Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The Paris residency’s most ambitious active measure during de Gaulle’s decade as President of the Fifth Republic was to fund a new news agency, the Centre d’Information Scientifique, Économique et Politique, founded in 1961 by Pierre-Charles Pathé, a newly recruited KGB agent codenamed PECHERIN (later MASON). The journalist son of the millionaire film magnate who had founded Pathé newsreels, he had first come to the residency’s attention two years earlier after publishing a naively pro-Soviet Essai sur le phénomäne soviétique:

The cruelties of Stalinism were only childhood illnesses. The victory of the Soviet Union is that of a correct vision of the march of history. The USSR, this laboratory of new ideas for the most advanced development of society, will overtake the gigantism of the United States.

From 1961 to 1967 the KGB paid Pathé 6,000 francs a month to publish a weekly newsletter (codenamed OBZOR) from his center, which was sold by subscription but sent free of charge to opinion-formers in politics, business, journalism and diplomacy. 37

The main purpose of the active measures implemented by Pathé and the Paris residency’s other agents of influence during the early Fifth Republic was to damage Franco-American relations, encourage a Franco-Soviet rapprochement and distance France from NATO. 38Saar-Demichel reported progress on all three fronts. His finest hour as a KGB agent came during a visit to Moscow to negotiate the sale of the French SECAM color system to Soviet television in March 1965, when he told his controller that de Gaulle wished to visit the Soviet Union in the following year. De Gaulle, he claimed, attached no importance to Franco-Soviet ideological differences and had told him:

Russia was, is, and would continue to be a great power in Europe. The outstanding qualities of the Russian people remained the same whatever the ideology of the Communist government, but at the present time Communist ideology acted as a bond which held together this vast multinational federation. However, it was not ideology but reasons of state which played the main role.

As for the reunification of Germany, to which the Soviet Union was resolutely opposed, de Gaulle wished to postpone it as long as possible: “The later, the better.” A doubtless exultant Centre passed on Saar-Demichel’s message to the Central Committee. 39

It remains unclear whether, as the KGB believed, the êlysée had asked Saar-Demichel to sound out Moscow on the question of a state visit—or whether, knowing de Gaulle’s wishes, he took the initiative himself. The Centre, however, claimed much of the credit for de Gaulle’s decision to distance France from NATO and improve relations with the Soviet Union. 40In March 1966 France withdrew from the integrated NATO command. Three months later de Gaulle made a triumphal state visit to the Soviet Union. The KGB had, in reality, little influence on either decision. Ever since the United States and Britain had rejected his proposal early in the Fifth Republic to join with France in a three-power directorate at the head of NATO, de Gaulle had been increasingly inclined to distance himself from it. His attempt to use the Soviet Union as a counterweight to American influence in Europe went back to his wartime years as leader of the Free French, when Roosevelt and Churchill had failed to treat him as an equal. “Ah, Monsieur le Secrétaire Général,” he told Brezhnev during his visit to Moscow, “how happy we are to have you to help us resist American pressure—just as we are pleased to have the United States to help us resist pressure from the Soviet Union!” But if—contrary to the private boasts of the Centre—KGB active measures did not determine de Gaulle’s foreign policy, they played at least a minor role in reinforcing his conviction that the Soviet Union was a traditional great power with an increasingly thin Communist veneer. His report to the French cabinet on his state visit to Russia concurred with the views expressed by Saar-Demichel. The Soviet Union, de Gaulle declared, was “evolving from ideology to technocracy:

I did not talk to anyone who told me, “I am a Communist militant or a party leader”… If one leaves aside their propaganda statements, they are conducting a peaceful [foreign] policy. 41

KGB active measures may have had a somewhat greater, though doubtless not decisive, influence on the evolution of French public opinion. According to opinion polls after de Gaulle’s state visit, 35 percent of French people held a favorable opinion of the Soviet Union (as compared with 25 percent two years earlier) while only 13 percent were hostile. Those with favorable opinions of the United States fell, partly as a consequence of the Vietnam War, from 52 percent in 1964 to only 22 percent at the beginning of 1967. 42

After the apparent successes of the previous few years, the Paris residency saw little purpose in continuing to fund Pathé’s Centre d’Information Scientifique, Économique et Politique, on which it had spent 436,000 francs since 1961. The center closed and its newsletter ceased publication. Pathé continued, however, to work as an agent of influence, writing regular articles in national newspapers under the pseudonym “Charles Morand.” From January 1967 to June 1979, he received a total of 218,400 francs in salary, plus 68,423 francs for expenses and bonuses. 43In 1969 Pathé was one of the organizers of the Gaullist-dominated Mouvement pour l’Indépendance de l’Europe, which the Centre regarded as a potentially valuable means of destabilizing NATO. 44

KGB PENETRATION OF the French intelligence community continued during the 1960s. Mitrokhin’s notes record that at least four French intelligence officers and one former head of department in the Sñreté Générale were active KGB agents during the period 1963-6, but give few details. 45In the years after de Gaulle’s resignation in 1969, the quality, though not the quantity, of the KGB’s French recruits seems to have declined. The total number of agents run by the Paris residency rose from 48 in 1971 to 55 in 1974; in 1974 the residency also had 17 confidential contacts. 46However, the files seen by Mitrokhin contain no indication that the 1974 agents included any senior civil servants or intelligence officers. The KGB had also lost the services of DROM, one of its two leading agents within the Socialist Party. In 1973 he was given “substantial funds” to pay off his debts. Shortly afterwards, however, DROM was reported to be in contact with the DST. 47

The best indication of the main strengths of the KGB’s French agent network in the mid-1970s is a list of thirteen “valuable agents” of the Paris residency who, with Andropov’s personal approval, were given substantial New Year gifts in 1973, 1974 and 1975. In each of these three years JOUR was given a bonus of 4,000 francs; ANDRÉ, BROK and FYODOR received 3,000 francs; ARGUS, DRAGUN, DZHELIB and LAURENT 2,000 francs; NANT and REM 1,500 francs; BUKIN-IST, MARS and TUR 1,000 francs. 48Two reservations need to be registered about this list. First, it does not include the residency’s most important ST agent, ALAN, who was paid on a different bonus system. 49(The same may apply to some other Line X agents.) Secondly, three of the agents who received the New Year bonuses were foreign officials stationed in Paris who provided intelligence chiefly on non-French matters. DZHELIB was a staff member of an Asian embassy, who provided ciphers and other classified documents; 50REM was a Canadian in the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, who acted as an agent-recruiter; 51BUKINIST worked in a Middle Eastern embassy. 52The eleven French recruits selected for New Year gifts in 1973-5 do, however, give an important insight into the Centre’s and Paris residency’s perception of their main French assets.