Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The Centre’s first instructions to the newly re-established Paris residency after the Liberation, dated November 18, 1944, instructed it to profit from the “current favorable situation” to renew contact with the pre-war agent network and recruit new agents in the foreign and interior ministries, intelligence agencies and political parties and organizations. Inspired by the success of scientific and technological intelligence-gathering in Britain and the United States, the Centre sent further instructions on February 20, 1945, ordering the residency to extend its recruitment to the Pasteur and Curie Institutes and other leading research bodies. 88The appointment of the ardent Communist and Nobel Laureate Frédéric Joliot-Curie as the French government’s Director of Scientific Research doubtless delighted the Centre. Joliot-Curie assured Moscow that “French scientists… will always be at your disposal without asking for any information in return.” 89

During 1945 the Paris residency sent 1,123 reports to Moscow, based on intelligence from seventy sources. Its operational problems derived not from any lack of agents but from a shortage of controllers. Up to February 1945 the residency had only three operational officers. 90In May MARCEL of the wartime HENRI group was instructed to set up a new group to assist in the penetration of the post-war foreign and domestic intelligence agencies, the foreign ministry and the political parties, and in re-establishing control over agents in the provinces. 91By November the number of operational officers in the Paris residency had increased to seven, supported by six technical staff, but there was to be no further increase for several years. In addition to recruiting new agents, the residency was ordered to check individually every agent recruited before the war. Unsurprisingly, its 1945 reports were criticized for lack of depth and insufficient attention to the most valuable agents. 92

The next available statistics on the intelligence supplied by the Paris residency cover the period from July 1, 1946 to June 30, 1947, when it supplied 2,627 reports and documents, well over double the total for 1945. It also had some major recruiting successes. In 1944 WEST, recruited by HENRI from the Resistance in the previous year, joined the newly founded foreign intelligence agency the DGER (from January 1946 the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre Espionnage (SDECE)), working first on the British, then the Italian, desk. His file records that he provided “valuable information on the French, Italian and British intelligence services.” Though WEST (later renamed RANOL) was dismissed in 1945 and moved to a career in publishing, he retained contact with some of his former colleagues. RATYEN, the first of his recruits to be identified in the files noted by Mitrokhin, was dismissed from SDECE in 1946. In 1947 WEST recruited two, more important SDECE officers, codenamed CHOUAN (or TORMA) and NOR (or NORMAN). 93

Soviet penetration was assisted by the chronic infighting within SDECE. In May 1946 André Dewavrin (alias “Passy”), de Gaulle’s wartime intelligence chief and the first head of SDECE, was arrested on a charge of embezzlement of which he was later found innocent. 94For the next few years Dewavrin’s successor, Henri Ribière, and his deputy, Pierre Fourcaud, were engaged in such bitter feuding that Fourcaud was forced to deny accusations that he had sabotaged the brakes of Ribière’s car and caused a near fatal accident. On one occasion, during the fractious daily meeting of SDECE division heads, Ribière drove his deputy out of the room with his walking stick. As one SDECE officer complained, “[D]ivision heads, finding themselves with conflicting orders from their director and his deputy, did not know what to do.” 95

In the year up to June 30, 1947, the Paris residency forwarded to the Centre 1,147 documents on the French intelligence services, 92 on French intelligence operations against the Soviet Union and 50 on other intelligence agencies. 96The files noted by Mitrokhin record that both CHOUAN and NOR worked on political intelligence (SDECE Section d’études politiques). CHOUAN was employed for a time in the American department of SDECE, but by 1949 was working on Soviet Bloc affairs. NOR specialized in intelligence on Italy. 97WEST was paid 30,000 francs a month by the Paris residency, and in 1957 was given 360,000 francs to buy a flat. 98Ivan Ivanovich Agayants, the Paris resident from 1946 to 1948, was fond of boasting of his success in penetrating SDECE. In a lecture at the Centre in 1952 he sneeringly described French intelligence as “that prostitute I put in my pocket.” 99

Penetration of the Foreign Ministry at the Quai d’Orsay proved more difficult. During a visit to Moscow in June 1946, the Communist trade union leader Benoît Frachon reported pessimistically:

The officials of the Foreign Ministry represent a very closed caste… well known for their reactionary views. Our situation at the ministry is very precarious. We have only one Party member. This is the private secretary of [Georges] Bidault [the Foreign Minister], who knows that she is Communist—so we do not have total confidence in her. Among the diplomats in foreign postings, only the embassy secretary in Prague is Communist.

The Communist embassy secretary was almost certainly Étienne Manac’h, who went on to become French ambassador in Beijing (1969-75). 100Manac’h, codenamed TAKSIM, had first made contact with Soviet intelligence while stationed in Turkey in 1942. His KGB file describes him as a confidential contact rather than an agent, who provided information from time to time “on an ideological-political basis” until 1971. His information was clearly valued by the Centre. During his twenty-nine years’ contact with the KGB he had six case officers, the last of whom—M. S. Tsimbal—was head of the FCD Fifth Department, whose responsibilities included operations in France. 101

The KGB’s most important Cold War agents in the Foreign Ministry were cipher personnel rather than diplomats. Ultimately the most valuable and longest-serving agent recruited by the Paris embassy at the end of the war was probably a 23-year-old cipher officer in the Quai d’Orsay codenamed JOUR (transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet as ZHUR). The large amount of Foreign Ministry documents and cipher materials provided by JOUR were despatched from Paris to Moscow in what his file describes as “a special container,” and enabled much of the cipher traffic between the Quai d’Orsay and French embassies abroad to be decrypted. In 1957 he was secretly awarded the Order of the Red Star. JOUR was still active a quarter of a century later, and in 1982 was awarded the Order of the Friendship of Peoples for his “long and fruitful co-operation.” 102

The dismissal of Communist ministers from the French government in May 1947 made further Soviet penetration of the official bureaucracy more difficult. The Centre complained in April 1948 that: the residency had no agents close to the leadership of the Gaullist Rassemblement du Peuple Français, the Christian Democrat MRP and other “reactionary” political parties; it had failed to penetrate the Soviet section of SDECE; intelligence on the British and American embassies was poor; and inadequate progress had been made in penetrating the Commissariat on Atomic Energy and other major targets for scientific and technological intelligence. 103

A plan was drawn up to remedy these failings and to promote active measures “to compromise people hostile to the USSR and the French Communist Party.” Once again, Moscow was not fully satisfied with the results achieved. In the five-month period from September 1 to February 1, 1949, the Paris residency submitted 923 reports, of which 20 percent were judged sufficiently important to pass on to the Central Committee. The Centre noted, however, that “the requirement set by the leadership with regard to political intelligence had still not been adequately met.” During the eleven months from February 1 to December 31 the residency supplied 1,567 reports. Though 21 percent were passed to the Central Committee, the reports were criticized for failing to “reveal the innermost aspects of events” and for “not making it possible to identify the plans of ruling circles in their struggle with democratic [pro-Soviet] forces.” 104