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”
EPISODE 5 – Pierre Sudreau, the minister very close to the KGB: these unpublished documents which say a lot
EPISODE 6 – AFP journalist and KGB mole without knowing it: the incredible Jean-Marie Pelou affair
A dozen tête-à-têtes at the Ministry of Finance, like a lying poker. Between the beginning of 1985 and January 1986, Harris Puisais and Raymond Nart spoke regularly in a spacious office on rue de Rivoli, where this administration was headquartered until its installation in Bercy in 1988. The first was a political advisor by Pierre Bérégovoy, Minister of Economy and Finance. Born in 1924, historical collaborator of Pierre Mendès France, he is a political wanderer who few things impress. The second is deputy director of the Territorial Surveillance Directorate (DST), French counter-espionage. He suspects his interlocutor of being a “Soviet mole”. During his numerous trips to the USSR, his interlocutors were “all from the services”, Puisais casually confirms, relates Nart in the Farewell Affair seen from the inside. “I had no secrets!” adds the ministerial collaborator, bravado.
As early as June 1984, diplomats reported strange information to the DST. Harris Puisais was then advisor to Claude Cheysson, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Responsible for relations with Eastern countries, he is very close to the minister. “Cheysson and Puisais saw each other regularly one-on-one, outside the firm hierarchy,” recalls another advisor. Puisais would circulate the idea that the Farewell affair, the code name of a KGB lieutenant-colonel who transmitted to France thousands of documents on Soviet espionage in Europe and the United States, would in reality be “set up fabricated by the Americans”, continues Nart in the same work. On May 31, 1985, François Mitterrand gave the same speech at the Paris Air Show, in front of the Soviet delegation. The Farewell affair “is the result of manipulation of the DST by the Americans”, he declares, according to Nart, contrary to the decisions he himself took by expelling, in April 1983, 47 false Soviet diplomats.
In April 1985, “the president began to unfold the entire film of the Farewell affair as if it had been a CIA plot from the start”, also remembers Gilles Ménage, then chief of staff to the head of state. , In The eye of power. An analysis fueled by… Claude Cheysson, in two letters from April and May 1985, reproduced by Ménage. Hence the irritation of the DST towards Puisais, perceived as the architect of a pro-Soviet intoxication carried to the Elysée.
“Whatever you do, don’t talk about it with Puisais”
Harris Puisais is one of those shadowy characters who fascinates. With his mustache and his salt-and-pepper goatee, his clever demeanor and his wit, he has the false air of an imp. In the Socialist Party, he is nicknamed “Mephisto”, while at the Quai d’Orsay, they call him “the colonel”, a nickname evocative of the occult adventures that are attributed to him. This former mathematics teacher with the physique of a colossus, rugby player in La Rochelle in his youth, gives the impression of having lived a thousand lives. In the 1950s, he roamed the ministerial offices of the Fourth Republic, becoming friends in particular with Antoine Pinay, president of the Conservative Council, with whom he married. The next two decades were those of business. He is seen as a producer of several French films, notably Crime doesn’t payby Gérard Oury, with Louis de Funès, Michèle Morgan, Annie Girardot and Pierre Brasseur. Above all, he began to specialize in East-West trade, for Air Industrie or Saint-Gobain, in Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and of course in the USSR. He follows in the footsteps of Jean-Baptiste Doumeng, known as “the red billionaire”, financier of the Communist Party and hub of parallel diplomacy with the Warsaw Pact countries. Another friend.
In the 1970s, the intermediary gained momentum. His stays in Moscow, where he stayed at the Kremlin, attracted the attention of the ambassador. In Paris, in addition to a presence at the national office of the France-USSR association, he became a high-ranking member of the Masonic obedience of the Grand Orient de France, within which he reached the 33rd grade, the highest possible . He participated in Freemasonry’s discussions with the Vatican, aimed at normalizing their relations. An anecdote, perhaps a little fantasized, illustrates his extraordinary interpersonal skills. “One evening celebrating with Jacques Brel, from the telephone booth of a café, he called the Pope to introduce him to him,” relates lawyer Vincent Sol, former son-in-law of Pierre Bérégovoy. At the Epinay Congress in 1971, he joined the Socialist Party, after a decade at the PSU. This expert in very discreet missions will then be used to organize the underground financing networks of the PS.
Rue de Solférino, at the PS headquarters, he found an old accomplice, Charles Hernu, with whom he co-founded the “Jacobins club”, a pro-Mendès France association, in 1951. The two men were close. In 1992, when Mihai Caraman, the Romanian spymaster, provided the DST with documents on the collaboration between the former Minister of Defense and several services in the East, the French secret service reviewed its entire history. His agents wonder if Harris Puisais could have been the KGB “relay spy” responsible for treating Charles Hernu without arousing suspicion during his time at the ministry, say Jean-Marie Pontaut and Jérôme Dupuis, former journalists at L’Express, In Agent Hernu. And yet, “Hernu told me: whatever you do, don’t talk about it with Puisais”, smiles François Heisbourg, advisor in charge of international affairs, and in particular links with Eastern countries, in the minister’s office of Defense between 1981 and 1984.
“He served as contact between the PS, the Soviets and the KGB”
The other godfather of Puisais in “Mitterrandie” is called Pierre Bérégovoy, “his inseparable”, writes Michèle Cotta in his Secret notebooks of the Fifth Republic. They too have known each other since the Mendès France years. In 1981, it was “Béré”, the new secretary general of the Presidency of the Republic, who imposed his friend on Claude Cheysson. At the Elysée, “the colonel” therefore has his supporters, but also his detractors. After the appointment of Bérégovoy as minister in June 1982, the entourage of the head of state asked the DST for an investigation into Puisais, Nart revealed.
The intelligence service discovered his very close ties with Nikolai Tikhonov, the Soviet Prime Minister, and his cordial relations with Mikhail Gorbachev. “He served as contact between the PS, the Soviets and the KGB,” wrote Raymond Nart in an internal memo on “Mephisto,” written between 1993 and 1995. “The Colonel” also attracted the attention of American security circles. In April 1983, the Early Warning letter, edited by Arnaud de Borchgrave, a journalist then close to the CIA, devoted half a page to Harris Puisais, described as the “eminence grise of the Quai d’Orsay”, “committed to the exchanges with the East and relaxation”.
Faced with Nart, Puisais does not flinch. In his “sumptuous” office, as the DST commissioner relates, he becomes a “fine tactician”, sticks to generalities. He “did not keep the names” of his “interlocutors at the KGB”, he said. He also maintains that Reagan, the American president, “manipulated everything by using the Farewell affair against the will of François Mitterrand”. The rest of their exchanges will remain confidential. In The DST on the front of the Cold War, Raymond Nart describes him as a “KGB agent”, while specifying that he “made part of his journey with the DST late in life”. Harris Puisais died on April 9, 1989. He was 64 years old.
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