomatic relations. In December 1961, Anatoly Golitsyn, commander of the KGB, defected to the United States. Eager to prove his worth, he gives up numerous names of spies. Concerning France, he claims, among other revelations, that Charles de Gaulle’s cabinet is home to a Soviet mole. John Kennedy wrote directly to the French president to warn him. Several French intelligence delegations travel to question the defector; he does not know the identity of the spy but can provide details. The names of Jacques Foccart, Louis Joxe and Georges Gorse circulated, but they were quickly exonerated. Faced with what it perceives as French inaction, the CIA stops collaborating with its counterparts.
“A very important Soviet defector”
In 1967, American writer Leon Uris used the story freely in Topaz. The spy novel became a bestseller, itself adapted for the cinema by Alfred Hitchcock in the Visein 1969. Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoly, ex-French intelligence agent in the United States, whispered in the novelist’s ear. He then announced in an article in the magazine life that Columbine, the mole eaten by Uris, does indeed exist. At the time of the release of Topazthe Elysée retorts conversely to Worldwho devoted an article to this imbroglio, on April 16, 1968, that “the accusation of a collaborator of the President of the Republic constitutes a grotesque fabrication, completely devoid of foundation”.
However, everything in the DST investigation shows on the contrary that the executive takes this suspicion very seriously. Golitsyn’s testimony is reproduced. It is stated that a “very important Soviet defector” declared that “the KGB was able to obtain information on several occasions, between 1958 and 1960, from what it called ‘the chancellery of the presidency of the Republic’ and that this source had provided in particular, between 1958 and 1959, information on the French position with regard to a NATO problem.
Born in 1916, Pierre Maillard, an associate professor of German and a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1942. The diplomat was stationed in Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Austria, before becoming head of the very strategic Levant service, responsible for the Middle East, in 1954. According to Jean Lacouture, the biographer of General de Gaulle, Maillard “does not hide his socialist sympathies and ‘Mendesists'”, and is “very well regarded in the Arab world”. It was at this time that the DST identified first contacts with a KGB officer. “From August to September 1956, Mr. Maillard had four contacts with Gavritchev, third secretary at the Soviet embassy, an important KGB officer,” write the investigators, who consider that “the subordinate official role” of the Soviet spy “ poorly explains” such repeated exchanges with “the head of an important department at the Quai d’Orsay”. The third of these meetings took place on September 11 at 10 a.m., “at the urgent request” of Sergei Gavritchev, further notes the DST, which draws a “parallel” between these interviews and the “Suez affair”, this conflict between Egypt and Israel, which the USSR follows very closely.
Several disconcerting discoveries
Incidentally, the police also mention that Sergei Gavritchev was “one of the Easter manipulators” at the same time. Not the slightest details. Georges Easter, a senior official at the defense staff and then at the NATO press service, was convicted of spying for the USSR. He provided multitudes of documents, including decisive plans of Berlin at the time of the erection of the wall in August 1961. Convinced of leading a mission in the service of peace, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964. However Easter and Maillard were “friends”, notes the DST, and classmates at the ENS. During the judicial investigation, after his arrest, Georges Easter admitted to having delivered two biographies of Pierre Maillard to the KGB. He will also say that he obtained from Maillard… official documents from the Quai d’Orsay on the Suez crisis, immediately given to his dealing officers.
The DST maintains that the diplomat also maintained contacts with Mikhail Tsimbal, alias Rogov, then head of the KGB station in France, in 1958. Another disturbing element, during a search of the Egyptian communist activist Henri Curiel, the latter attempted to disappear documents citing Pierre Maillard. “The first of these notes ended with a quote attributed to Mr. Maillard, the second specified, in its second paragraph: ‘the information which follows results from a study which we undertook after having consulted Maillard, Pons and Brunet du Quai d’Orsay'”, explain the police.
During its investigation launched in November 1967, the DST made several new discoveries. During a shadowing of the deputy SGDN, the investigators noted “the very close presence of the Soviet deputy naval attaché Rodionov”. This diplomat “belongs to the GRU”, military intelligence, indicate the police. He then returns to his embassy “after having completed a security process”. The investigators have the impression of having been on the verge of overhearing a clandestine meeting with Maillard. On the political level, the police were surprised to note that Maillard requested and obtained a meeting with François Mitterrand, at the latter’s home, on July 23, 1968. On May 19, 1968, when Pierre Mendès France asked the authorities to withdraw, the ex-adviser of de Gaulle is “rejoiced” about it, indicates the DST, which listens to his conversations on the telephone. As a final oddity, during a mission to Helsinki, from June 22 to 29, 1972, Maillard “made a getaway to a neighboring country where he was to meet a friend”, indicated a “reliable source” to the DST. The police concluded that it was “undoubtedly a trip to Moscow which remained completely clandestine”.
“A choice interlocutor”
Alas, these suspicions put together do not constitute guilt. In 1979, after a period of slight disgrace, Pierre Maillard became French ambassador to Canada. Three years later, he was appointed advisor to Jean-Pierre Chevènement, minister of François Mitterrand. From the 1970s, he joined expert groups of the Socialist Party. “I remember a shy, reserved man, who never put himself forward, never said that he had worked with General de Gaulle. He was the color of a wall. I have a hard time imagining him spy”, testifies Henri Fouquereau, founder with him of the very sovereignist Forum for France. In 2005, Maillard spoke out against the referendum on a European constitution, after having railed against the use of “Anglo-American” as a common language in Europe, as he indicated in a column in the World titled “Beware of cultural colonization”, in June 1985. “He was a very talented academic, very modest. I only had good information about him. The fact that he was an advisor to de Gaulle had a certain value for me”, indicates Jean-Pierre Chevènement. Contacted, his son Jean-François Maillard brushes aside the suspicions: “This is absurd gossip. It was not at all my father’s spirit. The DGSE in particular could not stand the fact that he was not an Atlanticist. In 1979 , his appointment as ambassador to China was prevented by the US State Department, that’s the truth.”
In The DST on the front of the Cold War (Mareuil), published at the end of 2022, Raymond Nart, Jean-François Clair and Michel Guérin, former deputy directors of the French secret service, quickly return to this affair. “A working hypothesis was built around Pierre Maillard,” they write, quoting Golitsyn. Pierre Maillard died on July 22, 2018 at the age of 102, “without his guilt having been formally established”, specify the three police officers. In Visitors from the shadows (Grasset)published in 1990, Marcel Chalet, director of the DST between 1972 and 1975, cites the case of a high-ranking official who “sometimes occupied important functions in the state apparatus” and whose contacts with Soviet diplomats “had always been at the level of resident or deputy resident of the KGB.” For the DST, this meant “that he was a choice interlocutor”, even “that he was a KGB collaborator”. After an investigation, notes Chalet, “the file thickened without anything being obtained that would allow any legal action to be taken.” The following chapter was thought of as a wink, its co-author, Thierry Wolton, confirmed to us. Its title? A Colin-Maillard with the spies.
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