From kyiv to the Elysée, via Moscow, Bamako, Ouagadougou, the beautiful Parisian districts, without forgetting the very pressing cyber threat, French spies are struggling to protect our security and our interests. The Express wanted to dig deeper: what do intelligence agents really do in the field? And above all, are they up to the challenges of the moment? The main leaders of French intelligence gave us their opinion, as did some thirty former members of the secret services. The result is an unprecedented dive into the troubled waters of the most confidential French operations. Revelations in three parts on the secrets of French espionage… and worldwide. Second part: Ukraine and Russian spies in France.
Chapter 3: Ukraine
“What’s your source?” Several times during the month of February 2022, French intelligence leaders ask this question of their American counterparts. The answer is always the same: “Our analyzes lead us to believe that Russia will invade Ukraine.” French spies won’t know if the CIA has a human source in the Kremlin. Does the Ukrainian file constitute a failure of French intelligence? Statements by General Thierry Burkhard at the World, on March 6, 2022, suggest: “The Americans said that the Russians were going to attack, they were right. Our services rather thought that the conquest of Ukraine would have a monstrous cost and that the Russians had other options.” However, despite the concomitant dismissal of General Eric Vidaud of the DRM, in reality for incompatibility of temper with the Chief of the Defense Staff, the interested parties strongly deny it. “From the start, we have said that the invasion of Ukraine would have a disproportionate cost for Russia. The result proved us right”, points out General Jacques de Montgros, new director of military intelligence. According to our information, Emmanuel Macron would be satisfied with the work of the secret services in this affair, believing that he had been correctly informed.
Because the DGSE and the DRM claim to have seen very early, from the fall of 2021, the strengthening of Russian mobilization on the Ukrainian border. Within the information sharing group which brings together, from November, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and France, the French are among the most advanced on the file. . Without ever concluding that Vladimir Putin will really intervene, but pointing out the Ukrainian assets in the event of an attack. “We had a divergence of analysis with our American and British partners, but we had the same information and the invasion was a hypothesis that we were considering. I note that you had also perceived the resilience capacity of the Ukrainians”, detailed Laurent Nunez, in July. Contrary to certain media discourses, the secret services also perceived very early on the colossal ammunition stocks of the Russian army. “I think we have a fairly clear vision on the subject,” warns Jacques de Montgros, who refuses to say more.
Another operation carried out by the French secret services, in particular the DGSE: a parallel diplomatic maneuver in Belarus, which led President Alexander Lukashenko to give up sending troops to Ukraine. This mission, which the Intelligence Online media revealed under the name of “Operation Alisia” and which L’Express is able to detail, consisted in particular of putting pressure on the leader’s security entourage on the financial and political consequences of an active participation in the conflict . If no voice officially confirms the presence of agents of the action service of the DGSE in Ukraine, the information does not leave much doubt.
Increased collaboration with US agencies also makes it possible to benefit from information almost in real time. “The exchanges are ten times a day,” confirms a French intelligence officer; Bernard Emié preferred to evoke in Neuilly a cooperation “of the fire of God” with the CIA. A confidence that shows American superiority, but also in what esteem they hold their French interlocutors. “In intelligence, there is no kindness. When you are given information, it is because we think that you can give as much”, analyzes Vincent Crouzet, ex-collaborator of the DGSE and author of Save Zelensky!a very realistic fiction about the Ukrainian conflict.
Chapter 4: The Russians
Sunday, April 10, is a day of celebration within the H4 division of the DGSI, in charge of Russian counterintelligence. French officials have just carried out an extraordinary operation, “as happens once every five years,” said a close intelligence tricolor. In a village, full of agents dispatched for the occasion, the police arrested in flagrante delicto a Russian diplomat, in possession of documents which he had just exchanged against several tens of thousands of euros with a source. A French. Within the French secret services, no one wants to give the identity of this person, nor the place of the arrest, as much for the sake of confidentiality as for his safety. But we agree to reveal that it is a “source with very high added value”. As for the manipulation of the diplomat, the French spies simply believe that they have “thwarted the most ambitious Russian operation since the fall of the Berlin Wall”.
The operation took eighteen months to set up, after the DGSI spotted the target talking with this member of the Russian embassy in Paris. The false diplomat was expelled, along with five other Russians all linked to this manipulation, including one based in Strasbourg, near the European Parliament. The case shows the French know-how in hunting Russian spies. “Today, we are among the best in Russian espionage abroad,” says one of the pillars of French intelligence. The time when “French intelligence and soldiers flowed like a leaky basket”, as KGB general Oleg Kalougin described it in his memoirs about the 1970s, seems well and truly over. From now on, the counter-spies of the DGSI are familiar with Russian procedures. They let fake diplomats act, under surveillance, keeping the right to expel them – at the start of the war in Ukraine, 35 members of the embassy were declared “persona non grata”.
This does not prevent a few embarrassing hiccups: on August 17, 2020, a French lieutenant-colonel stationed at NATO was arrested for spying in the service of Russia. But this officer did not have access to the highest levels of information. Last October, the French secret services leaked The world the baroque methods of Russian recruitment: an agent of the embassy responded to offers of young French engineers on Le Bon Coin, for courses in mathematics. It was about approaching them under a false identity, before asking them for information. One of the spies in charge of this operation was expelled in November 2020.
Aware of French capabilities, the Russian intelligence services have partly adapted their activities in France. In parallel with traditional espionage, they develop a parallel diplomacy of influence, betting on anti-Americanism. Here, no exchange of documents but support for personalities considered to be in tune with the vision of the Russian world. A legal collaboration, except to prove a conscious arrangement with spies, which is not always easy. To answer this soft-power more subtle, Emmanuel Macron erected, on November 9 in Toulon, “influence” to the rank of “strategic function” in French defense. The mission to fight against disinformation, in particular Russian, has been entrusted to Viginum, a new service dependent on Matignon, directed by Gabriel Ferriol, enarque and… ex-agent of the DGSE, according to our information.
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EPISODE 1 >French spies, the great investigation: DGSE-DGSI, in the secret of anti-terrorist operations