In an instant, he sits up like a truffle dog that has just sniffed a mushroom. His gaze leaves us to snap at the sinister-looking forty-year-old who has just entered the cafe. “DGSI”, he asserts. In front of our incredulous air, Sergei Jirnov continues: “The great French spies of the Ministry of the Interior”. Neither one nor two, our interlocutor takes his business and suggests that we change restaurants. As in the Legends Officehere we are clearing off at full speed, looking discreetly behind us before entering the neighboring brasserie.
The man is knowledgeable in espionage, he was a KGB agent for eight years, before resigning, then immigrating to France in 2001. After a bureaucratic muddle of which the administration has the secret, he ended up obtain political refugee status. Does he really think he is being watched 21 years later or is this a little staged? With these manipulation professionals, you can’t be sure of anything. But the defector seems sincerely concerned behind his big glasses: “We fixed the appointment on my cell phone. And with all my appearances in the media…”
“Valoche” Pécresse
Sergei Jirnov works a bit like an audio cassette. Side A: an ultra-sympathetic charisma, sublimated by a warm smile and French slang mastered to perfection, which can lead him to evoke with causticity “les Amerloques” or “Valoche”, that is to say Valérie Pécresse , met at the French Embassy in Moscow then at the ENA. The intelligence officer was admitted there as a foreign student in 1991-1992. In the greatest secrecy, he provided the Soviet military with notes on his comrades, but at the time he seemed so affable that no one thought to suspect him, even when he came to sports class wearing a t- shirt crossed out with the words “KGB”.
Side B: a propensity to distrust and a strong attraction for reasoning that a philistine would easily describe as “twisted”. He prefers to invoke with a smile “the analytical mind of spies”. We can understand his concern, his ex-colleagues in the Russian services would have tried several times to intimidate him, even to poison him, when he refused to reintegrate their ranks, he relates in The Pathfinder (Nimrod), the exciting autobiography he has just published. From now on, he quickly imagines the worst behind seemingly trivial events. He tells us that Russians have tried to kill him “twice” since he has been in France, the second of which by giving him an appointment via a journalist in the offices of Russia Today and Sputnik: “If I entered in the building, it was like Khashoggi, I didn’t come out and I was stuck in the trunk of a car”. The former intelligence agent still claims to avoid above all “Franco-Russian organizations”, a “nest of spies”. Word of expert.
Columnist at Hanouna
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the young man in his sixties – he looks fifteen years younger – has changed his media dimension. He is consulted like the Pythia before the Greek wars. Le FigaroRTL, PointRMC, Télé 7 Jours… Everyone is raving about this exquisite French KGB veteran, who speaks so clearly about complicated issues. Do not touch My TV, Cyril Hanouna’s show on C8, invites him every night, or almost. To the point that the presenter-businessman offered him a position as a paid columnist, which he is still reluctant to accept. A notoriety which protects him from reprisals, believes Jirnov: “Of course, the Russians can always kill me, but now that I am a little known, it would make noise. Even more than Skripal”.
Above all, the defector takes a dazzling revenge. Because Sergueï Jirnov does not hide it, he had a hard time staying under the radar for so many years, he who left his homeland without a plan B. “I who am a mine of information, I was not never asked for anything”, he regrets. This reproach applies less to the media than to the secret services, which have always ignored it. An assertion not entirely true, since the spy tells us at the same time that the DST – ancestor of the DGSI – “debriefed” him as it should at the time of his asylum application. “I didn’t give them what they wanted”, says the refugee, we guess that he did not wish to swing his Russian colleagues who were “illegal” spies in France. “On the ENA, they said to me: ‘You have taken us for a ride’. They weren’t happy,” he adds. No collaboration proposal followed.
“The DGSI sniffed it out”
Since then, our spy, who dreamed of a job as an interpreter at the DGSE or a role as an outside consultant in a State service, in parallel with a position as a professor in geopolitics, has struggled to get angry: “The French secret services suck. We think we’re dealing with great chess players but they’re just arrogant. They neglect all the sources they have on their territory. Look, I’ve never been asked for anything, so that I did the ENA, and that I have a degree of expertise that no one has”. The veteran of the KGB probably suffered from the shift to the background of the Russian file in the French strategic priorities, from the 1990s. No doubt also that his profile as a former “illegal” smelled of sulfur. In fact, even the enarques of his promotion have often snubbed their former comrade. Valérie Pécresse, with whom he conversed, he says, when she was a deputy, curtly rebuffed him when he congratulated her on her appointment as minister in 2007. Madam Minister, nor with her entourage”, replied her director of cabinet, an email transcribed in The Pathfinder. “Elysée, Matignon, Quai d’Orsay, Defense, I was never offered anything, despite a few appointments,” sighs Jirnov, who keeps a few correspondents in the ministries, whose names he prefers to keep silent. During all these years, he earned his living in the private sector: “Companies are fond of consultants who know the world of espionage”.
Contacted, a former member of a French secret service tells us that the person concerned was in fact approached by the Ministry of the Interior, without follow-up: “The DGSI sniffed him for a while and judged that he was not was not interesting or too unstable”. A well-known “russologist” also believes that his profile can easily be considered suspicious: “My deep conviction is that you never leave the KGB, so it’s not a profile I would trust” .
Putin, an “underling”
However, it is difficult to dispute the interest of his career for “services”: Serguei Jirnov is one of those who met Vladimir Putin in his first life. “Insignificant, a little underling with a failed career”, severely details the ex-spy about his former comrade, who worked with the KGB in the 1980s and 1990s. The Pathfinder, he recounts his four funny interactions with the man who was far from letting anyone perceive that he would become the strong man of the largest country in the world. The first is the most striking: during the Moscow Olympics in 1980, Jirnov, who already speaks the language of Molière very well, must answer telephone calls from the French-speaking delegation. Because he had conversed for more than two hours with a Frenchman, the student was again summoned by a young KGB agent. There follows a tense interrogation led by the young captain Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin. “Your three-hour chat with a national from an aggressive NATO bloc country has been recorded and is currently being translated. If there is a discrepancy, would it be only one millimeter between what you tell me here and what the interpreters will give me, believe me, you will not soon forget me”, threatens the future head of state. The discussion stops when the Francophile says he knows Brezhnev’s grandson. Zealous but not reckless, Putin.
In front of the French media, Sergei Jirnov willingly shares his knowledge of Russian power, but also of the psychology of Vladimir Putin, whom he surprisingly “outed”, on February 24, at Cyril Hanouna, by lending him an old relationship with the cellist Sergei Roldugin. “Putin is a repressed homosexual”, he persists before us, before listing the “clues” which, put end to end by an “analytical” (sic) mind, would take on their full meaning. And to quote us… Putin’s taste for “sambo”, a type of struggle which supposes a “body to body” between the competitors, the nights spent at Roldougin’s house, told by the current Russian president in First persona book of interviews published in 2000, the marriage canceled at the last minute by his first fiancée or the kiss he placed on the stomach of a young boy in the Kremlin in 2006. Needless to say that the spy did not convince us on this point.
Machiavellian plan against the Red Army
He seems much sharper in his description of the strategist Putin, a political animal suffering from a “delusion of grandeur” and who knows better than anyone how to smell Western weaknesses: “He plays on Westerners’ fear of a generalized conflict, since the end of the Second World War. He says to himself “They will do everything to avoid this”. According to him, his ex-comrade only respects authoritarian leaders, namely Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Ramzan Kadyrov, the boss of Chechnya. To find out about the intentions of the character, Jirnov claims to correspond with a general of the SVR, who contacted him anonymously. For several weeks, the two men have been chatting live on YouTube, and it would happen to the mysterious soldier to deliver information on current operations.
In May 2017, Sergei Jirnov proposed to Emmanuel Macron a plan to win the esteem of the Russian president, which he sent to him by email via one of his acquaintances from the ENA – he says. This consisted in agreeing to receive Vladimir Poutine in Versailles while sending him a message of defiance by roundabout ways: “The idea was to make Poutine understand that Macron would be a strong man. I had thought of leaving of a legal case against a Russian company, publicized three days before his arrival”. The French head of state did not follow up. Too bad, because the spy had thought of everything. He had imagined attacking… the Choir of the Red Army, the orchestra of the Ministry of Defense, which tours the whole world: “We could attack them for false advertising and fraud: there is no no more Red Army since there is no longer a Soviet Union”. Pure Jirnov Side B.