From the first hours of the Cold War, the Soviets undertook multiple attempts to recruit within the French political elite. In the Mitrokhine archives, this defector from Russian intelligence who went to the West in 1992, a name stands out, which we are revealing today: Jacques Bouchacourt. Code name “Nym”.
The Gaullist parliamentarian, whose collaboration spanned more than a decade with the KGB, was, according to the same archives, paid by Moscow in “expensive gifts”. In this new episode of our series dedicated to Russian spies at the Elysée, Etienne Girard goes back in time and immerses us in this France of the Thirty Glorious Years, where the first circles of power were sometimes real nests of spies.