France, nest of Russian spies? For nearly a century, Moscow secret service are active in France. To their credit, many recruits in the highest spheres of the State, most of whom will never be discovered during their lifetime. In many cases, doubt is permitted. Back in three episodes on three eras and three emblematic cases, with new elements.
© / The Express
The debate was settled for the first time twenty-eight years ago. In January 1995, four of the most prestigious historians, led by Serge Bernstein, professor at Sciences Po, and Robert Frank, professor at Paris I-Sorbonne, published a report on Pierre Cot. THE World echoes it and headlines: “The rehabilitated memory of a fellow traveler”. On the inside pages, another article is entitled: “Pierre Cot was not a Soviet agent”. It couldn’t be clearer. At the time, the debate caused a scandal. Pierre Cot, who notably served as Air Minister in the governments of the Popular Front, was one of the most brilliant “Young Turks” of the Radical Party in the 1930s, along with Jean Zay and Pierre Mendès France. His chief of staff was called Jean Moulin. During the Second World War, he went into exile in the United States after being deemed undesirable in London by General de Gaulle. Then he was elected deputy under the Fourth and then the Fifth Republic, under the colors of the Progressive Union, a party related to the Communist group in the National Assembly. Its action crosses forty years of French political history.
The work of the Bernstein-Frank commission responds to the investigative work of the essayist Thierry Wolton, The Great Recruitment, published in 1993. Wolton brings to light several testimonies hitherto passed over in silence in France. As early as 1987, Peter Wright, former deputy director of MI5, the British secret service, described Cot as an “active Russian spy” in his Memoirs, Spycatcher. Wright bases himself on the Venona project, a massive decryption of coded communications of the Soviet secret services, initiated by the United States. At the time, its content is not yet declassified. The passage will be redacted in French. In 1990, the British historian Christopher Andrew reiterated these accusations in his book The KGB in the world. According to a CIA officer he interviewed, Walter Krivitsky, head of Soviet intelligence in Western Europe, who became a defector in October 1937 and took refuge in the United States, also described Pierre Cot as an “agent paid by the Soviets”. . Wolton also notes, with great distances, the written testimony of the collaborationist painter Arthur Pfannstiel, questioned by the Directorate of Territorial Surveillance (DST), on October 8, 1945: “The searches enabled me to establish the following facts: Pierre Cot, former Air Minister, had receipts at his home which established with certainty that he had received large sums of money from the Soviets to finance his last pre-war electoral campaign. But Pfannstiel is a member of the Gestapo; his testimony is of little value.
Codename: “Daedalus”
The Bernstein-Frank commission focuses on the information that Pierre Cot was able to transmit to the Soviets. She concludes that there is nothing to show that Cot transmitted confidential information to agents he knew were in the pay of the USSR. “The only reservation to this conclusion is that it is impossible in the present state of things to be certain that all the available archives have been stripped”, add the historians cautiously. Precisely, in August 1995, the archives of the Venona project were declassified by the NSA, the American National Security Agency, which made these documents available to the public in open source on the Internet. We discover that, from 1942, the NKVD, the ancestor of the KGB, gave Pierre Cot the code name “Daedalus”. Vassili “Zoubilin” (Zaroubin, of his real name), the resident of the NKVD in the United States, is his agent handler. On July 8, 1943, in a communication decrypted by the NSA, Zoubilin transmitted to Moscow a report by Daedalus on the French Committee in Algiers. It is a question of the projects of General de Gaulle, whose code name is “RAS”, and of André Dewavrin, known as “Colonel Passy”, head of the secret services of the Resistance. “The Passy group set up a secret organization in France with the mission of seizing power after the war and forming a dictatorship led by RAS,” writes Pierre Cot, according to Zoubiline. Clearly, the former minister is making the worst accusations about the designs of Gaullism, with the Russian secret services. In another correspondence decrypted by the NSA, Zoubilin sends the NKVD a list of French officials, with this comment: “We control them all through Daedalus.”
This later revelation convinced the historian Sabine Jansen, member of the Bernstein commission and author of a doctoral thesis on Pierre Cot, to mention the Venona project in the notice she devotes to the former minister in the encyclopedia Master. “A telegram dated July 1, 1942, from Moscow and intended for the Soviet consulate in New York, mentions an engagement by Pierre Cot (in English, the words used, ‘the signing on’, are those normally used when a man enters the service of a foreign power) under the pseudonym of ‘Daedalus’ (Daedalus)”, notes the researcher, who admits that there is at least a serious doubt on the implication of Cot But she refuses to decide, insofar as many correspondences could not be decrypted by the Americans: “It remains difficult, however, to assess the nature and scope of this collaboration due to the incomplete nature of the sources concerned – of the 2,600 messages sent from New York to Moscow in 1942 and 1943, only 223 could be decrypted.”
Thereafter, Pierre Cot will go to the USSR. For five months in 1944, between March and July, he was on a mission to Moscow for the French National Liberation Committee, for which he studied the possibilities of cooperation between liberated France and the USSR. He ends up delivering a typed report of more than a hundred pages, in which he shows himself very enthusiastic about the prospect of a “Franco-Soviet friendship [dont les] benefits [sont] at the same time so numerous and so obvious that it is not necessary to insist on it much”. “The Soviet rapprochement corresponds to the instinct of the French people”, he pleads.
Until recently, French counter-espionage had never wanted to comment on the Cot case. In a book published in October 2022 by Mareuil Editions, The DST on the Cold War front, Jean-François Clair, Michel Guérin and Raymond Nart, three former members of the secret services, finally approach the subject. Their conviction is clear. “He had had his pre-war electoral campaigns financed by the Soviets, among other connivances”, write the counter-spies, whose work has been reread by the high hierarchy of the DGSI. “Pierre Cot was an agent of influence”, they conclude, confirming also his involvement in the documents of the Venona project. There remain gray areas that have never been clarified, despite several hypotheses: who would have been Cot’s agent? From when and until when would he have been the spy for the Soviets? The former minister was never worried about these facts. His relatives have always denied that he could have been an agent of the East.