Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

If Paris residency reports are to be taken literally, the “influence conversations” achieved some striking successes. Several leading French politicians from across the political spectrum as well as a few well-known academics, whom it would be unfair to name, are said to have adopted views on the threat posed by American defense policy, the future of East-West relations and the menace to French national sovereignty from a “supranational Europe.” Some of these individuals may well have been imprudent in their contacts with individuals from the Soviet embassy whom they might reasonably have suspected were KGB officers. It seems probable, however, that in many instances the Paris residency merely claimed the credit for policy statements which were relatively favorable to Soviet positions but which it had, in reality, done little to influence. Among the residency’s more absurd claims was the boast that KGB active measures “compelled” two of de Gaulle’s former prime ministers, Michel Debré and Maurice Couve de Murville, the latter the current head of the Foreign Affairs Commission in the National Assembly, to “defend France’s independence from the United States”—a policy to which both were already committed. Though the KGB also claimed to have brought influence to bear on close advisers of the President, Giscard d’Estaing, the Prime Minister, Raymond Barre, the Foreign Minister, Jean Franáois-Poncet, and the Socialist leader, Franáois Mitterrand, this supposed “influence” had no discernible effect on their policies. 102

KGB policy during the 1981 presidential election campaign was less clear-cut than during the election seven years earlier. At the end of the 1970s the left-wing alliance including both Socialists and Communists, which had supported Mitterrand in 1974, had broken down, and on the first round of the election he had to face opposition from the PCF leader, Georges Marchais, as well as from candidates of the right. Though KGB active measures in 1981 reflected greater hostility to Giscard d’Estaing and the candidates of the right than to Mitterrand, they were no longer, as in 1974, guided by the simple strategy of securing a Mitterrand victory. (It was clear from the outset that Marchais, who won only 15 percent of the vote, had no chance of winning the election.) The individual active measures recorded in the files noted by Mitrokhin suggest that bringing pressure on all the leading candidates was considered a more important objective than ensuring the victory of any one of them. As in 1974, however, the Centre seriously exaggerated its ability to influence the course of events.

In May 1980, Giscard d’Estaing had become the first Western leader to hold talks with Brezhnev since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, thus helping to rescue the Soviet Union from its pariah status in the West. In preparing for the meeting, Brezhnev’s advisers must have been greatly assisted in their continuing access to all the diplomatic traffic exchanged between Paris and the French embassy in Moscow. On Giscard’s return to Paris, he announced, perhaps somewhat naively, that the Soviet Union had agreed to withdraw one of its divisions from Afghanistan. 103Though Giscard’s attitude to the Soviet Union subsequently appeared to harden, the Paris residency embarked on active measures designed to persuade him that he would increase his chances of reelection by presenting himself as “the advocate of dialogue with [eastern Europe] against American domination.” Disinformation was sent to a member of Giscard’s staff which it was hoped would convince him that the most damaging scandal of his presidency, that of the diamonds given him by “Emperor” Jean Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, had been engineered by the CIA. 104The residency also claimed the credit for “inciting” attacks by the unofficial Gaullist candidate, Michel Debré, on alleged “departures from Gaullist principles” and pro-American tendencies on the part of the official Gaullist candidate, Jacques Chirac. Other active measures included schemes “to expose pro-Atlantic and pro-Israeli elements” in the policies of Mitterrand and one of his future prime ministers, Michel Rocard. 105

According to an opinion poll during the campaign, 53 percent of Jewish electors intended to vote for Mitterrand as compared with only 23 percent for Giscard d’Estaing. 106The KGB was predictably suspicious of Mitterrand’s popularity with Jewish voters. As in 1974 the active measures devised by Service A reflected the KGB’s anti-Zionist conspiracy theories, in particular its belief in the power of the French Jewish lobby. The most absurd of the residency’s operations during the election was probably its attempt to “compromise the Zionists” by passing bogus information to the French authorities purporting to show that they were planning “extremist measures” to disrupt the campaigns of Giscard d’Estaing and Debré. 107It is highly unlikely that this or any other active measure had any significant influence either on the main candidates or on the outcome of the presidential election.

Mitterrand’s success in May 1981 was followed by a landslide Socialist victory in the legislative elections a month later. Though the career of the veteran Socialist Party agent GILES, recruited a quarter of a century earlier, was by then almost over, he remained in touch with his case officer, Valentin Antonovich Sidak (codenamed RYZHOV), who was stationed in Paris from 1978 to 1983 under diplomatic cover as second secretary at the Soviet embassy. He continued to provide Sidak with what the Centre considered inside information from “the close entourage of F[rançois] Mitterrand.” 108

The arrest of Pathé in 1979 and the decision to break off contact with NANT in 1980 caused a major change of strategy in KGB active measures to influence the French press after Mitterrand’s election as president in May 1981. An unusually frank enquiry by the FCD Fifth Department concluded—probably correctly—that Synthesis, La Tribune des Nations and other periodicals funded by the KGB had had “practically no influence on public opinion.” In future the Paris residency was instructed to concentrate on the cheaper and more productive task of acquiring agents in established newspapers and magazines. 109The value of some of its existing media agents, however, was called into question—among them BROK, probably the KGB’s longest-serving journalist recruit. During the 1970s BROK had been one of the best-paid and most highly regarded French agents. A subsequent review of his work concluded, however, that he was “insincere, untruthful in his contacts with operational officers, exaggerating his information and operational possibilities, inflating the value of his information, and developing mercenary tendencies, lack of discipline and failure to carry out assignments.” In 1981 BROK’s 35-year service as a Soviet agent was abruptly terminated. 110The Centre continued to seek new agents among French journalists, but concluded that, in a television age, the Western press lacked the influence on public opinion which it had possessed twenty years earlier. 111

AT THE BEGINNING of the 1980s, partly as a result of the KGB’s declining confidence in its Paris agents of influence, the Centre probably regarded ST as the most successful part of its French operations. By the mid-1970s (if not sooner), the Paris residency had twice as many Line X officers and agents (over twenty of each) as any other residency in the European Community. 112Line X operations continued to expand during the late 1970s and—probably—the early 1980s. ST documents sent to the Centre (835 in 1973, 829 in 1974, 675 in 1975) rose to a record 1,021 in the first half of 1977. 113A total of 36 Line X officers served in Paris for all or part of the period 1974 to 1979, far more once again than in any other EC country. 114By 1980, if not before, France had become the KGB’s third most productive source of ST, providing 8 percent of all ST received by the Soviet Military Industrial Commission (VPK). 115