BY

Dominique Poirier

2019
 First printing August 20, 2019
ASIN: B07XBXLXH7
ISBN-13: 9781687670533
Book design and cover by Dominique Poirier.
Copyright © August 2019. All rights reserved.
This book includes a lexicon.
(3)
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations,
in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written
permission from the author.
 First, there was a god of night and tempest, a black idol
without eyes, before whom they leaped, naked and smeared
with blood.
Later on, in the times of the republic, there were many
gods with wives, children, creaking beds, and harmlessly
exploding thunderbolts.
At the end, only superstitious neurotics carried in their
pockets little statues of salt, representing the god of irony.
There was no greater god at that time.
Then came the barbarians. They too valued highly the little
god of irony.
They would crush it under their heels and add it to their
dishes.
—Zbigniew Herbert, From Mythology, 1962
 Contents

FOREWORD
LEXICON
PART I.
1. The French Intelligence Community in the 21st Century.
2. General Missions & Organization of the DGSE.
3. Recruiting & Training.
4. Protection of Secrecy, Compartmentalization, Security.
5. Human Resources.
6. Insider’s Lives.
7. Clandestine Lives.
8. The Lawyer & the Psychiatrist, Pillars of the DGSE.
9. Manipulating & Handling.
10. Elimination Methods: a. Social Elimination.
11. Elimination Methods: b. physical Elimination.
PART II.
12. The all-encompassing active measures.
13. Domestic Intelligence.
14. Counterintelligence.
15. Monitoring Methods.
16. French Intelligence & Freemasonry.
17. The Databases of the French Intelligence Community.
18. Manipulating Groups, Crowds, & Masses.
19. Social & Cultural Trends Shaping.
20. Domestic Influence & Counterinfluence.
21. On the Use & Monitoring of the Media in France.
22. COMINT / ROEM.
PART III.
23. The Special Relationship between France and Russia.
24. Policy, Objectives & Targets.
25. Strategies, Tactics, Methods.
26. Influence.
27. French Intelligence Activities in the United States.
28. French Intelligence Activities in Switzerland.
NOTES.
 FOREWORD
BY THE AUTHOR

The Cold War accustomed people to hearing about the

KGB, GRU, CIA, NSA, MI5, and MI6, without forgetting the
Mossad. Then prolific writers and film directors further
popularized these acronyms and the latter name. Today, only a
small minority of professionals in intelligence can cite other
intelligence services. Even the SVR RF that succeeded the
Soviet KGB in 1992 is largely unknown, although the new
foreign intelligence agency of the Russian Federation has been
active in the past twenty-eight years as its predecessor was
during the Cold War. The French foreign intelligence service,
the DGSE, is even better known. The reputation of France in
espionage is not overrated, but the ignorance of the SVR RF
should surprise, be it said in passing.
Indeed, in the four past decades or so, France extended
increasingly her intelligence activities in a way
incommensurate to her size and corresponding needs, starting
in 1982, exactly. Yet the popular French TV series The Bureau
and the media tell nothing on the latter reality. The French
intelligence community is currently employing tens of
thousands of people full-time; that is to say, much more than
other countries of larger sizes and with similar economies do.
This book purports to describe in detail this reality and its
causes. Without spoiling the pleasure of the reader, I can say
already that the spectacular increase of French intelligence
activities lays on a policy of stringent domestic surveillance,
on an aggressive yet little known rivalry with the United States
and the closest allies of this country, and on important political
and economic interests that France has in continental Africa.
In spite of its thickness, this book says about nothing on the
latter region, simply because its author never partook in
African affairs.
Chapter after chapter, the reader will learn that the
extraordinary importance France gives to her capacities in
domestic spying and foreign intelligence at last gave birth
indeed to a fully-fledged industry with an economy of its own.
We find in it a permanent and active cooperation mixing
numerous private businesses, the military, and a number of
civilian public bodies; a situation unusually encountered in
other countries if ever. One could say that France’s spy mania
could hardly remain a secret for long, given its ebullience.
Actually, the French spies resolved at some point to share their
passion openly with the public, to the point of promoting it
about as video gaming can be, indeed. I mean public relations,
thrilling video reportages on shadowing, never less than two
weekly interviews of former or active spies on television and
radio, enthusiastic press articles on telephone tapping, adds
touting the interest of a career in cyphering-deciphering and,
lastly, national exhibitions on real spy gadgets for kids. Of
course, a number of secrets of a much more serious sort
underlay the simmering new economic sector and the joyful
craze.
Since around 1980, the increasing French interest in
espionage led to the successive adoptions of hree important
provisions. Chronologically, they are the “doctrine of active
measures” from the early 1980s, which in the early 1990s
called for a “privatization of the services” i.e. intelligence
agencies, and in the 2000s, for “intelligence sharing between
agencies”. In early 2019, France had more than twenty such
agencies, most of which having been created in the past fifteen
years. The DGSE alone has more directorates, services, and
activities, than what says the would-be-sensitive information
this agency leaks regularly on the Internet.
The public is not supposed to know that France has been
relying increasingly on intelligence activities for her economy
and, in particular, to resume her commitment to a cooperation
with Russia that began as early as in the late 1950s. In 1966,
France disengaged partly from NATO, and the same year she
signed a treaty of cooperation with the Soviet Union about a
number of areas that formalized a relationship still inchoate at
that time. Twenty-five years later, in 1991, the Soviet-French
mutual understanding in science, technology, aeronautics, and
space, resumed as if naturally with the new Russian
Federation. How to turn round the subject of intelligence
activities when cooperating in such fields for so long,
especially with the Soviet Union and then with Russia?
What we can name the “Russian-French special
relationship” was never revealed to the French public until
recently, when a few French scholars, I name in this book,
were left free to publish a few works that question it publicly,
at last. Since 2017, a number of French senior executives in
the military and public service acknowledged openly the
existence of a relation with Russia, friendlier and closer than
what it truly is with the United States. At present, in 2019, the
justifications that the latter persons put forward for this
situation to exist are too many cultural and political
differences with the United States, and a geographical location
for Russia that would make this country “a natural extension
of continental Europe, with richer cultural and historical roots
in common”. For long, the arguments applied to the United
Kingdom. The so-called “Brexit” that began in 2017 seems to
come stressing further the endless actuality of this other
reality. If few journalists and experts in foreign affairs remain
shy on elaborating on the special relationship that France has
with Russia, they never demonstrated the same restraint with
discussing that of Britain with the United States, which France
ever perceived as an annoying fixture since Churchill stated it
publicly.
I am in the right position to say that countless times since
1961, the U.S. intelligence community caught red-handed
French spies involving in hostile activities against the United
States and its interests, in cooperation with the Soviet Union
and then with Russia. On a unique occasion, in April 1968, the
U.S. Government and the American media made the
extraordinary step to expose publicly the latter fact. Earlier in
1966, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson had pardoned France
for her mistake and claimed it unlikely to stain the long
friendship between the United States and France. Are
Lafayette and the Statue of Liberty by French artist Bartholdi
not reminding us the latter reality? Nevertheless, diplomatic
palavers hardly impress upon all those in the U.S. intelligence
community who are actively concerned by an opposite version
of the truth.
 Then why this reciprocal and unabashed denial bordering on
ridicule of a situation that is not a secret anymore, even among
the French public for the two past years at least? I explain this
in this book from the viewpoint of France. As for what U.S.
policymakers and spies are thinking of it when in private, I
have never been in position to listen to gossip corridors at the
White House, in the CIA, and in the FBI, and I cannot explain
all the motives, therefore, as they are several, I assume.
Although this book focuses on the DGSE and its activities,
it also paints an overall picture of the French intelligence
community detailing domestic spying and foreign intelligence
alike, as the DGSE takes in it a role of “mother intelligence
agency”. Although I did not quit this agency in good terms, to
put it mildly, yet I wished to explain all this with the
objectivity that befits a work of information the reader
expects. This explains why I limited my appearances in it to
less than fifty pages altogether; that is to say, each time I have
been a main actor in the anecdotes I tell, or when my personal
observations may help understand certain facts that would
remain obscure otherwise. Intelligence is a compound of
diverse and eclectic specialties that are not all exact sciences.
The requirement for a practice to be an exact science is
predictability in its effects, and an intelligence agency does not
want that those it spies on could predict its actions, of course.
—July 2019
 LEXICON
Of the Names, Words, and Acronyms
most Frequently found in the Book.
As it would be impractical to write a translation and an explanation to all acronyms and
particular words of French origin that often appear in this book, the difficulty justified a need to
add this Lexicon. Other words, acronyms, and expressions of French origin that do not formally
belong to the intelligence vocabulary are explained and translated between round brackets ( ) in the
text, or in footnotes. Hyperlinks have been created for this Kindle edition, and so the reader can
instantly access the definition of any of those particular words and acronyms by clicking on them in
the text while reading.
Agent: (same orthography in English). From an administrative standpoint, all French officials
are agents, from postal workers to employees of the national railway’s lines, to full time employees
of the DGSE, indifferently. Difficulties arise in the latter agency when using the word “agent,”
because it may mean a full-time employee of this agency or a field spy. When one means the later,
then one specifies a specialty / specificity at some point. Ordinary people and journalists use other
words and phrases improperly, such as “secret agent” and “special agent”. See also, Source.
Agent dormant: or “sleeping agent” or “sleeper” in English, is a spy placed in a target country
or planted in an organization not to carry on a mission at once, but to exist as a potential asset to be
activated eventually. Even when “inactivated,” a sleeper stays an asset anyway. A sleeper may play
an active role in espionage, sedition, influence, sabotage or else, by agreeing to act if “activated.”
Then many sleepers are activated under threats of eclectic natures because they were even not
aware to be counted on as agent initially, as it will be explained in detail.
Agent en place: or “agent in place” in English, is another name for “penetration agent,” used
once he successfully infiltrated a targeted group, company, or organization. It has the synonyms
agent infiltré and agent d’infiltration (“infiltrated agent,” “agent of infiltration”).
Agent provocateur: (same orthography and meaning in English). There are two broad sub-
categories of agent provocateurs, each evolving in opposite social middles, and whose usual
missions vary accordingly therefore, ranging from physical and harmful actions legally punishable
to intellectual interventions and public appearances as opinion leaders in contexts of influence and
counterinfluence. In both of the latter cases, the mission of the agent provocateur is to compromise
or to besmirch an individual or a group of individuals in some way, or to disparage an idea (political
or else), a religious belief, or even a country. In any case, the missions of the agent provocateur are
deception or some sort of entrapment. Since the early 19th century, the French intelligence
community ever used agent provocateurs intensively, and it has teams of skilled such agents acting
together in a concerted way, very elaborate at times. Nowadays, many agent provocateurs act on the
Internet in France and abroad. Recently, the mainstream media nicknamed the latter, “trolls” or
“state trolls”. Trolls are the most numerous and active during political elections and periods of
popular unrest in particular. Agent provocateurs of the latter sort are not novelty however, for they
seem to have been invented by Joseph Fouché when he was Minister of the French police, between
1799 and 1810. Frequently, the French intelligence community recruits as agent provocateurs, smart
and well-educated people, and even scholars at times, who however have a natural inclination for
treachery. The latter are made opinion leaders with the complicity of the French mainstream media;
in which case their role is a particular aim in domestic influence called catharsis par procuration
(“catharsis per proxy”). Others do subtle black propaganda against prominent characters, political
ideas, or foreign countries, by posing falsely as their proponent while acting in an excessive way
that actually does bad publicity against them; this is called “demonization by association”.
Frequently again, the French intelligence community uses agents acting under covers of journalists
to entice people to say a blunder on an interview or to present them under an unfavorable light, by
asking to them cunning questions. The French intelligence community hires agent provocateurs of
an entirely different sort to commit illegal acts (real or supposed), or to entice someone into
partaking in it, or into doing something rash to compromise this person ultimately. Finally, an agent
provocateur may claim to be who he is not in reality to lure someone into confessing his true
opinions or stance or a secret, again to discredit this person or to blackmail him eventually. The true
motives of agent provocateurs range from ideology, need to be noticed in some way, to boredom
and opportunism. Many of them are not on the payroll of an intelligence agency or of the police,
and are influenced or manipulated themselves in reality. A few of them are real agents working
consciously for an intelligence agency. See also, Appariteur, Occupy the place, Cut the grass under
someone’s foot (to), Bury (to), and Catharsis per proxy.
Agent Volant: or AV. See Flying Agent.
Agitprop or agit-prop: is a word of Russian origin (aгитпроп) and a contraction of the two
words “agitation” (агитаци ) and “propaganda” (пропаганда), which in this case means “to
communicate in a way intending to arouse popular resentment, negative feelings, dissent, and
protests and strikes if possible”. An action of agitprop is an aggressive narrative (i.e. black
propaganda) made of true or fake facts or of a mix of both. See also on Wikipedia.
Airgap or air gap: is a technical jargon in use in computer security indicating a computer or a
computer network (Intranet, generally) sheltered against all possible forms of intrusion, including
any possible data interception through electromagnetic signal interception (see also, TEMPEST).
Computers not connected to the Internet and running in rooms (underground and / or in bunkers,
generally) whose walls can stop electromagnetic waves, are reputed airgap.
Airtight: is an intelligence jargon word qualifying someone sturdy and trustworthy (ex. “he is
airtight”), after he has been put to the test. An airtight agent or employee thus proved that he is not
vulnerable to possible attempts to corrupt or even to coerce him, and to no other form of
psychological pressure and tricks. In French intelligence jargon and metaphorically, it is question of
“cuirasse” (“cuirass”) or “armure” (“armor”), and of faille dans la cuirasse (“crack in the cuirass”)
when a vulnerability is spotted.
ANSSI: stands for Agence Nationale de la Sécurité des Systèmes d’Information (National Cyber
Security Agency). The ANSSI reports to the SGDSN to aid the Prime Minister in exercising its
responsibilities about defense and national security. At first, the ANSSI seems to be a French
equivalent of the U.S. NSA, but it is not, and focuses instead on protection against cyber warfare.
The ANSSI assumes the mission of national authority in the field of security of information
systems. In this capacity, it is responsible for proposing rules applying to the protection of the State
and public information systems, and for checking the safety measures taken. In the field of the
protection of information systems, the ANSSI supplies a service for data monitoring, threat
detection, and alert and response to computer attacks on State-owned computer networks. The
ANSSI also provides its expertise and technical assistance to public services and companies
qualifying as sensitive or vital to the national interest, with a strengthened mission to the benefit of
“vital operators”–OIV. It is responsible for promoting trusted computer technologies, products,
services, national systems and expertise to officials and even to the public. It thus contributes to the
development of trust in the uses of digital (computer) technology in the country. The mission of the
ANSSI includes “monitoring and response,” product development for civilian companies,
information and advice, training, and labeling products and trusted service providers. Usually, the
ANSSI is managed by a director general who acquired his experience in the DGSE as Head of the
COMINT service, appointed by the Prime Minister and by decree. A Deputy Director General and a
Chief of Staff assist the former in his duty. The ANSSI is made up of the following five sub-
directorates.

1. Centre Opérationnel de la Sécurité des Systèmes d’Information–COSSI (Operational

Center for Information Systems Security), which guarantees the security and integrity of
the ANSSI itself and of its missions.

2. Sous-Direction Expertise–SDE11 (Sub-Directorate of Expertise), executes the overall

mission of expertise and technical assistance of the agency, and supports all other sub-
directorates of the ANSSI, ministries, private companies, security providers, and
operators of vital importance–OIV.

3. Sous-Direction Systèmes d’Information Sécurisés–SIS12 (Sub-Directorate for Secure

Information Systems), responsible for proposing, designing, and implementing, secure
products and information systems to the benefit of ministries, vital operators (OIV), and
of the ANSSI itself.
 4. Sous-Direction Relations Extérieures et Coordination–RELEC13 (Sub-Directorate of
Exterior Relations and Coordination), provides cross-departments management for the
external relations of the agency, the coordination of its interventions, and the drafting of
its regulations.

5. Sous-Direction Affaires Générales–SDAG14 (Sub-Directorate for General Affairs),

responsible for the programming and execution of the support and administrative
activities of the agency.

Within the COSSI cited above, the Centre Gouvernemental de Veille, d’Alerte et de Réponse
aux Attaques Informatiques–CERT-FR (Government Center for Monitoring, Alerting and
Responding to Computer Attacks) provides incident management support to ministries, institutions,
jurisdictions, independent authorities, local authorities, and OIVs. Additionally, the CERT-FR is
responsible for assisting the administrative bodies when setting necessary security measures. The
ANSSI has its own training center called Centre de Formation en Sécurité des Systèmes
d’Information–CFSSI (Information Systems Security Training Center), which awards a diploma of
Expert in Information Systems Security–ESSI. The annual budget of the ANSSI was in the
surroundings of 80 to 100 million euros in 2017, and it had a staff of about 650. The headquarters of
the ANSSI are located 51 Boulevard de la Tour-Maubourg, Paris 7th, that is to say, in the same
premises as the GIC and the SGDSN. However, most of its staff and its computers are located in the
Fort-de-Rosny of the Gendarmerie (Ministry of Defense), where are settled the headquarters of the
CNFRO, the CNFSICG, and the CNFPJ.
ANTENJ: stands for Agence Nationale des Techniques d’Enquêtes Numériques Judiciaires,
(National Agency for Forensic Digital Investigation Techniques). Created in 2017, it is an agency of
the Ministry of Justice “responsible for coordinating the efforts of the State in intercepting
electronic communications of criminal nature, and for supporting the rise of the National
Intelligence Collection Platform (PNCD). Additionally, and jointly, the ANTENJ defines the “tools
of the next generations” in domestic telecommunications interception. This agency, attached to the
Secretary General of the Ministry of Justice, replaces the former Délégation aux Interceptions
Judiciaires–DIJ.” In addition to facilitating to the Ministry of Justice the access to
telecommunications interception, the particularity of the ANTENJ is to provide the latter ministry
with legal authority

1. “to conduct technical operations granting accesses to intercepted intelligence and its
clear version [see Mise au clair] whenever a particular means of cryptology has been
used,

2. “to access private correspondence stored on the Internet (email boxes and cloud
providers) even when protected by computer identifiers and passwords, remotely and
unbeknownst to their owners and users,

3. “to set up a technical device whose purposes, without the consent of the persons
concerned, are the recording, fixation, transmission, and refined recording of words
spoken by one or more persons in a private or confidential capacity, as in private and
public places and vehicles alike, and of pictures of one or more persons in a private
place,” and

4. “to install a Trojan horse on any computer system (i.e. including cellphones).”

Additionally, the ANTENJ proposes regulations and suggests new tools for digital (computer)
espionage and monitoring techniques. Article 2 of the decree’s draft of this agency provides, for
example, that it may “be entrusted missions or partake in missions to define and to design data
collection tools or processes it implements itself, and that other public bodies implement within the
realm of their respective powers.” Finally, in the long list of its core competencies, the ANTENJ
intervenes within the jurisdiction of the judges, investigators, and of registries’ staff “and other
persons authorized to know the data that the National Platform of Judicial Interceptions–PNIJ
collects”.
Appariteur: is a word translating as “showman” in the specific context of French intelligence
activities. The appariteur belongs to the broader category of agent provocateurs. Those are
recruited in the lowest circles of the society because their missions are of physical nature
exclusively, and their expected qualities are to be totally devoid of any dignity and self-restrain in
anything. Appariteurs are hired to provoke verbally and physically individuals and groups of
individuals, either to humiliate or to bully them or / and to provoke them to lose their composure,
and to act in a way that will be harmful to them. For example, the relatively recent practice to
“pieing” someone is an appariteur’s job, as with the spectacular performances of the Greenpeace
activist movement and those of the Pussy Riot. However, in all of the latter well-known examples,
whether an intelligence agency hires, runs, or manipulates, those protagonists, or they act on their
own, always remains unclear, though this is of secondary importance in the absolute. Many people
act as appariteurs out of personal grief or just in their ambition to draw public attention on them.
Appartement conspiratif: or “conspiratorial apartment” literally, translates as “safe house” in
English intelligence jargon. It is an anonymous and uninhabited apartment or house used for secret
meetings, generally. In the DGSE, safe houses are used frequently for testing would-be-recruits,
one-to-one sensitive courses and trainings, debriefings of sensitive sorts, and for any other purpose
claiming great secrecy and safety. A safe house can be a building apartment in a city, or a house
isolated in the countryside. Usually, the inside of a safe house must have all characteristics of an
inhabited place, with furniture, tableware and kitchenware, etc., sometimes in order to lure a guest
to believe his host lives in it indeed.
ARCEP: stands for Autorité de Régulation des Communications Électroniques et des Postes
(Regulatory Authority for Electronic Communications and for the Post Offices). This public body is
analogous to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission–FCC, except that, in France,
regulations on the radio electric spectrum fall under the authority of an another services named
Agence Nationale des Fréquences–ANFR (National Agency for Radio Frequencies). Its address is 7
Square Max Hymans, Paris 15th.
Arrachage: is a French intelligence slang word difficult to translate in English otherwise than
“tearing off,” meaning “temporarily abducting someone or luring him into going by his own to a
place where his assassination is staged, either in order to make him talk or with the intent to recruit
him under duress”. The goal of an arrachage is to create a psychological shock, a trauma in all
cases. In France as in certain communist countries, arrachage may also be, at the same time, a
particular ordeal concluding the final stage of a recruitment to put the recruit to the test and to give
to him a foretaste of his sanction if ever he betrays.
Barbouze: is a pejorative and popular noun denoting a spy hired to do shadow operations, dirty
tricks, and odd tasks of criminal nature claiming the absence of any moral concern. See here for a
detailed description.
Barbu: is a slang word meaning “bearded man”. In the intelligence agencies of the police (DST,
RG, SCRT, DR-PP, and DGSI) it denotes colloquially a Muslim fundamentalist or a Muslim
terrorist, Ex., “He is a bearded man”.
Besoin d’en connaître: See Need-to-know. It is the exact French translation of “need to know”
in English-speaking intelligence agencies.
BCRA: or Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (Central Bureau for Intelligence and
Operations), was the name given to the WWII-era forerunner of the SDECE from July 1940 to
November 1943, under the lead of André Dewavrin aka “Colonel Passy” (see here and here about
Dewavrin).
BCRP: stands for Bureau Central du Renseignement Pénitentiaire (Central Bureau of
Penitentiary Intelligence). It is an intelligence agency of the French Ministry of Justice created in
2017, whose official mission is the fight against terrorism and organized crime, and greater
effectiveness in the monitoring of underground activities in prisons. To fulfill its missions, the
BCRP relies largely on telecommunications interception, and on a network of informants in prisons
called “moutons,” or “sheep,” specifically. The BCRP replaces a cell-sized body that had a staff of
10 only, previously created in 2003. Its annual budget was about 4 million Euros in 2017, for a staff
of about 50. Its address is 35 Rue de la Gare, Paris 19th.
BDRIJ: or Brigade Départementale de Renseignements et d’Investigations Judiciaires, formerly
Brigade Départementale de Renseignements Judiciaires–BDRJ (Departmental Brigade of Criminal
Intelligence). It is a unit of the Gendarmerie responsible for centralizing, guiding, disseminating,
and exploiting, national cards and files databases relating to wanted individuals and vehicles, and to
carry out criminal crosschecking at profit from units. There is one BDRIJ bureau per French region.
Less officially, the BDRIJ is also a regional unit of domestic intelligence responsible for filtering
and archiving domestic intelligence collected and sent by local Gendarmerie stations.
BfV: or Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the
Constitution), is the domestic security agency of Germany, equivalent to the DGSI in France and to
the counterintelligence and counterterrorism divisions of the FBI in the United States.
Blanc: intelligence jargon meaning “blank copy”. A blank is a document reporting anonymously
secret matters, highly sensitive, generally though not necessarily. The use of blanks in French
intelligence is a very old practice, and the word to name it would date back to the end of the 18th,
though it may be much older, very possibly. The practice of recording and transmitting highly
sensitive intelligence on blanks remains common in several French intelligence agencies, if not all.
BND: or Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service) is the German foreign
intelligence agency of Germany, equivalent to the DGSE in France and to the CIA in the United
States.
Boîte: or “box” literally, but translating colloquially “firm,” or “company” in France, for a long
time remains in use to name anonymously “the DGSE” inside this agency, said, la Boîte (“the
Firm”). However, as it is popular in France to call the firm any public or private company one works
for, thus it is safe to use this word even publicly without arousing the attention of anyone. For
example, employees in other intelligence agencies do the same either, and even police officers in
plain clothes when talking between themselves casually about their corps or police station.
Boîte-aux-lettres morte: aka BLM translates “dead drop” in intelligence jargon in English-
speaking countries. A dead drop is an anonymous and natural cache, such as a gap in a wall or
similar, in which a flying agent retrieves secret messages, money, or a specific espionage device, left
by a courier or the reverse. Therefore, a dead drop must be located in a place “that belongs to
nobody,” since anything is hidden in it incriminates the two parties that use it. An additional safety
measure is not to use a same dead drop several times or even just twice. The choice of a spot for a
dead drop is function of the inventiveness of a spy, based on an earlier teaching itself acquired from
experience. For example, the spy may conceal what he wants to send to his agency or reciprocally in
a waterproof box, which he will hide under a particular stone in a stream lost in the woods.
Although the dead drop is an old espionage trick, this means of communication stays in use
nowadays for sending and receiving things that cannot be sent on the Internet or through Bluetooth
or Wi-Fi wireless communication exchange between two parties. In intelligence jargon, a dead drop
is “chargée” (loaded) or “vide” (empty) accordingly. When an agent has “loaded a dead drop,” he
must let his correspondent know that it is. To the latter end, he must send to him a signal whose
nature also depends on his inventiveness. Then the signal can be a colored light left on during a
whole night in a room, which can be seen from a distance therefore, a sign, a small sticker, or a
chalk mark against a particular wall or in a bus shelter, etc. The two parties agreed previously on
precise days when a dead drop must be loaded, so as not to waste their time and take risks with
looking every day for checking the dead drop. For example, the B party must check every Monday
or the 4th of each month at a precise street cornet, to see whether there is such a mark on a road sign
that is there, which can be done quickly and anonymously by car in passing at a normal speed.
Bornage: is a jargon word denoting one or several surveillance gears hidden near the place
where a target lives or works, in order to monitor his activities automatically and remotely. Bornage
translates as “land marking” or “marking out,” literally but deceptively. The surveillance equipment
in question can be a miniature video camera or a motion sensor hidden near or even in the main
entrance of the building where the target lives, in a tree across the street, or (formerly but no longer)
in a false kilometer marker called borne in France (whence the etymology of the word “bornage”),
atop a street lamppost, or anything else. Today, as spy cameras can be very small and inexpensive,
and with lenses whose diameter are not larger than a pinhead, there is no longer any need to conceal
them that way, and thus they are very difficult not to say impossible to spot. However, for some
years “bornage” may also mean, “tracking someone’s moves and telecommunications thanks to his
cellphone” aka geolocation because a cellular phone pole antenna translates as borne in French.
Since then, geolocating the cellphone of a target round the clock is also called “bornage”
colloquially.
BR: stands for Brigade de Recherche (Research Brigade), which generally is a Gendarmerie cell
specialized in criminal and intelligence investigations. This acronym must not be confused with BR
aka BRrens (see below).
BR (aka BRens): stands for Brigade de Renseignement (Intelligence Brigade). There are BRens
in the Gendarmerie and in certain particular units of the Army.
Brigade du Chef: is an old RG jargon word translating as “Chief’s Brigade,” to name a small
group of police intelligence officers, formally called Groupe des Enquêtes Réservées–GER.
Brigade Financière: or Financial Brigade, is one of the divisions of the Paris’ Police Judiciaire–
PJ (Judicial Police or Criminal Police) with a specialty in white-collar criminality. It is part of the
SDAEF, although the term “financial brigade” often is misused to refer to it. Due to the particular
nature of its mission, many of its employees are unofficial contacts of intelligence agencies. The
Brigade Financière works much as an intelligence agency anyway. The financial brigade is located
122 Rue du Chateau-des-Rentiers in Paris 13d, hence its humorous nickname “Chateau des
Rentiers” suggesting “where rich people live”. It is one of the seven specialized SDAEF’s brigades
domiciled at this address, with a staff of over 400.
Burner: see TOC.
Bury (to): or enterrer in French, is a jargon word used in influence and counterinfluence. It
means “covering” or “overwriting” an incriminating or / and sensitive information leaked to the
media—especially on the Internet nowadays—in the goal to make it difficult to find out or
disappear, or to make it deceptively appear to be of “secondary importance” or fake. The goal is to
“send” the incriminating and sensitive information to oblivion, as a sophisticated and discreet form
of censure. In France, the mainstream media resorts largely and very frequently to this method upon
instruction of the political power and of specialists in influence and counterinfluence. In case the
unwanted information can be found easily by typing a particular key-word, name, or title on the
Internet, for example, then the method (the more often used by French specialists in
counterinfluence) is to publish a score of web or blog pages, threads and posts on Internet forums
with the same key words, name, or title, but each containing an irrelevant information or even mere
gibberish. Then those junk web pages are linked to others with URLs. The latter method lures
inescapably Google search engine to ranking first those decoys in its search result’s pages, due to
their greater recurrences and URL links suggesting “greater popularity”. Thus, the latter results
“push” the unwanted web page down the list. Then within a week, an undesirable web page can be
thus ranked several Google pages or results down under, with the expected effect to discourage
those who are looking for it, or to lure them to believe “it is uninteresting because it does not rank
high among the most popular results”. As other example, in the media, when the release of an
embarrassing news cannot be avoided, lest of an accusation of blatant censorship, then this news is
quickly followed by a breaking news, or by a rather ordinary news on which much emphasis is
given in order to make it appear as “more interesting”. On the next day, the media will not talk again
about the disturbing news to be buried, so that the public, overwhelmed by the emphasis given to
several other news quickly forgets it. Then someone deletes the unwanted news a week or month
later or makes its URL hard to find on Google. Most frequently, today, and still on the Internet,
state’s censors resort to this method to divert the attention of the public away from the unwelcomed
public release of incriminating and embarrassing news. Additionally, since Amazon launched self-
publishing in France, the intelligence community goes as far as to make publish a book in
emergency in the goal to bury another one, self-published, whose content is embarrassing to the
government. Then the former is media-hyped upon its release and is presented as a “reference” on
the subject that the other that is unwanted yet tackled on first. As result of the latter contrivance, the
undesirable book that the media never mentions sells poorly and is quickly forgotten. See also
Occupy the place, Cut the grass under someone’s foot (to), Agent provocateur, and Catharsis per
proxy.
CA: stands for Connaissance et Anticipation (Knowledge and Anticipation). It is a much formal
rule (a reminder, actually) intending to remind “for the record” what are the main mission and
purpose of intelligence (in five elementary points), in military intelligence especially. The latter five
points are the followings.
 1. Intelligence gathering,

2. Knowledge of potential areas of operations.

3. Diplomatic action.

4. Prospective approach.

5. Control of intelligence (transmission, interoperability, protecting, crosschecking).

CA must not be confused with the “4 stages of the cycle of intelligence,” more specifically used
in COMINT units.
CAEG: stands for Centre d’Analyse et d’Exploitation (Center for Analysis and Exploitation).
Along with the CROG aka CROGend, it is one of the two branches of the SDAO of the
Gendarmerie, with a specialty in domestic intelligence analysis.
Caisse de résonnance: see Echo chamber.
Case officer: Officier Traitant–OT, also called “Mac” colloquially in French intelligence. See
here for a detailed explanation.
Caserne: or barracks in English, for long was a code word used to denote the headquarters of
the SDECE, and of the DGSE eventually. Few people still use it nowadays.
CASIT: stands for Centre d’Acquisition des Signaux d’Intérêt Terre (Center for the Acquisition
of Signals of the Army), based in Mutzig. See 44e RT. See also here.
Catharsis per proxy: translated from the French “catharsis par procuration,” is a
psychological phenomenon even unknown to Google in 2018. French specialists in domestic
influence rely on it preventively and essentially to defuse or to nip in the bud popular unrest. In a
nutshell, the masses of people in the country who have a discontent about an issue, a situation, or
their own situation, have a catharsis when a single person claim for justice on their behalf in the
mainstream media; that is to say, per proxy. They find relief and they calm down when listening and
watching this person because they believe he / she best voices their claims simply because the
media seem to accord consideration to him / her. This ombudsman of course is an agent of influence
who does this in the service of domestic influence, either knowingly or unconsciously, because truly
he / she is not in capacity to lead a protest movement or has not the will to, and has been selected for
the latter reasons. The appeasement of the masses remains durable even if the one who thus “speaks
on their behalf” does not obtain satisfaction because the former believe their grief is not ignored, at
least, and gives hope for change to them. At a smaller scale, the latter effects are the same as when a
plaintiff in a court considers that a lawyer defends his interests better than he could alone, even after
the case is lost. Very few people attempt to obtain justice by “other means” after they lost a case in a
justice court, and this behavior reproduces in all similar contexts and then collectively. Generally,
people calm down after they could openly and loudly express their griefs (psychological
phenomenon of catharsis), even when this did not pay off in any way in actuality. Psychologists,
psychoanalysts, and psychiatrists call “decompensation” the bout of revolt that catharsis may be. In
the latter context, decompensation refers to the inability to maintain defense mechanisms in
response to stress, resulting in personality disturbance or psychological imbalance. Any injustice
results in a stress to an individual who is its first victim. On the contrary, one’s ability to repress
indefinitely his normal need for an outburst of anger is “compensation”. People compensate in three
possible ways. The first is “positive compensation,” which consists in finding pleasurable activities,
for example. The second is “overcompensation,” characterized by a superiority goal, which leads to
striving for power, dominance, self-esteem, or self-devaluation on the contrary. The third is “under-
compensation,” which includes a demand for help and leads to lack of courage and fear for one’s
life. When people feel they have little chance to obtain justice because their opponent is as powerful
as a state, in the case that interests us, yet they find relief when an apparently strong and influential
person voices their complaint on their behalf, publicly and loudly. Thus, they feel as if everyone in
the country, at last, heard their griefs though per proxy only. That is why the French intelligence
community is looking permanently for people with a particular profile to fill the roles of
“representative of the worried people”. The profile must include self-confidence, charisma, a
particular ability to express oneself in public or / and in writing, a need for public recognition and
fame, and even certain recklessness. Nevertheless, those people must have an inclination for
treachery and deception or are vulnerable to corruption. The French intelligence community recruits
such fake representatives as conscious or unconscious agents of influence to serve the ongoing
mission of domestic influence. Usually, there is one such agent of influence per minority, who
represents them in order to rein in their discontent, thus guaranteeing public order. Media of
opinion, political, religious, and activist groups, take advantage of the psychological phenomenon
when under discreet control of an intelligence agency. See also Occupy the place, Cut the grass
under someone’s foot (to), Bury (to), and Agent provocateur.
CCED: stands for Commissariat aux Communications Électroniques de Défense (Office of
Defense Electronic Communications). It is a national jurisdiction Service headed by an inter-
ministerial administrator reporting to the Minister of Electronic Communications aka ART, attached
to the Service de l’Économie Numérique–SEN (Digital Economy Service) of the Ministry for the
Economy and Finances. The CCED defines and implements systems to warrant the legal
interception of national telecommunications on private operators’ networks; that is to say,
interceptions required by magistrates (Interceptions Judiciaires) or “interceptions of security” i.e.
domestic spying (Interceptions de Sécurité). The CCED is a provider to the ANTENJ (in charge of
the PNIJ), and to the GIC with respect to their interconnections and relations with private telephone
and Internet operators. Additionally, this public body partakes in defining international standards for
mobile communication (cellphones and related), in leading the work of the CICREST, and in
contributing to changes in laws and regulations in its field. The CCED works in close liaison with
the service of the HFDS and assists it in crisis management in electronic communications
(telecommunications and audiovisual) in particular. The CCED is located in the building of the
Direction Générale des Entreprises–DGE (General Directorate of Businesses), 67 Rue Barbès, Ivry-
sur-Seine, suburb of Paris.
CCSDN: stands for Commission Consultative du Secret de la Défense Nationale (National
Defense Classification Commission). It is an independent administrative authority that “gives an
opinion on the declassification and disclosure of classified information, in accordance with the
provisions of the Article 413-9 of the Criminal Code. However, the CCSDN has no power to
declassify information of military origin and of the intelligence agencies of the Ministry of Defense,
such as the DGSE, DRM, and DRSD.
CDSN: stands for Conseil de Défense et de Sécurité Nationale (Defense and National Security
Council), formerly known as CSI. It is an inter-ministerial body that evolved toward a restricted
council of ministers of a sort, chaired by the President since 2002. In 2017, the CDSN took over the
tasks of the Conseil de Défense (Defense Council), and of coordinating security and defense
policies and to setting their goals. The CDSN defines the missions of the military such as
deterrence, conduct of operations overseas, major crisis response planning, intelligence means and
objectives, economic and energy security, domestic security programming for National Security, and
the fight against terrorism. The CDSN includes the President, the Prime Minister, the Minister of
Defense, the Minister of the Interior, the Minister for the Economy and Finance, the Minister for the
Budget, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and other ministers for particular matters under their
responsibilities whenever necessary and on demand by the President (the decree of its creation
refers to the ministers of the City, Youth, Social affairs, equipment, and even National education).
The Secretary General of Defense and National Security who attend deliberations carries on the
secretariat of the Council.
Centrale: or “la Centrale,” translating “the Center,” is a cryptic jargon word that for long
denotes internally the headquarters of the DGSE in Paris. Its use was leaked in the media a few
years ago. Remarkably, the KGB used the same word to name the headquarters of the KGB’s in
Moscow, Центр (Tzientr’), or “the Center” or “Moscow Center”. Its earliest use in France would
date back to the 1950-60s.
Cercottes: is a hamlet in the Northern surroundings of Orléans, near the 123 Air Base of Bricy-
Orléans where the SDECE and then the DGSE trained recruits of the Service Action until the 1990s.
See also 44e RI.
CFIAR: aka CFIARS, stands for Centre de Formation Interarmées au Renseignement (de
Strasbourg) (Joint Intelligence Training Center [in Strasbourg]). It is a training center of the DRM
where the DGSE also trains people who must learn foreign languages to work in foreign
telecommunications interception. See also here and here.
CGE: stands for Centre de Guerre Électronique (Electronic Warfare Center), which is the
military name given officially to the underground secret listening stations of the DGSE and the
DRM (Taverny, Mutzig, and a third one in Southern France that collects communication
interception through submarine cables landing on the Mediterranean coast).
Chantier: is a jargon word translating as “demolition site,” which in the present context means a
mission of social elimination consisting in destroying someone’s social life and economic
capacities, so that this person be discredited, socially isolated, and deprived of a normal existence.
In the DGSE, a chantier, also called élimination sociale (“social elimination”), is referred to,
formally and internally under the code number “53”. The chapter 10 relates entirely to this
particular mission and its process. See also Code 50.
Cible: is the French equivalent of “target,” universally used in the fields of intelligence, police,
and special units, to name an individual, body of individuals, or else, who / that is the object of a
mission generally hostile. The common use of this word stems from a need to dehumanize someone
being the object of a mission, to prevent the possible occurrence of an affective bond or of feelings
of empathy and remorse in those who are entrusted a mission.
CICREST: stands for Commission Interministérielle de Coordination des RÉseaux et des
Services de Télécommunications (Inter-ministries Commission for the Coordination of Networks
and Telecommunications Services). This body acts under the authority of the CCED, and has
authority on subjects such as emergency calls (location, routing plans), the national cellular phone
network and cellphones jammers. The CICREST is also responsible for the monitoring of regulatory
and normative aspects covering its field of action, including, inter alia, changes in European
regulations.
CISSE: stands for Commissaire à L’Information Stratégique et à la Sécurité Économiques
(Commissionner for Strategic Information and Economic Security). The CISSE is a senior official
who is entrusted a mission of economic intelligence relevant to the French strategy in patrimoine
économique, or “economic / industrial heritage,” in France as abroad. CISSE works in cooperation
with relevant ministries according to guidelines defined by the Prime Minister’s SISSE. To this end,
he leads a network of correspondents working in relevant ministerial departments, and in French
representations abroad (embassies) wherever proper, to define and to implement the public policy
with a focus on the following areas.

1. Protection and promotion of the tangible and intangible heritage of the French
economy, particularly in the context of international operations conducted by economic
actors, including those involved in innovation.

2. Corporate compliance standards for foreign financial relations, corporate fraud and
corruption, and social and environmental responsibility.

3. Defense of “digital sovereignty”.

4. Strategies for standardizations.

Chef de Poste: or “Chief of Station,” denotes a senior intelligence officer sent for a long-term
mission abroad to represent legally and under diplomatic cover the foreign intelligence service of
his country.
 Chiffre: or “number,” in English, since the late 19th century and until today denotes in the
French intelligence community, the military, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs the service
responsible for coding, and decoding sensitive signals and messages. It is referred to internally as le
chiffre, or “the number,” even in French consulates and embassies. In French intelligence agencies
of the Ministry of Defense and in the military in general, this service often identifies itself with a
symbol or picture of an ancient Egyptian sphinx instead of a name.
Claque: jargon word in the DGSE translating “slap,” meaning, “To give a trash to someone
(employee or agent) to punish him”. A harder trash intending to cause serious wounds to someone,
for punishing him for a graver reason, generally, is called fessée (spanking).
Closed Source: translates source fermée in French, meaning stolen secret information
(intelligence) or information that is not publicly available. Less than 10% of all information that the
DGSE collects to produce intelligence is closed source. The opposite of closed source / information
fermée is called “open source” / information ouverte.
CNCTR: stands for Commission Nationale de Contrôle des Techniques de Renseignement
(National Commission for the Control of Intelligence Techniques). It is the new name given in 2015
to the CNCIS.
CNEC: stands for Centre National d’Entraînement Commando (Commando National Training
Center) is a training center for military elite units, located in Mont-Louis and Collioure. See also 1er
Choc, and 11e Choc.
CNFPJ: stands for Centre National de Formation de Police Judiciaire (National Judicial Police
Training Center). The CNFPJ is a training center for forensic investigators of the police and the
Gendarmerie. It gives courses to future directors of investigation, criminal identification specialists,
anti-drug relay trainers, environmental and public health investigators, criminal analysts, heritage
investigators, and innovative technology and computer investigators. The CNFPJ cooperates
occasionally with universities or the corporate world, and it teaches and trains employees with a
specialty in counterespionage and security in intelligence agencies. The CNFPJ would train about
3,500 people a year, and it is in the Fort de Rosny-Sous-Bois, 1 Boulevard Théophile Sueur, Rosny-
Sous-Bois, in the suburbs of Paris.
CNFRO: stands for Centre National de Formation au Renseignement Opérationnel (National
Operational Intelligence Training Center). It is officially a technical training center of the
Gendarmerie, which trains also intelligence officers of the French intelligence community, and more
especially counterespionage officers and staffers of the Security Service of the DGSE, DRSD, and
other intelligence agencies. This training center is located in the same place as the CNFPJ, 1
Boulevard Théophile Sueur, in Rosny Sous Bois, in the Eastern suburb of Paris, where are also
settled the staffs and computers of the ANSSI, CNFSICG.
CNFSICG: stands for Centre National de Formation aux Systèmes d’Information et de
Communication de la Gendarmerie (National Training Center in Information and Communication
Systems of the Gendarmerie). This training center of the Gendarmerie trains shortlisted non-
commissioned officers and commissioned officers of the Gendarmerie in computer programming
(on Linux in particular) and radio communications, along a cursus of 5 years (about 60 students
graduate as experts each year). The CNFSICG is located in the Fort-de-Rosny, 1 Boulevard
Théophile Sueur, Rosny-sous-Bois, in Paris’ suburb, where are settled the staffs and computers of
the ANSSI, CNFRO, and CNFPJ.
CNR: stands for Conseil National du Renseignement (National Intelligence Council). Created
on July 23, 2008, the CNR is a coordinating body of the French intelligence agencies, and part of
the Conseil de Défense et de Sécurité Nationale–CDSN (Council of Defense and National Security).
Its role consists in defining strategic objectives and intelligence priorities, planning the needs in
human and technical resources of specialized intelligence agencies and services, and coordinating
the works of the main agencies of the French intelligence community (DGSE, DGSI, DRM, DRSD,
DNRED, and TracFin) and other lesser-known agencies.
Code 50: is a DGSE mission code used to name particularly sensitive missions such as, hostile
recruitment under threat or by coercion (code 51), social elimination (code 53), and physical
elimination (code 55). All these missions are presented and explained extensively in this book.
COM FST: stands for Commandement des Forces Spéciales Terre–CFST (Command Center of
the Army Special Forces), command center of the French Special Forces, located in Pau.
 COMINT: or Renseignement d’Origine Électromagnétique–ROEM in French intelligence,
stands for Communications Intelligence. In French intelligence, ROEM subsumes COMINT,
SIGINT, and ELINT. See Wikipedia.
Commandos Parachutistes de l’Air: or Parachute Commandos of the Air Force, is a special
unit of the Air Force made up of four specialized commandos quartered, except one, in Orléans-
Bricy, about one mile west of Cercottes where the SDECE for long, trained recruits of its Service
Action. The four commandos are Commandos Parachutistes de l’Air n° 10, 20, 30, and another
Commando Parachutiste de l’Air n° 20 quartered in Orange-Caritat. Indifferently, the Air Force and
the COS use these commandos. In most instances and in peacetime, the Parachute Commandos of
the Air Force are tasked to guard Air Force bases. Connections with the DRM and the DGSE are
close.
Commandos Marine: aka Groupement des Fusiliers Marins Commandos–GrouFuMaCo
(Marine Commandos) is a special unit made up of seven independent, highly trained, and
specialized, commandos that are frequently entrusted shadow operations in French oversees
territory, abroad, and often at sea and in territories near the sea. The Commandos Marine is the
French equivalent of the U.S. Navy Seals, and connections with the DRM and the DGSE are close.
The Marine Commandos are part of the Navy force, and more particularly of the Commandos
Fusiliers Marins–FORFUSCO (Marines Riflemen Commandos), under command of the Navy and
the COS indifferently. With the Foreign Legion (Légion Étrangère), Marine Commandos share the
particularity to wear green berets. Overall, the Marine Commandos are 600 to 700, and are
quartered in Saint-Mandrier-sur-Mer (Marine Commando Hubert), and in Lorient (Marine
Commandos Jaubert, de Montfort, de Penfentenyo, Trépel and Kieffer). The Marine Commando
Hubert is the spearhead of the Commandos Marine and is selected to carry out the most delicate and
sensitive missions, exfiltration of agents and VIPs in particular.
Com-Rens: stands for Commandement du Renseignement (Military Intelligence Headquarters).
Since 2016, it is the organic authority of intelligence and military intelligence units of the land
forces (Army). It is meant to appear officially as a military body covering unofficial activities of the
intelligence community (DGSE and DRM), in foreign and domestic telecommunications
interception COMINT / ROEM in particular. In this sensitive context, it is specified officially under
the indication and acronym “hors Budget Opérationnel de Programme”–BOP (out of Operational
Budget Program). From an official standpoint, the Com-Rens is in charge of military training,
operational readiness, and of the trainings of the entire intelligence service of the land task force
(intelligence cells of the joint task forces B2, and regiments S2). In cooperation with the DRM and
the joint intelligence authority, the Com-Rens cooperates in the production of Army intelligence in
operational situations near and behind the enemy lines, by exploiting multi-capteurs sources
(“multi-sensors” sources), sophisticated technical possibilities, and specific spy gears (HUMINT,
COMINT, ELINT, SIGINT, IMINT). The Com-Rens cooperates with the DRM, DGSE, and DRSD,
tasking military units such as 1st RPIMA, Commandos Marine, and 13d RDP, in particular.
Confirmation bias: denotes “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall, information
in a way that confirms one’s beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less
consideration to alternative possibilities. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of
inductive reasoning” (excerpt from Wikipedia, “Confirmation bias”). Confirmation bias occurs often
in the DGSE—as in all intelligence agencies in the World—with consequences that may be costly,
dramatic, and irreversible. The American reader can find in U.S. history the case of Senator
McCarthy between 1950 and 1954, which in this country epitomizes the consequences of
confirmation bias. Confirmation bias in Communist Cambodia resulted in the eradication of half the
population of this country, with poor and illiterate farmers who were death sentenced on charges of
being agents of the CIA.
Contact: see extended description here.
Contre-espionnage défensif: defensive counterintelligence. See chapter 14.
Contre-influence: or “counterinfluence” is a general mission relevant to domestic intelligence
the more often, though not only, consisting in countering foreign influence permanently and in
taking preventive measures against it. Counterinfluence denotes also an occasional action or mission
aiming to countering a single influence action that is not necessarily foreign, and whose author is
only seeking to voice his claims. In the latter case, counterinfluence in the facts is a task consisting
in stifling dissent and in enforcing censorship in the country, which is an ongoing and daily mission
in France. See also Influence. This book explains counterinfluence and all respects, methods, and
techniques, with true examples. Internally, the DGSE in particular and the French intelligence
community in general name this generic mission contre-ingérence, or “counter interference,” even
when the action of influence to be countered is of domestic origin.
CORG: stands for Centre d’Opérations et de Renseignement de la Gendarmerie (Gendarmerie
Operations and Intelligence Center). See detailed description here.
COS: stands for Commandement des Opérations Spéciales (Special Operations Command
Center). It is the body coordinating the use of the French special units of all military branches
(Army, Navy, and Air Force). Similar to the USSOCOM or UKSF in the United States, the COS
was created in 1992. Unlike the USSOCOM, the COS does not have distinct psychological warfare
or civil-military action units. Its role is to direct and to coordinate missions assigned to special units,
often of a paramilitary sort in third-world countries and in Africa in particular. The COS is made up
of 2 cercles (“circles” or “tiers”), although it does not acknowledge officially the existence of any
tier 2 unit. Tier 2, or 2d circle, operators receive better gear than standard infantrymen do. They
have access to FN Scar rifles instead of the French FAMAS, conduct special missions and
operations, and are essentially special operation capable, though to a certain extent. The tier 1, or
1st circle is under the permanent command of the COS, and the 2d circle can be called in support. In
the end, the COS can command any members of the armed forces for special operations whenever
necessary, including from the Foreign Legion although this other and particular military corps is
officially detached from the Army. Connections between the units of the COS and the DRM and the
DGSE are close, to the point that the former actually is the permanent reserve of the Service Action
that in the facts is a virtual service of the DGSE. The units of the COS are 1er RPIMA, 13e RDP, 4e
Régiment d’Hélicoptères des Forces Spéciales–4e RHFS, Commandos Marine, Commandos
Parachutistes de l’Air n° 10, Escadron de Transport 3/61 Poitou, and Escadrille Spéciale
d’hélicoptères–ESH. Then in the 2d circle we find Groupement des Commandos Parachutistes–GCP
(Commando Parachute Group, formerly CRAP), Groupement de Commandos de Montagne–GCM,
Commandos Parachutistes de l’Air n° 20 and 30, and Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie
Nationale–GIGN. Overall, the COS and its 1st circle have a staff of about 3,200 men including
about 250 for the headquarters. A brigadier general or rear admiral, NATO OF-6 post, leads the
command. The headquarters of the COS are located in the 107 Air Base Villacoublay, in Vélizy-
Villacoublay. See also on Wikipedia.
Couper l’herbe sous le pied: see Cut the grass under someone’s foot (to).
Courrier: translating “courier” in English, is an agent with a specialty in clandestine deliveries
of highly sensitive messages, money, or material, and in delicate retrievals of intelligence that
agents and sources collect abroad.
CRAP: stands for Commandos de Renseignement et d’Action dans la Profondeur (Commandos
in Intelligence and Action Behind Enemy Lines). It is a special unit of Chuteurs Opérationnels
(Operational Jumpers) with a specialty in high altitude jumps, up to 10,000 meters with breathing
assistance aka HAHO / HALO, or MFF. The name of this special unit changed in 1999 for
Groupement des Commandos Parachutistes–GCP (Commando Parachute Group) for the funny
following reason, allegedly. On a day when the chief of the CRAP—a lieutenant-colonel—and a
U.S. military officer met each other on a NATO military operation abroad, the later asked to the
former if he knew what the word “crap” means, in English. The French answered “No”. Then the
French-English translator who was present during this meeting explained that crap means “shit”
(merde, in French).
CRE: stands for Centre de Renseignement Électronique (Electronic Intelligence Center). It is
the official name given to any telecommunication interception station, regardless of its size and
importance, and including ELINT and SIGINT stations.
Criblage: may roughly translate as “screening” or “clearing,” but means in intelligence jargon,
“investigating on the past and present life of an individual, in order to checking whether there is in it
any possible fact or clue proving or suggesting unorthodox or suspicious political, religious,
intelligence, or criminal activities”. Ex., “to screen a person.” The possible reasons for screening
somebody are numerous and various, ranging from inquiring in view to recruit or coopting him, to
bestow upon him a security clearance, to validate or invalidate suspicions of incriminating
activities.
Criblé: may roughly translate as “riddled,” literally yet incorrectly because it is a slang adjective
in intelligence referring to a person whose card / file alludes to suspicious or disputable activities.
For example, a person whose file reports about or suggests unorthodox political, religious activities,
or activities of intelligence or criminal nature, is said to be “riddled” / criblé.
CROG aka CROGend: stands for Centre de Renseignement Opérationnel de la Gendarmerie
(Operational Intelligence Center of the Gendarmerie).
CRT: stands for Centre du Renseignement Terre (Intelligence Center of the Army), located in
Strasbourg. Its staff was 90 in 2017, and was expected to reach 170 in 2018, and 200 in 2019.
CSI: former name of the CDSN.
CTM: stands for Centre de Télémesures Militaire (Military Telemetry Center). It is the name
given to electronic spying stations searching for spy planes, drones, boats, and satellites. Its works
are relevant to the field of ELINT.
Cut the grass under someone’s foot (to): is a counterinfluence method that consists in
forestalling a hypothetical action of influence, deemed hostile or detrimental to the national interest
or public order. For example, creating a political movement (or religious or else) or a lobby
expected to spontaneously appear anyway due to an ongoing social / cultural trend, to discreetly
control it eventually. For it is thought that, if not, then an unknown party potentially hostile,
domestic, or foreign regardless, is highly likely to do it out of any discreet control of the State. In
France, this preventive measure of counterinfluence / counter-interference is intensively used and
extends commonly in its principle to many things and notions, such as media and press articles,
books, websites and other online media up to fake forums, Facebook pages and online videos,
businesses, exhibitions, and more. See also, Bury (to), Occupy the place (to), Agent provocateur,
Catharsis per proxy.
Cycle of intelligence: see here.
DAT: stands for Détachement Avancé de Transmission (Advanced Signal Outpost). It is the
official name given to a military unit based overseas (but also in the French territory), responsible
for military telecommunications, telecommunication interception, cyphering, and deciphering. A
DAT is often used as cover activity for civilian and foreign telecommunications interception in
French overseas territories and allied countries.
DCPJ: stands for Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciaire (Central Directorate of Judicial
Police). It is the French national criminal police department responsible for investigating and
fighting serious crime. It is part of the National Police of France.
DCSP: stands for Direction Centrale de la Sécurité Publique (Central Directorate for Public
Safety). It is an active directorate of the DGPN (General Directorate of the National Police [of the
Ministry of the Interior]) responsible for the protection of people and properties, and for providing
assistance, ensuring public safety, and maintaining public order. As headquarters of all French
police stations, the missions of the DCSP are numerous therefore, but one of its service, the SCRT,
successor of the RG, is in charge of domestic intelligence.
DCSSI: stands for Direction Centrale de la Sécurité des Systèmes d’Information (Central
Directorate for the Security of Information Systems), replaced in 2009 by the ANSSI.
DCTEI: see DIRISI.
DE: stands for Directeur d’Enquête (Investigation Leader).
Dead drop: see Boîte-aux-lettres morte.
Defensive counterintelligence: or contre-espionnage défensif in French.
Degré(s) de conscience: or awareness degree(s) in English. See complete explanation here.
DGER: stands for Direction Générale des Études et Recherches (General Directorate for Studies
and Research). It is the name given to the forerunner of the DGSE before the WWII was over
definitively, from October 26, 1944 to December 28, 1945, after this agency was named DGSS for a
fleeting time. It was headed by Jacques Soustelle (see here, and here), a committed communist
whose role has been determining in the Soviet penetration of the French foreign intelligence service.
DGGN: stands for Direction Générale de la Gendarmerie Nationale (General Directorate of the
National Gendarmerie), which is the headquarters of the Gendarmerie. It is located 4 Rue Claude
Bernard, Issy-les-Moulineaux, in Paris’ suburb.
 DGSE: stands for Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (Directorate-General for
External Security). Its staff was 5,100 officially in early 2018, but it has an estimated number of
about 20,000 full-time employees in reality. The latter estimate, more realistic and established by
the author of this book, includes the large number of staffers and contractors working under public
and private covers, and under the guise of newly created intelligence agencies. In a chronological
order, it was named 2e Bureau from 1871 to July 1940, BCRA during the German occupation of
France from July 1940 to November 27, 1943, DGSS from November 27, 1943 to October 26,
1944, DGER upon the liberation of France, from October 26, 1944 to December 28, 1945, SDECE
from December 28, 1945 to April 2, 1982, and DGSE since April 2, 1982. The headquarters of the
DGSE are located 144 Boulevard Mortier, Paris 20th. As the more than 800 pages of this book are
dedicated to this intelligence agency, take the time to read it for further explanations.
DGSI: stands for Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure (General Directorate for the
Security of the Interior), which is the French counterterrorism and counterespionage agency. The
DGSI was created in 2014 from the merge of the RG and the DST, officially, and after it was named
DCRI temporarily from 2008 to 2014. The DGSI focuses its efforts on counterterrorism, although it
is theoretically responsible by decree for counterespionage within the French borders. The DGSI
works under the official authority of the Ministry of the Interior, and its staff is made up of police
officers in principal, who thus can carry arrests and custodies legally. However, in reality and
unofficially, the Ministry of Defense monitors all activities of this agency via the DGSE since about
1982. Its staff was in the surroundings of 3,500 to 4,000 in early 2018. The headquarters of the
DGSI are located 84, Rue de Villiers, Levallois-Perret, in the Western suburb of Paris.
DGSS: stands for Direction Générale des Services Spéciaux (Directorate-General of Special
Services). For a brief period, from November 27, 1943 to October 26, 1944, this name was given to
the French foreign intelligence agency, after it was named BCRA in wartime, and before it was
named DGER. Its head was Jacques Soustelle, who is largely accountable for the Soviet penetration
of the French foreign intelligence service at its inception. See also here and here.
Diabolisation: or “demonization” or “evilization” in English, aims to fabricating a bad
reputation, image, and discredit for an individual, group of individuals, company, political doctrine,
or a country. This action of influence, counterinfluence, or information warfare is presented and
explained largely in this book with true examples. However, the French intelligence community
favors the method of demonization and discredit “by association,” in order to shield itself against
accusations from the French public and foreign countries. Typically, in the former case, the
mainstream media, and smaller media on the Internet, are called in support to present
disingenuously a targeted individual or body as an associate with disreputable other persons, bodies,
or ideas. When the case concerns an individual and in particular, the French (and Russian)
intelligence community favors fabricated association to fantasies such as UFOs, World conspiracies
theories, occultism, black magic, and similar, in order to discredit rather than demonize him.
DIJ: stands for Délégation aux Interceptions Judiciaires (Delegation for Judicial Interceptions).
The main and particular mission of this small body within the Ministry of Justice is to find out
solutions to reduce the rising costs of judicial (i.e. criminal) telecommunications interceptions
because French telephone and Internet providers offer this access to the communications of their
customers at a cost. The latter need stems from a concerning rise of those cumulated costs, owing to
increasing demands from the justice, the police, and the Gendarmerie, to eavesdrop
telecommunications carried out by private providers, to geolocate cellphones and others devices 24
/ 7 in real time, and to intercept and geolocate SMS in the same conditions (metadata interception
and collection). As example, between 1995 and 2005, this annual cost knew an increase of 207%. It
has been planned that the DIJ be a sub-service of the PNIJ or merges with it eventually.
Diplomatie Scientifique: or Scientific Diplomacy, is an activity and a particular department of
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, called Mission pour la Science et la Technologie (Mission for
Science and Technology) in the unofficial service of scientific, technological, and industrial,
intelligence. See here.
Disgrace (or grace): “To be in state of grace” or the opposite, “falling in disgrace.” are cryptic
expressions in large use in the DGSE to denote promotions or sanctions respectively, be they
justified or even known or not. This book presents a number of true such cases, yet it does not
explain the cause exhaustively because they happen to be obscure. Actually, the use of the two
expressions never is completed with explicit reasons / justifications, and the concerned individuals
are left with understanding / guessing what the latter are or could be.
 DPR: stands for Délégation Parlementaire au Renseignement (Parliamentary Delegation for
Intelligence), which is the French equivalent of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The DPR is composed of four state representatives and four senators. Its efficiency is disputable for
reasons explained here.
DNRED: stands for Direction Nationale du Renseignement et des Enquêtes Douanières
(National Directorate of Intelligence and Investigations of the Customs). It is the intelligence
agency of the French customs, created in 1991. In early 2018, its staff was in the surroundings of
700 to 800. Although the DNRED is a domestic intelligence agency, it sends regularly its employees
and agents to investigate abroad, with a focus on tax fraudsters. The DNRED is located 2 Mail
Monique-Maunoury, Ivry-Sur-Seine, in the Southeastern suburb of Paris.
DOE: stands for Direction des Opérations et de l’Emploi (Directorate of Operations and
Employment). It is one of the directorates of the Gendarmerie headquarters, called Direction
Générale de la Gendarmerie Nationale–DGGN (Directorate General of the National Gendarmerie).
One of the four departments of the DOE, named SDAO, is the command center of the domestic
intelligence mission of the Gendarmerie, located 4 Rue Claude-Bernard, Issy-les-Moulineaux, in the
Southwestern suburb of Paris.
Domestic intelligence: popularly called “domestic spying,” is not supposed to exist in France.
Those who are concerned directly with this mission call it officially sécurité intérieure, which
translates as “security of the interior,” or “homeland security,” formerly sûreté intérieure, or
“internal security”. Down the hierarchy of responsibilities and in the Gendarmerie, it is called more
realistically renseignement de proximité, or “proximity intelligence”. The Gendarmerie and the
Ministry of Defense in general involve the most in domestic intelligence, leaving a little role in it to
the police and the Ministry of the Interior. The subject of domestic intelligence and its still more
sensitive corollary, domestic influence, in France, are explained in detail from the chapter 13 on.
Dosage: (same orthography and meaning in English), is a technique in influence applying to the
media mainly, and in news and information in particular, but not only. Dosage consists in making
difficult to identify bias, influence, and propaganda mixed with true and objective information,
news, and true or fictional stories. As the name suggests it, the message of influence must be mixed
astutely with neutral and objective content, in order for the author or agent of influence to oppose
plausible denial to it whenever needed. There are different types and intensity of dosage,
quantitative, quantitative, and duration dosage in audiovisual content in the latter case. As this
subject is larger and more complex than it seems at first glance and serves the two different means
of influence and manipulation, it is explained extensively and even exhaustively in this book.
Political newspapers and magazines of opinion do not need to resort to dosage, since their political
stances are openly claimed or implicit, and are honest consequently. Pending further explanations
and at the simplest, dosage can be summed up in the following and imaginary example in a
sentence, which is an exaggeration intending to underscore the desired effect. “He is a charming,
lovely, and honest person, smart and witty, well educated, and he is handsome in addition.
Everybody in the neighborhood myself included loves him, so much so that one can pardon his
fondness for drinking”. In this disingenuous statement, dosage is about 70% of praise for 30% of
negative criticism only, but the final and desired effect truly is 100% harmful, bad to the image of
the targeted person.
Dossier secret: or “secret dossier,” is a particular and very old French practice dating back to
the early 19th century at least, yet still highly sensitive and officially denied today. It consists in the
gathering of as many evidences of incriminating information as possible on somebody, grave
enough to be highly detrimental to his image and punishable by law preferably. Then the evidences
are used as many leverages guaranteeing the loyalty and obedience of this person, or / and to coerce
him into doing something he would never do otherwise. Dossier secrets concern people expected to
rise the social ladder, only, such as senior officials. Ordinary French people having few or no
responsibilities have a police fiche (card) instead. Every prominent person or / and having public
notoriety in France, up to the President himself, has a dossier secret. Until the WWII, special
services of the police were the keepers of dossier secrets. The SDECE and then the DGSE took over
their keeping since 1945. The subject will arise again with a number of true examples and
anecdotes.
DPSD: stands for Direction du Renseignement et de la Sécurité de la Défense (Directorate of
Intelligence and Security for the National Defense). It is the former name of the DRSD between
1981 and 2016, earlier named Direction de la Sécurité Militaire–DSM (Directorate of Military
Security).
 DIRISI: stands for Direction Interarmées des Réseaux d’Infrastructure et des Systèmes
d’Information (Joint Directorate for the Infrastructure Networks and Information Systems). It is a
military telecommunication joint task force created in 2004. The DIRISI comes in support to the
DGSE and to the DRM for telecommunications interception overseas. The headquarters of the
DIRISI is located in the Fort de Bicêtre, Kremlin-Bicêtre, in the southern suburb of Paris, and its
considerable staff was about 7,300 military and civilians in early 2018. In 2006, the DIRISI merged
with the Direction Centrale des Télécommunications et de l’Informatique–DCTEI (Central
Directorate for Telecommunications and Computer Technology) of the Army. In 2007, it merged
with the Commandement Air des Systèmes de Surveillance, d’Information et de Communications–
CASSIC (Air Command for Surveillance and Information and Communications Systems). In 2008,
it merged again with the Service des Systèmes d’Information de la Marine–SERSIM (Navy
Information Systems Service). Finally, this organization represents the only operator of defense
telecommunications, allowing a global control of all communications between military staffs in
territorial France and forces deployed in operations abroad—whichever their corps of belonging are
—notably thanks to satellite links control (SYRACUSE and Telcomarsat satellites), and to the
backbone network of metropolitan infrastructure networks (SOCRATE).
DRM: stands for Direction du Renseignement Militaire (Directorate of Military Intelligence). It
is the French military intelligence agency, equivalent to the DIA in the United States and to the
GRU in Russia. The DRM works in close partnership with the DGSE on civilian and military
telecommunications interception in particular, and in intelligence activities abroad. The DRM
succeeded the 2d Bureau in 1992—although it is stated officially that the 2d Bureau disappeared in
1940. In early 2018, its staff was 1,800 officially.
DR-PP: stands for Direction du Renseignement de la Préfecture de Police de Paris (Intelligence
Directorate of the Paris Police Préfecture). It is the intelligence agency of the police of Paris,
specifically, with a specialty in domestic intelligence. Created in 2008, it actually is the new name
given to the RG of the police of Paris, formerly called RG-PP. Still officially or half-officially, the
RG-PP escaped the merger of the RG with the DST that resulted in the creation of the DCRI in
2008, and then DGSI in 2014. The DR-PP is in permanent touch with the DGSI, to which it sends
all intelligence it collects with a focus on counterterrorism and political activism. In 2008, the
“brigades du chef” aka GERs of many regional bureaus of the RG joined the DR-PP or remained
active as the SCRT, new name of the RG outside Paris. The staff of the DR-PP would be about
1,100 in early 2018. The headquarters of the DR-PP are located 7 Boulevard du Palais, Paris 4th.
DRSD: stands for Direction du Renseignement et de la Sécurité de la Défense (Directorate of
Intelligence and Security of Defense). Formerly called DPSD, the DRSD is the intelligence service
responsible for the security of sensitive personnel, information, equipment and facilities, including
intelligence agencies, with a focus on military activities and barracks, bases, and also the French
military-industrial complex. Overall, the DRSD is the military police, with an additional mission of
counterintelligence. See here.
DST: stands for Direction de la Sûreté du Territoire (Directorate for the Security of the Interior).
This is the French counterespionage agency, created in 1944, which changed its name for DCRI in
2008, and then for DGSI in 2014 when it merged officially with the RG. Under the authority of the
Ministry of the Interior, the staff of the DST was made up of police officers often recruited in the
RG and mainly. Originally, and until the 2000s, the core missions of the DST were domestic
intelligence, counterespionage, and counterterrorism, and it had a large capacity in
telecommunication interceptions on and from the French territory. From 1958-59, and after the
departure of its Director Roger Wybot, the DST reduced considerably its counterespionage activities
against the Soviet Union or even did not have any at all, and focused its efforts on the U.S. and U.K.
presence on the French soil instead, with a particular increase from the 1970s on. Then, from 1982,
the Ministry of Defense, and more particularly the DGSE, monitored unofficially all activities of
this agency. From the latter period, the mission of the DST evolved largely toward counterterrorism
and domestic intelligence, and focused on dissent from the late 1990s, at the expense of
counterintelligence.
Echo chamber: or “caisse de resonance” or “effet de caisse de résonnance” in French, is a
jargon phrase used in influence and counterinfluence to name a recurrent media phenomenon of
natural origin, called “echo chamber” in English-speaking countries. The phenomenon occurs as the
taking up by all news media of a breaking news published first by one only, with as consequence to
hype it unintentionally, often regardless of whether the news is true or not. Notwithstanding, echo
chamber effect occurs with news of minor importance likewise, down to mere rumors published on
a Facebook page. Agents of influence, state “trolls,” political activists, businesses, and even ordinary
individuals, count much on the effect for reasons ranging from disinformation, selling products and
services, to accessing fame. The echo chamber effect is relevant to the mimic effect, and to the
bandwagon effect, which also occur naturally in all societies. In France, specialists in influence and
counterinfluence rely largely on the echo chamber effect to spread true and false information until
the public feels concerned with it and memorizes it (i.e. mass indoctrination), in the contexts of
public opinion shaping and sensibilisation, or “awareness raising”. The artificial making of the echo
chamber effect depends largely on the sensational / dramatic “color” given to an information to be
spread and memorized by the masses, be it true or fabricated. When a sensational characteristic in a
news or influence message is absent, or not striking enough, the intelligence agency promoting it
must keep on reviving it (discreetly). When not, then it will not be memorized, and will be quickly
buried—see Bury (to)—under other news coming in round the clock. When used abroad against a
country in particular, the echo chamber effect must occur naturally (preferably), first, in the aim to
best deceiving the masses and local counterinfluence agents. As other (frequent) example: when one
is fabricating a large number of Views for a video on YouTube, or Likes on a Facebook page in the
expectation to see it relayed by other media, then one is attempting to trigger and to breed an echo
chamber effect. A number of true cases of this kind, all pertinent to intelligence activities, are
presented in this book.
Écran: or “screen” is a jargon word in the DGSE denoting a particular technique in human
intelligence and, simultaneously, an ordinary person hired and manipulated for a very short period
as a third party. It consists in paying the latter, called “screen” for the circumstance, to execute a
very simple task that is always to interact in some way with another person who is a target, ranging
from delivering something, saying a particular phrase or word, or, still simpler, to approaching the
target to give to him a quizzing smile without saying a word. In all cases, an agent must not interact
directly with his target in order to remain ever anonymous and unknown to the latter. It is a quite
common method in human intelligence, yet cunning because it puts anyone does not know it in
disbelief, especially when several screens are instructed to interact with him in a same week or
month. In point of fact, resorting to screens repeatedly with a same target serves a hostile purpose
that may unhinge the latter easily and drive him to a state of prolonged stress. Agents of the DGSE
pay customarily 50 euros (when in France) to someone hired to act as screen, and the latter is never
given the true reason of his small mission he is thus given, beyond the pretense of a small favor or
prank. In DGSE jargon, this way of interacting anonymously with a target is called colloquially
travailler par écrans or “working through screens”. DGSE agents seldom hire twice a same person
to act as screen, especially when interacting with a same target. The technique is used often in the
other context of harassment and social elimination because the target is thus lured in believing that
the screens are people acting consciously as members of a conspiracy against him. The main reason
justifying to resorting to screens is to deny plausibly one’s responsibility for one’s actions. The
choice of the noun screen derives obviously from the symbolical analogy to “interacting
anonymously with somebody from behind an opaque screen,” and it owes to the concern of the
DGSE with not leaving to anyone any evidence of its responsibility in the hostile actions it carries
out regularly.
ELINT: see Wikipedia. The French equivalent of this acronym is ROEM, standing for
Renseignement d’Origine Electromagnétique, or “Intelligence of Electromagnetic Origin”. See also
COMINT.
EMOPT: stands for État-Major Opérationnel de Prévention du Terrorisme (Operational
Headquarters for the Prevention of Terrorism). The EMOPT replaces the UCLAT in the role of
coordinating, animating, and controlling at a leading level the monitoring of people radicalized
ideologically or religiously, and of developing an offensive policy to fight radicalization. The
effectiveness of the EMOPT lays largely on the Fichier de Traitement des Signalements et de la
Prévention de la Radicalisation à caractère Terroriste–FSPRT (Database for the Prevention of
Terrorism and Radicalization). From the latter, this agency draws inferences and a fine mapping of
common risks and others relating to certain said-to-be “sensitive professions” in this context, such
as transportations, education, youth, sensitive industrial installations, and all others defined as and
by OIVs and SAIVs. Specialists in this particular field call the latter mapping, very elaborate and
established largely on computer programs running extremely detailed domestic intelligence
databases, “structure fine,” or “fine structure” (explained with more details in the chapter 17). The
operational monitoring and supervision of radicalized persons are organized at regional and even
small areas levels, under the authority of prefects (who increasingly have an experience in
intelligence, often in the DGSE when the case applies). In addition, each report is communicated to
the Prefect locally concerned, according to the place of residence of the person “to be taken care
of”. In each department, a “cell for the monitoring and prevention of radicalization,” led by the
Prefect and the Procureur de la République (Public Prosecutor), brings together all concerned
governmental agencies and their counterparts abroad, local authorities, public services, cooperating
associations, and contacts. Under the authority of the office of the Minister of the Interior, the
EMOPT is represented at national and regional levels (administrative départements), and it includes
representatives of the DGSI, SDAT, SCRT, DR-PP, SDAO, and BLAT. Additionally, the EMOPT
stays in close touch with the DGSE. Individuals the EMOPT targets are said to be “tagged S” (see
Fiche “S” or S card). The latter provision implies that a targeted individual may be blacklisted
nationally, thanks to a dense network of contacts described in detail in this book. Actually, the
EMOPT cooperates actively to the monitoring, blacklisting, and social elimination of other people
the DGSE, DGSI, and DRSD thus target. However, the latter special provision does not mean that
the EMOPT has been informed of the true reasons for which it must closely monitor the activities of
an individual, and / or to blacklist him. In any case, it comes to explain why a deserter of the DGSE,
or an individual who refuses to “cooperate,” may accidentally discover with surprise that he is
indeed blacklisted because he would be “suspected to be a terrorist”. See Social elimination, chapter
10.
Enquêtes réservées: or “exclusive investigations,” is a jargon phrase in use in the RG in
particular, standing for shadow operations, illegal intelligence missions in domestic intelligence.
There was even a Groupe des Enquêtes Réservées–GER (Exclusive Investigations Group) within
the RG, itself a branch of the Groupe Études Recherches (Research and Studies Group) in the
Section Traitement du Renseignement–STR (Intelligence Analysis Section). The staff of the GER
was called “brigade du chef” colloquially because everything it did was highly sensitive since
always illegal and had to be denied systematically. The GER was accountable for the physical
eliminations (assassinations) of numerous French nationals between 1945 and the 1980s. The RG
merged in 2008 with the DST to become the DCRI, which changed its name again for DGSI in
2014. The staffs of GERs did not join this new agency and resumed their positions in the newly
created DR-PP and SCRT instead. See also Brigade du chef.
Enterrer: see Bury (to).
Exfiltration: or “extracting” (somebody) means “Rescuing or helping discreetly an operative or
a hostage held in a foreign country to escape”. This type of mission is called “exfiltration”.
Officially, the DGSE has its own aircraft fleet, with several and various military aircrafts, and then
this agency enjoys the use of many civilian planes owned by cover civilian companies (also used by
super-agents). Special military units of the COS are frequently used for exfiltrations. Exfiltrations
from third-world countries, frequent in France, are carried out by the Commando Hubert of the
Commandos Marines in particular.
FaDet aka “fadette”: stands for Facture Détaillée (Detailed Invoice). It is the acronym given
internally in domestic intelligence to monthly detailed invoices of telephone calls, which operators
send normally to their customers. Thus, a customer is informed about calls made with his cellphone
or telephone landline, their exact durations to the second, and their recipients, this processing being
done automatically by the operator. It is often question of FaDet in domestic intelligence and in the
police and the Gendarmerie because obtaining copies of such highly details invoices is integral to
domestic telecommunications interception. French journalists often misspell it “fadette”.
Faire le courrier: “to make the mails” is a jargon phrase used colloquially in French
intelligence to say, “Opening and reading someone’s mails illegally”. Intercepting and reading mails
before they reach their recipients is the activity that indeed was at the origin of the creation of the
first French intelligence agency, then simply named “le secret” (“the secret”) in the early 17th
century, and possibly before that time (see here). Since this old time and until the 1960-70s, it was
common in rural France to still name the French intelligence community “la secrète” (i.e. “la
police secrete,” or “the secret police”). In France in domestic intelligence, mails are intercepted,
opened, and read in Post office bureaus; that is to say, even before they reach mailboxes. For the
Post Office, a public service, always cooperates actively with the police and the intelligence
community, at any time and on demand.
False-flag recruitment: “recrutement sous un faux drapeau [or pavillon],” in French, refers to
a deception that takes place when the agent or source is recruited explicitly. It consists for the
recruiter in pretending to act for another country than the one he is truly serving. For example, a
French intelligence recruiter claims to recruit on behalf of the Israeli intelligence service, a terrorist
organization, a prominent private company, industrial group, public service, the UNO, some activist
group, a religious secret service, a mafia, or whatever; that is to say, anything but the DGSE and
France, by all means. The goal to the recruiter is to be in position to deny at any time the
responsibility of the human intelligence activity he carried out in the service of France.
Additionally, the method, very common, makes things easier to the recruiter to mislead his recruit in
anticipation to the moment he will no longer be of any interest, and in anticipation of his possible
ulterior demand for a reward or protection. For, if the recruit is denied his reward, then he is likely
to react by publicly exposing his recruiter, out of revenge at least. This is a trick as old as the Greek
antiquity, and Homer explained it as the tale of Odysseus fooling Polyphemus the Cyclopes by
telling him that his name is Nobody. Preferably, and still according to the DGSE, recruiting an agent
or the more often a source under a false flag is carried out as it fits the country of origin of the
recruit, his known political or religious affinity, particular realm of interest, or anything else that
pleases to the latter. It aims to make the best profit of the natural stance / belief of a source for / in a
certain country, ideology, religion, or his hatred against another reciprocally. The recruiter then
introduces himself as an agent of this country, which facilitates greatly the relations, and stimulates
the recruit in his work because, thenceforth, he serves his recruiter out of patriotism, political or
religious commitment, or whatever similar motive. One lesson French (and Russian) spies learn in
this respect is, “One should never try to change a recruit’s beliefs or allegiance but turn it to one’s
advantage instead”.
Fermer un contact: or “to close (or “break”) a contact,” is a DGSE jargon phrase meaning,
“Putting an end to a relationship with an individual by driving him to make the first step in the
break”. The method consists in being unpleasant or acting in an upsetting or / and weird manner, all
the while pretending disingenuously to act in a friendly manner, as typical example. This is a safety
measure intending to deceive this individual on the real intentions of the agent who “opened a
contact” with him. The two methods and its alternatives are explained in detail in this book, here.
Fessée: or “spanking” is a jargon word in the DGSE, meaning “Giving a hard trash to someone
(employee or agent) to punish him, with the intent to cause serious wounds”. A lighter punishment,
causing pain only or a few broken teeth and bruises at worst, is called claque, or “slap”.
Fiche S: or “S” card is an index that intelligence agencies and particular police services use to
“flag” an individual considered a threat to the national security or public order. The letter “S” stands
for Sûreté de l’État (State security). It is the highest level of such warnings in France, and it justifies
the surveillance of someone although it is not a cause for the arrest of this person, as long as no
wrongdoing punishable by law has been done. The S cards database includes mobsters, prison
escapees, anarchists, libertarians, far-rightist activists, anti-nuclear campaigners, suspected Islamist
radicals in particular since the 1990s, and people who did no graver wrongdoing than browsing
jihadist websites or met radicals outside mosques. Additionally, carding someone S is used
frequently in the context of hostile recruitment, and as a means to punish an agent or a former
intelligence employee who strays or attempts to flee abroad (as defector, for example). For the value
of this police index is accepted internationally, especially in European countries, and then
INTERPOL releases this information to all police services in the World. Carding someone S,
therefore, is an easy and very effective way to blacklist someone socially and professionally, in
France, the European Union, and even possibly in the World. The goal in the latter case is to “make
the life of the fugitive a hell,” until he returns to France, “gets back to reason,” and resigns to
cooperating in intelligence (as snitch or double agent). France tagged S some 400,000 people since
1969.
Filoche: jargon noun used colloquially and universally in the French intelligence community to
denote the activity of shadowing / tailing people, i.e. “He has specialty in filoche”. As this word has
no equivalent in English, even remote, an about acceptable translation could be “shadowship”.
Filocheur: jargon noun of the same family and meaning, as “filoche” above, an agent with a
specialty in shadowing / tailing people, i.e. “He is a filocheur”. As about filoche, this noun has no
equivalent in English, and the closest translation, used elsewhere in this book, is “tailer”.
Flying agent: English translation of “Agent Volant–AV,” is the name given formally in the
DGSE to the equivalent of an operative or Non-Official Cover–NOC in the U.S. intelligence
community. Remarkably, this name given to field agents of a superior category does not allude to a
bird, as women field agents are called hirondelles, or “swallows” colloquially, but papillons, or
“butterflies”. Still metaphorically in the same agency, “butterflies can be caught” (i.e. recruited)
with a “butterfly net” (i.e. the recruiting agency’s network and crews) and, then they can be firmly
kept “with a pin in an insect display case” (e.g. threat, blackmail, considerably reduced economic
means, or a fabricated bad reputation).
 Fonds Spéciaux aka Fonds spéciaux aka Fonds Spéciaux de Matignon: phrase and name
standing for “special State’s funds” aka “special funds of the Prime Minister”. The Fonds spéciaux
are dedicated to the financing of secret activities relating to the exterior and interior security of the
State. The control and safekeeping of the funds are done under highly confidential conditions
because the intelligence operations and missions they finance cannot be so with conventional budget
appropriations, subject to transparency rules. For the year 2016, the secret appropriations amounted
to €47,300,000 ($58.6 million) in commitment authorizations and payment appropriations. The
Fonds spéciaux provide an easy solution to the executive power to dispose quickly and freely of
financial resources to finance illegal activities, and the reason of State comes to legitimate the
particular provision. For long, the Fonds spéciaux are shrouded in a bad reputation maintaining a
climate of suspicion on the ruling elite because a part of it actually is reserved or diverted for
supplements in the remuneration of ministers and their collaborators (members of ministerial
cabinets), free of tax, and for the illegal financing of political parties and electoral campaigns. Since
a reform in 2001, the Fonds spéciaux are reserved for intelligence agencies only, allegedly.
However, the DGSE no longer really needs those funds since this agency privatized largely and
secretly several of its directorates and penetrated the private economy in France from the 1990s.
Besides, the yearly amount appropriated to the Fonds spéciaux is become ridiculously small, when
compared to the common needs and expenditures the shadow operations of the DGSE imply in the
21st century. See also here about the use of the Fonds spéciaux to reward agents financially upon
their returns from long missions abroad.
Fontaine: or fountain is a jargon word standing for discreet break-in in the home of a target,
generally in order to conceal spy microphones therein, i.e. “installing a fountain”. Exceptionally, a
break-in is deliberately botched either to bully the target or when there is no other way to enter a
place unbeknownst to its tenant.
FSB: Russian equivalent to the FBI in the United States and to the DGSI in France. See
Wikipedia.
Gagneuse: translates “winner,” literally, but it is also a French slang and a jargon word that
procurers use to name colloquially a prostitute they own and handle, thus named because “she wins
money for her man”. The metaphor is pejorative, obviously, and even insulting to the agent who
ignores his case officer may thus name him possibly, though not all do it. That is why some case
officers call themselves “mac” colloquially and jokingly because this other word is a contraction of
the French macquerau, meaning “mackerel” or “procurer”.
Gendarmerie: is a French police force working under the authority of the Ministry of Defense.
See Wikipedia for an exhaustive and official explanation, and here about the role of the Gendarmerie
in domestic intelligence.
GER: stands for Groupe des Enquêtes Réservées (Exclusive Investigations Group), which was a
special unit of the Renseignements Généraux–RG. Until 2008, the GER gad the responsibility of the
illegal missions of the RG, such as burglars (see also “Fontaine”), concealing spy microphones (see
also “Sonorisation,” and Pose technique) and spy cameras around a house (see also “Bornage”),
threatening targets (see also “Arrachage”), harassment, stalking, and similar. See also Enquêtes
réservées, Brigade du Chef, RG, DR-PP, and SCRT.
GIC: stands for Groupement Inter-ministériel de Contrôle (Inter-Ministerial Group of Control),
which names anonymously the domestic intelligence agency responsible for domestic
telecommunications interception and home bugging, created in 1959. See also here.
GOdF: stands for Grand Orient de France (Grand Orient of France). It is the leading grand
lodge of the French liberal Freemasonry, unrecognized by the UGLE (regular and world
freemasonry), which actively partakes in domestic intelligence and influence, counterintelligence,
and intelligence abroad. See chapter 16.
GOS: stands for Groupe d’Observation et de Surveillance (Monitoring and Surveillance Group).
GOSs are Gendarmerie units tasked to shadowing individuals and small groups. In 2017, there were
11 regional teams of the GOS in continental France and overseas territories. The CNFPJ trains for
seven weeks in the field and in real situations people selected to work in GOS teams. Remarkably,
the shortlisting process to enter a GOS is very demanding physically because trainings are similar to
that of a military elite unit. It implies climbing walls up to roofs bare hand, crawling into sewer
pipes, and similar. Of course, other technical trainings courses relate to photography and computer
imaging, spy microphone installments, telecommunications interceptions, mastering the use of IMSI
Catchers, lock-picking, drone-piloting, and varied tips and tricks in break-ins (see also Fontaine and
Bornage), shadowing, etc.
HFDS: stands for Haut Fonctionnaire de Défense et de Sécurité (Senior Defense and Security
Officer). The main task of HFDSs is to issue security clearances. They are officials who hold a
defense and security function in a French civil service, although their higher authority is the military
and the DRSD in particular. The Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs each have a HFDS
representative. Remarkably, the Ministry of the Interior commanding the civilian police and the
DGSI have a Senior Defense Official instead, to fulfill the same function, which fact underscores
the lordship of the military over the police, further explained in this book. The other ministries each
have one Defense and Security Official who is a representative of the Ministry of Defense or they
share one together, which other fact underlines again the omnipresence and omnipotence of the
military in French public affairs when the question is, who is granted access to classified matters
and who is not. From a general standpoint, HFDSs are responsible for supervising and coordinating
security measures in the defense sector (defense plans, security of the defense, and protection of
secrecy). Since 1986, HFDSs are also responsible for the security of information systems
(computers and computer networks), and thus can restrict people’s accesses to data on a case-by-
case basis. See also Need-to-know.
Hirondelle: or swallow, is a jargon word used to specify “a female field agent,” and more
particularly a “female flying agent” (or female operative). See Flying agent.
Honorable correspondant aka HC: (same words in English) was a jargon word of the SDECE
denoting a contact, specifically, not to be confused with an agent or source. However, French
journalists and even DGSE and DGSI executives, when interviewed, continue to use this word or
simply “correspondant”. As an aside, internally in the DGSE and the DRM, sources, contacts, and
agents are referred to and indifferently as “capteurs” (sensors), on a same stand as spy microphones
and camera, spy satellites, and related equipment. See a complete definition of contact here.
Hors BOP: stands for hors Budget Opérationnel de Programme (out of Operational Budget
Program). It is a phrase used in the French military to name detached units, individuals, and
particular and non-provisioned expenditures. In the particular context of military
telecommunications and “Guerre électronique” (Electronic Warfare), BOP encompasses military
materials, infrastructures, services, and even personnel truly used by intelligence agencies (DGSE,
DRM, DRSD, GIC) yet acting under the cover of ordinary military activities. For these agencies
hide commonly their activities under covers of ordinary military activities in territorial France as in
French overseas territories, and in certain foreign countries having a partnership in defense /
intelligence with France. Actually, this provision in camouflage and secrecy applies to
telecommunications interceptions in particular, and to regional bureaus of the DGSE, DRM, DRSD,
and GIC on the French soil.
HUMINT: or Renseignement d’Origine Humaine–ROHUM (Intelligence of Human Origin) in
French intelligence jargon (DGSE, DRM), stands for Human Intelligence. See also Wikipedia.
Identité Fictive aka IF: is a DGSE jargon word meaning “fake” or “fictitious identity” (for an
agent or intelligence officer). French spies often lie about their identity, but they seldom are sent
abroad under fictitious identities with fake passports and related documents, all on the contrary to
Russian spies who are prone to the practice. Actually, if it is true that many French spies introduce
themselves under aliases and fake names, yet a large majority of them are carrying genuine identity
papers and cards specifying their real identities.
Identité réelle aka IR: is a DGSE jargon word meaning “true identity” (for an agent or
intelligence officer).
IHEDN: stands for Institut des Hautes Études de Défense Nationale (Institute for Higher
Studies in National Defense). It is a French public academic institution for research, education, and
promotion of expertise and awareness raising in defense affairs. The vocation of the Institute is to
train high-level military, government officials, and senior executives in defense. Some sessions are
reserved to junior auditors, students in the foremost Grandes Écoles and under the age of 30
generally. Its courses are given in the Chateau de Vincennes, in Vincennes, Eastern suburb of Paris.
Numerous DGSE executives, employees, and certain agents—including the author of this book—
attended courses and conferences at the IHEDN as auditeurs (listeners). Founded in 1937, the
IHEDN became a public body in 1997, placed under the authority of the Prime Minister. In 2010, it
merged with the DGA’s Direction Générale de l’Armement–DGA (Directorate General for
Armament), and the Centre des Hautes Études de l’Armement–CHEAr (Center for Higher Studies
in Armament).
IMINT: or Renseignement d’Origine Image–ROIM (Intelligence of Image Origin) in French
intelligence jargon, stands for Imagery Intelligence. See Wikipedia.
IMSI Catcher: is a telephone eavesdropping device used for intercepting mobile phone traffic
and tracking location and data sent and received by mobile phone users. Essentially, it acts as a fake
mobile tower antenna located physically between the mobile phone of a target and the real towers
antenna nearby. That is why it is also called “man-in-the-middle attack” aka MITM. Using an IMSI
catcher gear does not limit to buying and using a gadget because it claims a specific knowledge and
the access to the coding-decoding protocol of the internet provider of the target, available to this
organization and to the local government only. For all mobile phones and telephone network
providers use encrypted signals today. Until the early 1990s, eavesdropping mobile telephone
conversation from the field was possible, and even very easy, when portable telephones used FM
frequencies ranging between 200 and 400 Mhz. It became increasingly difficult from the latter
period, with the additional general use of encryption in telecommunications. See also Wikipedia.
Information blanche (grise, noire): other name denoting colloquially open sources or closed
sources used universally in intelligence, but here indicated with a color. Thus, “white information”
is the same as open source or open intelligence, and the opposite to black information that is
sensitive to its legit owner. The color gray is added to specify an information that is neither publicly
released nor highly sensitive. In other words, a “gray information” may be a lightly classified
information, a business document “for internal use only,” a military user manual and similar; that is
to say, all things that are not big secrets as a government sees them, but whose their legit owners
would not release on the Internet or give to a journalist.
Information ouverte: or open intelligence, better known as open source—as English words
happen sometimes to be in use in French intelligence, though less and less—stands for publicly
available information, yet of interest for intelligence purpose and crosschecking at the stage of
intelligence analysis. Very often, collecting and crosschecking a gathering of open sources—found
on the media, Internet, and books, mainly—allow indeed to discover secrets or “information
fermée,” aka closed intelligence aka closed source, in English. Of course, finding valuable
information by resorting to crosschecking and deductive reasoning based on open sources claims a
serious background knowledge in intelligence, similarly enlightened knowledge in one specialty in
particular when needed, and above-the-average analytic and synthesis skills. For example, in most
countries, it is possible indeed to guess the confidential political decisions and even the future
moves of the governmental apparatus—particularly in domestic policy—simply by analyzing the
overall content of the mainstream media, and by identifying certain trends and patterns. When one
has a good knowledge about the sensitive characteristics of a country in particular, then one may
sort out valuable intelligence that is not publicly available, through analysis and deductive reasoning
only. The DGSE estimates that its production of intelligence is the outcome of more than 90% of
open source and of less than 10% of closed source.
Information fermée: or closed source. See Information ouverte above.
Information Warfare: called guerre de l’information in the French intelligence community,
relates to reciprocal influence and interference attempts between two countries or more. Information
warfare covers the use of media and their contents, the way the media themselves are used, and, in
French intelligence in particular, cultural media and contents. By extension, COMINT is integrated
in information warfare because of the increasing use of the Internet in information and cultural
contents. Additionally, psychological warfare, culture warfare and cultural warfare are integral to
information warfare in French intelligence, and all relevant actions are defined in accordance with
the doctrine of active measures that France adopted in the early 1980s. The latter provision has the
particularity to imply intimate connections between actions in foreign intelligence and domestic
intelligence (see chapter 12). The subject of information warfare is presented and described
abundantly in this book because it was the specialty of its author.
Intelligence Officer: or Officier de Renseignement–OR in French, is a full-time employee of the
DGSE under military status and with the rank of commissioned officer, formally speaking.
However, Intelligence Officer—or Counterespionage Officer—also applies in the DGSI because
many full-time employees of this counterespionage and counterterrorism agency were hired in the
police with the rank of police officer. Back to the DGSE, a full-time employee under civilian status
is not called Intelligence Officer, even when he holds an executive position. A full-time employee
under military status with a rank of non-commissioned officer is called “Sous-Officer de
Renseignement” (Non-Commissioned Intelligence Officer). Only the public and some journalists
mistakenly call “Officier de Renseignement” any full-time employee of a French intelligence
agency, including agents sometimes.
Interceptions de sécurité: or Security [telecommunications] interceptions, in English. See here.
Interceptions judiciaires: or Criminal [telecommunications] interceptions, in English. See here.
Intoxication: (same orthography and meaning in French and in English). The DGSE and the
DGSI use the word “intoxication,” but preferably enfumer, or “to smoke” e.g. deceiving an
opponent by “sending” to him fake or biased information. In all English-speaking countries,
intelligence agencies use the word “deception” to mean the same exactly.
IRCGN: stands for Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nationale (Criminal
Investigation Institute of the National Gendarmerie). It is the forensic science department of the
Gendarmerie, integral to the Pôle Judiciaire de la Gendarmerie Nationale–PJGN (Criminal Branch
of the National Gendarmerie), and alongside the SCRC and the Observatoire des Systèmes de
Transport Intelligent–STI (Intelligent Transportation Systems Survey). It is one of the six French
scientific police laboratories, alongside the five laboratories of the National Police. Created in 1987
under the name Criminal Investigation and Technical Branch of the Gendarmerie (STICG), the
institute settled in 2015 in Pontoise (Val-d’Oise).
ISR: stands for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (same orthography and meaning
in French and in English). This acronym is a reminder in military intelligence, coined to sum up the
means (i.e. multi-capteurs, or “multi-sensor”) and process in intelligence, which include intelligence
from human and electronic sources, i.e. HUMINT + COMINT + SIGINT + ELINT + IMINT, and
more whenever possible / needed.
Légende: what the DGSE and the DGSI name commonly légende can be translated as
“narrative,” or “fabricated pedigree or biography,” more exactly. In many countries, intelligence
services use commonly the word “legend” to denote the falsified biography of an agent / operative.
As a more or less important part of those fabricated biographies is fake or exaggerated, the falsified
and fake points must be made difficult to question, obviously. Typically, and among other
possibilities, the légende of an agent refers to diplomas, published papers, theses, and relates to
particular subjects, preferably rare and little known even in the university population. A légende
may mention fictitious positions held in French companies, but preferably in foreign businesses as
people in capitalist countries are wary of French credentials nowadays. Then it is up to the agent to
find out positions and further credentials in “neutral” companies in the target country where he has
been sent, in order to mix craftily what is fake in his biography with what is true. To the agent, the
goal is to erase as soon as possible all fake credentials / references from his biography / resume, as
he is gradually gaining experiences and credentials in the target country, and to have a true
biography and a façade of indisputable honorability in the end. For reasons mentioned above, the
DGSE refrains from helping an agent to obtain a position in a French company having activities in
the country where he has been sent. However, many French agents use, from their own, to add or
delete one letter in their real names for falsifying their identities because most people fail to notice it
or do not accord great importance to it, and they pretext “a misspelling” or “typo” when questioned
about it. Fabricating légendes for an agent is a common practice in the DGSE, but fictitious
identities associated with them remain an exceptional provision. About diplomas in particular, the
DGSE manages to give authentic ones to its agents, as we will see at some point in the chapter 27,
with detailed explanations.
Légion Étrangère: or Foreign Legion is an old and special division of the French military that
is officially detached from the Army. This corps is an equivalent to the U.S. Marines Corps in its
skills, strength, capacities, and missions. However, the particularity of the so-called Foreign Legion
is to recruit foreigners, even when they do not come to France with a valid visa. The latter
characteristic makes the Foreign Legion an interesting recruitment pool to the French intelligence
community, for some of its recruits are experienced military coming from all around the World.
Paradoxically, a 10% quota limits the number of French nationals who enlist in the Foreign Legion,
but its commissioned officers must be French nationals. Additionally, the latter are selected among
those who rank the best at the École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr (Officer School of Saint-Cyr).
Otherwise, a non-commissioned officer or even a commissioned officer of the “regular military”
who enlists in the Foreign Legion must restart his career from the rank of private. One more of the
numerous particularities of the Foreign Legion is that all its recruits, including French nationals, are
given a fictitious identity upon the first day of their enlisting. The fictitious identity includes first
and last name, place and date of birth, and country of origin, as long as the initials of the new name
are the same as these of the true name. Then rookies must learn their new names by heart through
repeated calls during their first training’s weeks. One can enlist in the Foreign Legion for a
minimum term of five years, at the end of which one is offered either to have one’s real identity
back, or to keep for good the fictitious one. Therefrom, one can ask for French citizenship under this
identity. The fictitious countries of origin are not chosen at random because they must be countries
of which the recruit is fluent in the language. For example, a French citizen may be offered to
choose between several countries except France where a majority speaks French. Owing to an
enduring tale, many recruits believe they can escape the police by enlisting in the Foreign Legion
when a warrant is issued against them. However, during the first weeks of the recruiting process,
unfolding in Aubagne, near Marseille, where the headquarter of the Foreign Legion is located, fake
recruits (see Mouton) are tasked to spot such fugitives and criminals, and to investigate on the
mental balance and past lives of all, while the headquarter leads discreet investigations on all
recruits. When a recruit happens to be a criminal on the run, the Foreign Legion calls the
Gendarmerie that comes to proceed to his arrest in the barracks forthwith. Contrary to another
assumed belief, foreigners who come in France to enlist in the Foreign Legion more often than not
are not knaves and crackpots. Many simply experienced a succession of minor troubles (bankruptcy
followed by heavy debts, divorce, etc.) and fell into despair. The Foreign Legion is quite
existentialist in its rather secretive culture. Some recruits are looking for a new life for various
personal reasons, and some are looking for a challenge of a sort because the Foreign Legion has a
justified reputation of hardship, similar to that of the U.S. Marines. A minority has a fancy for
military matters and looks for “the best of the best” in this field. However, the Foreign Legion is
wary of another minority of recruits looking for violence and a “right to kill” on one of the theaters
of operation in which this corps takes part regularly. Among all those recruits, the French
intelligence community is looking for particular profiles for purposes ranging from translator in a
COMINT unit, snitches, to flying agents fluent in a foreign language and familiar with a country of
interest. Those talents must make their five years terms in the Legion before being formally
recruited by an intelligence agency. For the hardship they have to undergo during this term is similar
in its principle to the recruitment process of the DGSE. Unlike most of the other ordinary units of
the French military, the Foreign Legion trains its men in a particular way that is tantamount to
brainwashing. Most of its soldiers and non-commissioned officers develop a strong bond with this
corps, unusually encountered in the regular Army. The Foreign Legion is full of religious-like
traditions and rules that make its soldiers loving this corps collectively and contracting a “faith” in
it, analogous to what happens in Christian monasteries of the most austere sort. The Foreign Legion
has even a special retirement home located in Southern France. A well-trained Légionnaire is a true
believer, indeed, but seldom a violent individual as surprising as it may be, which makes him a
French military with a very particular profile. The latter characteristic seldom applies to the
commissioned officers of this corps, however. Among the 12 regiments and units of the Foreign
Legion, the 2e Régiment Étranger de Parachutistes (2d Foreign Parachute Regiment) is of particular
interest with regard to the subject of this book. For the latter is one among the best French special
units, and it involve regularly in special and shadow operations abroad, in African countries in
particular. Former Minister of Defense and Prime Minister Pierre Messmer formerly was
commissioned officer in the Foreign Legion, and former Director of the DGSE General René Imbot
either.
Leurre: the meaning given to this word may translate in several nuances in English, according
to its exact purpose and ulterior expectations. It ranges from “decoy,” to “red herring,” to lure, and
to “lure for attracting birds” to translate perfectly the understanding French intelligence has of it,
very close to “bait”—the French equivalent of “bait” is appât, in French. The French intelligence
community makes an intensive use of “lure for attracting birds” in domestic intelligence, as it is
explained with true examples in this book, and then it resorts frequently to “baits” abroad.
Mac: relates to the French slang “maquereau,” or “procurer,” to name colloquially “case
officer”. See also Gagneuse.
Mise-au-clair: may translate as “to sort something out,” which is a jargon phrase coined and
used in the French intelligence collectivity, meaning “Extracting something that makes sense from a
whole that does not”. Therefore, mise-au-clair applies to a variety of cases ranging from scrambled,
incomplete, or unclear intelligence intercepted by the COMINT service, to badly written, spelled, or
coded / enciphered message.
 Mouchard: is the French equivalent of “snitch,” and more exactly of “little snitch” or “rat,” that
is to say, an informant of minor importance, expendable, therefore. See also here.
Moustache: (same orthography and meaning in French and in English) is a jargon word
commonly used for decades in the French intelligence community to denote a spy colloquially
though not pejoratively. The colloquialism applies regardless whether one refers to an agent, an
intelligence officer, the director of an intelligence agency, even when from a foreign country and
hostile. For ex. “He is a moustache,” or “He is a spy.” The exception is the super-agent, called
“super moustache”. It is a running joke and even a cultural more in the DGSE to arrive at a party
wearing a fake moustache, for nobody understands the true meaning of it but one’s colleagues. As
an aside, when in public, French spies love making passing references that only enlightened people
can understand, simply because this gives to them the feeling to belong to an exclusive middle, for
once.
Mouton: or sheep is a jargon word denoting an informant in a prison whose mission is to elicit
confidences from other convicts, often in the aim to collect a piece of information that a criminal
refused to say to the police. See also BCRP.
Mutualisation: formally called “mutualisation du renseignement,” means “intelligence
pooling” in the French intelligence community. Since January 2016, all agencies of the French
intelligence community can share their intelligence legally, although this provision has some normal
restrictions justified by the rule of compartmentalization aka need-to-know.
Nonverbal language (or communication): the DGSE makes an extensive use of nonverbal
communication as a means to communicate secretly; that is to say, behaviors of communicators
during interaction. Eye contact is the instance when two people look at each other’s eyes at the same
time, and wink and nod; it is the primary nonverbal way to indicate engagement, interest, attention,
and involvement, or else in accordance with the subject of the conversation or / and certain words
and names in particular. The duration of eye contact is its most meaningful aspect, and it includes,
of course, winking, movements of the eyebrows, and particular facial expressions. This means of
interpersonal communication is in large use in about all intelligence agencies in the World. Two
spies, or even diplomats, each belonging to an intelligence agency that is foreign to the other, can
however understand each other silently when associating nonverbal language (metacommunication)
with their talks. Reciprocally, a counterespionage specialist can identify a spy by spotting certain
particular patterns in his nonverbal language. In the DGSE, this particular aspect of the training of a
future employee or agent is implicit and takes place through repeated interactions along years. As
such, the latter heuristic teaching is also part of indoctrination, of the learning of a particular culture,
and of a scale of values that together change the character of someone gradually. Thus, two DGSE
employees or agents meeting together for the first time and accidentally can understand quickly that
they are colleagues working for a same agency—as Freemasons learn to do so, actually.
Noyautage: is a French word in use in French intelligence exclusively, with no real equivalent
in English language. It can be translated as “putting a pit or seed in a fruit,” because the word “pit”
or “seed” itself is a metaphor already, meaning “infiltrating a group of individuals with one of
several penetration agents or snitches”. Subsequently, the closest English translation of
“noyautage” is infiltration. However, French spies use it specifically to mean “Infiltrating in the
aim to manipulate and to harm,” and not necessarily to collect intelligence. Noyautage often aims to
take the control of a group of people from within, for an intelligence agency to influence the latter in
its decisions and actions, permanently in general. Thereof, the use of the noun noyautage as verb to
say “noyauter a group,” meaning “Secretly taking the control of a group from within thanks to one
or several penetration agents”. The latter explains why noyautage often applies to
counterinsurgency.
OCRGDF: stands for Office Central de Répression de la Grande Délinquance Financière
(Central Office for the Fight against White Collar Criminality), which is a branch of the Sous-
Direction de la Lutte contre la Criminalité Organisée et la Délinquance Financière–SDLCODF
(Sub-Directorate for the Fight against Organized Crime and Financial Crime), acting under the
authority of the Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciaire–DCPJ (Central Directorate of Criminal
Police). See SDLCODF.
Occuper la place: or “to occupy the place,” means “Not to let a sincerely committed individual
or a foreign spy be the leading speaker of an unorthodox cause or idea likely to entice and rally
numerous people”. This method in influence and counterinfluence actually is the same as couper
l’herbe sous le pied (“to cut the grass under someone’s foot”). See Cut the grass under someone’s
foot (to), Bury (to), Agent provocateur, and Catharsis per proxy.
Occupy the place (to): see Occuper la place, above.
Offensive counterintelligence: or contre-espionnage offensif, in French, denote offensive
measures in counterintelligence, in opposition to simply hunting foreign spies. Offensive
counterintelligence relies largely on deception, and is explained with examples in this book, due to
the richness and complexity of the topic.
Officier Traitant aka OT: or case officer, aka (colloquially) “handler,” in English. See also
Mac and here for an exhaustive description.
OIV: stands for Opérateur d’Importance Vitale (Vitally Important Operator). OIV denotes an
organization identified by the State as having activities that are either indispensable or, on the
contrary, potentially hazardous to the population. An “activity sector of vital importance,” as
defined by Article R. 1332-2 of the Defense Code, consists in activities that serve the same purpose.
It “Relates to the production and distribution of indispensable goods or services—since those
activities are difficult to substitute or hardly replaceable—, the satisfaction of basic needs for the life
of the population, the enforcement of state authority, healthy domestic economy, maintaining the
defense potential or security of the Nation, or that may constitute a serious hazard to the
population”. An OIV, as defined by Article R. 1332-1 of the French Code of Defense, is an
organization that “carries on activities in a vitally important business sector, manages or uses one or
more establishments or works necessary to this activity, one or more infrastructures and materials
whose damage or unavailability or destruction as a result of malicious acts, sabotage or terrorism,
could, directly or indirectly, endanger severely economic potential, the security or survivability of
the Nation, or seriously jeopardize the health or life of the population”. Remarkably, the SGDSN
designed and is currently managing the safety of Secteurs d’Activités d’Importance Vitale–SAIV
(Sectors of Vital Importance). Then the definitions of OIVs and SAIVs, public or private, allow to
set a strategy in national security against malicious acts (terrorism, sabotage) and natural,
technological, and health risks. There are 12 SAIVs. See SAIV.
Open source: see Information ouverte.
Operative: this English American word has no real equivalent in the French intelligence
community, but it corresponds to a field agent called agent volant or “flying agent” in the DGSE.
See Flying agent.
OPJ: stands for Officier de Police Judiciaire (Judicial Police Officer). From a general
standpoint, to be entrusted the right to carry arrests implies the holding of the official status of OPJ.
According to Article 16 of the Code of Judicial Procedure, OPJs can be

mayors and their deputies,

officers and senior officers of the National Gendarmerie and gendarmes with at least
three years of service, and nominally appointed by joint order of the Ministers of Justice
and of the Interior, with the assent of a committee,

inspector generals,

deputy directors of active police,

general controllers,

police commissioners and police officers,

 officials of the body of management and enforcement of the national police with at
least three years of service in this body, and designated nominally by order of the
Ministers of Justice and of the Interior upon the assent of a commission,

customs officers of categories A and B appointed specially by order of the ministers in

charge of justice and the budget, taken upon the assent of a commission whose
composition and functioning are determined by decree in the Council of State,
 persons exercising the functions of director or deputy director of the judicial police or
of the National Gendarmerie,

masters of ships (captains), who thus are judicial police officers who can record
offenses on board and investigate a case, and

district leaders of the TAAF.

OSINT: is a contraction of “Open Source INTelligence,” which intelligence activity consists in

finding or inferring intelligence from analysis and deductive reasoning, based on a gathering of
information publicly available called source ouverte (“open source”). See Information ouverte.
Ouvrir un contact: or “opening a contact” in English, is a DGSE jargon phrase meaning,
“Engaging into a relationship with someone (a target) on purpose, in the frame of a mission.” See
also Fermer un contact. See detailed explanation here.
Parcours de sécurité: or (somehow) “security trial course” in English, is a DGSE jargon phrase
meaning “Walking or riding for a long time (several hours typically) and resorting to particular
provisions in order to checking whether one is under physical surveillance (shadowing)”.
Passer de l’autre côté du miroir: or “going through the mirror” in English, is a DGSE jargon
and obviously metaphoric phrase. The first meaning of it is “Renouncing to one’s self to become
part of a collective, i.e. the DGSE”. The latter transformation can be achieved through a succession
of very particular provisions and ordeals unfolding along the recruiting process, the whole of it
being relevant to “thought reform,” actually. For the metaphor—but also the real and scientific
explanation from a psychological standpoint—says, “As long as one sees his own image in a mirror
i.e. feeling one’s ego / individuality, then one is likely to enter into a conflict with oneself each time
one does something bad”. This, otherwise, would be a problem when working with an agency such
as the DGSE because this agency expresses collectively greater trust toward someone who
relinquished one’s ego or self-esteem, and one’s individuality more exactly. During the recruiting
process of the DGSE, the only and real purpose of certain tests, to which the recruit must submit
knowingly or not, is to ascertain he no longer feels any shame when doing questionable or
disgusting things, i.e. he lost his self-esteem. Very often, those ordeals, of which the DGSE takes
care to keep evidences or testimonies, may also be used as leverages / threats eventually, in case the
recruit steps back or attempts to disobey. The latter provision is the setting of a blackmail indeed,
seldom formulated explicitly because it is made obvious implicitly only. The second meaning is
explained formally to the recruit and is rather relevant to a romantic or dramatic narrative meaning
“to belong,” following a secret ordeal, typically. As time goes by, threats and implicit blackmail
guaranteeing loyalty and obedience may cease to be effective, possibly. That is why it is not
uncommon to submit a same agent or employee several times to an ordeal tantamount to a
recruitment along his career. The latter added ordeals are called colloquially “traversée du desert,”
or “desert crossing”. The alternative to this “safety measure” warranting indefectible loyalty and
obedience is to involve an employee in an elaborate scheme in which he will compromise / corrupt
himself at some point, wittingly or unwittingly regardless. Therefore, going through the mirror is a
short phrase that may imply a number of notions, and which, from the viewpoint of a detached
observer, provoke spectacular changes of character in an individual. Even when the latter seems to
be a smart, educated, no nonsensical, and easygoing person, yet he will seem to act irrationally at
times, without ever giving a rational explanation for the striking behavioral discrepancies. For he is
no longer acting by his own, but under precise instructions and under a threat that only the DGSE
and him can possibly know. That is also why such people must not necessarily be considered as true
believers, nor be associated with the latter category, even when the peculiarity of their characters
strongly suggests they are indeed. As the DGSE considers the method as the best to guarantee
someone’s allegiance and obedience, this agency favors it again, whenever possible, when it wants
to recruit an agent or a source abroad, although it is not always possible. The DGSE does not “trust”
an employee or agent who did not go through this process successfully.
 Patrimoine: is a particular word in use in French politics and in ordinary public services, even
though the DGSE and other intelligence agencies are actively concerned with enforcing the
provisions it implies. Patrimoine may translate “heritage,” although it is sometimes (rarely) written
“patrimony” in English texts. The French Government and / or certain French ministries are prone
to extend the definition of heritage to anything serving the national interest and grand strategy. The
perception the States has of heritage extends far, enough to encompass French citizens and abstract
values, indeed. Then the DGSE intervenes in the context of the safety and purposefulness of the
French heritage to protect it whenever possible, and to aggrandize it through mergers and
acquisitions essentially. Overall, the French State and the DGSE have a strong sense of collective
ownership, which exteriorizes as a frenzy indeed for hoarding about everything and anything, and
then to increase as much as possible the value of all those belongings and acquisitions, subjectively
in reality and most of the time. At times, the latter need may go as far as to organize rigged or even
fake auctions, in which the estimated or normal values of goods France owns or produces in
quantities are raised artificially and considerably. In reality, the amounts of money thus spent come
from and go back “to a same coffer”. Owing to what has been explained above, the full range of the
notion of heritage is not made public because it would be shocking and is evoked internally only in
many instances. A typical example of the French perception of heritage is the case of a foreign
company, A, bounds to acquire a French one, B. If ever B is given a particular importance as seen
from a strategic or even a “cultural” standpoint, then it will be politically tagged “national heritage”
or “economic heritage,” in order to justify all possible means to prevent A from acquiring it, and the
reverse is true when France is the purchaser. For another way to conquer a country, according to
French strategists, is “to buy piece by piece” its most important economic, industrial, and cultural,
assets, along a course of several decades, generally and for obvious reasons. As true example, see
the recent purchase of the French multinational company Alstom by the U.S. multinational
conglomerate General Electric–GE, which is still upsetting many in the French Government—and
in the DGSE apparently, as far as a number of comments in the media suggest it. The U.S.
acquisition triggered a political controversy in France around “the takeover by a foreign and hostile
company of a French strategic player in heavy industry”. Additionally, the Ministry of Defense was
concerned with Alstom’s heavy gas turbine business because they power French nuclear submarines
and the unique airship carrier France owns. A former DGSE executive even publicly complained
about the latter point in particular. However, and in passing, the latter did not make mention that
Alstom’s expertise in gas turbine is known and mastered in Russia, and that there is a great deal of
chance that France turns to Russian gas turbine manufacturer NPO-Saturn to powering her future
nuclear submarines thenceforth, and not anymore to now U.S.-owned Alstom. See also SISSE, and
CISSE.
Piscine (the): or “the swimming pool,” for long was a name given colloquially to the SDECE’s
headquarters in Paris because of its immediate vicinity with the public Piscine des Tourelles (public
swimming pool of Les Tourelles). As the public at some point knew the use of the name, it is no
longer so in the DGSE since the 1970s, or exceptionally otherwise in coded messages between
partners. Anecdotally, many full time employees of the DGSE go to bath in this swimming pool,
and that is why it is monitored in an unusual manner—staffs in it behave as overzealous watchdogs,
with the expected consequence to deterring ordinary patrons to come again.
Planter: or “to plant,” may mean colloquially several very different things, but in intelligence
jargon it means “sending an agent to occupy a position in a company, a public administration or any
other body in which he must spy on, sabotage it, or influence it from within”. E.g. “to plant an
agent”. Planter relates closely to “Noyautage,” therefore.
PNCD: stands for Pôle National de Cryptanalyse et de Décryptement (National Branch of
Cryptanalysis and Decryption). This virtual body exists unofficially for more than ten years, and it
succeeded the physical Centre de Transmission et de Traitement de l’Information–CTTI
(Transmission and Information Processing Center), itself created secretly in 1987 and achieved in
1990 in the underground of the Taverny Air Force Base. Actually, the PNCD is a virtual body
drawing its capacities in breaking codes from a very large network of intelligence, military, and
civilian public and private super-computers, computers, and even smartphones and other computer-
powered gears working together through distributed computing network, knowingly or
unbeknownst to their official owners / users. The PNCD is still a French state secret to date (March
2018), but the chapter 22 on COMINT / ROEM of this book explains some notions about it.
PNIJ: stands for Plateforme Nationale des Interceptions Judiciaires (National Platform for
Judicial Interceptions). The CCED assists technically the ANTENJ and the PNIJ. It replaces the
Système de Transmission des Interceptions Judiciaires–STIJ (Transmission System for Judicial
Interceptions) created in 2000; that is to say, domestic telecommunications interception. The PNIJ
was supposed to be operational in 2008, but the ambition proved impossible to materialize at that
time, due to numerous and repeated computer bugs. The PNIJ was still plagued with bugs after it
entered service and until early 2018. The PNIJ was created in 2005 and put into service on January
1, 2017. It is a service of the Ministry of Justice working under the tutelage of the ANTENJ
attached to the Secretary General of the Ministry of Justice. Thales Group, a French multinational
company that designs, builds electronic systems, and supplies services for the aerospace, defense,
transportation, and security markets, developed the PNIJ in 2014. Actually, in 2008, Thales acquired
a monopoly over the market of telephone and Internet tapping for the French Government, along
with Alcatel-Lucent, Bull, and Orange. Before this event, several small companies working in
partnership with Orange had held this monopoly since 1988, all owned by a same woman named
Hélène Girard.
Porte-serviette: is a jargon word denoting colloquially an agent of little importance working in
an embassy or consulate under cover activity and diplomatic status. His secret activities limit to
carrying messages and diplomatic pouches, and to assisting an intelligence officer or an intelligence
Chief of Station and other similar duties, generally. As the word has no literal equivalent in English,
it may translate “pouch (or bag) carrier,” and the choice of the name owes to a need to indicate “a
spy working in a consulate or embassy with insignificant official responsibilities”.
Privatisation des services: or privatization of the services. See here.
Propagande blanche: or white propaganda means, “positive and flattering propaganda”
generally carried out by media hype. The more often, white propaganda is done in the context of
domestic influence, but it may be done to help someone raise to prominence and acquire fame in a
foreign country such as a politician, or to help an agent or source raise up the ladder and access a
position of importance and influence.
Propagande noire: or black propaganda aka disinformation means “offensive and damaging
propaganda”.
PT: stands for Pose Technique, or “Technical Installation,” which means “Installing a spying
device (“bugging”) in a house, car, or in the surrounding of a house that must be put under
permanent and discreet surveillance”. See also Sonorisation, Fontaine, Bornage, and GOS.
Raining (it’s raining): from the French, il pleut, is used colloquially in the French intelligence
community and in the French liberal Freemasonry to mean about the same as, “someone shit in the
fan,” and all possible “tracks,” if ever there are some, must be erased / blurred forthwith. See also
Umbrella (opening the umbrella).
Remueur de casseroles: or “pans’ stirrer,” is an old intelligence jargon expression given to an
agent provocateur or appariteur in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It denoted an agent whose
business was to “stir up the social saucepan” in any district, in order to “bring minor details to
light”. Most pans’ stirrers were “labor spies” (little snitches) hired to infiltrate, monitor, disrupt, or
subvert labor union activities and protests. Under the reign of Napoléon III, an under-category of
those agents of the henchman sort was called blouse blanches, or “white blouse”. As may be
supposed from their name, pans’ stirrers moved in the lowest circles of the society, and were hired
for very little among waiters, moneylenders’ goons, racecourse’s snitches, and similar gentry. White
blouses still exist today under the name appariteurs and are publicly identified under the new name
“black blocs” when hired to sabotage and to demonize a protest movement under false pretenses of
far-left, far-right and anarchist activism. The French intelligence community considers and treats
such agents with similar contempt. Of late in 2019, the appariteurs / black blocks have been used
extensively to disrupt the Yellow vests movement in France, and to make the latter pass for violent,
racist, and anti-Semitic, people, in the expectation to demonize them (see demonization). See
detailed explanations about the latter action here. Nonetheless, the broader category of agent
provocateurs subsumes those agents. However, these classes of agents must not be confused with
that of henchmen, mostly immigrants from African countries until the early 1990s, and now
immigrants of former Yugoslavia and more particularly of Serbia.
Rens: stands for Renseignement (with an “R” cap.), or intelligence or “intel” in English.
RG aka Renseignements Généraux: or General Intelligence, in English was a police
intelligence agency with a specialty in domestic intelligence. Officially dismantled in 2008, it still
exists actually, under the two other names DR-PP and SCRT, corresponding to the former RG-PP
and DRG, respectively. Created in 1907, the general mission of the RG was to informing the
government on any social movement that could harm the state and its image, maintaining the ruling
elite in power, and to disrupting protest movements by resorting to clandestine and illegal actions
and measures that the ordinary police could not afford. Additionally, the RG surveyed social,
political, and cultural trends in the country, and watchdogged masonic lodges. For all the latter
reasons, the public has always perceived the RG as secret political police. Indeed, the domestic
intelligence agency has been at the center of countless scandals and affairs, including assassinations,
until the SDECE and eventually the DGSE took over the latter task. See DR-PP, SCRT, DST, DCRI,
DGSI, and Brigade du chef.
Renseignement de proximité: or “proximity intelligence,” stands for domestic intelligence in
Gendarmerie and police jargon, with a specialty in collecting domestic intelligence in each French
town, which then is sent to the national database managed by the SDAO.
ROEM: stands for Renseignement d’Origine ElectroMagnétique, or “Intelligence of
Electromagnetic Origin,” French equivalent to SIGINT (Signal Intelligence). in English. In France,
it also stands as an equivalent of COMINT and ELINT. See SIGINT on Wikipedia.
ROHUM: stands for Renseignement d’Origine HUMaine, or “Intelligence of Human Origin,”
equivalent to Human Intelligence–HUMINT. See HUMINT on Wikipedia.
ROINF: stands for Renseignement d’Origine INFormatique, or “Intelligence of Computer
Origine,” which denotes a type of intelligence without equivalent in English-speaking countries
because it relates to intelligence collected through hacking, pirating, and stealing computer data.
The term and its acronym are in use in the DGSE and DRM.
ROIM: stands for Renseignement d’Origine IMage, or “Intelligence of Image Origin,”
equivalent to Imagery Intelligence–IMINT. See IMINT on Wikipedia.
Romeo: is a jargon word referring colloquially to a male agent with a specialty in seducing
either female or male targets in order to compromise them. The name was associated with this
meaning in East Germany and is in use in numerous intelligence agencies in the World since then.
The French intelligence community makes an extensive use of Romeos in France and abroad.
SAC: stands for Service d’Action Civique (Civic Action Service). The SAC was a secret and
unofficial State-militia with a specialty in dirty tricks and domestic shadow operations. General De
Gaulle, prominent politician Jacques Foccart, and Minister of the Interior Charles Pasqua posing as
a rightist politician but fiercely anti-American, created the SAC in 1960. President François
Mitterrand dissolved the SAC in August 1982, following the simultaneous assassination of a whole
family of six by this militia, very possibly staged to justify the dismantlement of this organization.
The latter event is known since as “Tuerie d’Auriol” (Auriol Massacre). The SAC posed as a
would-be-anti-communist militia, but the reality justifying its existence after the Algerian War of
1954-1962 was more complex than that. In 1960, the special relationship between the Soviet Union
and France had begun already, and several SAC executives had close connections with the KGB or
were its agents. Actually, after 1962 and until 1981, the SAC was a “multi-purposes” militia that
chased French communist agents working for China, and members of Communist / Socialist
organizations suspected to be informants and infiltrated agents of the United States and Britain. The
task of the SAC was to disrupt the activities of those agents by pretending they were dangerous
Communist activists. Most members of the SAC were not informed of this reality of their missions
however, as they were sincerely committed anti-communist, thus fooled, manipulated, and
considered as expendable henchmen. The other particularity of the SAC was it recruited people with
eclectic backgrounds, such as former or active military in special units and commandos, police
officers of the ordinary police and of the RG, far-rightist activists, mob members, appariteurs and
agent provocateurs, and even active or former agents and barbouzes of the SDECE. The true role of
the latter was to exert discreet influence and control from within the militia.
SAIV: stands for Secteurs d’Activités d’Importance Vitale (Sectors of Vital Importance). There
are 12 SAIV, defined in a decree of June 2, 2006, and amended by a decree of July 3, 2008. In the
public sector, SAIVs are

1. civilian activities of the State,

 2. military activities of the State,

3. judicial activities, and

4. aeronautics, space, and research.

Then comes the safety of citizens:

1. health,

2. water supply management, and

3. food.

Then come sectors of economic and social life of the Nation:

1. energy,

2. electronic communications, audiovisual and information,

3. transportation,

4. finances, and

5. industry.

The military programming bill for 2014-2019 says that it is the responsibility of the State to
provide sufficient safety to the critical systems of vital operators (see OIV). Through four main
measures, the provision aims to establishing a minimum level of security for organizations deemed
of vital importance. Therefrom, the government would be able to set obligations such as prohibiting
computer-connection of certain critical systems to the Internet (e.g. nuclear power plants), setting up
detection systems by state-trusted providers, checking up the security level of critical information
systems through an audit system, and to be in capacity to imposing necessary measures on
Operators of Vital Importance (OIV) in the event of a major crisis. Remarkably, the safety of SAIVs
has been designed and is managed by the SGDSN of the Ministry of Defense. Additionally, the
measure associates indiscriminately public and private OIVs with the implementation of the
national security strategy, with respect to protection against malicious acts (terrorism, sabotage), and
natural, technological, and health risks. See also OIV, and ANSSI.
SCRC: stands for Service Central de Renseignement Criminel (Criminal Intelligence Branch). It
is the central criminal police agency of the Gendarmerie. At the national level of criminal police
intelligence, the mission of the SCRC is to centralizing and exploiting data and intelligence on
criminals and criminal activities, and to carrying on searches of persons and vehicles transmitted to
it by all units of the Gendarmerie. The latter information is collected to identifying criminal
phenomena and making comparisons between criminal patterns and methods in particular i.e.
criminal typology, in order to easing their solving. The SCRC also manages the Gendarmerie’s
cards and files databases, and it maintains relations with multiple law enforcement services and
agencies (national police, customs, INTERPOL, Europol, etc.), and with certain private companies
and associations (victims’ associations, car manufacturers, research centers, etc.), nationally and
internationally. Internationally renowned among police services, the SCRC receives visitors from
foreign police services—including the U.S. FBI in 2013—with which it shares its techniques and
expertise. It also is the central point of reference for the National Gendarmerie with respect to
criminal analysis and behavioral pattern analysis i.e. profiling. Additionally, the SCRC carries on a
police mission on the Internet to fight cybercrime, particularly in the fields of child pornography,
scams, counterfeiting, racism, and xenophobia. The SCRC has a Section Commandement et
Pilotage–SCP (Command and Control Section) that subsumes

1. Groupe de Permanence Opérationnelle–OCG (Operational Permanency Group), a

2. Cellule Formation Assistance–AFC (Training Assistance Cell), and a

3. Secretariat–SET.

Next come 4 divisions and 17 specialized departments that are

1. Division Administration des Applications Judiciaires–D2AJ (Division for the

Management of Judicial Applications) itself subsuming
1. Département du Fichier d’Antécédents Judiciaires–DFAJ (Department of the
Criminal History Cards and Files),
2. Département des Fichiers de Recherches–DFRE (Department of Wanted
Persons Files),
3. Département du Fichier Automatisé des Empreintes Digitales–DFAED
(Department of Automated Fingerprint Cards),
4. Département du Droit d’Accès Indirect–DAI (Department for the Right to
Indirect Access),

2. Division Analyse et Investigations Criminelles–DAIC (Division of Criminal

Investigation and Analysis), itself subsuming
1. Département Atteintes aux Personnes–DAP (Department of Offenses
Against Persons),
2. Département Atteintes aux Biens–DAB (Department of Offenses Against
Property),
3. Département Délinquance Économique, Financière et Stupéfiants–DEFS
(Department of Economic, Financial and Narcotic Delinquency),
4. Département Exploitation Renseignement et Analyse Stratégique–DERAS
(Department for the Exploitation of Intelligence and Strategic Analysis),
5. Groupe Relations Internationales–GRI (International Relations Group),

3. Division Opérations et Appuis Spécialisés–DOAS (Division of Operations and Special

Support) itself subsuming
1. Unité Nationale d’Appui Judiciaire–UNAJ (National Unit for Judicial
Support),
 2. Département Sciences du Comportement–DSC (Department of Behavioral
Sciences),
3. Département Science de l’Analyse Criminelle–DSAC (Department of
Criminal Analysis Science),

4. Division Lutte Contre la Cybercriminalité–DLCC (Division for the Fight Against

Cybercrime), itself subsuming
1. Département Coordination et Appuis Numériques–DCAN (Department for
Coordination and Cyber Support),
2. Département Investigations sur Internet–D2I (Department of Internet
Investigations),
3. Département Prévention et Suivi des Phénomènes sur Internet–DPSPI
(Department for the Prevention and Tracking of Internet Phenomena),
4. Département Répression des Atteintes aux Mineurs sur Internet–DRAMI
(Department for the Repression of Attacks Against Juvenile on the Internet),
which itself integrates the
5. Centre National d’Analyse des Images de Pédopornographie–CNAIP
(National Center for the Analysis of Child Pornography Pictures).

The SCRC is located 5 boulevard de l’Hautil, in Cergy-Pontoise.

SCRT: stands for Service Central du Renseignement Territorial (Central Service of Territorial
Intelligence), which is the domestic intelligence agency of the civilian police, along with the DR-PP
for Paris and its suburbs. Above all, it is the new name of the RG officially dissolved in 2008. The
French Government rendered deliberately unclear the general mission of this intelligence agency in
order to hide the reality of a new name for the RG. The mission of the SCRT is to exploiting
domestic intelligence concerning all domains of the institutional, economic, and social life likely to
cause unrest. It is also responsible for studying facts in the French society deemed likely to
challenge the core values of the Nation and political orthodoxy, such as religious excesses,
phenomena of community and national identity withdrawal, social unrest, and violent political
protests. When compared to the RG it replaced, the SCRT has the new characteristic to hire
gendarmes in plain clothes, a provision granting the Ministry of Defense discreet control over this
sensitive agency of the Ministry of the Interior. In late 2017, the SCRT had a staff (officially) of
2,700 to 2,800 police and gendarmes. The SCRT is integrated in the Direction Centrale de la
Sécurité Publique–DCSP (Central Directorate for Public Security), under the responsibility of the
Direction Générale de la Police Nationale–DGPN (General Directorate of the National Police) of
the Ministry of the Interior. The SCRT was created in 2014 as a successor of the temporary SDIG,
and it subsumes a General Secretary and seven specialized branches, each called Division and
presented below.

D1, Division des Faits Religieux et Mouvances Contestataires (Division of Religious

Facts and Protest Movements),

D2, Division de l’Information Économique et Sociale (Division of Economic and

Social Intelligence),

D3, Division des Dérives Urbaines et du Repli Identitaire (Division of Urban Drift and
Identity Withdrawal),

D4, Division de la Documentation et de la Veille Technique (Technology-Watch

Division),
 D5, Division de l’Outre-Mer (Division of Overseas Territories),

D6, Division des Communautés et Faits de Société (Division of Minorities and Facts
of the Society), and

D7, Division Nationale de la Recherche et de l’Appui (National Division for Search

and Support).

The D7 aka DNRA is an operational branch of the SCRT, responsible for covert surveillance in
sensitive areas in the contexts of counterterrorism and other undisclosed concerns. At the territorial
level, the DNRA relies on six main regional units called Sections Zonales de la Recherche et de
l’Appui–SZRA (Zonal Sections for Search and Support), located in Lille, Metz, Lyon, Marseille,
Bordeaux, and Rennes. The SZRAs of Metz, Bordeaux, and Marseille have Search and Support
Groups in Strasbourg, Toulouse, and Nice, respectively. Possibly, the SZRAs actually succeeded the
GERs of the RG. Then there are 14 Services Régionaux du Renseignement Territorial–SRRT
(Regional Services for Local Domestic Intelligence), and 79 Services Départementaux du
Renseignement Territorial–SDRT (Local Service for Local Domestic Intelligence). Additionally,
there are several intelligence cells called Services du Renseignement Territorial–SRT (Territorial
Intelligence Services) in some arrondissements (city districts) in large cities, and 71 Antennes du
Renseignement Territorial–ART (Territorial Intelligence Cells) located in the premises of
Gendarmerie brigades and in airports with more than 4 million passengers a year. The exceptions
are Orly and Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airports, where its sister agency, the DR-PP, takes over. The
SCRT must merge with the SDAO of the Gendarmerie to become a larger national domestic
intelligence agency, which indeed it is already in the facts in 2019. In 2017, the headquarter of the
SCRT was located in the former building of the Ministry of the Interior and of the DST, 11 Rue des
Saussaies, Paris 8th.
SDAEF: stands for Sous-Direction des Affaires Économiques et Financières (Sub-Directorate of
Economic and Financial Affairs). Although the SDAEF is a police branch, certain of its units are
active in domestic intelligence and investigation relating to counterintelligence (non-officially
acknowledged). In this context, the SDAEF is the police agency responsible for investigating on
prominent French personalities up to the highest political level, a fact the author of this book knows
firsthand. The SDAEF is one of the sub-directorates of the Direction Régionale de la Police
Judiciaire de Paris–DRPJ-Paris (Regional Directorate of Criminal Police of Paris). Its investigations
and intelligence activities focus on financial criminality, and on the varied types of frauds in this
field. The names of its seven units, below, speak for themselves.

1. Brigade Financière–BF (Financial Brigade),

2. Brigade de Recherches et d’Investigations Financières–BRIF (Brigade for Researches

and Financial Investigations),

3. Brigade d’Enquêtes sur les Fraudes aux Technologies de l’Information–BEFTI

(Brigade for Investigations on Fraud in Information Technology [pirated software]),

4. Brigade de Répression de la Délinquance Astucieuse–BRDA (Brigade for the Fight

against Astute Fraud),
 5. Brigade des Fraudes aux Moyens de Paiement–BFMP (Brigade for the Fight against
Fraud to Means of Payment),

6. Brigade de Répression de la Délinquance Économique–BRDE (Brigade for the Fight

against Financial Crime), and

7. Brigade de Répression de la Délinquance aux Personnes–BRDP (Brigade for the Fight

against Crime against Persons).

In 2017, the SDAEF had a staff of about 400 police officers working in plain clothes. It is
located 122 Rue du Château-des-Rentiers, Paris 13d.
SDAO: stands for Sous-Direction de l’Anticipation Opérationnelle (Sub-Directorate of
Operational Anticipation). It is a domestic intelligence agency of the Gendarmerie, created in
December 2013, acting under the Direction des Opérations et de l’Emploi–DOE (Directorate of
Operations and Employment) within the DGGN. This sub-directorate is made up of the Centre de
Renseignement Opérationnel–CRO (Operational Intelligence Center) aka CROG aka CROGend—
the additional “G” and “Gend” standing for de la, “of the” Gendarmerie—and of the Centre
d’Analyse et d’Exploitation–CAE (Intelligence Analysis and Treatment Center) aka CAEG aka
CAEGend. The Gendarmerie is insisting on the fact that this agency is providing its support to the
BLAT. Officially, the main missions of the SDAO limit to

proposing the doctrine relating to domestic intelligence missions entrusted to the

Gendarmerie,

processing internal and external intelligence to alert authorities on threats, as well as

to monitor sensitive situations in the short term,

participating in the search, collection, analysis and dispatching for / of intelligence on

defense affairs, public safety, and national security, necessary to the execution of the
general mission of the Gendarmerie,

enforcing the processing of operational intelligence on public safety and economic

security,

leading or partaking (with the other sub-divisions of the DOE) in the inter-ministerial
management of crises, and

monitoring and coordinating the actions of Gendarmerie units in accordance with their
respective areas of responsibilities.

The mission of the SDAO largely is about domestic intelligence gathering and analysis, carried
on in order to feed police and intelligence cards / files databases whose process is as follows.
Overall, in 2016, there were 500 to 600 intelligence analysts working full-time in the SDAO. Note
that the latter number is considerable, knowing that all those gendarmes work in domestic
intelligence of human origin. Notwithstanding, the latter workforce only is the head of a larger
national intelligence network fed 24 / 7 by all Gendarmeries units of continental France and its
overseas territories, which other staff is about 100,000. Still today in 2018, the public is unaware of
this part of the works of the Gendarmerie, and the mainstream media do not report about it. In 2017,
the SDAO was bound to merge with the SCRT to become a still larger national domestic
intelligence agency, thus marking the complete and definitive military takeover in domestic
intelligence. The headquarters of the SDAO are located 4 Rue Claude-Bernard, in Issy-les-
Moulineaux.
SDECE: stands for Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (External
Documentation and Counterespionage Service). It is the former name of the DGSE from December
1945 to April 1982. It is noteworthy that this name for the last time indicated counterespionage
activities in this agency. Since then, no official information was given to the public on the existence
of the offensive counterintelligence and counterespionage activities of the DGSE abroad, and within
the French borders alike. The reasons for the latter oddity are the activities of this agency in
territorial France are intensive and extend in reality to domestic intelligence, influence, and
counterinfluence, unofficially. The counterespionage activities of the DGSE—integrated in its
influence and counterinfluence activities—focus on the United States and its allies, and no longer on
Russia since the early 1960s at least (see the third part of this book in particular about this point).
Effects do not follow the definitive disappearance of this indication about counterespionage in the
name “DGSE,” therefore. Instead, the official change owes to concerns of political and diplomatic
orders following the election of President François Mitterrand in May 1981, and to considerable
changes that occurred in France from this important political event on, all of political nature, and
explained in this book.
Sensibilisation: or “awareness raising” denotes one of the most often used technique in
domestic influence in France. Awareness raising consists to the domestic influence branch of an
intelligence agency in instructing the mainstream media to be insisting on certain political and / or
social and / or economic issues, in order to influence the population in a way favorable to the
smooth fulfilling of the political and economic agenda of the Government. Typically, therefore,
awareness raising actions / missions precede the passing of new regulations and taxes. The method
may also aim to handling the public opinion in a way fitting the economic agenda of the
government, by preparing the masses to important political and economic changes to come.
Internally in the DGSE, it is said that awareness raising aims to “warming up” or “preparing” the
masses / public opinion in anticipation of a political decision planned in advance, so that the event
will not catch the public by surprise, and thus will not cause unrest. The method is relatively old in
its principle since it was in common use to prepare the masses for war, and even to raise their
willingness to go to war against a country presented to them as a scapegoat. However, its larger
application and generalization as described above actually was a Soviet import that occurred in
France during the preparatory stage of the riots and general strikes of May 1968. It happened in the
early months of the latter year, first as a sophisticated technique in agitprop known in the Soviet
KGB under the name сенсибилизаци (siencibilizatz’iya), otherwise used in the other field of
epistemology in Soviet Union. In France, the latter Russian word was given definitively the
translation “sensibilisation” (without equivalent in English) circa March 1968, as this word,
sounding similar, already existed with other meanings in this country. The latter facts explain why
sensibilisation / awareness raising is the same in its principle as the other method of “minority
influence” in agitprop. Sensibilisation / awareness raising, and minority influence are explained in
detail with true examples in this book.
Service Action: aka Division Action or Action Service is a special branch of the DGSE with no
real physical existence, responsible for planning and carrying out shadow and covert operations of a
paramilitary nature. The core specializations of the Service Action are sabotage, destruction of
material, assassination, detaining / kidnapping, and infiltration / exfiltration (extraction) of persons
to / from hostile territories. Almost all its staff is recruited under military status, and the DGSE
selects its men in the units of the COS in most instances; that is to say, not exclusively. Though well
known, and popularized in France as a corps of “action-heroes spies,” the Service Action actually is
a virtual service with no permanent agents waiting in some barracks for the next mission to come as
firefighters do. Thus, the COS is acting as a permanent “workforce pool” that trains permanently
elite soldiers to varied specialties likely to serve the needs of the Service Action on a case-by-case
basis. Before that and during the Algerian War of 1954-1962 especially, the 1er Choc and the 11e
Choc were special and permanent units of the Service Action, with a much lower workforce. The 1er
RPIMA and the Commandos Marine took over the role of the latter units, though not exclusively.
The Service Action fills other security-related roles including assessing the security of strategic
sites, such as nuclear power plants and military facilities, and the submarine base of the Île-Longue
in Brittany with its Commandos Marine. Some members of the NGO Greenpeace in France are
undercover members of the Service Action. The latter fact has been publicly raised as a hypothesis
before the publishing of this book, following the “Affair of the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior” in
1985, which boat belonged to Greenpeace, precisely. Along with another service of the DGSE, the
headquarter of the Service Action is located in the Fort-de-Noisy, in Noisy-le-Sec, Northeastern
suburb of Paris, a few miles from the headquarter of the DGSE. The Service Action has four
training centers preparing soldiers of the COS for its missions, which together compose the Centre
d’Instruction des Réservistes Parachutistes–CIRP (Paratrooper Reservist Instruction Center). They
are the

Centre Parachutiste d’Entraînement Spécialisé–CPES (Paratrooper Specialised

Training Center) for clandestine operations, formerly located in Cercottes, and which
would be located in the 123 Air Base Bricy-Orléans since the 1990s,

Centre Parachutiste d’Instruction Spécialisée–CPIS (Paratrooper Specialized

Instruction Center) for special forces, located in Perpignan—the CPIS is the successor of
the Centre d’Entraînement à la Guerre Spéciale–CEGS (Training Center for Special
Warfare),

Centre Parachutiste d’Entraînement aux Opérations Maritimes–CPEOM (Paratrooper

Training Center in Naval Operations) in Quelern, which instructs combat divers (see also
Commandos Marine), and which is the successor of the Centre d’Instruction des Nageurs
de Combat–CINC (Combat Swimmers Training Center) in Aspretto, Corsica. In addition
to those known training centers and units, there is the

Centre National d’Entraînement Commando–CNEC (National Commando Training

Center) where is quartered in the 1er Régiment de Choc (1st Shock Regiment), unofficial
successor of the 11e Choc, itself a special operations center located in Mont-Louis and
Collioure. And there is the

1er RPIMA, based in Bayonne.

Otherwise, the Service Action prepares commonly and anonymously its men for their mission in
very various places such as public facilities, abandoned plants, houses, and buildings that all are
look-alike of their true targets. Remarkably, members of the Action Service are “recycled” as
civilian field agents, flying agents, barbouzes, and intelligence officers, when they no longer are fit
physically for paramilitary operations. The latter can be considered as French “James Bonds” of a
sort, owing to their past special trainings and experience in hostile regions of the World. Many such
recycled Service Action members access senior executive positions in the DGSE eventually, as they
are the best-trusted employees of this agency, due to the extreme forms of indoctrination and tests
they went through. Anecdotally, but interestingly, instructors happen to call members of the Service
Action, “Comrade,” during their trainings.
Service de Sécurité Extérieur: or Exterior Security Service (of the DGSE). See here.
Service de Sécurité Intérieur: or Interior Security Service (of the DGSE). See here.
SGDSN: stands for Secrétariat Général de la Défense et de la Sécurité Nationale (General-
Secretary for National Defense and Security). It is a governmental body in direct connection with
the Prime Minister’s office, responsible for aiding the President in the exercise of his
responsibilities in the fields of National Defense and National Security. As the author of this book
had meetings with staff members of this body who had previously been working in the DGSE, he is
able to say that the SGDSN is concerned with strategic questions and planning pertaining to all
areas of French intelligence activities. Officially, the SGDSN ensures the secretariat of the Defense
and National Security Council (CDSN), and its missions in this context are
1. to leads and coordinates inter-directorates works relating to the national defense,
security policy, and public policies,

2. in liaison with concerned ministerial departments, to monitor the evolution of crises

and international conflicts that may affect the interests of France in the field of Defense
and National Security, and to find out and to suggest solutions and provisions for it—the
SGDSN also is called in the preparation and management of international negotiations or
meetings with implications in defense and national security, and it is kept informed of
their results,

3. to propose, disseminate, enforce and control necessary measures for the secrecy of the
national defense—the SGDSN prepares inter-ministerial regulations on defense and
national security, and it dispatches them and monitors their enforcement,

4. in support to the CNR, to partake in the adaptation to the legal framework of the
intelligence agencies, to plan their resources, and to ensure the organization of the inter-
ministerial groups of analysis and synthesis in intelligence,

5. to ensure the organization of the inter-ministerial groups of analysis and synthesis in

intelligence,

6. to ensure that the President and the Government have the necessary means of
command and electronic communications in the fields of defense and national security,
and to guarantee their effectiveness,

7. to propose to the PM and to implement the government policy in security of

communication and information systems—for this purport, the SGDSN exerts its
authority over the ANSSI—,

8. to guarantee the coherence of actions undertaken in the policy of scientific research

and technological projects of interest to the defense and national security, and to
contribute to the protection of national strategic interests in this field—which defines
objectives and missions in technological, scientific, and military intelligence.

The SGDSN is made up of the

Service de l’Administration Générale (Service for General Management),

Direction des Affaires Internationales, Stratégiques et Technologiques–DAIST

(Directorate of International, Strategic and Technological Affairs), and the

Direction de la Protection et de la Sécurité de l’État–DPSE (Directorate for the

Protection and Security of the State).

Then the DPSE itself is made up of the

 Sous-Direction Affaires Internationales (Sub-Directorate of Foreign Affairs),

Sous-Direction Non-prolifération, Sciences et Technologies (Sub-Directorate for Non-

Proliferation, Science, and Technology);

Sous-Direction Exportations des Matériels de Guerre (Sub-Directorate of Arms

Exports),

Sous-Direction Prospective et Planification de Sécurité (Sub-Directorate of Foresight

and Security Planning),

Sous-Direction Protection du Secret (Sub-Directorate for the Protection of Secrecy),

Mission Interministérielle de Sûreté Aérienne (Interdepartmental Mission for Air

Security),

Mission Recherche et Technologies de Sécurité (Committee for Research and Security

Technologies), and the

Bureau des Documents Classifiés du SGDSN (Office of Classified Documents of the

SGDSN).

The SGDSN has a staff of about 900 and it is located 51 Boulevard de La Tour-Maubourg, Paris
7th, in the Hôtel des Invalides, together with several other intelligence agencies presented in this
Lexicon.
SIGINT: stands for Signal Intelligence, or Renseignement d’Origine ElectroMagnétique–
ROEM in French.
SISSE: stands for Service de l’Information Stratégique et de la Sécurité Economiques (Service
for Strategic Information and Security of the Economy). Recently created in 2016, it is an
intelligence agency with a specialty in economic intelligence and economic warfare, focusing on
heritage according to the French perception of this notion (see Patrimoine). Its missions are the
followings.

1. To identify sectors, technologies, and companies, in the economic, industrial, and

scientific sectors deemed pertinent to the national interest, and to centralize relevant
intelligence of strategic nature.

2. To contribute to the development of the Government’s position on foreign investment.

3. To inform government authorities about individuals, companies and organizations that

are of interest—or constitute a threat—to the national and strategic interest (see OIV and
SAIV).
 4. To help ensure the proper application of the law of July 26, 1968 (protection of
sensitive information).

In addition, the SISSE animates and guarantees the coherence of the work of the Ministry for the
Economy and Finance in the areas of its competencies. The SISSE is composed of a
multidisciplinary team of professionals including senior advisers in certain ministries. The
collective expertise of the latter extends to many fields, such as industries and services, economic
security, homeland security affairs, research and innovation, defense, aeronautics and space
industries, health and “life science,” sustainable development and competitiveness, and European
and multilateral affairs. The SISSE leads and runs a network of 22 Délégués à l’Information
Stratégique et à la Sécurité Économiques–DISSE (Delegates for Strategic Information and
Economic Security). The latter are posted in Directions Régionales des Entreprises, de la
Concurrence, de la Consommation, du Travail et de l’Emploi–DI(R)ECCTE (Regional Directorates
for Business, Competition, Consumer Affairs, Labor and Employment), in the framework of the
development in France of a territorial / regional policy in economic intelligence. DISSEs come to
support the authority of préfectures in France’s regions. Moreover, the SISSE is the outcome of the
merger of the Délégation Interministérielle à l’Intelligence Économique–D2IE (Inter-Ministerial
Delegation for Economic Intelligence), and of the Service Ministériel de Coordination à
l’Intelligence Économique–SCIE (Ministerial Coordination Service for Economic Intelligence). See
also CISSE.
SDLCODF: stands for Sous-direction de la Lutte contre la Criminalité Organisée et la
Délinquance Financière (Sub-Directorate for the Fight against Organized Crime and Financial
Crime). It is a police agency responsible for fighting money laundering, terrorist financing, and
fraud, working under the authority of the DCPJ. Its role is to coordinate the action of police and
Gendarmerie services in the previously mentioned fields. It investigates suspicious transaction and
activity reports submitted by TracFin, and it is responsible for the cooperation with Europol and
INTERPOL international police agencies.
Sleepwalker: see Somnambule, below.
Somnambule: or “sleepwalker” in English is a jargon word that specialists in domestic
influence and counterinfluence give colloquially to all ordinary people composing the masses. The
reason justifying the choice of this noun, pejorative in a sense, is that an overwhelming majority of
“ordinary people” is unable to make the difference between neutral and objective information
(news) and influence and propaganda. As seen from the viewpoint of specialists, the whole
population behaves as millions of sleepwalkers ready to believe anything the media, authors, and
agents of influence, tell and write, indifferently. The reason explaining the naiveté is that people
tend to believe at its face value everything is formally published and broadcast, by wrongly
attributing some official and unanimously approved virtue to media such as print and audiovisual
periodical publications, books, and similar. Then the greater the number of people truly or
apparently involved in the publishing / broadcasting of a fact or fallacy is, the truer it seems to be in
the understanding of the masses. Additionally, the greater the known number of people who
watched, listened, or read, the fact or fallacy is, the greater the probability is that “it is true indeed,”
still in the understanding of the masses. The latter explanations actually are these of the better-
known bandwagon effect and peer pressure effect. Therefrom, influence and counterinfluence
specialist have the other mission to protect the people / sleepwalkers of the country they serve
against foreign influence that relies on the same psychological phenomena, by spreading
counterinfluence messages. regardless whether both are facts or fallacies. Moreover, in France,
specialists in influence and counterinfluence are tasked to prevent the masses of people /
sleepwalkers from “waking up” and understanding they actually are thus fooled permanently, and
by which methods and tricks they are so, since their own country fabricates and spreads fallacies for
them either. In other words about the latter explanation, teaching the masses on methods and
techniques in foreign influence would be effective and salutary, doubtless, but at the same time it
would reveal to them the influence and propaganda that their own government tailors and spreads
for them. As a result and as examples, in France, words and notions such as, “group effect,” “peer
pressure,” “bandwagon effect,” “minority influence,” and even “schadenfreude” are unknown and
never mentioned and explained in the media, while the latter are well-known and even largely
explained in other countries, such as the United States and Switzerland. In the DGSE, a rule
alluding colloquially to this particular definition of sleepwalker says, Ils dorment; ne les réveillez
pas (“They [the masses] sleep, don’t wake them up”). Edgar Morin, French communist philosopher,
sociologist, intelligence officer, and founder of modern methods and techniques of mass influence
and manipulation is at the origin of this particular use of the word sleepwalker. Morin often said,
“Eveillés, ils dorment” (“Awaken, they sleep”), quoting his own way Greek philosopher Eraclitus.
Thus, Morin implied that, as taken collectively, ordinary people who constitute the masses are too
stupid to make the difference between the truth, influence, propaganda, and disinformation. For the
record, the exact and complete English translation of Morin’s quote above is, “All men do walk in
sleep, and all have faith in that they dream: for all things are as they seem to all, and all things flow
like a stream” (G.T.W. Patrick, The Fragments of the work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature, N.
Murray pub., Baltimore, 1889, first p.) From 1945 to 1946, Morin was Lieutenant in the French
Army, appointed Head of the Propaganda Bureau of the French Military Government in Landau, a
body of the French Occupation Army in Germany. In 1951, Morin was expelled officially from the
Communist Party—this was appearance for the sake of deception, actually. Thereupon, the same
latter year, Morin was admitted to the CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research), for which he
resumed a specialty in the study of popular culture. In 1960, French sociologist Georges Friedmann
brought Morin and Roland Barthes together to create the Centre for the Study of Mass
Communication, which in 2008 became the Edgar Morin Centre of the EHESS, Paris, after several
name changes. After the events of 1968, in 1969, Morin and other scientists and scholars created the
think tank Groupe des Dix, which, until 1976, designed and defined modern French methods of
indoctrination, deception, domestic influence, and information warfare, all adopted by the SDECE
and eventually resumed by the DGSE. From firsthand experience, the author of the present book
reduces the definition of sleepwalker in this peculiar context to “A lay and law-abiding citizen who
supports enthusiastically a political candidate whose demeanor is analogous to that of Tony
Montana in the film Scarface”. Indeed, in all countries, an overwhelming majority of people judges
would-be politicians it votes for from their appearances and speech-styles, and not much from a
thoughtful analysis of the substance of their speeches and of their pedigrees. Wherefrom, certainly,
Mark Twain’s famous aphorism, “A lie can travel around the World and back again while the truth
is lacing up its booths”.
Sound (to): or sonoriser or sonorisation, in French. Regretfully, “sounded” or “sounding” does
not translates satisfactorily the French verb sonoriser, which means in DGSE jargon, “Hiding spy
microphones in a place (vehicle, room, office, apartment, or a whole house)”. In English-speaking
countries, many people say, colloquially either, “bugging,” and call spy microphones, “bugs”. This
mission is also called, more formally, Pose Technique–PT (Technical Installation), and it connects to
discreet break-in, called colloquially fontaine, or “fountain”. See also Pose Technique–PT.
Source: (same orthography and original meaning in English). The French intelligence
community, and the DGSE in particular, do not use the same words and notions as their American
counterparts when calling colloquially “spies” their own agents and full-time employees. As in the
United States, confusion may arise easily with the latter understanding in France. In the United
States, full time employees of the FBI are called “agents” or “special agents,” and confusion may
arise therefore when foreign spies are called “agents” either. Things do not improve when full time
employees of the U.S. Secret Service are called “secret agents”. There are similar confusions in
France, where ordinary people tend to call full-time employees of the DGSE, “agents” or even
“secret agents” either, which is incorrect in both cases, formally speaking. In private and
colloquially, both full time employees of the DGSE and the CIA admit they are “spies” themselves,
down from the simplest employee and up to the director. However, in the latter agencies again,
formally speaking and pejoratively, a spy may also be a foreign and illegal agent, but Americans
only use the nouns “operative” and “illegal”. Americans people and the CIA in particular name the
latter spy, “Non-Official Cover–NOC” when he is their own, whereas in the DGSE, the equivalent
of the U.S. NOC is “agent volant,” translating as “flying agent”. A foreign national the DGSE
recruits to spy on against his own country is called “source” and not “agent,” internally and formally
(same word in English). Then the DGSE and the DRM name capteurs, or “sensors,” all its sources,
contacts, field agents, and flying agents, indifferently, when looking at the overall picture of their
own intelligence networks. See detailed definition here.
Sous-marin: or “submarine” is a jargon word in French intelligence that may denote two very
different things, depending on the context. In the first instance, a submarine is the name given
colloquially in the DGSE to a penetration agent once he is planted and active, and then as such he is
an agent in place (agent en place in French). However, submarine may also denote a foreign
national recruited as source while working in a company, agency, public service, or as member of a
political party or any other body. Still in the latter context, a submarine is rather named “mole” in
English-speaking countries, but the French translation of the latter noun, taupe, is also popularly
used in France and in the media and fictions in particular. Then in the second instance, submarine is
a jargon word given to a vehicle (a car or the more often a delivery truck) used for the static and
discreet monitoring or surveillance of a place. For long, about all French intelligence agencies and
certain police units used civilian camouflaged delivery vehicles for this purpose, with police officers
or spies who hid inside for long hours, thus carrying on a discreet surveillance mission. Police units
still used such delivery vehicles in the early 2000s. Since about the 1990s, French intelligence
agencies often use civilian cars (sedan or wagon, for example) with nobody inside because they are
equipped with several miniature cameras concealed in them. Those devices are connected to a radio
transmitter that sends video signals to a distant location, using either the ordinary national cell-
phone network or a particular encrypted “proprietary frequency” when the video signal is
transmitted to an apartment or house nearby, within one mile typically. The DGSE also uses thus
equipped sedan and wagon vehicles (generally old) for the surveillance of its own sensitive places
and areas, including civilian buildings where their employees work under cover and / or live. In the
latter case, someone comes regularly to replace batteries and change the license plates of the vehicle
—those license plates can be French or foreign (European), indifferently.
Special: (same orthography and meaning in English) is in the DGSE a jargon adjective used to
say—often in association with non-verbal language—discreetly that someone is or very possibly is
a spy. For example, in a conversation between two employees of the DGSE, “A salesman rang at
my door, today; he was a bit special,” meaning, “I think this salesman was a spy acting under
pretense to be a salesman”. DGSE employees use other words when talking about someone they
suspect to be one or their colleagues, or when one warns another of the visit of a colleague the latter
has not been previously noticed of. For example, “An employee of the Ministry of Agriculture is
going to come to see you, this afternoon; he is a good person, you will see,” meaning, “He is one of
our colleagues, you don’t yet know, whose cover activity is official at the Ministry of Agriculture”.
Special France: French DGSE equivalent to NOFORN (No FOReign Nationals) in the U.S.
intelligence community. See Need-to-know.
Speech jamming: is a specifically French verbal influence and counterinfluence method in
public debates and TV shows. It consists in talking out of turn repeatedly and boldly, in order not to
let a targeted individual tell or testify about an embarrassing fact or sensitive subject. Agents of
influence who resort to this method talk loudly and louder than the speaker talks, and they pretend
generally to be indignant in addition, or they joke at the expense of their interlocutor in the aim to
unsettle and to discredit him in front of the attendance. The Soviets, first, introduced the method,
used frequently in France since the 1960s. Most French Communists selected to speak publicly
learned the method, and they resort to it in public debates and TV shows, typically. Actually, the
method found its direct inspiration in its principle in the “kiai” of Karate because the intent is to
strike or inhibit psychologically one’s opponent before an audience by resorting to an effect of
surprise. Additionally, the method teaches that as boldness and impoliteness is unexpected in a
debate between people supposed to be gentlemen, then the effect is the more striking and aims to
rally to the opinion of its practitioner a majority that is popular and largely little mannered. In a
normal and frequent context, when somebody wants to impose his authority implicitly, or to strike
back against a danger, then he raises his voice naturally. The trick proves successful again when
used to silence and to discredit someone, especially when in front of an audience that takes instantly
and wrongly the inhibition of the latter for weakness. When the latter verbal aggression results in
the interlocutor losing his composure, then this is also an expected effect that must bring further
discredit to him. There is one more additional effect to the method, when in the case of TV
broadcast debate, which consists in arriving on stage showing the indignant and disgruntled attitude
of “the victim” who is in his right, to bully, intimidate, or inhibit, further the interlocutor even
before a single word has been uttered.
Spetssvyaz: stands for Служба специальной связи и информации (Special Communications
and Information Service of the Federal Protective Service of the Russian Federation). It is the
Russian counterpart of the U.S. NSA since 2003, formerly known as FAPSI. Remarkably and
surprisingly, the existence of this body is largely unknown to the public, and the Western media
never mentioned it to date in 2019, in spite of its potency and aggressiveness against Western
countries. As an aside, the latter remark applies to the Russian foreign intelligence service SVR, as
the Western media continue to talk about the defunct KGB, and never name its successor the SVR,
surprisingly again.
 SR: stands for Section de Recherche (Investigative Section) in the Gendarmerie in particular.
For long, the SDECE and then the DGSE and the DRM use the acronym “SR,” standing in this
other case for Service de Renseignement, or “intelligence service” or “intelligence agency”.
STRJD: stands for Service Technique de Recherches Judiciaires et de Documentation
(Technical Service of Criminal Investigation and Intelligence). It is the former name of the SCRC.
Submarine: see Sous-marin.
Super-moustache: (same orthography and meaning in English) is used colloquially in the
DGSE to specify a super-agent. See here.
SVR RF: Cлужба Bне ней Pазведкi, or “Foreign Intelligence Service,” new name of the
foreign intelligence branch of the KGB since the fall of the Soviet Union; the domestic intelligence
branches having been renamed FSB. It will be question of this intelligence agency in this book in a
number of times. See also Wikipedia.
Target: or cible in French intelligence jargon is a word denoting a “person of interest” to an
intelligence agency, qualified as such for a variety of reasons. Usually, a target is an individual
under surveillance because he is suspected to be a foreign spy or a terrorist, or / and who must be
corrupted one way or another, discredited, assassinated, or recruited as agent or source. However,
target may also apply to a group of people, business, public body, NGO, sector of activity, or even a
country, i.e. a target country.
Taupe: or mole in English. The French intelligence community favors internally the jargon word
sous-marin (submarine) to name a “mole”. For the record, and otherwise, Soviets coined the word
“mole” in espionage during the Cold War. See Sous-marin.
TEMPEST: is a National Security Agency–NSA specification and a NATO certification
referring to spying on information systems (computers) through leaking (electromagnetic)
emanations, including unintentional broadcast of radio or electromagnetic signals, sounds, and
vibrations.—Wikipedia, “TEMPEST,” Nov. 2017. See also Airgap.
TOC: stands for Téléphone OCculte, or “occult cell phone,” French equivalent to the English
slang noun “burner”. It denotes a prepaid, non-registered, mobile phone used for sensitive or
anonymous telecommunications, and even for a one-time use only.
TracFin: stands for Traitement du Renseignement et Action contre les Circuits FINanciers
clandestins (Intelligence Processing and Action against Clandestine Financial Networks). It is the
name of the intelligence agency of the Ministry for the Economy and Finances, whose general and
official mission is to fight against illegal financial transactions, money laundering, and terrorism
financing. This agency also involves in intelligence missions and operations abroad, in partnership
with about all other intelligence agencies. In 2017, TracFin’s workforce was 145, including 7
Officiers de Liaison (Liaison Officers). Other intelligence agencies, the police, and the Gendarmerie
are cooperating regularly or occasionally with TracFin, through their own financial crime services
and units. Among the latter that are the most concerned, there are the Central Office for the
Suppression of Financial Crime—COSFC, the Prudential Supervisory Authority, the Financial
Markets Authority, the SDAEF, the SDLCODF, the Directorate of Financial and Economic
Intelligence of the DGSE, and several other local authorities. For the record, for several decades, the
French intelligence community is particularly active in financial and economic intelligence for a
number of motives including merges and acquisitions abroad. TracFin’s headquarter is located 10
Rue Auguste Blanqui, Montreuil-sous-Bois.
Traitant: is a jargon word and an abridged version of Officier Traitant–OT (Case Officer)
whose equivalent in English-speaking countries is “handler”.
Umbrella (opening the umbrella): or “ouvrir le parapluie” in French intelligence and in the
French liberal Freemasonry alike, is a jargon and code phrase standing for “Taking all possible
measures against a clear and present danger,” or more simply, “Taking cover”. In most instances if
not all, the expression is used when a sensitive information has been deliberately or accidentally
leaked or is about to be publicly revealed. The publishing of this book is a good example of one
such clear and present danger, and more or less discreet prophylactic measures will follow it, such
as denials, complaints, and varied accusations of the unflattering sort for its author, which together
are called “opening the umbrella”. See also Raining (it’s raining).
Veille informationnelle: or “news watch,” is the monitoring of news i.e. open sources in the
media, in order to stay informed of all facts that spies cannot possibly know because they are
unpredictable. In France, people in charge of counterinfluence / counter-interference are doing news
watch round the clock, in order to spot as quickly as possible actions of influence and black
propaganda of domestic and foreign origins, indifferently. Immediate and appropriate measures
generally follow because the French intelligence community is particularly concerned with French
bashing online and on conventional media and is very reactive to it.
1er RCP: stands for 1er Régiment de Chasseurs Parachutistes (1st Parachute Hunters
Regiment), which is the oldest and among the most decorated airborne regiments of the French
Army, along with the 1st RPIMA, the 13d RDP, and the 2d REP of the Foreign Legion.
Remarkably, this regiment was created following the training of three French officers to parachute
jumping by the Soviets in 1935. The 1st RCP belongs to the 11st Parachute Brigade, but not
formally to the COS. In spite of latter remark, many intelligence officers of the DGSE were
recruited in this regiment. The 1st RCP is based in Pau.
2e Bureau aka Deuxième Bureau: or 2d Bureau, is the forerunner of both the DGSE, DRM,
and even the DRSD, between 1871 and 1940 (officially). However, the 2d Bureau still co-existed
more or less officially with the SDECE as the French military intelligence agency after the WWII,
until the DRM was created in 1992. Until the latter year, it was formally called “État-Major du 2e
Bureau” (Staff of the 2d Bureau), as the author of this book has had access to documents issued and
printed under this name still in the 1960s.
1er RPIMA: stands for 1er Régiment de Parachutistes d’Infanterie de Marine (1st Marine
Infantry Parachute Regiment), which is the military unit the most closely connected to the Service
Action of the DGSE. Courses, trainings, and drills in this elite unit focus on “dirty tricks,” such as
stealing and sabotaging vehicles, break-ins in varied sorts of premises and lock-picking, kidnapping,
killing, bomb-making, etc. In the DGSE, soldiers of the 1st RPIMA are colloquially called “the
cowboys”. Remarkably, the regiment insignia of the 1st RPIMA bears the letters “SAS” and the
motto “Qui Ose Gagne,” or “Who Dares Wins,” in remembrance of French who served in the
British SAS during the WWII. The history of the 1st RPIMA connects to the 11st Choc and to the
1st Choc, which were the elite units of the SDECE / DGSE feeding the Service Action of this
agency in workforce until the end of the Algerian War of 1954-1962. The 1st RPIMA is still more
secretive than the already discreet 13d RDP and the Commandos Marine. Its force is about 800
men, and it is based in Bayonne, in the far Southwestern part of France, near the Spanish border.
See also Service Action.
1er Choc: stands for 1er Bataillon Parachutiste de Choc (1st Shock Parachute Battalion). This
elite and secretive unit has an unclear history mixing with that of the 11e Choc and the 1er RPIMA.
Created in Britain in 1940 during the WWII, its mission was similar to that of the latter until its
disappearance along with the 11er Choc in 1963, for political reasons mainly, with cases of
disobedience and rebellion about the Algerian War the media never reported. Some of its men
joined the CNEC as instructors eventually. Anecdotally, it is little known that former prominent
French politician and Minister of the Interior Michel Poniatowski served in this unit during the
WWII, of which he was eventually named “Caporal d’Honneur” (Honorary Corporal). Poniatowski
was also “Caporal d’Honneur” of the 11e Choc, which suggests again that the 1er Choc and the
former in fact were a same elite military unit.
11e Choc: stands for 11er Régiment Parachutiste de Choc (1st Shock Parachute Regiment). It
was created in 1946 as the special unit of the SDECE, with a specialty in dirty tricks and shadow
operations (as the 1er Choc and the 1st RPIMA) under the name 1er Bataillon Parachutiste de Choc
(1st Shock Parachute Battalion). This unit disappeared in 1955 but was reactivated the same year
and lasted until 1963 to serve in the Algerian War. Then it was reactivated in 1985 but was
dissolved again and for good in 1993. Some of its men joined the CNEC as instructors. See also
Service Action.
2e RH: stands for 2e Régiment de Hussards (2d Hussars Regiment). It is an elite unit with a
specialty in infiltration, camouflage, intelligence, and survival techniques, using the latest
technologies. The 2nd RH characterizes by the mobility of its patrols that are deployable on short
notice, renowned to be very discreet intelligence “riders”. Its 850 men are quartered in Haggenau,
and some of them are concerned with the surveillance of the COMINT underground center (CRE)
of Mutzig. The 2d RH has close connections with the DRSD and is concerned with defensive
counterespionage.
13e RDP: stands for 13e Régiment de Dragons Parachutistes (13d Parachute Dragoon
Regiment), which also is a special unit of the DRM and of the DGSE, along with the 1er RPIMA
and the Commandos Marine. It is a special reconnaissance regiment of the Army, and one of the
three regiments in the Com FST, itself under command of the COS. Its motto is “Au-delà du
possible” (Beyond Possible). It has eight Escadrons (Squadrons), presented below.

1st Squadron, is a training squadron nicknamed “Intelligence Academy,” whose

mission is to train all personnel in airborne search missions.

2nd Squadron, with nautical specialists (“offensive intervention divers,” swimmers-

palmers, and kayakers).

3rd Squadron, with mountain specialists in very cold environment, but in equatorial
zone alike.

4th Squadron, with desert specialists in mobility and penetration behind enemy lines in
arid zones.

5th Squadron, with said-to-be “3D specialists” in high jumps (up to 10,000 meters with
breathing assistance [HAHO/HALO, or MFF).

6th Squadron, with specialists in signals, signals interception in the field, and
intelligence processing.

7th Squadron of Intelligence Exploitation.

8th Squadron of Command and Logistics.

For example, recruits of the 13d RDP are trained to capture silently small games and to eat them
raw, in order not to be spotted by the fault of a wood fire (Commandos Marine do the same with raw
fishes). They train to live and sleep for days in holes they must dig in the ground before covering
them with branches and leaves. Their use of candles instead of a pocket electric lamp is mandatory
and is a distinctive mark of this regiment. Of course, they train to steal anything to survive, as long
as this does not betray their existence and location. The 13d RDP has 700 to 800 men, and is
quartered in the Camp de Souge barracks, in Martignas-sur-Jalle.
44e RI: stands for 44e Régiment d’Infanterie (44th Infantry Regiment). This is not a real
military unit, but a military cover for many employees of the DGSE who joined this agency while
under military status. Otherwise, the 44th RI was an authentic unit of the French Army from 1642 to
1918. Today, the French Wikipedia page of the 44th RI says this unit “currently serves as a support
body for military personnel assigned to the DGSE,” and is based in Paris. However, the latter page
does not say that this regiment was officially based in Cercottes, and the 89th Service Battalion
likewise before that. The insignia of the 44e Régiment d’Infanterie is an ace of spade that since then
is a distinctive reconnaissance symbol in the DGSE.
44e RT: stands for 44e Régiment de Transmissions (44th Signals Regiment), which is an
“electronic warfare” (“Guerre Électronique”) regiment subordinate to the Com-Rens. The 44th RT
receives its missions from the DRM and the DGSE. It partakes in the acquisition of intelligence of
electromagnetic origin (COMINT / SIGINT / ELINT) with a focus on COMINT and is working
underground in the electronic warfare center (CRE) of Mutzig. The latter official activity connects
closely to its main and real mission of civilian communications interception, in partnership with the
Technische Aufklärung (Technical Service) of the German BND (COMINT / SIGINT / ELINT). In
1985, the 44th RT split into two distinct signals units as the interest of the French intelligence
community for cable communications interception was rising. One remained active under the name
44th RT, and the other was renamed 54e RT. The 44th RT has about 900 men. See also CASIT.
54e RT: stands for 54e Régiment de Transmissions (54th Signals Regiment). This regiment was
created in 1985 from a split of the then growing 44th RT. Therefore, the missions of this regiment
are about the same, and it is also subordinate to the Com-Rens and receives its missions from the
DRM and the DGSE. Its headquarter is located in Oberhoffen-sur-Moder, about 7 miles northeast
from the underground telecommunications interception center (CRE) of Mutzig.
61e RA: stands for 61e Régiment d’Artillerie (61st Artillery Regiment). The mission of this
regiment is to operate drones and to receive spy satellite images. It is the IMINT / ROIM regiment
of the Army. The 61st RA is split in two, with one unit in Villiers-le-Sec, and the second in
Semoutiers-Montsaon. It is subordinate to the Com-Rens and receives missions from the DRM and
the DGSE.
89e Bataillon des Services: (89th Services Battalion). This unit of the French Army became
publicly known as the “regiment of the spies” in 1986, following a blunder (allegedly) of the
Ministry of Defense, which publicly released a list of military officers of different units including
some who belonged to the 89th Services Battalion. Allegedly, the clerk who wrote the latter list had
not been informed that this regiment did not exist as it was only a cover for DGSE intelligence
officers under military statuses, unless this was done on purpose for some particular reason in the
wake of deep changes and deception operations following the election of socialist President
Mitterrand in 1981. Consequently, the 89th Service Battalion was at once “dissolved,” and replaced
with the 44th RI, whose secret raison d’être is the same.
 PART I.
Inside the French
Intelligence Community
“All hope abandon ye who enter here”.
—Dante Allighieri, Inferno, C. Iii, Henry F. Cary tr.
 1. The French Intelligence Community in the 21st
Century.
Contrary to the expectations of many in France since the end of the Cold War, the
French intelligence community has been increasing considerably its human resources, its
technical means, and its reaching capacities abroad as at home. There was a boom in
intelligence activities in the country that began in the 1990s. It evolved to a frenzy for
espionage from the mid-2000 with a multiplication of intelligence agencies, only paralleled
by the more discreet creation of liberal masonic lodges and grand lodges in France and
abroad, serving intelligence activities too. Today, the French Government claims officially
six intelligence agencies (premier cercle / first circle), which are the DGSE, DRSD, DRM,
DGSI, DNRED, and TracFin. This is much already for a country with a population of about
68 million. However, I list 14 more agencies and services in reality, which makes the
amazing number of 20. These other agencies are the ANSSI, ANTENJ, BCRP, BDRIJ, DR-
PP, GIC, PNCD, SCRC, SCRT, SDAO, SGDSN, SISSE, SDLCODF, and the EMOPT. A
large majority of these other agencies specializes in domestic intelligence, and several of
them introduce officially as police and Gendarmerie agencies, or even as ordinary public
services carrying on all-administrative tasks.
That is not yet all because one could add the Gendarmerie itself, due to its other mission
of “proximity intelligence” (renseignement de proximité) or domestic intelligence, with a
staff of about 100,000. To which come to add several military regiments specialized in
intelligence behind enemy lines, shadow operations and dirty tricks, acting under the
command of the COS of the Ministry of Defense—renamed Ministère des Armées in 2017,
or Ministry of the Armed Forces. Then we find about two hundred regional domestic
intelligence cells and units, of which the French Government says nothing.
Moreover we must add several liberal masonic grand lodges and numerous lodges, which
in France act collectively and unofficially since 1873 as a powerful force of domestic
intelligence, influence and counterinfluence mainly, and counterespionage on occasions.
Additionally, they play important roles in intelligence and influence abroad. This little-
known role of the Freemasonry in France will be largely explained and supported by
evidences and true stories in the chapter 16 dedicated to the subject of Freemasonry and
intelligence specifically, and in the chapter 23, with more true anecdotes. Pending this, the
reader must know that the Freemasonry in France involves actively in domestic political
and economic affairs, contrary to what masonic rules commands in the regular Freemasonry
and in other countries.
Giving even a rough estimate of the number of people working full-time in intelligence
activities on the French soil only is an uncertain task, the more so since official figures are
well below the reality. For example, in 2018, the DGSE claimed a force of about 5,000,
whereas in my own estimate it must be in the surrounding of 15,000 to 20,000. The large
and unknown number of military and civilians working under various public and private
covers, a widespread practice in France, further complicates guesses. These figures do not
include some thousands more spies with specialties in telecommunications, signal
interception, and imagery intelligence. As about the full-time workforces of the twenty
intelligence agencies and thus specialized military units, the number may be as high as
50,000 in all. Then we should add the large number of sources, occasional and regular
informants, snitches, contacts, and agents, which most likely raise the number to 1 million
and probably more in territorial France only. Then the French conditions of recruitments of
agents abroad—of French expatriates in particular—make this other estimate an impossible
task.
Officially, the French Government justifies this disproportionate spying force with its
worries about Muslim terrorism, which motive is partly true and actually concerns a
fraction of France’s intelligence activities. “Partly” only because France considers
unofficially that she is waging a secret war against certain countries: the United States of
America and their allies, chiefly. By “war,” the reader must understand espionage in fields
ranging from politics, to economics, commerce, finance, industry, and communication and
information warfare, in the context of it strategic agenda. Regarding the United States in
particular, there is indeed in the DGSE a progressive-spirited besieged mentality and a
perception of France as a garrison state. In this agency, one may quickly come to believe
that “the Americans are everywhere” in the country, whereas I think it would be an
outstanding performance for an American to come to spy in France unnoticed, today. As a
starter, snitches penetrate all U.S. businesses coming in to settle activities on the French
soil, at all levels of their staffs. I could not name with certainty all countries that more or
less officially partner with France in intelligence against the United States, but at least I can
cite Germany, Russia, South-Africa, and the United Arab Emirates. Then Lebanon, Syria,
and even Iran occasionally cooperate with the DGSE and certain agencies of the French
intelligence community. Then I reckon joint intelligence operations, occasional at least,
with China, Belgium, and with certain former countries of the Warsaw Pact such as
Romania and Serbia in particular. Otherwise, the DGSE recruits agents in Northwestern and
Western Africa, and certainly in Latin America, and in countries of the E.U., of course.
Some special recruitment spots also are the French-speaking part of Canada, Mexico, and
the Caribbean.
In the 1990s, and of late in 2016, the French intelligence community introduced two new
internal policies, called privatisation des services (privatization of the services) and
mutualisation du renseignement (intelligence pooling), respectively. The latter evolutions
actually were the logical consequences of the doctrine of active measures the DGSE
adopted in the early 1980s, largely explained in the chapter 12. The latter policies share the
same particularities to betraying an abnormally elevated need for domestic and foreign
intelligence simultaneously, paralleled by a growing absence of concerns of the political
apparatus for people’s free will and privacy, and more especially for the good health of
domestic economy. As seen from inside, France has been venturing in a war economy
alongside ever-growing efforts in financial and economic intelligence.
At the latter regard, the creation of the PNCD (2000s), recently associated with the policy
of intelligence pooling, resulted in a considerable increase in telecommunication
interception (COMINT, or ROEM in French) at home as abroad. The existence of the
PNCD is still a secret as I am writing this chapter, but it is likely to be made public in a near
future, either under this same name or a new one. In any case, it will be publicly introduced
as a French counterpart of the U.S. NSA, though without further specifics due to its so
particular interworking that draws largely its considerable capacities to a large exploitation
of civilian networks. Already, the PNCD, in partnership with the Technische Aufklärung
(Technical Service/COMINT Directorate) of the German BND, South-Africa, the United
Arab Emirates, and likely the Spetssvyaz (Special Communications and Information
Service of the Federal Protective Service of the Russian Federation), provide France with a
considerable reach in telecommunications interception and deciphering worldwide. Again,
the latter capacities are striking when compared with the relatively small size of France and
of what the needs of this country should be in peacetime.
Everything has been said above was made possible because of several political provisions
I summarize, below.
First, in the aftermath of the Cold War, there has been a transfer of a sizeable part of the
funds that previously were allocated to the Army, Navy, and Air Force to intelligence
activities. Came to add to this a relatively recent and unofficial cooperation of the military
in intelligence, especially in COMINT, with the providing of workforce, materials, and
infrastructures. An attentive reading of the Lexicon of this book and of the chapter 22 on
COMINT delivers conclusive evidences of the disproportionate capacities and efforts in
intelligence.
Second, from the 1990s, the DGSE in particular put the considerable power this
agency had gradually acquired at home since the end of the Second World War, at the
service of a discreet takeover of countless private companies, while creating numerous
others by its own. To this new internal policy, largely explained later, it gave the name
“Privatization of the Services”. Still today, the French public has little knowledge of this
upheaval if any, even though some affairs, scandals, and rumors were considerable and odd
enough to arouse scrutiny. The most striking examples were the Affair ELF-Aquitaine[1]
from 1994, and the multiple odd connections of the long Affair of the Crédit Lyonnais
bank[2] from the 1990s.[3] The ruling elite promised to the people that there would be no
such scandals anymore. In fact, the DGSE resumed similar activities with further
precautionary measures that seem to be effective or so for the moment.
The privatization of the services indeed put the whole country under the unofficial rule of
the Ministry of Defense, about as it was in the WWI, indeed. It must be said that if the
DGSE has its loyal men in the civilian counterintelligence service of the Ministry of the
Interior, the DGSI, as we shall see, the reverse is untrue however. The balance of power
between the police and the military in the context of domestic intelligence, which normally
takes place in a democratic regime to prevent any takeover by one of the two, was always
tilted in favor of the latter in France since the birth of the Third Republic in 1871. However,
extraordinary concerns and needs gave birth to this recent privatization of the services in
peacetime, a measure unprecedented since the eve of the First World War in 1914.
At the end of the 1980s, the DGSE in particular had increased considerably its power in
domestic intelligence already, and the initiative violated the prerogatives of this agency as
defined by the Code de la Défense (Code of Defense).[4] Additionally, at the latter period, it
patently infringed upon the ordinary missions of the Renseignements Généraux–RG, of the
Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire–DST, and of several other specialized services
and units of the police placed under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior. In point of
fact, the latter bodies were all thoroughly reformed in 2008, as soon as Nicolas Sarkozy was
elected President of France. History says, as we shall see, General Charles de Gaulle
actually started the military takeover as early as in May 1958.
On the long run, of course, constantly recruiting and expanding resources and means in
intelligence entailed financial needs in proportion exceeding the share of the defense budget
normally allocated to intelligence activities in peacetime. The headquarters of the DGSE,
boulevard Mortier in Paris, became too small. In the details, the new warmongering policy
of the aftermaths of the Cold War and its corollary difficulties were the followings.

Increasing significantly human resources, corresponding technical means, and

infrastructures, to responding effectively to new threats and objectives.

Need for self-financing intelligence activities since their new running cost
altogether becomes excessive and difficult to justify to the two chambers of the
Parliament.

Maladjustment of the official premises of the DGSE, which have become too
small, but difficulty to justify to the population the official creation of multiple
and large facilities dedicated to intelligence activities exclusively, since such an
undertaking cannot go unnoticed and would raise concerns.

Incompatibility of the growth in intelligence activities with suitable discretion.

In 1992, the DGSE had devised a project of moving to the Fort de Noisy, a large and old
military base located a few miles east of Paris, in Romainville. The DGSE owns this base
for a long time already, and it uses it as training center and headquarters for its Service
Action and for another specialized service (Technical and Support Service). The first
estimates of the cost for transforming it into a large gathering of modern and highly secured
buildings, with its fences, checkpoints, and else, were enormous for France.[5]
Therefore, this agency found another idea: “privatizing its human resources and
infrastructures” under more and various civilian cover activities. Anyhow, the DGSE
secured for itself a budget to renovate a smaller military base formerly occupied by an
engineering regiment, opportunely located front of its headquarters across the street,
boulevard Mortier. However, how to privatize a large espionage agency led by military?
The money that should have been used for the construction of new highly secured
buildings was invested instead in multiple autonomous cells and units, each having the
deceptive features of private businesses and associations, each fit and equipped to shelter
specialties of the odd sort. There a private security company, there an association of
researchers specialized in the study of migratory flows, there a design company, there a
publishing house, there a company of sale and maintenance of computer equipment, there
the studios of a Web TV channel, there a graphic design studio, and so on, and on. The
scheme was not really a novelty in its principle because for long, already, the SDECE and
its successor the DGSE secretly settled most of its services in the premises of ministries and
public services. Then all those services were—they still are—scattered into multiples units
and small cells, again hidden under the appearances of ministries, public services annexes
in Paris and its suburbs, military barracks and bases, and then in the whole country
(regional cells and units).[6]
In addition to their secret activities, however, all those cover activities and their staffs are
left with the real need to produce goods, to do services for the public, and thus to make
enough financial resources for their ordinary expenditures, travels, and even salaries in
many cases. After all, this was not so much a novelty, since that is how any intelligence
agency creates and maintains cover activities abroad. In France, the practice truly began
more than a century ago because of a need for more space at that time already. The
evolution of the 1990s simply extended and generalizes the method with a new focus on
private business activities.
Thus, from the usual work environment of a garrison-like governmental administration
imbued with a secretive and monastic mentality, working in autarky behind high walls and
barbed wires, numerous intelligence units and cells shifted overnight to a new existence of
would-be-ordinary workers and researchers infiltrating the economic fabric of their own
country. In fact, they were supposed to act and to work exactly as spies do in foreign
countries, unlike in a hostile country however since, for example, they enjoyed significant
advantages from longtime connections with the main telecommunication and energy
providers. Thus, the Internet, telephone, and electricity bills they had to pay were 10% only
and exactly of the amount billed to ordinary clients.
The privatization of the services indeed improved the effectiveness of intelligence as a
whole, and that of domestic intelligence even more, for such a policy turns any intelligence
agency into a formidable espionage machine. It allows to envisage confidently massive and
virtually unlimited recruitment with improved secrecy without real budget concern, since it
is financially autonomous. Additionally, together these dummy companies can literally
crush those deemed “undesirable,” since their vocations are not exclusively lucrative. Their
commercial goals are variable geometry. Small businesses, that is to say, intelligence cells
between 1 to 20 employees, are not really affected by growth and cash flow concerns. If
ever the Ministry of Defense expects to raise their number indefinitely, then, of course,
together they might even change the conditions of the private economy in the whole
country.
Actually, the latter point was part of one more ambitious policy: involving as many
ordinary citizens as possible in intelligence works under pretenses of political concerns,
activism, and benevolence; that is to say, turning as many of them as possible into social
vigilantes. The American reader can figure easily how this can be made possible, by
imagining the method of neighborhood watch generalized at the scale of a whole country,
and by substituting a concern for crime, vandalism, and terrorism, to a pretense of civism
and committed good citizenship. Thus, any citizen would be a virtual informant of the
intelligence community, and when not he would have contacts belonging to his own cluster
of acquaintances and relatives, inescapably, by virtue of the principle of the six degrees of
separation. To the reader who possibly does not know what the six degrees of separation in
social science are, the expression gives a name to this idea saying, all people in the World
are six or fewer “steps” away only from each other, so that a chain of “a friend of a friend”
statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps.
For example, if ever I knew your name and address, then, with the assistance of the
DGSE, I could “coincidentally” get in touch with you because we each have a relational
link through a few people already—and rather quickly if ever we use a same online social
network together. Also called “small world-experiment” by famous scientist Stanley
Milgram in the 1950s,[7] Frigyes Karinthy set it out in 1929 originally, and Irish American
playwright John Guare popularized it with a play in 1990, under the eponymous title, Six
Degrees of Separation.
The diagram on the next page shows a simplified representation of how the social fabric
organizes itself in clusters, naturally and spontaneously, simply under the spur of the innate
human fear of loneliness. The existence of those clusters connecting each to other allows
the easy monitoring of a whole society in view of effective domestic intelligence. For the
sake of my explanation, the agent in domestic intelligence is represented at the center of the
sketch. He must be in touch with a network of unconscious and unwilling informants acting
out of simple public-spiritedness. Therefore, the agent could be a police officer known with
this quality to everyone, without notable change in the effect. Particular means, described in
the chapter 20 in its appropriate context of domestic influence, come to arouse the need of
each to be a good citizen. If one person has five friends and close acquaintances—whence
the term “six degrees of separation”—and if each of these friends has a similar network of
friends and acquaintances himself, this quickly becomes a social network that, at the second
degree only and already, consists of a much larger number of people. My second diagram,
explains the four ways somebody joins a cluster, which can also be considered as many
opportunities of connection with anyone, from the viewpoint of the DGSE.
The French intelligence community ever kept for the public opinion the reputation for
itself of a mysterious, exclusive, and secretive middle, made up of a tiny minority of people
endowed with extraordinary abilities and capacities. It has always refrained from denying
that intelligence would be the world of fantasy, danger, extravagance, and romances that
cinema and novels present continuously. More than that, through its active and former
employees, contractors, and agents, the French intelligence community makes a point with
publishing “serious” autobiographies, biographies, and other essays on espionage, with a
steady frequency in 2018 of about two to three books a month. The latter literature feeds its
readers with a deceptive or truncated description of what French intelligence agencies and
their people are doing exactly.
 In this respect, the reader would be surprised, perhaps, to
learn from such books that espionage and counterespionage in
France would be “non-existent” since about the end of the Cold
War, that domestic intelligence activities are “disappearing,” and
that influence, domestic influence, and counterinfluence would
“exist in totalitarian regimes only”. Today, the latter enterprise
of domestic deception leaves the French population with a
perception of the missions of its intelligence agencies that limits
to counterterrorism, and to paramilitary operations in Africa for
saving hostages. The narrative, largely relayed by the
cooperative French mainstream media, is not going to change
anytime soon, precisely because it is an efficient way to
enforcing the denial of several facts of political and diplomatic
natures covered by secrecy. The first is that France is no longer
an authentic ally of the United States since the early 1960s.
Consequently, France has steadily developed a special
relationship with Russia since June 1966 exactly. Second, from
about the same period, the French foreign intelligence agency,
SDECE, and then DGSE from 1982, was always active in joint
intelligence operations with its Soviet and Russian counterparts
against the United States. Then this French-Russian
cooperation, to the advantage of the latter, as we shall see,
extends naturally to activities against other countries allied to
the United States, the United Kingdom chiefly. In passing, this
explains why no former French spy is willing to speak about
intelligence and counterespionage, since France has not been
spying on Russia and has not been hunting Russian spies
anymore for decades.
 Motives and opportunities of people to organize in
clusters.
The U.S. intelligence community is well aware of all this,
obviously, and its public and official denial of the aforesaid
owes mainly to a now old and vain hope for a return of France
to reason, first openly expressed by President Lyndon B.
Johnson in 1966. To which comes to add a natural necessity for
economic and diplomatic relations with the United States
despite the situation, whose intricacies alone could fill several
additionally chapters in this book. The latter fact connects
directly to the former because France considers that she must
oppose strong domestic counterinfluence in her territory against
an American cultural and economic influence she perceives as
annoying, and even overwhelming. Additionally, there is in
France a centuries-old tradition of domestic espionage that is
historically inherent to her political culture, chronologically
monarchic, imperialist, and spirited by the Roman Catholic
Church, and then by an idea of secularist and anti-clerical
progressive State-capitalism mainly inspired by thinker Claude-
Henri de Saint-Simon from the 1820s. To sum it up, there is a
French popular belief saying that a few thousands “intelligence
officers” are occupying desk jobs in the secrecy of two
relatively small headquarters, the DGSE and DGSI, both located
in Paris, exclusively.
The reality is that this authentic situation co-exists with an
enormous secret police force pervading the whole country, and
and a continually active army army of spies of all kinds abroad.
This book is an attempt to figure out the whole, with a focus on
certain specialties relevant to my experience with the DGSE,
therefore with some loopholes.
As the subject of domestic intelligence is touched upon and
will resume all along the Part II of this book, the privatization of
the services also serves the normal need for domestic influence
and counterinfluence, two specialties the ignorant public uses to
name “propaganda”. The DGSE thus created and purchased
small media companies publishing and various specialized
magazines.[8] For, although such publications seldom are
financially profitable, their influence upon people who are
looking for particular goods, services, and realms of interest,
remains significant however, considerable in some instances, i.e.
quality vs. quantity in readership. At the latter regard, those
publications are useful tools of influence in the context of
domestic economic protectionism, which the French intelligence
community names patrimoine (heritage). Their ownerships and
subsequent control on their contents deter foreign competitors to
spread their own soft power in the country. The latter provision
aims to fulfill a general mission of preventive counter-
interference, exactly as there is a mission of preventive
counterespionage.
Today, in France, press magazines, websites, and even
Internet forums and blogs, whose owners feel free to publish
whatever they want, are rare in reality. Not because they all
would be published by domestic spies, of course, but first
because they cannot evade domestic spying. Second, because
those who are responsible of this media monitoring are tasked to
deter them in advance to publish contents thought “hazardous to
public order,” which vague concern extends far in the facts. One
of these means of deterrence is known largely and popularly
already, under the name “political correctness”. With the boom
of the Internet and the subsequent easy access to information
published all around the World, the DGSE expanded
considerably its staff responsible for the enforcement of this
unofficial censorship, in the goal to give to it a reach abroad, as
we shall see too. In the context of this other new mission,
counterinfluence specialists of this agency not only watch the
contents of certain foreign online publications, but also the
comments of their readers on concerned websites and social
networks. The Economist newsmagazine is a good example of
the latter effort. This part of this mission is called veille
informationelle (news watch).
In the stricter context of influence and counterinfluence, book
publishing and even music production companies have not been
forgotten. As for the movie picture industry, though highly
relevant to this particular intelligence activity yet it remains an
entirely different matter because any discreet intervention in it
entails much bigger financial needs, and the involvement of
highly skilled and specialized spies, entirely under control of the
military in France since the WWI, as we shall see again. Let
alone individual missions and grand operations implying
acquisitions and merges of media and entertainment companies,
which commonly take years without any guarantee of success.
The average running cost of a clandestine cell of 5 to 10
employees and technicians working under the cover of a private
company amounted in 2013 between 400,000 to 800,000 euros a
year. One intelligence employee, the same latter year, was
costing annually between 16,000 and 20,000 euros on average,
welfare charges included,[9] according to his skills and level of
responsibility. The remaining amount must cover expenditures
common to any company, manufacturing and services costs
included, wherever they exist. However, those running costs and
expenditures must be understood as “including intelligence
activities”.[10] In about 1 on 10 cases only, the cover activity
proves sufficient for self-financing and for generating profits.
When this happens, the funds may be converted into aids to
unprofitable other companies or they may be invested in new
ones. Or else, and the more often, they may finance small
intelligence missions or costly operations of various sorts in the
country or abroad. Remarkably, the latter missions may not
necessarily relate to the branch of activities of the company that
pays for it.
Why this focus on media and related activities when
privatizing intelligence, the reader may possibly wonder about?
First because exactly as in war, an increase in offensive
foreign intelligence activities must be paralleled by an increase
of defensive and domestic intelligence activities, since the
targeted countries answer to this aggression with offensive
intelligence activities either, inescapably, starting with influence
and black propaganda implying access to the media of the target
country. Exactly as in wartime, the media, which together shape
the public opinion at home, must not be abandoned to the
retaliatory influence of the targeted countries. Second, because
the DGSE, therefore, has a natural and logical need to find out a
purpose in its cover activities, suitable to defensive intelligence
activities, preferably; that is to say, counterinfluence, counter-
interference, and counterintelligence.
Now, I must warn the reader that some responsibilities and
current missions I attribute to the DGSE in this book may
possibly be carried out by other agencies today, due to the
sudden creation of numerous new intelligence agencies and
other relevant units and cells for the past fifteen years.
Nonetheless, those official provisions do not and cannot much
change the role of the DGSE as “mother intelligence agency” of
the Ministry of Defense in the French intelligence community.
Moreover, the DGSE camouflages certain of its services under
pretenses of such new intelligence agencies, and in certain
domains, such as COMINT, it shares its activities with the DRM
and the military. The latter particularity should draw the
curiosity of the reader toward the role of the DIRISI, as first
example. Lastly, the attentive reading of this book will reveal
the more or less discreet takeover of the French police by the
Gendarmerie, under the authority of this same ministry during
the same recent period. This is a striking novelty betraying a
considerable but untold evolution within the French
Government apparatus.
 This introductory chapter concludes on parliamentary control
on intelligence activities. Actually, there has never been in
France such a thing as a real senatorial control over intelligence
activities, and certainly not public and broadcast hearings of
intelligence directors, as in the United States. In 2007, appeared
for the first time a parliamentary intelligence commission
named Délégation Parlementaire au Renseignement–DPR
(Parliamentary Delegation for Intelligence). The official role of
this senatorial commission is to monitor the general activities of
all intelligence agencies. In 2013, it was officially stated that the
prerogatives of the DPR enlarged considerably, to the point of
being in charge of a “parliamentary control of the governmental
initiatives in intelligence activities,”[11] and of public policy
pertaining to this domain, additionally. These facts, however,
cannot concern intelligence operations in progress, nor special
instructions given by the State to intelligence agencies, nor
operational processes and methods, nor relations with foreign
intelligence services or international organizations having
competencies in intelligence.[12] Moreover, friendly exchanges
and ongoing cooperation between French intelligence agencies
and their foreign counterparts, in particular, are said to be too
sensitive to let any parliamentary commission hearing and
recording even a single word on them. Thus, this order
definitively prevents the happening of any real and
comprehensive political control over the intelligence community
in France.
From personal experience and knowledge, I noticed that, on a
general basis not to say always, provisions, orders, decrees, and
laws concerning intelligence activities are issued and enacted
officially long after they have already been put into practice,
with a delay of ten years on average; that is to say, once too
many people know about it already.
 2. General Missions & Organization of the DGSE.
E veryone has learned in the media and fictions that spying abroad is the vocation of
intelligence agencies. This perception owes to the fact that the general mission of those particular
public bodies has a romantic side, sometimes. The reality says that France has always had a
perception of her own of the role of an intelligence agency, much larger than what most ordinary
French people assume. To sum it up the simplest way, what the French ruling elite expects of its
intelligence community encompasses everything it cannot do officially and openly. That is why the
French have always been used to call any of their intelligence agencies les services secrets (the
secret services), and not intelligence service or intelligence agency.
Yes, French are insisting on the plural form of the word “services,” even when alluding to one
intelligence agency in particular. For, in this country, the words “secret services” mean to suggest a
variety of tasks and general missions that do not necessarily connect each with others, and which in
a number of instances are absolutely not relevant to espionage, counterespionage, counterterrorism,
and to intelligence as encompassing as the latter word may be. Actually, this fact is not a French
exclusivity. I quote about it U.S. Admiral Mike McConnell who knows certainly much more about
intelligence in the World than I do: “If you think about spies in most of the 180 or so countries in
the World, it’s an internal police force used against its own people to keep someone in power”.[13]
The French public is largely ignorant and poorly informed about the subject of intelligence, in
spite of apparently abundant literature, documentation, audiovisual programs and documentaries,
and news on its actualities on occasions of affairs. Actually, its own Government and media deceive
it permanently and, since the end of the Cold War, they introduce French spies as terrorist hunters
and Rambo-like shadow warriors wandering in African wildernesses. According to this version,
French spies would be unselfish heroes sacrificing themselves for the country. Well, not all French
are so naïve, and they are even less and less so because France has the cultural particularity to be a
country plagued by mysterious affairs, scandals, and innumerable bizarre cold cases in which
French spies invariably have a role at some point. On those other occasions, the media shift to an
entirely different version, saying that the spies of the country are mysterious and dangerous people
endowed with extraordinary administrative powers. Or else they are people unconcerned by the law
because they seem to be granted the extraordinary rights to steal, cheat, abduct people, and even to
torture and kill anyone they want without running the risk at any point to be sentenced before a
court of justice.
In the latter case, they are no longer called “heroes,” of course, but “barbouzes” (pronounce bar-
booz), a pejorative slang word whose closest English equivalent I found seems to be “spook”. The
word barbouze has been coined in a time when spies were said to hide their faces behind a fake
beard, really or metaphorically regardless. For the root of the French slang barbouze is barbe, which
means “beard,” in English. We seem to be invited to believe that not only French soccer players and
activists have a particular concern about hairs because French spies, when between themselves, use
to name each other “moustaches” colloquially (same orthography and meaning in English) for
about the same reason as wearing a fake or real beard. Hiding one’s face is the intent, even if the
expression actually is all metaphoric and truly means, “Concealing one’s true character under the
pretense of another, invented out of the whole cloth”. The word moustache in French intelligence
agencies is not pejorative at all, though neither it is flattering. It is just a way to name a spy without
using the latter word that could catch the unwarranted interest of people when uttered in a public
place. They are not supposed to know this.
Yet “spook” does not translate the exact meaning of barbouze correctly because it rather means,
“a spy working with an intelligence agency or who is hired by it temporarily, and granted the
extraordinary right to indulge in criminal activities in the service of the Republic”. Nonetheless, a
barbouze must not be confused with a spy who would be granted “the right to kill,” as the fictional
James Bond does. For a barbouze either has been hired by an intelligence agency because he has
been found to have the mind of a criminal or because of his fondness for action and adventure, and
for his physical fitness. Then he has been trained to conduct dangerous missions, and to execute
criminal acts on behalf of the reason of State. Not all French spies are barbouzes actually. I will
describe the latter category in the chapter 5, along with the others.
Beyond individuals sent abroad to spy and the barbouzes, it is difficult to the common
Frenchman to figure that a large number of spies are working behind desks, and that they are
individuals no more fantastic than a clerk in a post office can be, chronically penniless, additionally.
Indeed, the French intelligence community is happy with this popular belief saying that all its spies
are intrepid men and women of action, working in harmony with a minority of quiet, sedentary, and
highly minded scholars.
French nonprofessionals also believe their spies are so exceptional individuals that they are as
rare as famous people can be, very unlikely to be stumbled upon in their usual supermarket. To the
point that if ever I had said to any ordinary French I worked with the DGSE, it is certain that he
would have answered something as, “Oh, pleased to meet you; I am the Queen of England”. These
deceptive perception and attitude leave any spy with the feeling to be alone and misunderstood,
which is what the agency that hires him wants, exactly.
The reality of the trade, to a large majority of French spies as I once was, is to be a Parisian
commuter who goes every day to work by public means of transportation, often in company of
colleagues. In addition, spies of the latter category are numerous enough to meet each with others in
Paris’ streets, purely accidentally. That is why I had the feeling that we were quite numerous and
much more ordinary folks than what the average French assumes. As for my ex-colleagues who
were “illegal spies” abroad, I could not even figure how my reader in America pictures them. To
help him a little having a first assumption of it, pending many other details I reveal in this book, I
tell to him that those other French spies belong typically to two or three broad profile’s categories,
in both the male and female genres.
The most common of those types has the profile of the typical seducer or forward salesperson. He
often has a good looking and seems to belong to the lower middle class. Therefore, he is rather
talkative, as many ordinary French typically are, but he noticeably is a streetwise character. Yet he is
not as intelligent and educated as he wants others to believe. In truth, he always has a good nerve,
typically. French spies of another category seem to be of the opposite type, as they are deceptively
insignificant and uninteresting types; the kind of people no one ever pays attention to. Talk with one
for an hour, and you forget him once he turns his heels and disappear. Later, when it would be too
late, you would think something as, “Hey, I remember this guy, now. His name was something like
… uh … John, or Bill, perhaps”. Then you find “the prodigy type,” often rather young with many
diplomas and awards of all sorts. That one is the person above all suspicions, talented, skilled,
reliable, and well mannered. He inspires much confidence, and that is why you would certainly hire
him in your company and marry him to your daughter.
Female French spies often deceive others by making as much profit as they can of their genre or
they have been selected by virtue of their natural ability to inspire kindness and confidence in all
respects, about as White Snow does. When young, they appear as the good girl who takes care of
your children when you go downtown for a dinner with your partner. When older, you would
suppose they work in real estate or as direct salespersons for Tupperware. Still older, the more often
they look like respectable ladies as helpful and kind as your neighbor. More rarely, they are as
lively, self-confident, hardworking, and tough as this typical bar or restaurant owner you see in
movies.
Just bear in mind that they all are con artists by trade, and that they learned many tricks to fool
you. I will explain all the tricks in question in this book, and even many others that field spies as
those I summarily presented above are not supposed to know.
Ordinary French also call spies agent secrets (secret agents). Be warned that I am using the word
“spy” because I know it is how most Americans, and even American spies call them either. In
France, few people would call “spy” an employee of the DGSE who works behind a desk, though a
few do. They rather use this word to name foreign and illegal agents, pejoratively usually. The
adjective secret (same orthography and meaning in French) is just a nuance since all officials in
France are called agents anyway, standing for a shortened version of agents de la fonction publique
(public service agents), quite innocuously. Therefrom, in this country, a secret agent is an official
who does secret things, meaning in the field rather than in an office. However, as his existence must
be a secret because everything he does is, then he can hardly be an official in the full sense of the
word, logically. There are secret agents who are officials, but all provisions are taken to ensure that
no one would know this and what they really do, except some of their colleagues. The sole French
official who is an active secret agent and who is known officially as such is the Director of the
secret services, the DGSE.
Since the DGSE is a governmental administration under military status, from an administrative
standpoint, military and officials work in it together.[14] Military are given responsibilities and a
salary in accordance with their ranks, i.e. private, non-commissioned officer, and commissioned
officer. Civilians working in this agency do not make up for a novelty. Yet there was a time, before
the WWII more especially, when military only worked in foreign intelligence as full-time
employees in the 2d Bureau.
Nonetheless, the DGSE stays much military in its “collective soul,” and it is officially acting
under the authority of the Ministry of Defense anyway. Herein it is the French “all-seeing eye,” and
this must not be taken lightly as a literary description since a secular human eye is the unofficial
symbol of the DGSE, known as such internally only.
The French foreign intelligence agency has had a number of nicknames since its re-creation after
the WWII, all coined by its own employees. Yet they all became public knowledge at some point:
La Caserne des Tourelles (The Tourelles’ barracks), which was too obvious, La Piscine (the
swimming pool), one of the earliest and whose origin owes to the immediate vicinity of the DGSE
headquarters with the public swimming pool of Les Tourelles, La Centrale (The Centre or Center),
which remains more or less in use among DGSE staffers since it has recently been made public
knowledge, and the most practical Le Ministère de la Défense (The Ministry of Defense) because it
offers an easy denial by substitution, just in case. The latter is still largely in use among DGSE full-
time staffers. Finally, there is the most recent la boîte (“the Firm”), still in use today. Some
disgruntled insiders, such as Maurice Dufresse,[15] nicknamed it “the French KGB”. I did it too
because of its close ties with Russia and of similar culture and internal policy.
Describing accurately the missions of the DGSE is not an easy task for the following reasons.
This agency has an official list of missions “approved by the Government” and more or less
officially known. Roughly speaking, it includes human intelligence abroad, counterterrorism,
paramilitary operations, and foreign telecommunications interception. Officially, the DGSE does not
do things such as influence, counterinfluence, and disinformation, and it has no activities on the
French soil because it is officially the mission of the DGSI and of some other lesser-known
agencies, named in the Lexicon and in the next chapters. The DGSE flatly denies all other missions I
did not name above, even when caught red-handed in the act of executing them—it happens. This
book presents and describes in detail a number of those unacknowledged activities, precisely.
The DGSI is another agency officially specialized in counterterrorism and counterintelligence “at
home,” acting under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior, therefore a civilian police force. Its
staff includes police officers working with a minority of civilians who are not police, and with
another minority of military, gendarmes in most instances. The DGSI is similar to the
counterintelligence and counterterrorism divisions of the FBI, theoretically only, as we shall see.
For the record, the acronym DGSE stands for Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure
(Directorate-General for External Security), which is vague, obviously. Between 1945 and 1982,
this agency was named SDECE, standing for Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-
Espionnage (External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service). In the chapter 4 and others
in suitable contexts, I shall explain the political reasons that justified the otherwise unexplainable
disappearance of the word “counterespionage” from the name of this agency. Notwithstanding, the
DGSE still carries on this mission, even more than in the time of the SDECE, and focuses on
offensive counterespionage. In actuality because by official decree, the DGSE kept the
responsibility of offensive counterespionage of the former SDECE and an additional mission of
preventive counterespionage was confirmed similarly.[16] At the inception, in 1982, the latter
missions were entrusted to two different branches acting under the authority of a department of this
agency named Directorate of Intelligence, but these provisions were theoretical in the facts.
Before elaborating on counterintelligence and counterespionage, it is necessary to explain that the
activities of the DGSE are subdivided administratively and technically into specialized departments
called “directorates” and “services”. Much secrecy surrounds the exact names, missions, and
number of these departments. All details of that order made publicly available in books, the media,
and the Internet must be taken with a grain of salt, for they mostly are deceptions aiming foreign
and rival intelligence agencies. If I know exactly how human resources, services, units, and cells are
managed in the DGSE, yet I do not know indeed the names and even the number of all DGSE
directorates and services, more numerous in reality than officially. The less so since I have no idea
of how many people are working in each of these sub-bodies. This information actually is one
among the best-guarded secrets in this agency, for the logical and following reasons.
If the CIA knew the real number of full time employees of the DGSE working on intelligence
activities against the United States, as example, then this other agency would be able to make
relatively accurate guesses about the number of French spies in America. An intelligence agency
that runs 1,000 illegal agents in a foreign country cannot reasonably do it with 500 full time
employees at home, only. All intelligence that a single illegal agent can bring to his agency is
evaluated, analyzed, and crosschecked by several people working behind desks. The management of
this agent, alone, implies several other people. Then officially acknowledging the existence of
certain directorates would be tantamount to revealing certain activities of the DGSE that this agency
and the French Government both deny. Last but not the least, a majority of these directorates, or
rather the services they head, are located outside of the headquarters of the DGSE, and hidden under
cover activities ranging from specialized departments of ministries and companies, military bases,
other intelligence agencies, and even NGOs. Then, most of those services are scattered
geographically into units and cells, also working under more eclectic cover activities, as we have
seen in the previous chapter.
Furthermore, along my career in the DGSE, I understood at some point that the DGSE does not
necessarily separate its activities into categories one would find logical. That is to say, for example,
espionage, counterespionage, influence, counterinfluence, analysis, and so on, and then reproducing
this type of schema by countries. Of course, I know there is a large service specialized in African
affairs because the DGSE is particularly active in this continent in reason of the important natural
resources France obtains at a good bargain in it. Governments of many African countries truly
remain under French influence, and their presidents are but puppet leaders in reality. Therefore, this
would justify a full-time staff in France of much more than 1,000, with specialists in fields as varied
as politics, military affairs, oil and many other resources, maritime affairs, means of transportation,
etc.
For example, I knew for a while a DGSE analyst who worked in a unit hidden in the Ministry of
Agriculture, and whose specialty was oleaginous, i.e. all kinds of oils used in the food industry,
along with all kinds of plants from which they are extracted. However, this man was not working
alone on oleaginous, and his occupational activity did not make him a specialist in African countries
either. Additionally, it is common in the DGSE to lead several very different activities according to
one’s affinities, generally, and because the provision prevents routine and subsequent boredom.
Thus, a second activity may become a hobby of a sort or the reverse. Last but not the least, a chief
analyst with a specialty in a foreign country regularly consults a number of contacts, each having an
expertise in very specific and rare fields, who are not employees of the DGSE. It would be very
costly and unproductive to hire full time all those experts, of course. The latter are not paid for their
services because they are happy simply with talking for a while with someone who share their
passions, or who believe they are interviewed by a journalist, or because they obtain information
that is of interest to them in return, or else because they understand they thus are helping their
country. In France, innumerable scientists, engineers, scholars, journalists, and other experts, thus
help regularly the DGSE, unbeknownst to them in most instances. Many are happy to know that “a
ministry is interested in their take about a field they know well,” and that is how things go on.
If my reader looks at the list of scientific and technological activities interesting French spies in
the United States alone, then he will figure logically that a large number of intelligence analysts and
other specialists are working on U.S. science and technology, alone. This number cannot but be
larger than a hundred of specialists, therefore, among whom some are not employees of the DGSE.
Then, as the DGSE has been particularity active in the U.S. movie industry for decades, the reader
may figure easily that this other field alone justifies necessarily a staff of much more than a hundred
of individuals working on it, in the same conditions. However, someone who is an expert on the
film industry is also in capacity to work on several other countries in the same branch, which fact
makes any estimate difficult to figure out. To sum things up, DGSE intelligence analysis on the
United States alone, including all topics relevant to this country, may possibly involve a staff of full
time employees of 500, helped collectively by a global network of contacts of 5000 or more. The
latter figures are abstracts and irrelevant to a reality I ignore.
Then come influence activities in the media and by very varied other means such as front NGOs,
businesses, and activists living on the U.S. soil. All this is busying remotely in France a large group
of other specialists working in cooperation with chief analysts, necessarily. Then come
telecommunications interceptions, with a large workforce of engineers and scientists in signals,
mathematics and cryptology, computer programming, optic fiber, and the like, plus hundreds of
translators and first instance analysts tasked to find out and unscramble (mise au clair) pertinent
intelligence among a bulk of raw intercepted telecommunications of no interest they send to
analysts.
 Thereof, it is not difficult to figure out that the DGSE is hiring full time much more than 1,000
full time employee and specialists who, from France, are focusing their efforts on the United States
alone. If we add the likely minimum number of field agents (illegals) and contacts who are working
for the DGSE, and their sources who serve more or less regularly this agency on the U.S. soil, it is
of my assumption that we arrive to a total of 10,000 individuals at least, currently spying on this
country full time or are contributing to this effort occasionally.
I said that the way the DGSE establishes specialties, and their directorates, services, units, and
cells, does not necessarily resemble what the reader may assume. Along my career, I understood the
DGSE integrates its activities in counterintelligence and information warfare in the broader category
of active measures, along with very different other specialties, such as influence, cultural warfare,
agitprop, and disinformation. These sub-missions themselves can be executed in much more various
ways than the reader could figure, as we shall see in the next chapters. For the DGSE makes for
itself a general specialty in deception and disinformation. The COMINT mission and its service and
units, as other example, is integrated along completely unrelated other services in a larger
department, named anonymously Direction Technique (Technical Directorate).
As an aside, the reader must learn what the difference is between counterespionage and
counterintelligence exactly. The reader knows or he figures correctly what counterespionage is
about, since he learned what the U.S. FBI does to fight foreign espionage, probably. The other word
“counter-espionage” refers to a broad category encompassing several missions, of which counter-
espionage is only one.
Then espionage is the trade of stealing or guessing secrets, whereas intelligence encompasses this
activity, plus a large number of others of a peculiar and exotic kind for some. Soon in this chapter,
we shall see which can be those other activities, and again with further details in other chapters.
“Counterintelligence” means, “To counter any form of intelligence activities by means whose limits
are set by the scope of inventiveness and imagination”. That is why, in numerous instances,
counterintelligence is setting various forms of deception, designed and planned on a case-by-case
basis. For example, countering an action of influence itself is an action called counterinfluence, but
also and rather an action of contre-ingérence (counter-interference) from the viewpoint of the
DGSE, all specialties being subsumed in the counterintelligence mission, therefore.
That is not yet all because in the general doctrine of the DGSE we find, “Attack is the best
defense”. Possibly, the latter might remind to the reader the Latin adage, first coined between the
4th and 5th centuries by Vegetius in his tract De Re Militari, saying, “Si vis pacem, para bellum,”
(If you want peace, prepare for war). French spies just go on one more step ahead of this wise
provision, which comes to explain why the DGSE is so aggressive in its counterintelligence
activities abroad, as if this agency was striking back against an aggression that no one else could
see, collectively and “angrily”. Therefore, the DGSE does continue a mission of counterintelligence
even when there actually is no hostile intelligence activity at all, if I may put it that way. Later, we
will see how all this works because this chapter purports to provide the reader with a comprehensive
overall picture of the missions of the DGSE, within the limits of my knowledge, of course.
Before enumerating the missions of the DGSE in particular, and those of certain others French
intelligence agencies in general, I must specify, at last, that the former agency partakes largely in
domestic intelligence, domestic influence, and other relevant missions and actions, unbeknownst to
the French public. I will explain all this, and how this agency does it in the next chapters. First, I am
going to use an international terminology, specific to the trade of intelligence in the 21st century, to
describe those tasks and missions. Some are specialties of certain intelligence agencies other than
the DGSE (as in late 2017), whose names are indicated under their acronyms between parentheses
whenever the need arises, otherwise presented in the Lexicon of this book.
Domestic intelligence (sécurité intérieure) or “domestic espionage” or “internal security”—
sometimes called popularly “political police”—is watching the population and the economic,
political, and social stability of the country within its borders. It is one of the largest and more
important missions of the French intelligence community, even before espionage abroad, actually.
Domestic intelligence lays largely on the use of a large number of informants, agents, and
contacts working in unofficial and informal relations with several intelligence agencies, the police,
the Gendarmerie, the customs, the Ministry for the Economy and Finance, and even with certain
social services. To be counted among those intelligence recipients, we also find several liberal
masonic grand lodges: the leading GOdF first, and then more than thirty other liberal grand lodges
in existence in 2018. Then we find the media, very cooperative in France and which together
function as a power of influence and counterinfluence, and as a domestic intelligence network.
Finally, we find considerable electronic means of telecommunications monitoring and surveillance
(landline telephone, cellular phone, Internet, and social networks). There is an obviously close
connection between the missions (and the agencies) of counterintelligence and domestic
intelligence, presented in a specific chapter to come.
The following tasks are commonly included in the general mission of domestic intelligence.

Monitoring the activities of political parties, trade unions and corporate organizations,
associations, and universally recognized religions (Gendarmerie, Police, SCRT, DR-PP,
DGSI, GIC, and SDAO).

Monitoring personalities (elites) from all backgrounds, because they are likely to use
their notoriety and popularity for purposes deemed subversive, deliberately or in reason of
an influence or manipulation from a foreign country, since they have regular accesses to
the media (SCRT, DR-PP, DGSE, DGSI).

Monitoring employees in activities deemed sensitive and strategic, called OIV and
SAIV (defense, scientific research and new technologies, production of important natural
resources, certain raw materials and energy, water treatment and supply, postal services,
banking and finance, aeronautics, human resources of “key companies” of the Nation, in
general) (DRSD, ANSSI, SGDSN, Gendarmerie).

Monitoring the circulation of elites (control and restrictions of citizens’ access to

social positions and power through wealth or / and outstanding abilities) (GOdF, DGSE,
DR-PP, SCRT, SDAO, SDAEF, OCRGDF, GIC).

Domestic influence or “social engineering” (ingéniérie sociale): mission integrated in domestic

intelligence or “preventive counter-interference” (contre-ingérence), which includes

monitoring classic media (newspapers, radio, and television), and digital media
(Internet, social networks, etc.) (DGSE, DGSI, DR-PP, SCRT, SDAO, GIC),

monitoring cultural activities and their carriers / media (cinema and entertainment and
online entertainment, literature, music, theater, and all live performances and arts, since
these information / influence carriers are regularly and historically used by foreign
countries, terrorist or extremist organizations of varied types, as supports of influence,
disinformation, agit-prop, subversion, and propaganda) (DGSE, DGSI, DR-PP, SCRT,
SDAO),

monitoring educational activities and their carriers / media (literature for children and
teenagers, schoolbooks, dictionaries and encyclopedias, essays on general culture, etc.,
private schools and learning and training centers, etc.) (GOdF, DGSE),

monitoring recreational activities (recreational sports, leisure, folk and popular

activities, related clubs and associations, games and board games manufacturing and
publishing, videogames editing and publishing, online recreational activities, etc.) (GOdF,
DGSE, DR-PP, SCRT, SDAO),
 monitoring fashion, fashion accessories, clothing and related, since they are frequently
used as supports of influence, agit-prop and other subversive messages (GOdF, DGSE,
DGSI, DR-PP, SCRT, SDAO),

monitoring advertising, since these branches of communication are used as

information carriers for “dual meaning” aka metacommunication, frequently (discreetly
promoting unwarranted ideology, doctrine, or religion, or spreading propaganda under the
pretense of promoting a brand, a product or service, or a legit political doctrine or
religion) (GOdF, DGSE, DGSI, DR-PP, SCRT, SDAO).

Are included in domestic intelligence (but can be detached from it) the particular missions of

counterterrorism (SDAT, EMOPT, DGSE, DGSI, DR-PP, SCRT, SDAO, GIC,

CISSE),

surveillance of extremist political, and / or religious groups and sects (GOdF,

EMOPT, DGSE, DGSI, DR-PP, SCRT, SDAO, SDAEF, OCRGDF, SDLCODF, DCPJ,
GIC),

counterintelligence and counterinfluence (DGSE, DGSI, DR-PP, SCRT, GOdF),

surveillance of drug manufacturing, smuggling, and organized criminality (mafias,

large and dangerous gangs) (DGSE, DGSI, DR-PP, SCRT, SCRC, SDAO, DNRED,
TracFin, SDAEF, OCRGDF, SDLCODF, DCPJ, GIC, SISSE),

surveillance of money-counterfeiting, and related counterfeiting activities concerning

administrative and identity documents (DGSE, SDLCODF, SDAEF, SCRC),

surveillance of arms smuggling (DGSE, DRM, DRSD, DGSI, DNRED, SGDSN),

surveillance of financial crime and money laundering (“white collar criminality”)

(DGSE, DR-PP, SCRT, SCRC, SDAO, DNRED, TracFin, SDAEF, OCRGDF,
SDLCODF, DCPJ, GIC, SISSE, GOdF),

monitoring imports (DNRD, DRSD),

monitoring gambling (casinos, horse races, etc.), because those activities are highly
likely to be used for money laundering and the concealment of illegal incomes, or simply
not reported to revenue administrations (DR-PP, SCRT, SCRC, SDAO, TracFin, SDAEF,
OCRGDF, SDLCODF, DCPJ, SISSE),
 monitoring immigration flows and immigrants (EMOPT),

surveillance of prostitution and procurism (DCPJ, SCRT, SDAO, SCRC),

surveillance of human trafficking (DNRED, DCPJ, SCRT, SDAO, SCRC),

Espionage abroad and intelligence gathering: is the best-known mission of the intelligence
agencies. It encompasses the following activities.
Technological / scientific intelligence: thefts of scientific and technological discoveries,
manufacturing processes, marketing and commercial concepts, both for defense and civilian
applications. This intelligence must then be transmitted carefully and appropriately to public and
private companies at home (from large groups and companies, to SMEs, start-ups, on a case-by-case
basis and / or for the sake of strategic-economic aims or other specifics). This mission involves
frequently the creation of companies or subsidiaries, and the sending of students and migrant
workers to target countries. The tasks associated with this activity may include, between others:

reverse engineering (reconstruction of a technology by analysis of a finished product,

or a stolen prototype) (DGSE, DRM),

technology watch is the “soft” (without theft) monitoring of the activities of foreign
public and private companies. This may precede a theft attempt or, most frequently,
produces valuable information (synthesis) that should enable a French company to
outpace its foreign competitors (stimulating, protecting, and monitoring the private
economy of the country, and reducing foreign imports) (DGSE, DRM, Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, SISSE).

Economic and financial intelligence, which consists in monitoring indices and economic data
by sector of activity, and financial situations of private companies and foreign public finances. This
mission also includes the special oversight of major foreign investors, individuals as organizations
(juridical persons), and increased oversight of possible mergers, acquisitions, and exchanges. It also
monitors the stock market, legal and illegal attempts to speculate (tampering) on shares,
commodities, currencies, and on finished products (information technology and new technologies),
to draw inferences, spotting odd discrepancies, and forecasting ultimately (DGSE, TracFin, SDAEF,
OCRGDF, SDLCODF, SISSE).
Political intelligence, which consists in monitoring the political developments of foreign
countries in general, in order to provide information to the government as an aid to decision-making
and initiative. A particular part of this sub-mission is to identify individuals who are likely to access
key political positions in the future, to approach them and, if possible, to influence them in the best
interests of the country, and, if possible, to recruit them as sources (conscious or unconscious)
before their accesses to positions of influence / responsibility (DGSE, GOdF).
Military intelligence, which consists in monitoring the activities of foreign armies, the
frequency of their drills (which may indicate a preparation for an armed conflict), new military
equipment and related they invent, develop, and acquire, and their quantities. It is also about
assessing the overall loyalty and obedience of the military to the political power in place, policies,
orientations, and evolutions in military affairs, etc. This mission includes the search for information
on new arms and equipment being in the process of tests, and spotting potential recruits (sources) in
the military, and defense, aeronautic, and space industry, who may provide intelligence or carry out
subversion and / or sabotage (DRM, DGSE, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs).
Telecommunication surveillance (COMINT) is a sub-mission involving heavy and expensive
technological equipment, means, and infrastructure, secured static infrastructures (buildings,
antennas, optic fibers), satellite launchers, super-computers, vehicles, ship, planes, drones, and
submarines. It consists in acquiring a capacity for intercepting telecommunications through classic
landline telephone and related (cable, optic fiber, ADSL, Internet), satellite telecommunications, and
wireless telecommunications, in the aim to be in capacity to select those that may contain
information deemed important to any degree. This mission includes code breaking and actions such
as hacking and jamming (DGSE, DRM, PNCD, GIC, Com-Rens, DIRISI, and DGSI).
Signal intelligence (SIGINT / ELINT) is the monitoring of radio signals, close enough to
wireless telecommunications interception. This sub-mission consists, more specifically, in
monitoring radio signals emitted by individuals, planes, ships, satellites, and radars. It includes
actions such as hacking and jamming (DRM, Com-Rens).
Foreign publications and media watch (which includes national and foreign-published essays
and novels, particularly since the boom of self-publishing) is not a mission distinct from those
mentioned above, with few exceptions, however. It is a constituent part of each according to their
respective specialties. Certain foreign publications and media are monitored by a category of
intelligence agency employees called analysts. Analysts do not devote themselves exclusively to
reading all publications on countries they study, for such a task would imply the recruitment of
entire regiments of such employees, which would be extremely costly and unproductive. This
information may be reported directly to employees of the intelligence community or to journalists,
who often are agents or contacts. In addition, since national press agencies often are the first
informed of current events, they are always in more or less direct touch with certain intelligence
agencies (DGSE, DRM, DGSI, SGDSN, SCRT, and DNRED). This situation facilitates the
gathering of open sources or reports on facts in the places where events of interest happen, shortly
ahead of their publication in the media in the latter case, therefore—this also provides for immediate
censorship, should this other need arise.
Image intelligence (IMINT) takes pictures of sites and infrastructures, movements of troops or
assimilated, from planes, drones, and satellites. It includes aerial reconnaissance, of course.
Although the general intelligence mission we have just overviewed involves thefts of confidential
information, it can be considered as a “passive” activity essentially, when compared to certain other
missions I will review summarily for the moment. For to steal information, it is necessary that the
target country produces it first, one way or another.
The active mission of intelligence agencies in the frame of media surveillance includes, pell-mell,
activities relevant to “information warfare” aka “info-war,” or info-guerre in French, at home as
abroad. This mission is as little known to the public as domestic intelligence is. That is why it will
be presented in detail along several chapters. It includes:
Propaganda, which as a visible or / and audible part of an influence action is disseminated at
home as abroad. Propaganda may be likened to advertising and PR because it involves the same
media, forms, and techniques. Propaganda itself is a general mission including

white propaganda, spread “at home” the more often, which aims to put the emphasis
on a particular news, fact or political decision by the State, the reputation of an individual
who is playing a key role or who must play an important role at some degree (political,
cultural, economic, or else), or a new alliance (economic, cultural, or else) with another
country in the frame of a diplomatic and economic action, etc. (DGSE / Ministry of
Culture and Communication, GOdF),

black propaganda aka disinformation, always designed to do harm against a foreign

country, one or more of its companies and / or of its goods or services (on the French
soil), or one or more of its prominent personalities. Black propaganda / disinformation
may also be disseminated selectively, either “at home” or in the target country, or from a
third-party country in order to undermine the relations between the former and the latter.
Alternatively, it also can be a combination of these different possibilities, in part or
globally (DGSE). For example, a black propaganda / disinformation action aiming a
foreign country, but carried on from within the French borders may aim to

1. degrading the popularity of this target country (of its culture, products, policy, or
else) among its own Nation, because it is considered economically or politically
 inconvenient, or detrimental in some particular way to the domestic policy or agenda
(interference), or else, and often to justify the political need for a “scapegoat” at
home,

2. sending indirectly and unofficially a “warning” to the target country in the

context of current diplomatic relations (for example, having a McDonald fast-food
set in fire or blown up by a group of activists manipulated by the DGSE),[17]

3. sending a reply or “tit-for-tat” to a foreign propaganda action (proven or

perceived as such) coming from the target country (counterinfluence action),
intended as a deterrent generally.

Black propaganda / disinformation when directed against a target country from within its borders
may serve (as examples, because the diversity of aims is large)

to destabilizing a candidate during elections, because it is known that the

positions he will take, if elected, will be detrimental to the long-term French
intelligence and / or political agenda,[18]

to influencing decisions or votes on occasions of major international meetings,[19]

to turning the public opinion of the target country against its leaders, and thus, at
the simplest, to deter the population to vote for an initiative (e.g. on the occasion of a
referendum) that would be unfavorable to the interests and long-term political /
strategic agenda of the French political elite and / or the DGSE,[20]

on the occasion of an election campaign abroad, to tilting the balance in favor of

a candidate who is known to have sympathy for France or for one of her goals or, if
elected, who is deemed to favor the French agenda on the occasion of important
international meetings to come,[21]

to attacking a company and / or its products and services (for economic and
strategic reasons at home and / or in other countries the more often).[22]

As the reader can see, propaganda defies the ethics and moral dear to the people, still more than
the theft of sensitive information. This is why French intelligence agencies and their unofficial
speakers (authors, scholars, and other “independent” individuals, and “ex” and “former” officers
and agents) always refuse to acknowledge this practice when expressing themselves in public.
For the past ten years, the DGSE does much propaganda for itself. This is visible on occasions,
for example, of “come back home” with fanfare of its agents who were captured or held in hostage
during their missions abroad. The Minister of Foreign Affairs or even the President himself honors
the latter individuals publicly before their quick sending back to their anonymity.[23]
Influence: when this word is not used in the general sense encompassing different forms of
propaganda at home or abroad, it is a mission that the public, journalists, and even foreign
counterintelligence services can hardly spot and identify in its unfolding, aims, and effects. That is
why influence deserves to be well explained. An action of influence can be directed against a single
individual, a group of individuals, or against a company or even an entire nation. In the latter case, it
is often difficult to make the difference between propaganda, disinformation, influence, and
manipulation, strictly speaking. Anyone is influenced in one’s thoughts, decisions, and actions,
generally is unable to be aware of it, especially when the action of influence actually is a
manipulation, since manipulating consists in tampering with the unconscious part of the brain,
contrary to what influence is about, strictly speaking. An action of influence often involves a single
actor called “agent of influence,” while there is no “agent of propaganda,” although a single agent
often is at the origin of an action of propaganda or disinformation.
If propaganda usually is a sudden and short-lived but very visible action, influence is always
gradual and insidious, often part of a long-term grand strategy whose duration may span and even
exceed a decade. The purpose of influence is to change durably the opinion of people it is aiming at
about one of several issues simultaneously. While attempting a concise definition, I remember one
of the main characters in an American movie who uses the trivial expression, “fucking with other’s
mind,” to sums up what influence is because it challenges definitively all more refined and shortest
formulas I could find.[24]
Influence, as this word suggests, is about influencing people, but always in a way much more
subtle than that of propaganda or advertising, and which must not be understood and exposed by
those it aims at; this hope often is rewarded. That is why an action of influence often limits to giving
emphasis to an already existing trend that appeared naturally (ideological, political, religious, or
else), or to twist it in a way serving an opposite idea. As true examples, influence can be introducing
some ideas and slight changes in a far-rightist discourse, to transform it into a far-leftist doctrine in
the facts, or putting the emphasis on selected quotations of the Bible, the Koran, or of the story of
Buddha, to make it appear as a forerunner of the socialist thought. On one hand, all influence
attempts of the latter kind can be spotted and exposed with the help of epistemology. On the other
hand, it is of little concern to the agent of influence because less than 1% of any population can
explains what the word “epistemology” means, including in the most advanced Western societies.
Agitprop (or agit-prop), which stands for “agitation and propaganda,” is a relatively old term in
intelligence that names activities included in the sub-missions of propaganda and influence, all
being part of the general mission of information warfare. Specifically, agitprop missions involve
agents, conscious to act in the service of a foreign intelligence agency or not, naturally gifted with
charisma, and who always ready themselves to rallying followers in the name of whatever cause
they often believe in. Many of those agents are true believers, therefore, and not spies in the formal
sense of this noun because they are unaware to be manipulated and supported by “conscious agents”
or case officers, exactly as terrorists often are.[25]
The goals of an agitprop mission may be, among other possibilities,

to create a protest movement to seed dissent in the target country, or to handle or help
remotely a prominent activist or several, at the preliminary stage of a popular revolution
aiming to overthrow the government, for example,

to create a fake movement of protest or of political dissidence at home to forestall the

spontaneous appearance of a real one; that is to say, to “cut the grass under the foot”[26] of
an enemy country that is thought likely to arouse popular unrest by resorting to agit-prop.
Frequently, the latter action of preventive counter-interference is integrated in the more
general missions of counter-terrorism, of the fight again political extremist or irredentist
movements, or against natural and endogenous forms of political dissent likely to evolve
to popular unrest,[27]

to create an opinion movement or trend at home (domestic influence) or abroad, in

order to rally a majority of people among the masses to the objectives of a political
agenda that the State cannot enforce openly without running the risk to stir popular unrest.
Below are two examples.
 1. Opinion leaders are needed to initiate anti (someone or something) movements in
a target country to stir unrest and endless polemics in the media, and to inhibit the
normal decision-making process of the government ultimately.

2. The people accept more easily a project of decree when it seems to suit the desires
or needs of a “significant minority,” and when seducing a majority with an
unpopular decision is deemed an unattainable objective.[28]

In France, where domestic influence specialists are making a daily use of the latter (2.) deception
technique to reach objectives as various as numerous, is it called sensibilisation, which word and its
action may translate as “awareness raising.”
Protection of personalities is a mission executed frequently by the intelligence community,
directly or through police or guards in permanent and official or unofficial contact with the
concerned VIPs. This mission often has a dual purpose because it also allows to monitor the ever-
possible suspicious acts of the protected VIPs, and to filter unidentified or foreign contact attempts
with them (protection against influence and collusion attempts) (DGSE, SCRT, DR-PP, DRSD).
A more discrete aspect of the protection of personalities concerns foreign nationals in temporary
exile (politicians, senior officials, activists, etc.), and defectors who are wanted or who have been
justice sentenced in their home countries or in another, yet who are likely to play an important role
in those regions someday (e.g. in the event of a change of government or else). Such individuals
will be more or less well welcomed and treated in accordance with their past or current positions,
importance, and popularity in their country of origin. For they may take political functions and
responsibilities at the highest level upon their return to their countries, and as such they are highly
likely to favor the foreign country that protected them during their exile in return. It happens that
those returning refugees become agents in the service of the intelligence agency of the country that
took them under its protection. For the duration of their stay under protection is long generally, in
which cases it is inescapable to learn details on their privacy that will be embarrassing to them
eventually, when they will become public personalities in their country. Documented knowledge of
the latter details may be of great value since it can be used as leverage.
Still about “active missions,” we find:
Hostile physical actions that include

sabotage, which can be done against a large variety of targets in France as abroad. The
limits in the variety of sabotages are those of imagination. The next technical
breakthrough in safety will have its weak point, which will allow its sabotage. From the
simplest to the most complicated, this kind of active mission may range from sabotaging a
vehicle, in the goal to immobilize it temporarily or to create heavy expenses to its owner,
in the frequent case of harassment, to a massive computer attack that must saturate a
computer server, to destructing infrastructures and heavy equipment of all kinds such as,
water plant, power plant, enriched uranium centrifuges, railways overhead lines or the
bogie axle box cover of an oil-tank wagon, etc.

In France, sabotage has the particularity to be accomplished by highly trained military

specialists of the COS, usually, whose units are attached more or less officially to the
Service Action of the DGSE.[29] However, those specialists may also be civilians or
agents having particular skills (in computer technology, typically), expendable mobsters
recruited in prisons or who are proposed to do a dirty job in exchange for their freedom,
[30] or manipulated activists expected to take full responsibility for their actions
eventually. Sabotage actions are frequent overall, and they may be carried out as much in
France as in the home of a target designated as “hostile and hazardous to the national
interest or public order,”[31] as in foreign countries. Sabotage is always ordered or directly
done by the counterintelligence service of the DGSE, DGSI, SCRT, DR-PP, EMOPT, or
even the DRSD.[32]
 Harassment / stalking is one of the most common sub-missions of the French
intelligence community. A mission of harassment may be directed against isolated
individuals or various businesses and organizations (at home or abroad), and usually it
aims to

1. coercing a person or a group of persons (company, corporate association, or

similar) into submitting implicitly to the will of an intelligence agency (unrequited
cooperation), via an intermediary who never clearly introduces himself as agent of
this agency, in order not to run the risk to publicly expose it, since harassment,
stalking, and blackmail remain illegal activities punishable by law,

2. or coercing an individual or a company into renouncing its activities, or into

leaving the country when foreign.

Harassment can also be executed in the context of the “social” or “physical elimination” of an
individual. The expressions “social elimination” and “physical elimination” mean, respectively,
making significant discredit against an individual (making someone’s life “a misery”), and pushing
someone into committing suicide, or to bring about his accidental death or as a normal consequence
of an induced disease. Both are done through various unofficial and officials means, and through the
staging of unsettling situations and exceptional circumstances. Even though France is not in an
official situation of war, physical eliminations of this type remain relatively frequent, and they are
carried out almost exclusively against French nationals or immigrants from all social middles, and
seldom against a national of a foreign country due to diplomatic concerns and subsequent bad
image abroad. Although France is known as a modern democracy of the Western World, yet she has
a long and heavy record of State assassinations and other suspicious deaths linked to politics, high
finance, and espionage.
The reader might be surprised to learn that the French intelligence community resorts commonly
to social elimination against its own agents, sources, employees, and ex-employees, either to
prevent the risk of sensitive information disclosure deemed harmful to the reputation of the
intelligence community, or as a method integral to a “hostile recruitment,” as we shall see in detail
in a next chapter.
Physical elimination is assassination, therefore, which in the twenty-first century is rarely carried
out the spectacular way cinema and literature regularly present to the public. In a large majority of
cases, it is necessary not to arouse public scrutiny with a case of suspicious death, as this leads
inevitably to independent investigations on its possible causes, and to undesirable media coverage.
That is why the targets of this kind of sub-mission die the most frequently either by suicide
following a depression, or as consequence of an ordinary illness or accident, often in relation to
their natural or provoked activities and inclinations (alcoholism, smoking, narcotics, sex, dangerous
sports, and leisure activities). Violent and blatant physical eliminations as in espionage movies exist
nonetheless, as it will be explained in detail in the chapter 11.
Must be added to the category of hostile actions, drug trafficking, terrorism, and money
counterfeiting. As an aside, the French intelligence service began to make fake banknotes (Russian
rubles) as early as under the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, drug trafficking since the early 20th
century in Indochina and even before possibly, and recruiting and training terrorists since the 1970s.
Paramilitary operations, although carried out by soldiers (of the COS) or by mercenaries, are
missions supervised by the DGSE and the DRM. It is unnecessary to describe this type of sub-
mission, since the mainstream media reports it regularly. At least, it may be useful to specify that
the DGSE enjoys the immediate availability of the highly trained elite military units of the COS,
each having distinct specialties, under its direct command. The men of these units must always
ready themselves to intervene abroad in the context of a variety of shadow operations, ranging from
exfiltration (extraction) or the rescue and recovery of hostages and agents, sabotages, to discreet
participations to coup d’états in third-world countries.[33]
 Now, we are arriving to a general sub-mission that can be passive and active simultaneously,
which explains why it is presented separately from the two others.
Defensive counterespionage obviously is a sub-mission of counterintelligence, popularized by
cinema and the literature of fiction, and by some serious essays written by former counterespionage
agents and officers. Counterintelligence is, in its principle and essentially, a police-like activity of
research and investigation because it consists in seeking and identifying spies sent to or recruited in
place by foreign powers, and even private spies paid by foreign companies having activities on the
French soil for seeking to know what their competitors are doing (i.e. industrial, scientific, and
economic espionage).
The French public does not know much about counterespionage beyond the first stage of
investigation summarily described above, the second being found commonly in
Offensive counterespionage, which also is a sub-mission of counterintelligence. Offensive
counterespionage is an activity of a peculiar sort because it combines high intellectual capacities
that could be described as “refined,” with villainous acts that popular moral and ethics strongly
condemn. What we call “double agents,” characters widely popularized by literature—John Le
Carré most notoriously—and cinema, are exclusive products of offensive counterespionage. One of
the best-known missions in the specialty is to deceive a foreign intelligence agency by recruiting or
/ and manipulating a foreign spy, through coercion in most instances. Or else, by other means,
tactics, or strategies of the cunning sort. Offensive counterespionage is a job that often ends with
somebody’s death or definitive disappearance, sadly in all cases.
In the twenty-first century more than ever, every time a counterespionage unit unmasks a foreign
spy, it considers that it is infinitely more productive to make him a double agent than to expel him
abroad or to send him behind bars. The French intelligence community says, “Counterespionage is
not judiciarisable” (judiciable), due to the extreme rarity of conclusive evidences. In addition, the
official arrest of a spy always has diplomatic consequences and influences negatively the public
opinion about the foreign country involved.
For example, France never arrested nor officially expelled an American spy, and the United States
reciprocally—I was at the right place to testify that French spies in the United States are numerous
and highly active. In cases of the extreme sort, those spies are arrested and sent to prison under the
official but false accusation of “terrorism,” or of some other unrelated criminal act. Or else, they
may be sent to a psychiatric asylum upon the issuing of a fabricated diagnosis of some mental
illness.
Assassinations of foreign spies are rare in the Western World since the end of the Cold War,
though they happen now and then, with a steady increase for a few years. It may be difficult to
know exactly which party assassinated the spy: his own or the counterespionage agency of the
country where he was spying on? For a flying agent or an intelligence employee who surrendered or
who got away in a foreign country is highly likely to be coerced there into cooperating with the
local counterespionage agency, under threat to be sent back to his country. As this individual is put
in physical touch with thought-to-be-spies of his country, as bait, then he runs the risk to be
assassinated more or less discreetly by his compatriots who thus sanction him for his betrayal.[34]
By virtue of the importance to maintain economic and other exchanges between countries, such
tragic consequences are seldom desired, however. That is why media hyped arrests of foreign spies
today are always conducted in keeping with the general pattern of diplomatic maneuvers, and
ongoing negotiations. The practice aims to obtaining concessions by placing the guilty country that
sent spies in position of weakness vis-à-vis the public opinion in particular, and on occasion of
important international meeting close in time, in which negotiations must take place. The effective
date of the event always is scheduled precisely in agreement with governmental and diplomatic
instances, at the highest level.
For example, for the past forty years or so, the United States has always contented herself with
“expelling” discreetly countless French spies back to France, on the ground that France is her
military and political ally, officially, thus resuming the “Johnson doctrine” of 1966.[35] France sees
things from a different angle, and she could not but takes American kindness as an implicit
encouragement: the number of spies the DGSE sent to the United States has ever been growing
since the 1960s. However, in 2000, I heard about a diplomatic warning “not for public release” that
the U.S. Department of State addressed to France, asking for stopping sending spies to America or,
at least, “to reduce their number,” without humor.[36]
 All this explains why espionage cases the media report have become rare from the end of the
Cold War to about 2005, although there are no fewer spies today than before 1991; in point of fact,
they certainly are more numerous in the 21st century. As the reader is wondering about, possibly,
“What about foreign spies in France?” I answer this question in the chapters 14 and 15 because I am
still presenting generalities.
Finally, we come to the presentation of the internal missions that are not of a bureaucratic nature.
There is of course a “Human Resources Service” in the DGSE, as well as staffs responsible for
accounting and budgetary tasks, and the proper maintenance of the main and ancillary premises
(electricity, plumbing, masonry, etc.). To my knowledge, there is no such a thing as a unique secret
place that would design and build all “approved” gears for intelligence employees, and no DGSE
“quartermaster Q” or some jack-of-all-trades who would invent and build futuristic gadgets and
supercars for spies. Instead, the DGSE has a number of highly skilled specialists and gifted
individuals who each are working separately under cover activities suitable to their areas of
expertise, alone or in very small cells in most instances, but all under the authority of a Technical
and Support Service (Service Technique d’Appui) officially located in the Fort de Noisy, near Paris.
Typically, those specialists work in different anonymous locations, which often are their homes or
personal business workshops, and unbeknownst to each other. That is why a technician who
modifies and customizes laptop computers knows nothing about another who is concealing tiny
gadgetry in clothes and leather items. Nowadays, spies and even military often find better gears and
gadgets on the civilian market than those they could painstakingly invent and build. Even the
espionage agency of a major power cannot financially afford to compete with Intel Inc., Samsung
Electronics, or Apple Inc.; it simply is common sense. The exception I know is the Russian
counterespionage service, FSB, which indeed sells abroad espionage gadgets it invents and
manufactures. The FSB was doing well in 2000 already, with optical fiber spy cameras concealed in
false screws, bolts, and rivets, for example, as I could see by my own. The FSB is a regular provider
of French counterespionage departments and agencies, and reciprocally with few French electronics
companies that are official providers of the Ministry of Defense.
That is why the DGSE often manages to obtain from a big French company a specific piece of
equipment it cannot build or find otherwise, or even from a foreign company. In the late 1980s, the
DGSE asked to one of its contacts in Japan, who worked in a large and well-known Japanese
camera company, to suggest to its engineering department to add a particular yet simple option in a
compact camera it was about to release on the market. It was a timer that could make the camera
snap a picture every X second automatically until the film magazine is empty. For such a camera
had to be mounted either on a kite or on a model airplane, in the aim to transform it into an
inexpensive spy drone. Miniature drones that could do the job done did not exist before the early
2000s, and another requisite was that an agent abroad who needed such piece of equipment had to
be able to build it all by himself, from ordinary and innocuous goods and parts freely and easily
available in local outlets. The Japanese engineer indeed obtained from his enthusiastic superiors to
add the timer to a new compact camera, but none of all those people ever knew they truly had
designed a spy gadget for the DGSE.
Let alone small private businesses that specialize in espionage equipment for private
investigators, which manufacture decent equipment for espionage and counterespionage. Then a
good technician can easily make at home spy micro cameras, microphones, and GPS trackers, from
cell-phones parts, and for cheap. However, there is indeed at least one small intelligence cell whose
task, among others, is to monitor the fields of science, technology, and industry with a concern with
acquiring, creating, and improving espionage devices and related gadgetry. Its employees keep
abreast of new inventions, technological, and scientific, breakthroughs. When I was still working
with the DGSE, this cell was in Paris downtown near the Place de la Bastille, with a cover activity
of publishing house. Remarkably, its official owner, Valérie-Anne Giscard d’Estaing, had the
singularity to be at the same time the daughter of former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing,
and an authentically intrepid and would-be-adventurous women, indeed. On a day I enjoyed a meal
with her, she told me she just crossed the unfriendly Mali desert on a motorbike.
French spies do not enjoy standard issue or customized Aston Martin or similar. However, there
is indeed a secret automotive service that can provides a spy or a counterspy with any sort of cars
and motorbikes, including upscale and luxury vehicles. A spy who looks needy cannot execute
certain missions (counterespionage in most instances) properly. That is why he must wear expensive
clothing and luxury goods, also provided via various channels and a network of contacts.
 Otherwise and commonly, French counterspies often are provided with foreign brand cars looking
deceptively old and tired, for their engines and all mechanical parts inside are surprisingly clean and
serviced with great care. Strikingly when opening the hood of any such car, the engine seems brand
new. Those cars are not bought; they come from seizures by the police, justice, and the customs,
before they are inspected and serviced thoroughly. Another particularity with those cars is that they
are not parked together in some secret parking lot, but each in the private underground parking place
of a DGSE employee. The employee is not given its registration, insurance papers, and key,
however—a large majority of French intelligence employees are not allowed to own a car
personally, even not a small motorbike—because they could not afford it financially, to begin with.
For a while, I was asked to take care of such cars myself. The first was a sedan Volvo 740, and the
second a Volvo 244 station wagon, both strong and reliable vehicles. As an aside, for decades, the
DGSE has been customizing some of its vehicles by improving their performances, hidden under
the deceptive appearance of sedans and down-the-range cars.
One word about guns since they are seen popularly as exciting features of the realm of espionage.
In France, guns are not for spies, but for counterspies and case officers. However, everyone must
submit to a bit of target shooting with handguns during the recruitment stage, in addition to
intensive trainings in martial arts and street fighting techniques. Trainings with guns are far from
being as thorough as in the U.S. FBI, but exceptions exist in the case of recruits coming from
special military units of the COS, mostly but not exclusively.
For long, DGSE’s trainings in martial arts and street fighting were done in an anonymous location
at the number 6 of the Rue Saint-Anne, in Paris downtown—that is where I was trained. Training
with guns was done in an ordinary and civilian shooting range located in the near suburbs of Paris—
I do not remember which one—and in another one located underground, next to the underground
parking of the Avenue Foch. The latter belongs officially to the police under the name, Stand de Tir
de la Police National. I went to the former in the 1990s and to the latter in the 1980s when I moved
to Paris. Actually, in the early 1980s, two police officers of the RG (today called SCRT and DR-PP)
first trained me with guns in the French countryside. As surprising as it may seem, I was told that
my training with handguns was developed initially by the FBI, and then imported in France by
Raymond Sassia, a police officer who once had been bodyguard of President Charles de Gaulle.
One of my former colleagues, a regional executive of the DGSE, was trained first in the Army
(sniping in the 1st RCP and at the military shooting range of Magnac Laval) in the late 1960s, and
years later in the 1990s, at the shooting range of the police school of Cannes-Écluse, in the
département (district) of Seine-et-Marne. The Army-owned shooting range of Fontainebleau (Seine-
et-Marne) is rather used to test guns for snipers, and experimental rifle ammunitions at 300 meters
(328 yards); civilian shooting ranges allowing shooting at distances in excess of 50 meters are
scarce in France.
French spies never carry guns, but some counter-espionage officers, case officers, and
intelligence executives do. Those who own a handgun (or several) must buy it at their own expense,
with a license to own such firearms that they all-normally acquire through registration in an
ordinary civilian shooting range. Very few have a license to carry a handgun, except officers who
work under Gendarmerie or police statuses. If buying guns under the counter is a common practice
in the DGSE (in my time, most of those and their ammunitions were smuggled hidden in semi-
trailer trucks from Belgium and Switzerland), it is also because those who do it are granted
unofficially the right to own guns this way. This was my case; I owned many for a while, including
full-auto submachine guns and assault rifles, therefore illegally. Otherwise, there is an automatic
pistol in each directorate’ building of the DGSE located outside the headquarters of this agency,
closed in a small safe under the counter of the reception room.[37]
Beyond all this, there is of course a computer maintenance and repair service in each big
directorate building.
The most important of all these “ancillary” services and certainly the most sensitive among all is
the
Interior Security Service (Service de Sécurité Intérieur), whose mission is to monitor all
intelligence employees in order to prevent possible leakages or misconduct that could lead to
exposures of sensitive activities, and ever-possible betrayals of course. The Interior Security Service
handles the mission of the
Exterior Security Service (Service de Sécurité Extérieur), which can be likened to an all-
ordinary service of physical security of the premises, tasked to check the entrances and exits of all
employees and everything they may carry with them and to do body searches.
This presentation of the DGSE is not exhaustive at this point. It even does not allow figure its
size, numerous infrastructures, technical means, and the number of its specialists, technicians,
employees, agents, and what can be its services, specialized units, and cells. The HR service of the
DGSE reckons close to 180 different specialties and positions. Devoting all pages of this book to it
would not yet be enough, and I do not know all of them anyway. Many French know where the
headquarters of the DGSE are, as this is no secret. They deceptively assume, however, that
everything about espionage in their country is concentrated in its old military barracks girded with
gray walls crowned with barbed wires. Not quite, for insiders know of the existence of numerous
other secret premises and annexes scattered throughout the country, hidden for some under
appearances that many would still refuse to believe if they were told the truth. That is why
“knowing the truth” in the DGSE is something that cannot happen in one day. This indeed takes
many years just to believe it. For example, it is common that an intelligence cell, company, or even
the managerial staff of a directorate occupy anonymously a part of the building of an irrelevant
ministry or a local public service, or even poses as a private business.
The reader has not yet even glimpsed what a private company under control of the French
intelligence community is. Moreover, he would certainly find difficult to believe there are indeed
“villages” of intelligence employees, staffs responsible for first instance (or raw) analysis mainly,
bearing all the deceptive marks of any ordinary village lost in the French countryside, except for
some details and particularities that would not strike the traveler who stops a few minutes in one,
just to buy a drink.
The duty of the analysts who live and work in those villages is first instance analysis or raw
analysis, called mise au clair in the French intelligence community, of typed messages, documents,
and audio-records coming from telecommunications interceptions. Once the stage of mise au clair is
done and a first instance value is given to this “raw intelligence,” it is sent elsewhere to better-
qualified analysts who proceed to its careful examination, or second analysis or refined analysis.
I am unable to tell how many such villages exist in France, but I visited two, each located not far
from Paris, and also a small group of old houses and buildings located in the Eastern part of Paris
downtown, at a few minutes’ walk south of the DGSE headquarters.
One has to be a perceptive person to notice some unusual patterns in those locations, such as, for
example, nearly all their inhabitants dress simply with cheap, casual, and sober clothes. They seem
poor overall, and they all tend to behave correspondingly. They have neither cars nor motorbikes,
though they do not have the demeanors of unemployed persons or underpaid blue-collar workers.
You see on their faces that they are not as uneducated as their apparent poverty suggests it. Most of
them are rather young and healthy and are silent individuals who all look away when crossing the
path of a stranger. There are not many children in those eerie quiet places, nor many seniors.
One such village is located south of the department of Seine-et-Marne, one hour from Paris. The
staff of its official Gendarmerie station actually is the Security Service under the direct and official
command of a Gendarmerie escadron (squadron) based in Paris—that is unusual, of course, since it
should depend of the squadron of Metz in this region, from an administrative and military
standpoint.
Secret villages for spies are not a French invention, however. The first of this kind would have
been created in Scotland during the WWII, in a location known as Inverlair Lodge, near Spean
Bridge. In Inverlair Lodge were sheltered spies, foreign nationals generally, who had been deemed
not up to the task of infiltrating the Third Reich upon their trainings, yet who knew too much
already to be left at large. Therefore, they were well looked after in this place and even prevented
from leaving. Although they had some comfort and could leave during the day to mix with locals,
exactly as in DGSE’s villages on evenings today, the situation caused frustration, naturally.
There was also the now popularly known Bletchley Park, located in Milton Keynes, England, and
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA, on the slopes of Black Oak Ridge, from which the new town of Oak
Ridge got its name, and several others in this country and in Canada.
As an amusing aside, Inverlair Lodge would have inspired “the Village” of the popular British
TV series The Prisoner. For Inverlair Lodge, run by the SOE in wartime, was given the cover name
“Number 6 Special Workshop School,” but the SOE nicknamed it “the cooler”—for those who were
“put on ice”? The latter number suggests there were five more villages of this sort at least, unless
the number was intended for deception, just in case.
 In fact, when one considers the French intelligence community in its entirety, then one feels
compelled to say that it does not seem much different than it was a century ago; “a disorderly
organization”. However, calling the French intelligence community “disorderly” would be a
deceptive assumption because this is done on purpose, precisely.
 3. Recruiting & Training.
T he first spy novel ever published in France appeared in 1896, under the title Cousin de
Lavarède, written by Paul Deleutre aka Paul d’Ivoi. Cousin de Lavarède is a forerunner of a sort of
Hergé’s series, The Adventures of Tintin, sans the pictures. Deleutre had been a spy of the 2d
Bureau himself, which explains why he authored his novel under a pen name. I do not agree with
this half-official version because The Count of Monte Cristo, first published in 1844 by Alexandre
Dumas, by far deserves the honor. During his Homeric journey, “Edmond Dantès” aka “Count of
Monte Cristo” leads a spy life, unambiguously. He even becomes a super-agent loyal to Napoleon
Bonaparte who is no longer emperor, and so in spirit only because he serves his own interest above
all, his revenge against corrupt officials, actually. Edmond Dantès often recruits sources and agents,
establishes good connections in all middles of the society, disguises, assumes multiple fictitious
identities, runs a network of henchmen, intercepts and jams communications, manipulates and
influences people, and even he kills. Change the time of The Count of Monte Cristo for the 21st
century, and it will be a thrilling Frederick Forsyth’s style espionage story.
The latter novel has been an exciting turn-page to me, but film adaptations I watched thereafter
proved disappointing, not to say laughable. However, I would not dispute that the special place The
Count of Monte Cristo occupies in my mind can easily be challenged by Splendeurs et misères des
courtisanes (translated either as The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans or as A Harlot High and
Low). Written by Honoré de Balzac in 1838, this likewise long journey is a spy story of a different
style, in which the poor and vulnerable “Lucien de Rubempré” is a young agent recruited, trained,
and handled by master spy and barbouze “Vautrin” who lives under the fictitious identity of Abbot
Errera, whom he killed to steal his coffer full of gold coins. The likewise numerous spy tricks,
manipulations, and practices in this other long novel in four volumes are still largely in use in the
DGSE, indeed.
Nevertheless, the first wave of French spy and counterespionage novels explicitly presented as
such was published between 1911 and 1913, one year before the First World War broke out and in
anticipation of it. Bestsellers in this then new literary genre were Fantomas, Agent Secret, Nez-En-
L’Air, and many more. Pierre Souvestre, authentic spy of the 2d Bureau and “journalist,” wrote
them all. Souvestre’s challenger at that time was Gaston Leroux, also a flying agent of the 2d
Bureau under the cover of reporter journalist and war correspondent. Prolific novelist Leroux wrote
the Rouletabille series, The Double Life, The Man who Came Back from the Dead, The Phantom of
the Opera, The Veiled Prisoner, The Masked Man, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, and many
more. Leroux since then enjoyed worldwide success and renown as novelist, yet he “fell into
disgrace” in his own country after the Great War, only because of his rightist and anti-communist
stance. No French publisher wanted to publish Leroux anymore from the 1920s, and his contacts in
the mainstream media of that time were all severed, as if in a concert effect. The untold French
ostracism and lamentable blacklisting against Leroux persisted posthumously after his death in
1927, and even after the WWII!
All French espionage novels or almost have been written by authentic spies or former ones since
the publishing of Cousin de Lavarède at the end of the 19th century. Of course, those stories when
published in wartime had the common characteristic to depict their main characters as highly
likeable, intrepid, unselfish, virtuous, and honorable gentlemen secret agents, or just private
detectives such as Rouletabille. They all were ready to put their lives at stake “for the honor of their
country”. Obviously, their foreign foes all were nothing but sinister, ruthless, and merciless spooks.
This not only was intentional, but also formally asked from 1914 by the Propagande du Grand
Quartier Général (Propaganda of the Great Headquarters), and from 1915 by the 5th Bureau of the
Ministry of War aka Bureau de l’Information et de la Propagande (Bureau of Information and
Propaganda), both little known or even forgotten military bodies, today.
The new popular literature of action, espionage, and counterespionage of the early 20th century,
whose real aim of course was to breed vocations, also was a profitable activity launching a genre
that never waned since then. The tale of a world of espionage presented as romantic and exciting
began to spread in the country, exactly as what French talent spotters in intelligence expected.
Britain had launched the trend from 1885 with Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle had
opened the way in the counterintelligence alternative with his Sherlock Holmes series, only two
years later, in 1887.
 When the war finally broke out in 1914, the 2d Bureau and certain divisions of the police needed
to recruit more than ever, obviously, but no longer only in the large crowd of illiterate and
expendable blue-collars, third-rate immigrants, and petty criminals. The French intelligence service
needed fresh, young, smart, and well-educated recruits, able to grasp the intricacies of modern
warfare, espionage, and counterespionage, and mastering a foreign language if possible.
So, this recruitment’s propaganda had spread under the guise of a literature said-to-be realistic,
and obviously “inspired by true events,” which could not possibly be questioned by any
whistleblower at a time the Internet did not yet exist. More than ever in those years of upheaval, the
press and the book publishing industry were under State control and censorship, still similarly
stringent today, remarkably.
The French foreign intelligence agency never did any public relations from 1945 to the early
1990s. From the 1990s on, as the secret war in intelligence against the United States and its allies
was growing, the DGSE had to fulfill its new need for growth and greater capacities, and so for
yearly recruiting more spies than France ever did since the Great War, still brainier in addition.
However, this agency did not do much for this because its all-military management imbued with a
left-leaning special forces mentality still refused to communicate the way private companies do. At
that time, my insisting suggestions to communicating with the public always were turned down,
sternly, on the ground that most senior executives just “would not accept it”. In my understanding,
the real cause of it was, the DGSE has a collective perception of itself that is more a power that be
that must remain secret than an intelligence agency, which reflects a reality, by and large. Thus, the
effort in public relations limited to former directors of the DGSE who, from this period on,
“ritually” published their succinct autobiographies, in addition to resuming the practice of regular
interventions of evangelists in universities and specialized schools, in use in the early 1980s
already.
The situation lasted until about 2005, when the DGSE found itself in dire need of technicians,
engineers, and scientists in computer technology, telecommunications, cryptography, and related, to
fulfill its expectations in COMINT. The latter need added to an already greater demand for more
employees and agents of the “ordinary” class. However, the challenge was that candidates of this
new breed could easily find much better salaries and work conditions about anywhere else than in
this agency or in any other intelligence agency. Intelligence doesn’t pay, that’s an understatement.
The greater effort the DGSE made in its endeavor to woo new employees materialized as
encouragements toward some “former” field agents, senior executives in particular, to write books
on their experiences with this agency, all positive and exciting, obviously. Epic journeys and
flattering autobiographies of French field spies and senior executives began to bloom in French
bookstores, and on the then rising Amazon selling platform.
Since about 2010, an average of two to three books on espionage of this kind are monthly
published, yet they all do not tell much on the realities of French spycraft beyond rare passing
references that ordinary people can hardly understand. Additionally, all those autobiography focus
on counterterrorism and Southern third-world countries, for the DGSE does not want to talk about
its activities in countries of the Northern hemisphere, and still less about counterespionage. Those
books that truly are media in a large promotion of French spycraft receive invariably praiseful
commentaries in the mainstream media, and their authors are ritually invited to express themselves
on the leading radio stations and TV channels on pretenses to delivering their enlightened takes on
the news of the moment on espionage and terrorism, to tout their books since it is all about this. By
comparison, only one to two books on intelligence were published yearly from the 1970s to the
early 1980s, and those limited to WWII and Algerian War periods, with exceptions that were so
rare that each became an instant and enduring bestseller.
In 2015, the DGSE surprised everybody, journalists in particular, when at last this agency
resigned to venture out of the shadow by launching an intensive and overt recruitment campaign by
ads. Moreover, it did consistent public relations operations through press articles, television
reportages, interviews of former agents and even active senior executives, and conferences, in a
first real attempt to improve its dark reputation. One among the latest and most striking of those
public relation operations, in 2015-2018, is the more or less officially acknowledged DGSE
production and making of the espionage TV series Le Bureau des légendes, re-titled The Bureau in
its English-dubbed version. The series, originally aired in France from 27 April 2015, is bound to
reach its fourth season in 2018. Unambiguously, it has been created to foster enlistment in the
DGSE, and to insist on an image of modernity this agency never had h. The Bureau succeeds the
film Secret défense, also largely produced and made unofficially by the DGSE in 2008. I watched
the two first episodes of the first season only while writing this chapter because of the media-hype
that is currently (early 2018) made around it in France and in the United Kingdom, I notice. As I
assume the reader might be interested in my take about The Bureau, I tell a few personal
observations I drawn from the latter episodes.
First, I find The Bureau surprisingly realistic with respect to characters’ styles and demeanors,
up to the way they dress. They interact each with other as in the reality I knew. Leftist stances and
rants are never hinted at in talks however, but I could very well feel the spirit, present in all
characters. The inside of the DGSE headquarters also fits very realistically several typical patterns I
have seen in units and cells undercover elsewhere in Paris, colors, furniture, and safe cabinets
included. Exceptions to this realism are discrepancies I consider as minor, such as scanner / printers
in offices and meeting rooms, and offices a little too cozy and personal to be true, even for senior
executives. The real work environment in the DGSE is more impersonal, colder, and cheaper
especially; this agency indeed rejects everything is comfortable or seen as too fancy. The outside of
the DGSE headquarters in Paris is the actual one; so, no comment about this. Cars are realistically
down the range or old.
Video-telecommunications on the Internet did not yet exist when I left. Anyway, using this
means to communicate in clear talks from a foreign country is completely fanciful, unless in the
expectation of a foreign interception, for deception. The surveillance team limiting to two
gumshoes in a car does not make it, but their dogged drudge-like demeanors reflect a reality. Given
the situation of hero “Guillaume Debailly,” the apartment he is temporary given is supposed to be
bugged in a real-world situation; the Interior Security Service would do it, inescapably. For a
number of reasons, the reader will understand later in this book that the DGSE would know much
more about Debailly’s night with his foreign lover in a too-fancy-to-be-true hotel than what the
series shows. How an agent could afford to go to any hotel with his own money, anyway?
I understood that Debailly would be an agent returning from a mission in Syria under a false
identity, Identité Fictive–IF in DGSE jargon. Therefore, he is not supposed to go at once to the
DGSE headquarters upon his return, unless he was chief of station, the less so only to meet people
and to wander around aimlessly in offices and corridors, and to lead meetings as communication
managers for Procter & Gamble do. Sensitive meetings are supposed to occur in rooms in the
underground of the DGSE buildings or in anonymous places outside, not in a meeting room
upstairs with large windows.
I neither saw nor heard of Debailly’s case officer, save for a young woman who seems to be his
contrôleur (supervisor). As agent he claims to be, Debailly is not realistic in several other respects,
chiefly because he is brought to see and to know too many things at the same time. An agent is not
a senior intelligence officer—I did not hear of his promotion at this level—or he is, and the series
just missed to mention this. Nevertheless, even in the latter hypothesis he would fail to be realistic
in this respect.
The woman psychiatrist says at some point she specialized in biologie comportementale
(“behavioral biology”) in the Army, which, I notice with surprise, are the true words to name
behaviorism and its study in the DGSE, otherwise unused and unknown in other middles and the
civilian sector.
The synopses of the three first seasons show Arabic and African countries. This fits a pattern of
the unwillingness of the DGSE to allude to countries of the Northern hemisphere, where this
agency leads numerous and much more thrilling missions and long-term operations. Objectively,
The Bureau is a well-done series on the DGSE, and great care is given to details, often very
realistic; it lies by omission otherwise and essentially.
As an aside, from the late 1990s and until I left the DGSE in the early 2000s, I remember that the
subject of the Soviet TV series Семнадцать мгновений весны (Seventeen Moments of Spring),
released in 1972, arose in this agency with an abnormal frequency. For this series of the espionage
genre intended to promote enlisting in the KGB during the Cold War, along with a dozen or so of
excellent Soviet espionage films made at the same period. Seventeen Moments of Spring is
unexpectedly good, somehow in the style of BBC TV series of the 1980s, to help the reader figure
what it is. Obviously, Seventeen Moments of Spring makes Soviet spies passing as the good guys,
despite an assassination in cold blood in one of the first episodes, quite normal in the espionage
genre, after all. At no moment in its twelve episodes is there any evidence of blatant communist
propaganda, remarkably. To say, by comparison, I happened to watch American movies whose
scenarios could have been written in Moscow at the same period! The latter anecdote purports to
mean that I am wondering whether the idea to make The Bureau actually would not have been
inspired by Seventeen Moments of Spring, even though there is an obvious evolution from the
French film Secret Défense, again about terrorism and with scenes in third-world countries, and
again with actors who are authentic spies of the DGSE.
In the mid-2018, the DGSE surprised everyone ever more by opening online accounts under its
name on YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn, still with the very visible intent to woo new recruits,
and by insisting on a fresh, modern, and dynamic work environment. However, the latter initiatives
show also the discomfort, not to say awkwardness, that this agency still displays with
communicating about itself. The latter particularity is the more surprising since the DGSE has a
consumed and outstanding expertise in propaganda and influence, I know firsthand.
Nevertheless, the considerable evolution of the DGSE in the field of public relation for recruiting
is unlikely to pay off as much as it is hoping. For this agency will never resign to offer decent
salaries even just approaching the cheapest commonly found in France’s private sector, this for a
number of reasons I will all explain in the next chapters. That is why the promotion still hardly
does more than focusing on catching the attention of young and curious people more receptive than
others are to the notions of mystery, secrecy, shadow power, and adventures; as the military did
during the First World War, in sum. For worse, since about the early 1970s, the notion of patriotism
has lost much of its appeal in France; it is visibly weaker than in many other countries of the
Northern hemisphere, to the worries of the ruling elite.
As is the case with many intelligence agencies in the World, the DGSE is still facing the
problems, on one hand, to be courted by disturbed and poorly skilled applicants and other immature
fans of James Bond, and, on the other hand, to having a hard time with attracting sound, brained,
and highly educated recruits.
There are four main and general types of recruitment in the DGSE, and each may have sub-types
that recruiters choose according to what can be or is expected from the candidate and his profile,
background, and current social status and occupational activities. As I previously said, close to 180
specialties are listed in the DGSE, and so the guidelines in recruiting processes and trainings may
vary accordingly, even though people go through the same process first, and specialize eventually,
in a large majority of cases.
People believed to be good agents do not experience the same recruiting process as others who
seem fit to fill sedentary positions of full-time employee working behind computer screens.
Expectations for a candidate may also change in accordance with his performance in the recruiting
process, not to say often actually, for he may reveal weaknesses or particular skills previously
unspotted. It is an ordeal anyway, whose main goals are to elicit actions, reactions, and behaviors
under circumstances exceptionally encountered in the normal society where people go to the
university, work, fail or succeed, and retire peacefully. It aims to knowing what will do a candidate
in real situation if … And there are many ifs, which are of the odd sort for most.
The second particularity of the long and exhausting range of tests, deliberately made unsettling,
is to be a first elementary training in intelligence, simultaneously. That is why those who fail at
some point along the process are not simply dismissed and sent back to their ordinary dailies and
friends of before, for they learned too much already. Failures during recruitment entail
consequences that make the series The Bureau resemble Seven Heavens by comparison. Enlisting
in the DGSE is for a life term, to begin with. No way to move on when one fails in one’s studies or
is fired. A dramatic aspect of recruitment in the DGSE is that candidates are not at all warned of the
latter highly likely issue beyond the stern and simple sentence, “You must be sure of your decision
because there will be no way back”.
Nevertheless, the latter demonstration of exceptional kindness concerns candidates who
voluntarily enlist, only, as some are recruited forcibly for a reason. Some others could not possibly
escape it anyway, only because they were born in a family of spies. Now, I enumerate the recruiting
processes, in detail this time.
1. The recruitment of staffers who will never physically involve in clandestine missions in the
field. This is a relatively simple, smooth, and “fast” process because it concerns people who will
not have to cope with the difficulties, intricacies, and agonies of hiding I will explain eventually.
They will work daily in an office under the constant and implicit monitoring of their own
colleagues, and in many instances but not necessarily under that of the Security Service. For the
system of the privatization of the services is making up for two broad sub-categories of full-time
employees: those who will work at the DGSE headquarters in Paris or in a highly secured facility
located elsewhere, and those who will work under light monitoring either at home or with
colleagues under a private or public cover activity.
The duration and complexity of the recruiting process may greatly vary because it depends on
the level of secrecy of the tasks that the recruit must carry on. The higher the level of
responsibilities and / or secrecy expected, the longer and the more complex the recruiting process
is. Actually, it lasts as long as the recruit holds and performs well, up to a point deemed satisfying.
The duration may also vary according to whether the DGSE knows well the family of the recruit
already, or not—his background therefore[38]—, and not only because he must be receptive to its
indoctrination along the course and have the expected mindset and beliefs in the end. No matter
how good and promising the recruit is, he must think and behave exactly as his future colleagues do
before joining them. That is why, along the process, he is put in touch with an increasing number of
varied employees, each having a specialty and rank different of the others, called to express their
opinion on the fitness of the recruit. Another influential factor in the early stage is whether the
candidate is a military, gendarme, or police officer already.
The recruiting process with people who are in that latter case is one among the fastest. In most
instances, the recruit has been proposed explicitly to join the DGSE in the context of an alternative:
either occupying a position in a new military unit, typically, or quitting to work in intelligence.
Candidates of this kind have been warmed up “to pick up the red pill”. The particular
circumstances surrounding the proposal are set to make it appear as attractive and mysterious;
exciting, therefore. Mystery and secrecy make up for the bait as they are necessary to the human
soul.
Other situations often arise, such as a “career opportunity in intelligence” following an accident
whose injuries are making a military unfit to serve any longer in his unit. Otherwise, the
proposition may happen on an early military retirement, or when the dismissal of a new assignment
has been decided on purpose. In an overwhelming majority of cases, the candidate has been spotted
and shortlisted unbeknownst to him, and his background checking has been done thoroughly,
already.
For long, spontaneous candidacies in intelligence in France were rare, at least because it was
difficult to know where to send one’s application and resume.
In my case, I voluntarily enlisted in 1980, when I was in the Army, partly because I grew up in a
family in which the subjects of domestic intelligence and police often arose in conversations, and
partly after I read a book—quite deceptive, but I could not know it at that time—written by a
former counterintelligence officer of the DST.
Notwithstanding, the main reason for this poor interest of the public in a career in intelligence
was, and still is today, that the DGSE and the French intelligence community together are suffering
from a sulfurous yet justified reputation, which owes mainly to recurring affairs, scandals, stories
of mysterious and violent deaths, and the like. For long, the latter fact shaped French intelligence
with a counterpoise of recruits with a military background.
As an aside, by chance, lastly, I stumbled on evidences of a kind that all unenlightened people
would fail to see, which indicates unquestionably that the DGSE is currently looking for gifted
people with autism and Asperger syndrome, and that this agency is testing them in a private
company simulating DGSE-like work environment. For those particular characters, it is true, are
also known for their elevated tolerance threshold with terse comfort and cheap wages. They
certainly are the happier with it because they typically have a hard time with finding a job in
ordinary private companies. For much I could see and understand, this agency now seems to be
looking for such people gifted in logics and mathematics in particular.
2. The recruitment of agents who either will be handled in the country in the frame of
domestic intelligence or in defensive counterintelligence. The duration and complexity of this
recruitment may be similar to that of the full-time employees, described above, i.e. short. Then,
considerations that make a difference with rookies chosen to have a desk job are the followings.
First, recruits with prior military background and / or who are relatives of people who have a
desk job in the DGSE already, have greater chances not to be recruited as field agents. Thus, they
will enjoy certain privileges that the latter do not have because they will be considered as
“insiders”. If not, they will be rewarded with enviable cover activities, exactly as in the military,
where the son of a general seldom remains stuck down the ladder as non-commissioned officer.
 Less favored people may be very quickly “hired” following their blackmail; this is a quite
common scheme. They may also be coerced into working in intelligence through arranged
economic and social circumstances, first because they have particular skills and other abilities that
are of interest to the DGSE; second, because they come from the lower class and did not graduate.
The case occurs with talented computer geeks and with gifted individuals who, as it often happens
in spite of this quality, did poorly at school and did not graduate.
3. The recruitment of (conscious) agents who will be sent to foreign countries. This
recruitment shares some characteristics with the earlier types, but its duration may be longer, and
its process is richer and much more demanding to the recruit. However, the latter particularities
also depend of the country where the rookie must be sent. The many rookies the DGSE sends in the
Northwestern and Western parts of continental Africa do not need to be outstanding and highly
trained individuals, and they are trained in the field usually, not to say always. The average ex-non-
commissioned officer coming from an elite unit is good enough for that.
Otherwise, those who do well intellectually on tests and who graduated are more likely to be sent
in Northern countries, where counterespionage agencies are very active, clever, and enjoy
sophisticated ways of mass monitoring and surveillance. Those recruits will have to go through
very demanding tests and trainings, as we shall see.
This does not necessarily mean that all candidates who will be sent in advanced countries are
great talents, however. For there are two particular considerations pertaining to intelligence tactic
and grand strategy, which the DGSE devised with certain countries it qualifies as “priority targets”;
that is to say, the United States and its closest allies, chiefly, and a few other capitalist countries.
Contrary to what the reader possibly figures, many recruits sent in Northern and advanced
countries are seldom highly trained in intelligence, unless they are expected to work under
diplomatic cover or in subsidiaries of large companies and groups, and to become Chief of Station
eventually. For many such candidates are recruited as “unconscious agents” first. They will be
trained upon their successful settlement, and on a strict need-to-know basis. There is also the
exception of the recruit trained in the field in a foreign country, to be sent to execute a mission in
another eventually, and there is the case of the recruit who is called back to France to work in an
office, in case of his unsatisfactory results in the field. No one, including the DGSE itself, ever
knows in advance and with certainty what will be the career path of a recruit.
As about why a recruit would be poorly trained although he is sent abroad to be an agent, the
DGSE considers, first, that there is no need to know advanced intelligence tricks and methods to
work as agent abroad, at least as long as the agent did not settle successfully over there. Knowledge
in spycraft in the DGSE is distilled as a precious commodity, about as water in the desert is, for
survival only. Second, no special knowledge is given as long as this agency did not ascertain the
loyalty of the young agent freshly sent abroad, where he obviously enjoys certain liberty. The
DGSE must also ascertain that the agent has not been compromised or is under the unusual
surveillance of the local counterespionage agency. Other considerations and needs, rather relevant
to tactics, are taken into account on a case-by-case basis, as we shall see in a next and relevant
chapter. There is no such a thing as “one rule fits all cases” about this, for obvious reasons.
4. The recruitment of foreign nationals as agents, either in their own countries or while they
are temporarily living in another or in France, and who in any of these instances are expected to
become clandestine agents spying on against their own countries; possibly also from France or
from a third party country, which is a common situation. They may be recruited to do varied
intelligence activities against a country from a third one. For example, an Israeli national who is
sent to Canada to do disinformation against the United States nearby in the service of France, in
order to deceive the FBI into believing this spy “might be well working for Israel,” or whatever
other country. There are about three broad sub-types of such agents.

1. Those who are recruited because they distinguish themselves as true believers in
a cause clashing with the tenets and values of their own countries, e.g. activists of
varied sorts, or simply because they are dissatisfied with their lot and fail to see
ground for further expectations in life. The latter are ready to commit to whatever
cause. In most instances, those pertaining to these two sub-categories will never
know they are recruited by an intelligence agency, especially not the DGSE.
 2. Those who for long have been spotted and monitored by French nationals
(contacts) living abroad, sometimes as early as when they were teenagers.

3. Of course, there are those who are tricked or coaxed into cooperating through
some blackmail, as result of their misconduct or mistakes, or else who are corrupted
one way or another and according to plot contrivances presented in this chapter and
in others.

Then there are two broad types of recruiting processes that can sometimes succeed one to the
other. We will call them, (1) “friendly recruitment,” and (2) “hostile recruitment”. Hostile
recruitment, when undertaken in first instance, is more likely to concern individuals expected to
become field agents. Finally, the DGSE trains, supports, and helps activists and other types of
recruits, such as agents of influence, agent provocateurs, and even terrorists.
The DGSE more willingly recruits than it considers a spontaneous application, though this seems
to be changing for a few years because it is wary of the latter for two reasons mainly, explained
below.

1. Applications judged to be at the same time not very serious or not very
interesting, because they are sent by individuals who have a fantasy perception of
intelligence, of its missions, and of its various ordinary tasks and most elementary
and logical rules. Typically, they are lovers of James Bond and Jason Bourne films,
action novels written by authors such as Jean Bruce, Gerard de Villiers, Robert
Ludlum, and the like.[39] The DGSE is not in need of recruits of the warmongering
ilk, fit for pure action and violence. This agency can find them in quantities in the
mob and in the military, let alone the COS. However, applications with references to
writers of espionage novels such as John le Carré or Vladimir Volkoff may receive
more attention because the novels these authors wrote propose a more realistic
perception of the trade of intelligence.

2. Much more rarely, applications believed suspicious, because one suspects them
to be penetration attempts by a foreign intelligence agency or a criminal or terrorist
organization. Intelligence agencies and their offensive counterespionage units in
particular resort to contrivance much more subtle than the spontaneous candidacies
of their agents when they aim to stakes as high as penetrating a foreign intelligence
agency. There is an authentic fear, obsessional indeed, of penetration in the French
intelligence community and in the DGSE in particular, which at times translates
into absurd behaviors, ill-considered decisions, and dramatic actions … much likely
to cause its happening, in fact.

Most people who ask for joining the DGSE spontaneously have been lured into doing so. I brush
aside all such enlistees who self-influenced authentically with reading and watching espionage
novels, films, TV series, and other video documentaries, let alone videogames. Recruits of this kind
make for a minority indeed, which, I acknowledge however, is certainly growing since 2015 due to
the new and aggressive policy in recruitment of this agency, and the simultaneous launch of The
Bureau TV series. However, the latter implements are unlikely to have brought significant changes
in everything I explain on recruiting processes in this chapter, since they are fundamentals
painstakingly crafted and perfected along a course of more than a century.
The DGSE has an uncanny ability in spotting talents. Herein talents must not be only understood
as young and bright people with suitable diplomas, or who are about to graduate in fields relevant
to the priority needs of this agency. Possibly, the American reader is influenced by his culture in his
first assumption saying that, for long, Yale was a recruitment pool the CIA favored, and the same
apply for the English reader who would probably cite Cambridge and Eton. It is true that a number
of DGSE senior generalists and executives studied at the École Nationale d’Administration–ENA,
which wholesome is the French equivalent of Yale at this regard. Many others graduated at
“Sciences Po” (Paris Institute of Political Studies), and much more, possibly, at the École des
Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales–EHESS, or they took evening courses at the Conservatoire
National des Arts et Métiers–CNAM.
However, the DGSE distinguishes itself by being the sole French bureaucratic public body in
which anyone may expect to be hired without any diploma. Indeed, a large number of its
employees joined it with little educational background, and many French spies graduated in some
field after their applications were accepted. Yes, I know, the CIA does the same since the time
when this agency was named OSS. Remember that the French intelligence service largely differs
from its American counterpart in reason of its progressive culture, not to say far-leftist tenets.
All on the contrary to any ordinary public or private company, the DGSE does not blindly regard
a diploma as an unquestionable proof of capacities, at least because this agency holds all means and
patience to check whether someone truly is competent in something, and to which extent he is
competent in this something, and how capable he is to become a good specialist in it. Again,
qualities that matter most to the DGSE are above-the-average will and perseverance, and a loyalty
seldom encountered in the private sector. That is why many candidates who come to knock the
door of this agency with a reputed diploma however fail to make it, and end up as agents or
snitches working under the authority of a case officer, whereas others who enlisted with less than a
high-school degree yet access high responsibilities. That is not yet all.
Candidates who were not spotted before they sent their applications spontaneously are tested
first on their natural capacity to identify oddities in talks and situations. I could not give even a
rough estimate of the number of smart and highly educated people I met who, however, were
unable to frame the average crook and to spot the gross fraud. The latter are those who show
concerning disregard for the most elementary precautionary measures that any grown-up individual
must take in our society nowadays. Worse, some indulge in believing in UFOs, ghosts, telepathy,
and farfetched conspiracy theories; they are naïve candidates, in short, of the kind the DGSE sees
as unfit “sleepwalkers”. This agency is looking for people with a minimum of awareness and
common sense, and for who, if possible, is fit to become a good “fox” or “wolf,” if I may put things
that way.
However, in most instances, as I said, people who spontaneously enlisted—as I did—either grew
up in a family in which they were more or less deliberately influenced by a relative who worked in
intelligence already, or were spotted and cleverly influenced by an acquaintance who was acting on
order. It is still a personal choice in both cases anyway. That is the way the DGSE sees it, at least
each time this agency can ascertain the relative or acquaintance in question indeed is friendly and
trustworthy, and not an unknown individual who might be a foreign spy or his source, or a terrorist
trying to plant one in the most sensitive and secretive of all French intelligence agencies.
For long, and until the early 2000s, when the DGSE began to recruit massively, applying
spontaneously for joining this agency could be an awkward undertaking, especially to those who
had not the opportunity to meet an evangelist in a university or military school. Senior executives
who authored essays on French intelligence, and ex-field spies who published their
autobiographies, abstain from saying much about this, conspicuously;[40] the media seem to follow
the untold rule as if they knew it is a secret. At least, one would find the name “Direction Générale
de la Sécurité Extérieure” in the phone book, with one phone number and the address of its
headquarters. Nonetheless, the daredevils who tried this uncertain possibility proved right.
First, a stern female voice on an answering machine greeted them coldly and invited them to
leave a message and their phone number; nothing was said about enlisting. Those who not yet
discouraged did it, received shortly a very official phone call on behalf of the DGSE, even when on
a Sunday. This time, the candidate could deal with a warmer voice and a few minutes of
conversation ensued, enough to introduce himself summarily and to chisel his patriotic motives.
Once the mysterious person on the line had thus ascertained the candidate was neither a caveman
nor a crackpot, then he gave to him a cryptic address corresponding to the Ministry of Defense and
not to the headquarters of the DGSE, at which a cover letter and a curriculum vitae would be
greeted with all required attention. Things went fast, at first.
That was all, yet enough to shake up a whole machinery whose nosiest cogwheels would not be
heard until a handful of weeks, under the appearances of impromptu pollsters or door-to-door
salespersons who ask too many questions. Meanwhile, the candidate would be put to the test
through staged accidental encounters with would-be-suspicious individuals involved in odd
businesses with some foreign countries. If he was mature enough and insightful enough to see the
game, then, of course, he would not miss such an opportunity to send a second mail about it to the
address that the man of the DGSE gave to him, even if he was witty enough to understand that such
a coincidence was too big to be true, and that the suspicious people he met were definitively too
incautious and talkative to be serious.
After that, the successful candidate would meet accidentally someone tasked to become one of
his closest acquaintances. As months would go by, the new acquaintance would transform
gradually into a tutor, and the candidate into his pupil, enough for a friendly recruitment to begin,
smoothly first. The process could thus last several years, yet the tutor would never formally
introduce himself as an agent of the DGSE, nor even spell this acronym, thus keeping his pupil in
an uncomfortable situation that is an important constituent of all tests and their arranged
circumstances.
As for the civilian candidate of my explanations above, the military did read some serious books
on French intelligence, certainly, enough to him to know how close the ties between the DGSE and
the military are. That is why he would talk more or less formally to the captain of his company or,
perhaps, to an officer of higher rank in the regiment about his ambition to join this agency.
He, too, was right with this, for such a step is unusual enough to catch the careful attention of
any military officer. A few weeks later, the captain would call him upon for sending him at once to
the building of the command company of the regiment, where an officer of the DRSD came in to
meet him for an undisclosed reason. The extraordinary meeting would last for half an hour or a
little more, enough to the officer of the DRSD to make a first opinion about the candidate, and, if
positive, to gift him the cryptic address of his office … and even to entrust him a first mission as
snitch. The mission would be to find out who is introducing and selling pot in the regiment.
However, the obvious prerequisite to anyone is tasked to investigating on drug trafficking is to buy
and consume narcotics, or else to be familiar with the customs and jargon of petty drug dealers.
This is what the DRSD wanted to know about the candidate, truly and precisely.
If the candidate proved unable to collect any intelligence on drug trafficking, thus formally
demonstrating he never even smoked pot, then the DRSD would organize a variety of arranged
situations and accidental encounters for the candidate, all with the cooperation of a handful of
regular contacts and sources this agency has in each and every units of the three branches of the
military. That is how the recruit would be provided with opportunities to send reports on suspicious
activities of entirely different sorts, staged and fictitious in reality, such as military properties thefts,
extremist political activism, and clues pointing to Muslim fundamentalism, on condition he would
be smart and aware enough to properly identify the facts and assess their gravity and interest to an
agency such as the DRSD.
If the candidate demonstrated the abilities the DGSE is looking for, and objectivity and honesty
when reporting, then he would be called upon a second time to meet another man of the DRSD, a
thoroughbred non-commissioned officer, generally, called Inspecteur de la Sécurité de la Défense–
ISD (Defense and Security Investigator) in this agency. This man would begin his training formally
and seriously this time, starting with evading the surveillance of would-be-spies or criminals, and
other security measures.
If there are notable differences in form between the recruiting processes of the civilian and the
military, their substance and timing remained about identical. With respect to the form, the military
candidate enjoyed the considerable advantage to know who is who and where he was heading all
along his recruitment while the civilian was struggling through a foggy process.
It should be said that the latter differences depended on the intellectual performances,
educational background, and psychological profile of the candidate. Things were made more
challenging to those who are gifted with higher intelligence, abilities in analyzing complex
situations, spotting facts of interest, separating the latter from irrelevancies and background noise,
and synthetizing what remains of the sorting. Candidates with such higher intellectual capacities
were stirred toward desk jobs, and possibly trained to occupy managerial positions or to become
highly skilled specialists eventually. Unless, as I said, some too concerning weaknesses found in
their profiles during their trainings forbade the latter career options.
The two recruiting processes above remained unchanged from 1980, and earlier probably, to the
early 2000s, and they are unlikely to have much changed today, in 2019.
On a general basis, on the key moment the background checking of a voluntary enlistee proves
positive and his recruitment begins, the recruiters give to him a warm yet implicit welcome. In the
DGSE, it is said colloquially, “he is given all his points out of a maximum of 10”. Then, as the
recruiting and training process unfolds, the faults that the recruit may do and the bad reactions he
may show will make him lose points, one by one, or even several at a time. Thus, the recruit is
brought to understand that the trust and position he will be given much depend of his good will and
obedience, more than all skills and wit he may show. This unsettles him because he assumed
initially that, on the contrary, he would win gradually the consideration of his recruiters, starting
from nothing. The reader will find again this pattern in the other types of recruitment described in
this chapter.
This particular way to train a recruit actually is a psychological plot contrivance in his hiring,
intending to force him to relinquish his beliefs for new ones, and to abide rules and a new conduct
in life he sees as very demanding and even absurd, generally. In fact, a number of the weird
expectations indeed are so because they are nothing but tests that will not resume once he will be
hired for good. The DGSE just wants to ascertain the recruit is ready at some point of his
recruitment to do anything this agency may ask to him, and to believe in anything it may tell him,
blindly.
Displays of revolt and incredulity are sanctioned forthwith with sophisticated but indirect forms
of retaliation as various as unsettling but never explicit, which all converge toward a same goal:
frustrating the recruit. If ever the rebel persists in his claims of privacy and independence of spirit,
then his splendid resilience is welcomed with elliptical threats alluding to an unclear but certainly
impending doom. Thenceforth, the recruit notices a change in the events that surround him
“ordinarily,” as in the attitude of his new “acquaintances”. For, now, they seem to act
noncommittally and to take some distance with him, as if cautiously. At this point, he still ignores
he is dangerously exposing himself to the extreme measure of a hostile recruitment, a process very
close to a social elimination, which practice is rich, spectacular, and common enough to make the
unique subject of the entire chapter 10.
All along the recruiting process and in any case, never the recruit is given the slightest friendly
advice on how he should behave. Contrary to the soldier of an elite unit, who still can find the relief
to know he is sharing his ordeal with his brothers in arms, the recruit of the DGSE is isolated and
has to bear the frustration of an unexplainable loneliness. Overall, that is why and how he is
brought to understand, at some point, that the reality of his situation bears little relevance with
what he learned in autobiographies of spies and essays on the DGSE. This agency is a very
particular middle that expects him to relinquish everything, up to the trust that his closest relatives
put on him. This explains, by the way, why the spouses of so many employees and agents of this
agency divorce them during their recruitments or soon after, as their recruiters never have any
concern with the obvious harbingers of this sad event. Later, we will see that those breaks may be
expected, indeed, and are even contrived on purpose at times.
Importantly, and from a general standpoint, the reader must keep in mind that the recruitment of
an insider called to hold a desk job as B or C category employee, and even that of an engineer who
will rank A on the pay scale, greatly differs of another broad category in which we find people who
will work in the field. The latter are agents, case officers, intelligence and counterintelligence
officers, and certain insiders thought fit to hold executive positions in the area of human
intelligence and counterespionage, in particular.
The latter fact divides the human resources of the DGSE into two much different categories of
profiles. The former are very ordinary and inoffensive people of the dovish type, much of the
average office employee working at the post office or in a private company, whereas the latter have
been shortlisted and then trained as streetwise and aggressive spies of the hawkish types; that is to
say, indoctrinated about as a fanatic must be. It would not be excessive to say that all those of the
latter type are dangerous people, indeed, even though they are not necessarily sociopaths; many
have empathy the same way those of the former type do. Countless field agents remain field agents,
ran with a tight rein as if they were eternal rookies, and they will never access higher
responsibilities simply because they are deemed too dovish to be trustworthy, no matter how smart
and educated they are and how good achievers they prove to be. Yet those could not be agents if
they did not relinquish their selves to the spies of the hawkish type who, henceforth, command
them the same way as one controls all moves of a remote-controlled toy.
The latter point is important because it comes to explain why the ordinary psychiatrist or
psychologist, who has never been enlightened on practices in human intelligence, always finds hard
to assess the personalities of agents, and remains puzzled by the striking inconsistencies and
oddities he finds in their behaviors. It is as if he were dealing, at first glance, with recurring cases
of double personality or of schizophrenia or of borderline personality disorder, the more often. For
in his second instance analyses of those “disturbed people,” this specialist would always fail to find
in them all necessary criteria to diagnose such mental disorders. Yet the ill would remain
annoyingly obvious, and its diagnosis would never be done for wants of any description of it in all
psychiatric manuals.
One should always be advised to regard the field agent, regardless how kind a person he may
truly be, as nothing but the soulless and faultless dehumanized proxy of an unknown and ruthless
spy hiding somewhere in an office and who does not bother with any prejudice.
I have overviewed voluntary enlistment; now, I present recruitments with more detailed
explanations on their unfolding because of the added difficulty to convince someone to work in
intelligence.
The recruitment of the DGSE employee
In the case of the friendly recruitment of an individual shortlisted to become a full-time
employee, he most often is a young individual aged 20 to 27, and he obtained some degree after a
baccalaureate / high school degree. In this pool, there is a relatively sizeable proportion of career
military or who have just joined the military, the Gendarmerie, or the police. For military-like
discipline, mindset, and highly organized work all stay dominant in the DGSE. The fact that DGSE
employees and executives who come from the military do not wear uniforms does little to
challenge the latter perception. Wherefrom, a vicious circle that gives the advantage to recruits who
come from the military over civilians, untold but much real. In other words, the DGSE recruits
civilians because the agency needs them, particularly to meet its needs for researchers, engineers
and scientists.
The aforesaid means this agency tailors its rules and regulations for the dumbest and the nastiest
of all its employees, and at this other regard, the “one-size-fits-all rules” applies to security and
discipline, indeed. One who is boarding an airliner “potentially is a terrorist” and his tube of
sunscreen “might be a bomb,” and they must be dealt with accordingly. Well, the employee of the
DGSE “potentially is a traitor” and “he might use his cellphone to spy on his own agency”. The
difference between these two unpleasant experiences is that, fortunately to ordinary people, one
does not have to board an airliner every day. On one hand, the DGSE wants to recruit smart and
educated people, but on the other hand, it is unable to relinquish an iron discipline that was
enforced in a time when French spy agencies recruited scoundrels only. More to the point, the
DGSE builds in its midst a dull culture that inescapably transforms over time any balanced and
educated individual into a humorless drudge and ideologist fanatic, whose scale of values left place
to a set of abstract and very restrictive rules.
Who feels attracted in the notions of discipline, order, primacy of the planned hierarchy of skills,
surpassing oneself, action, “thirst for adventure,” and “new horizons” will feel more comfortable
than civilians are with the daily life and managerial methods of the DGSE, at the beginning at the
very least. Who already experienced one year at least of living in the military is always less
shocked or surprised by the realities of the realm of intelligence than someone who didn’t. It will
be even the more difficult to those who do not like the military or who are reluctant to stringent
discipline. Employees in the DGSE, executives included, often are given no explanation or
justification for what they are asked to do and how they must behave. This is one more social
particularism that often breeds demotivation and a routine perception of one’s job and life. The
pattern reproduces itself up to the Director, as testifies for remarks and observations that former
directors of this agency write in their autobiographies. Nowadays, a running bitter joke in the
DGSE is to mock its particular form of management with this saying, “Why should I do this?
Because!” Another one, identical in its meaning, says, “It’s like that, and that’s all!” A last one but
not the least cryptic says, “You signed to be pissed off!”
A large majority of staffers in the DGSE have the feeling to do a clerk job in an ordinary
administration, yet many are content with it. Thereof, it is easier to understand why an
overwhelming majority of workers and executives in intelligence, including myself until I left, do
not at all perceive themselves as spies or as would-be-special individuals. If many among the latter
enjoy watching espionage films, yet they perceive them as amusing fantasy stories with no
connections whatsoever with the reality of their dailies. Which is true, after all; those people are no
more spies than officials working for the revenue service are, and their very ordinary traits of
personality indeed fit the pattern. This explains, in passing, why French intelligence agencies are
wary of candidates who fancy too much spy stories.
 Why military do fit so well in the mold of the DGSE, exactly?
The answer is that French soldiers are individuals literally locked up in an environment
impervious to the great diversity of manners, opinions, and way of life of the civilian middle. They
all must conform to unique culture, lifestyle, tastes, and typical way of thinking, standardized and
defined by a single and pyramidal hierarchy. They are expected to remain impervious to the diverse
considerations and opinions of the civilians living outside their realm, even though, of course, they
are born and have been raised in the latter environment. One could say that the French soldier is
locked up in a social bubble that holds him in his thoughts, even when he leaves the barracks. Then
little of the privacy of the soldier, and above all of his character escapes the attention of his
superiors and colleagues. It is difficult to an individual to isolate himself in the military; privacy is
not accessible, and it is still worse in the military police corps of the Gendarmerie.
That is why, in passing, the DGSE and the almighty French Ministry of Defense tend to distrust
other police intelligence agencies. Police officers remain civilians in the eye of the Ministry of
Defense; they go back to civilian life after work. Gendarmes do not, and that is why they are held
as more trustworthy than police are. As a matter of fact, police and gendarmes do not feel at all
they belong to a same community, though they often are brought to cooperate together and even to
work in a same office. They do not each perceive things and do not behave the same way. When in
private, gendarmes distrust the police also because they see police officers as people who are left
with too much liberty, prejudicial to discipline and effectiveness. The Gendarmerie is trying
discreetly to overshadow the police for a few years, with the long-term goal to put French law
enforcement and justice under the complete authority of the Ministry of Defense. Police are no
fooled with it, which fact caused them to protest and to go on demonstration in the 2010s. The
weakness of the French police is to have been for long infiltrated by numerous DGSE employees,
agents and informants, and by the GOdF. Therefore, there is a balance of power that is tilting in
favor of the military, which will question further democracy in France in a near future, as the trend
is growing rapidly.
Consequently, the military is a privileged pool of recruitment when the DGSE needs to assess
somebody thoroughly and quickly. Several years of observation and tests may be necessary to
know a civilian recruit at a point where one only will suffice for a military. However, when the
DGSE is recruiting a military, this individual is still tested in his environment, in addition to the
usual tests and observations of his superiors. At most basic, this implies that the rookie be
discreetly and cleverly put in touch with other soldiers who test him unbeknownst to him, by
resorting in this goal to friendly and desultory conversations tailored to elicit confidences on
privacy, preferences, tastes and opinions about anything and everything.[41] The recruit will be
tested in civilian environment, obviously, since this is where intelligence works go on, exclusively.
The subject of intelligence agencies and espionage will arise at some point in one of those
conversations, inevitably, and it will be the beginning of an approach until the moment of the direct
proposal, most often presented as a mutation or career option. Overall, recruitment in the DGSE is
presented much more clearly to a military than to a civilian. Remarkably, the latter proposals and
opportunities unfold in elite units (commandos, paratroopers, etc.) the more often, not to mention
that the rookie who managed to be admitted into an elite military unit of the COS entered in
intelligence unbeknownst to him!
Things are quite different to the civilian recruit because the process of the tests he must go
through is drowned craftily in the diversity of opinions, tastes, and lifestyles, of the civilian world,
especially if the context of the recruitment is a big city with all the craziness and quirks its
inhabitants must cope with every day.
The DGSE has contacts in schools and universities, not only in France but in many other
countries either. This is all the easier because many professors also are specialists in their fields
who regularly cooperate with the DGSE, knowingly or not, or they are talent-spotters chasing the
future good analyst and some other specialists. All those informal recruiters are at the right place to
spot them in a class. As an aside, in certain French universities, the DGSE sends evangelists openly
and officially, who show up on graduation days usually, to present the agency and tout the interest
of a career in it.
However, the proceedings for recruiting a young civilian in a university setting is often
uncomfortable to the latter, even when it comes to friendly recruitment. For the DGSE, with the
complicity of some teaching staffs, is quick to place some pitfalls on the educational path of the
targeted candidate to limit his options at the final moment of the proposal; there will be no “blue
pill”. Whoever managed to graduate with honors can still decline the offer to disappear in the
shadow, and try his luck abroad instead if he realizes that “all doors are inexplicably shutting down
in front of him;” it often happens that way. However, the flight to more lenient heavens sometimes
is what the DGSE is waiting for, precisely. When this happens, the targeted candidate does not take
long to find by happenstance a friend in the foreign country where he arrives: a French national as
him, often. How could the young, ignorant person that he is conceive that this last encounter is not
as accidental as it seems, in fact?
In this particular scheme, either the recruit will learn about the country where he is gone to live,
which valued experience in the field will prepare him to be a specialist of it, or he will be trained in
the place as field agent when he will understand that “France chased him and caught him back”.
The favored tactic the DGSE resorts to in such circumstance, again is to close all exits except the
one the target “must choose by his own”. Creating trouble to a young expatriate is not that difficult,
and the DGSE indeed masters the art of arranging fortuitous coincidences. We will see how in
another chapter.
Back to France, during the recruiting process, from the viewpoint of the DGSE, things may go
“smoothly” or not. It will depend essentially on the personality and acumen of the candidate who is
become an unwitting recruit at that point, and whom thenceforth is rather seen as a laboratory rat in
an experiment in behaviorism, as we shall see in detail in the chapter 9, and from the viewpoint of
the expert psychiatrist of the DGSE. This is the beginning of a setup that the enlightened observer
would compare to the film The Truman Show. Indeed, the release of this film in 1998 spanned an
amused buzz in the DGSE, for it was quite an accurate metaphor of the way this agency recruits
and tests, and of how it arranges setups, manipulate, and influence people it targets. This provides
me with an opportunity to say that in the following year 1999, Fight Club and The Matrix gained
similar popularities among French spies. If the recruit is clairvoyant enough to spot odd patterns in
the events unfolding around him, and that, thereof, he decides cautiously “not to make a step
further,” then the tactic of the DGSE has foreseen that this deliberate stillness will bring him to
economic and social asphyxiation. Thenceforth, his recruiters will wait patiently for the moment
the recruit’s survival instinct will compel him to resign to accept what he would have refused in
ordinary circumstances. About patience, the DGSE have plenty of it to resell, if I may say so, for
the DGSE very rarely renounces pursuing a recruitment simply because the recruit denies it. In
such case, if the friendly recruitment proves fruitless, then a hostile recruitment is set up. The
reader is going to see how, soon.
Frequently, the final stages of the recruitment of a future full-time employee of the DGSE are
conducted in an undercover unit: a private company or public service as any other, at first glance.
The rookie, who still believes he has been hired by an all-ordinary body, will be led subtly to
understand and to cope with the latter fait accompli, always to his bemused surprise, of course.
Then the reader may ask, certainly, “What happens on the day of the formal hiring?”
Well, nothing. There is no party, no cake, no cheers, no drink, nothing at all, not even a “day,”
actually, for it is the beginning of a probationary period. It is nothing but the continuation of
something that began years earlier at this point. The reader might be surprised again to learn that
numerous rookies are even not informed that the DGSE just recruited them! Instead, the latter are
brought to face the reality of their hires in the form of “an odd company whose internal rules differ
in all respects of others’.” The latter case is quite common.
I make a short aside to say that the DGSE often resorts to films to “tell” secret things and
messages that this agency is reluctant to say openly—as many other intelligence agencies in the
World do, actually. As so many films have been made for a century, there is always one whose plot
corresponds exactly to what this agency wants someone to understand. I do the same with the
reader each time I name films in this book, but only in order to save pages of lengthy explanations,
examples, and descriptions, since I tell everything explicitly, already. If the reader wants to
understand quickly and rather accurately how an anonymous DGSE recruitment unfolds or
thereabout, then I recommend to him to watch again The Firm (1993) and The Devil’s Advocate
(1997). The setup is about the same, but it extends over a much longer time, and there is no good
money and attractive perks in the reality of the DGSE, ever. Some of my ex-colleagues enjoy other
films such as The Game (1997), and The Assignment (1997) for the same meaning. The few
targeted candidates who prove smart enough not to let themselves be fooled with setups of this sort
catch the strength, in extremis, not to pick the red pill—in vain, however.
 Another particular provision is taken with certain recruits, civilian in particular, expected to work
at the DGSE headquarters. The latter are sent for a few months of adaptation and transition from
their civil life to an environment that simulates perfectly what working every day at the
headquarters of the DGSE is. This is an undercover training center, which actually is the nuclear
power plant of Fessenheim, in Northeastern France.[42] There, everything seems to be organized
exactly as in the headquarters of the DGSE, in Paris. Moreover, numerous employees among the
650 working full-time behind barbed wires are ex-military on early retirement.[43] There are the
same checkpoints and stringent security measures, about the same number of specialized
directorates with a chief of service in each, a directorate building where all directors of directorates
and the Director are working together, the same hierarchical organization with the same rules, and
the same physical monitoring of the area with regular patrols surrounding the plant. The recruit
finds in this place even the same mandatory learning of numerous technical acronyms, the same life
after work in small studio apartments monitored by a janitor and his wife, in addition to mutual and
informal watchdogging between tenants.[44]
There, recruits who do not comply obediently enough are given small and weird sanctions,
which for the most are harder and overly complicated work conditions and relations with their
colleagues. Then they learn through implicit ways that quitting a service for another implies they
must sever all their relationships with employees of the former, which exigency may be saddening,
frustrating in any case. Rookies selected for Security jobs are trained in the same place with real-
situation drills consisting in smuggling forbidden and stolen items in and out the plant through its
checkpoints,[45] and to carry on interviews and investigations of and on anybody in a service, up to
the director of directorate.
Not so anecdotally, the rookies who are sent there are given a French version of Evolution Man:
Or, How I Ate My Father by Roy Lewis, a small novel to be read in their free time. Those who do
not yet catch the metaphor that the DGSE attributes to this book—although it suits well the nuclear
environment, already—always find someone in Fessenheim, “coincidentally,” to enlighten them
with a more obvious warning, since it is a death threat actually. Well, I will not go as far as to say
that death threats are common in the DGSE, yet they are not so rare.
The reader could be tempted to think of all this that the DGSE is not a refuge for the most
brilliant minds, and that its staffers actually are no more clairvoyant than the uninitiated. The latter
deduction indeed fits a reality that sometimes surprises the fresh rookie. For intelligence, in the
formal sense of the word, is not the first quality that the DGSE expects from its recruits, actually. It
is even not an advantage because one should not confuse intelligence with education and skills. In
fact, the DGSE rather adapts to brighter minds in its midst than it appreciates them sincerely. The
latter fact explains why senior executives in this agency are not necessarily of the thoughtful and
highly gifted type one would expect.
At this point of my explanations, a new contradiction arises: nearly everyone in the DGSE must
be smart yet behave as a simple person with simple tastes, realms of interest, and leisure activities.
The latter oddity even extends to humor, which preferably must not be of the sophisticated genre.
In short, one must behave “as the average French people,” for this intelligence agency perceives its
gifted employees and contractors as “hard to control elements,” people who are “difficult to break
through”. Consequently, the DGSE tends to consider the latter as “potential threats,” indeed:
individuals capable to thwarting their monitoring and repeated controls that together are the
corollary of working in this agency, precisely. Overall, the DGSE seems to be wary not to give too
high responsibilities in management to people with an above-the-average intelligence already,
knowledge in intelligence techniques especially, lest of a “dangerous concentration of power” in
one individual. Reciprocally, these perception and subsequent situation frustrate those “outcasts,”
in addition to the common practice of micro-management in intelligence work.
As an aside, the latter concern repeats with people who have a close relative who is also working
with the DGSE. For in this other case, those employees and agents are highly likely to share
confidences on their respective specialties, thus entailing a breach in the rule of the need-to-know.
The latter need often arises, as recommendations and co-optations between relatives are common
and even encouraged in this agency. Each such case is examined carefully. End of aside.
Consequently, the recruiting process of individuals with intellectual capacities falling within the
average is shorter than with those who are superior in this respect. Gifted recruits are quick to
identify tests and to differentiate them with true accidental circumstances. When this happens,
results are considered inaccurate or worthless, obviously, or they may even be seen as deception
attempts. The same tests must be redone, therefore, with greater discretion and in entirely different
circumstances. Procter & Gamble-like abstract psycho-technical tests exist in the DGSE, allegedly,
yet not all recruits must submit to it as they rather concern people recruited as technicians.[46]
Anyway, the DGSE is much interested in real situation tests or in tridimensional and physical tests
to the least, and not really in two-dimensional tests done with pen and paper. In the case of recruits
deemed fit to be executives, oral tests with questions of the tricky and ambiguous sort happen to be
carried out formally and explicitly over a period of several months to one full year, at the rate of
one to two sessions a week with an experienced psychiatrist.[47] Two afternoons focus on solving
subtypes of word plays. The same psychiatrist also directs and monitors odd tests, such as repairing
various items previously broken on purpose, pieces of furniture and knickknacks mainly. One of
those numerous tests is, “Find the best way to hide something the size of a soap bar in this place”.
Such tests with a psychiatrist are done in an anonymous apartment, a safe house, where
everything therein has been brought for this particular purpose only, which makes the place a look
alike of a junk shop. There is a large bookcase filled with all sorts of reference books and old
literary classics, and innumerable paintings of the peculiar sort and other similarly varied
ornaments put on display against the walls. The setting aims to catch the curiosity and subsequent
comments of the recruit, while the examinant psychiatrist listens attentively. Conversations on
eclectic subjects ensue naturally, thus helping the psychiatrist in his assessment of the examinee.
The very long examination is costly to the DGSE, as it involves about three hundred hours of tests
—at minimum in my case, and according to my estimate—carried out by a graduated and
experienced psychiatrist who studied psychoanalysis in addition. Such an examination is
inaccessible and unthinkable even in a large and rich company looking for a senior executive, of
course, but the DGSE catches up with the cheap wages it pays eventually.
Qualities that the DGSE appreciates the best in a candidate are patience, resilience, moral
strength, quick adaptability to changes in situations and environments, left-leaning inspired
humility, and a rare capacity to postpone gratification indefinitely, of course, i.e. tolerance
threshold to frustration. This agency ranks the latter qualities, once reunited, much higher than pure
intelligence and education. This explains why highly intelligent and capable employees in the
DGSE often are put under the authority of others who are inferior to them in this respect. At this
point, the reader understood that this agency is eager to see its recruits relinquishing their selves;
that is to say, “going through the mirror,” to take on its own expression.
Complementary criteria on the fitness of a recruit are of a political order, and / or they take into
account his family environment, social middle and place where he grew up. Whether a candidate
has been raised in a balanced family or by a single is a detail of great interest to the examinant
psychiatrist. For example, a candidate who in his youth moved frequently from the home of his
mother to his father’s because they divorced and had a bad relationship is an experience that may
have altered his understanding of the notions of commitment, loyalty, and betrayal.
However, the influence of family connections upon one’s career in French intelligence still
remains unclear to me today, as they are hardly predictable although indisputable. As examples, a
brother of prominent French socialist politician Ségolène Royal was still holding a low-ranking
position in the DGSE, and the son of a director of directorate was left struggling as field agent
abroad for more than fifteen years. On the contrary, a close relative of former Prime Minister Pierre
Messmer was entrusted the running of a large French spy network in Quebec. The dumb son of a
not much smarter retired Consul in Brazil seems to enjoy a status of permanent fixture in the
French intelligence community; in 2000, he was shortlisted for a position of clerk at the Council of
the European Union.
The end of a recruiting process is not scheduled at a fixed date, as many believe, but once the
recruiters consider they have a perfect knowledge of the recruit and the assurance of his fitness.
The DGSE is setting for itself a maximum duration in the recruiting process however, which is in
the surroundings of five years for a highly valued employee. If the expected term extends longer,
then it owes to others causes, on a case-by-case basis, somehow similar to the intricate reasons
justifying the termination of the full-time employment of a competent executive. In other words,
the need to hire full-time someone who has been a contractor for years may arise for a purely
practical reason relating, for example, to the evolution and changes in the missions and aims of the
agency. The termination of someone’s full-time employment does not owe necessarily to his bad
conduct or mediocre performance. I have known of two people whose full-time employments thus
were terminated: one for a much more enviable executive position with ELF oil company, in the
1980s; the other for a position of general manager of a startup with a starting investment of about 2
million euros (converted from French francs in 1996).
At a senior managerial level, it is not so rare that someone quits the agency to be hired again a
few years later, and then quit again, in both cases for purely technical reasons such as additional
trainings in management, engineering, a particular scientific matter or else. Moreover, there is in
the French intelligence community, overall, a frequent practice of moving people from one
intelligence agency to another. The latter particularity, again, concerns individuals with certain
abilities and experience, or / and who hold managerial positions.
As I have been in touch with several such individuals, I can cite the case, remarkable among
many, of Jean-Jacques Cécile, an intelligence officer who at some point of his career joined the 13d
RDP, an elite military unit of the COS. Cécile was also assigned to one or two exotic regiments of
Zouaves and Spahis, whose origins relate to French African colonialism. In the early 1980s, he was
sent to the Compagnie Prévotale of the Gendarmerie mission in East Berlin, located Behrenstraße
42, near the Französische Straße subway station. The latter assignment happened in the context of
the Mission Militaire Française de Liaison–MMFL (French Military Liaison Mission). There,
Cécile said, he was in permanent touch with local authorities; that is to say, the Stasi and the Soviet
KGB. As he was fluent in German already, and in English too, he thus learned Russian. Eventually,
Cécile was assigned to media monitoring with the Gendarmerie, and years later to the SGDSN in
Paris. Cécile also is a skilled specialist in military affairs, and more particularly about British and
U.S. special units—he authored an authoritative book on the British SAS. He taught and trained
many intelligence employees and agents. Living in eastern France and being in permanent touch
with both the DGSE and the DGSI, Cécile has been working for years under the cover of journalist
specialized in military affairs, and as writer.
The recruitment of an analyst, first, is a matter of discreet observation of the recruit, i.e.
unbeknownst to him, followed by about two to three years of tests and ending under the form of a
would-be-administrative competition whose admission actually is decided in advance.
“Hostile recruitment”
When recruiters have to admit their powerlessness in accessing a satisfying knowledge of a
recruit and control over him, then they undertake to weaken his psychological defenses and to push
him to question his own set of moral values and bearings. This is done by submitting him to a
variety of ordeals, staged situations of the upsetting sort, odd encounters and even coercion
attempts. All of the latter provisions actually make up for a sophisticated and overwhelming form
of harassment we will call hostile recruitment.
I repeat again, but with a different ending fitting the particular circumstance: in the ordinary
society, the one who thinks at some point he did not join the right company is free to resign at any
time and to move on. That is not possible in the DGSE, for when a recruit gives up and decides to
try his luck elsewhere, unilaterally, then this agency puts an end to his normal recruiting process
and shifts to the method I am going to explain now, irrevocably. In passing, this other way to recruit
a spy is used commonly for coercing snitches and agents who refuse to cooperate any longer, and in
few other cases. The expected psychological stages and progression of a hostile recruitment,
presented on the diagram next page, may be summed up in words as follow.

1. To push the recruit into questioning the perception he has of himself; that is to
say, destroying his self-esteem.
 2. To encourage the recruit to review entirely the personal interpretation he makes
of his past existence, and to reconsider his perception of the world around him and of
its rules i.e. the views of all ordinary citizens, in order to teach him the entirely
different viewpoint of the realm of intelligence in general and of the DGSE in
particular.

3. To induce the recruit into accepting his complete dependence on the agency,
which he must henceforth serve before any other priority, and regardless of his
personal opinions, since the latter must change accordingly.

The recruiting team does all the above by setting up for the recruit a general situation of
economic tenuousness and of social confinement. The first expected effects of these provisions are
to arouse anxiety in the recruit, and to lead him at some point to a mood of despair and to feelings of
worthlessness and helplessness. The latter context is planned and set in advance by exposing the
recruit to repeated and varied forms of manipulations, staged situations, and deceptions. Before
carrying on this manipulation or at the same time, the leader of the recruiters devises tactics to
undermine the social network of the recruit, and to severe his relationships with his friends,
acquaintances, and even relatives. The goal is to ascertain that the recruit cannot any longer expect
moral comfort and help from anyone, and that his only possible acquaintances limit to his recruiters
and their temporary accomplices, exclusively. For he must be extracted, literally, from the world of
ordinary people with whom he must not have any contact anymore ultimately.
This extraordinary situation is made possible, first, through varied and discreet particular
provisions and interventions, all aiming to tampering with ordinary steps the recruit may make with
public services, banks and the like, and his attempts to find a job or just new friends. The reactions
and attempts of the recruit are known in advance by deceiving him into trusting one of his recruiters
who has been instructed to act as his last loyal friend, to whom he confides about everything he is
doing and planning, therefore. Additionally, his activities on the Internet and by telephone are
monitored round the clock, exactly as if he were a target.
Very often, not to say always, all measures of retaliation the recruit takes in his hope to make stop
what he obviously perceives as his demise includes all-normal resentment and anger, verbal
violence, and physical violence possibly. However, the method says that the recruiting team must
mirror the latter reactions of despair as in a tit-for-tat game; that is to say, identically reproduced
through staged circumstances that the recruit must see as oddly coincidental events, logically
unlikely to happen to anyone leading a normal existence. That is how he is brought to understand
gradually that “an extraordinarily powerful person or organization he does not know, and to whom
he cannot say anything, yet is constantly watching him and interfering in a cunning way in his
privacy”. The recruit feels forced to suspect everyone “to be an accomplice of his invisible foe,” and
to see as suspicious all accidental events he is confronted with, including truly coincidental and
accidental events he still saw as normal and logically explainable before his ordeal began.
Overall, the making of these “new life” and mindset for the recruit focuses on frustrating him to
an extreme measure that must drive him to feelings of powerlessness and haplessness characterizing
inhibition; that is to say, to a situation that makes him highly receptive to the orders of a new
authority and to his indoctrination. Remarkably, the DGSE does not explain the full extent and aims
of this process to all its employees involved in the recruiting process, since their qualities and
positions forbid them to access this knowledge. They are underlings, and as such they are given a
very simplified and cryptic explanation that is intentionally deceptive, such as, “This is a drill” or,
“This guy did something very grave”. To some of those employees, ignorant of what is happening
because they do not need to know its reason, this knowledge limits to a DVD of Johnny Got His
Gun (1971), a film whose plot is the ordeal of “Joe Bonham,” a quadruple amputee who also lost his
eyes, ears, mouth, and nose on the war front during the WWI. In this story of the most depressive
sort, “Joe” stays conscious and able to reason, but his wounds make him a prisoner in his own body,
thus leaving him in a state of living death and unbearable frustration. The goal of a hostile
recruitment indeed is to cripple socially the recruit.
 Undeniably, it is also an elaborate form of psychological torture, whose principle has been and is
still in use in many other countries for varied purposes ranging from eliciting a confession from a
criminal or a political detainee, to political or religious indoctrination, to mere punishment. In the
present case, the DGSE is anxious not to leave any evidence that could point to its direct
responsibility in the dire predicament and suffering of the recruit, thus leaving him with no hope for
any exterior help, indeed. However, the recruit is brought at some point to understand but not to
prove in any way that the DGSE arranged his situation entirely. He is also warned in an elliptical but
perfectly understandable fashion that if ever he attempts to ask for help and to explain the real
causes of his demise, then other provisions will be taken to make him pass for a mentally disturbed
individual. As proof of the ineluctability of this threat, the DGSE sends to the recruit other messages
of a similarly cryptic vein that are forecasts of his future decisions and moves, which come as more
shows of power in the facts. Those predictions are all logical because they will be the only possible
responses to the next staged circumstances that the recruiters of this agency planned. However, the
DGSE never ventures into this stage of a recruitment before it has acquired the absolute certainty
that the recruit has no longer any possible alternative in reserve, and that his life and future now
depend entirely on its will and whims.
As previously hinted, any individual submitted to such a treatment for a prolonged time is highly
likely to enter into a state of irrational violence at any moment, for violence against others is a way
to decompensate, logically explainable from a psychological standpoint. The recruit may also enter
a state of neurasthenia and attempt suicide. Behavioral sciences explain that violence directed
against oneself, as an ultimate way to put an end to an unbearable suffering, may occur when even
violence against others does not yield relief anymore. That is why all moves and the behavior of the
recruit are watched discreetly and carefully, round the clock, indeed.
Many such recruits experience muscular pains they are unable to explain, typically, for they all
never experienced any such trouble before, and they never heard of anyone complaining about such
strange illness. Those muscular pains actually have a nervous and psychosomatic origin, and they
are the commonly encountered consequences of a prolonged episode of intense frustration and
inhibition. Such troubles are much unlikely to happen to anyone in normal circumstances and in a
country reputed democratic, of course. That is why the average physician is unable to determine
their cause generally, and cannot heal the recruit his patient, therefore; the more so since neither
medical radiology, nor scanner, nor blood tests can help find the origin of the bizarre trauma. That is
not yet all because hostile recruitment when prolonged for several years is also highly likely to
expose a recruit to more serious psychophysiological hazards, some of which being definitive and
incurable. I will review the most frequently encountered of the latter hazards in the chapters 9 and
10 because a hostile recruitment wholesome is a mission of social elimination limited in time,
which ends when the recruit at last resign to surrender unconditionally to a faceless authority.
 Doubtless, the explanations above surprise the reader, unless he is knowledgeable in intelligence,
as it seems absurd to run the risk to handicapping a recruit whose good health is a requisite,
precisely. The position of the DGSE about this issue is that a recruitment must be as reliable as the
stress test of a gun—which entails the barrel of a gun may blow up under the pressure exerted by an
overloaded test cartridge—, a metaphor of my own that some of my ex-colleagues would accept as
valid, certainly. Everyone in this agency is aware of the risks that are thus ran deliberately with the
health of recruits, and accidents indeed happen regularly. Yet the DGSE uses commonly to trivialize
violence and concerning situations, each time someone hazards to say that they are unwarranted,
perhaps. French historian Alain Dewerpe, highly knowledgeable in practices and methods in human
intelligence, commented largely the latter recklessness in one of the best and most accurate books
on spycraft ever written in French language, in my opinion. Dewerpe called it violence d’État
(State’s violence), since in all circumstances it is done by an intelligence service on behalf of the
reason of State.[48]
From the viewpoint of the expert psychiatrists of the DGSE who closely monitor all hostile
recruitments, recruits who undergo this treatment are left with three possible options only. The latter
are, (1) fighting, (2) fleeing, and (3) inhibition aka inhibition behavior, the latter being a state of
near psychological and physical paralysis. The two first options lead the recruit to his demise, and
the reader must note for later that they are characterized by action. The third and last option,
presented as the stage 5. on the previous diagram, is renouncement to action, which is the one that
the DGSE expects in the end. For this resigned behavior is the basis on which the full obedience,
new set of beliefs, and scale of values of the recruit can be rebuilt. Inhibition is the same as
unconditional surrendering, as seen from a trivial standpoint that is correct. The reader familiar with
psychology can otherwise understand the whole process as a gradual elimination, from up to
bottom, of the four last layers of the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, pictured on the next page to
further clarify my explanations.
The psychological shock, in step 1. on the previous diagram, which is the starting point of the
hostile recruitment, either can be quick and violent or unfold gradually over a long period for about
a same result to occur ultimately. For example, the sudden exposure of an intimate and
compromising event of the privacy of the recruit, which renders the blackmail obvious, or any other
kind of traumatizing and durable threat such as a staged execution—called arrachage in French
intelligence jargon—, all produce the same psychological effect sought. Therefore, the
psychological shock can gain gradually in intensity along an apparently endless succession of
“failures” and of “exits” that systematically “disappears” at the last moment “in front” of the recruit,
still in order to make his feeling of frustration intense, unbearable on the long run, indeed, until the
stage of definitive and prolonged inhibition occurs.
As the recruit ventured previously, wittingly or not, into a friendly recruiting process, he realizes,
too late, that “he made a mistake” at some point. Nevertheless, as soon as he tries to retreat, to get
away (fleeing, the second option) or to fight the danger (the first option), he feels at once the
pressure of a “strangler collar that was gently placed around his neck,” unbeknownst to him until the
fatidic moment.
None of his recruiters, and their henchmen the less so, will give to the recruit any mercy or
comfort, nor they will even show any compassion. For they who did not enjoy such relief fail to see
any good justice in the exception, and they have not been hired because of their intellectual
capacities and moral anyway. That is why, on the contrary, they will joke and laugh on his
misfortune, openly. The psychological phenomenon of schadenfreude[49] explains the latter reaction,
odd and inappropriate in the normal society, obviously. The psychiatrists of the DGSE know well
the latter psychological phenomenon, of course, and they even expect it to occur in those recruiters
at the moment the recruit understands “he has been trapped,” and that his situation is hopeless. For
the cynicism and the cruelty that the recruit obviously perceives as such must come to reinforce
opportunely the psychological shock looked for. He is brought to realize that “humanity is a tale or
wishful thinking and not a reality,” as expected either. In point of fact, in the other context of a
sanction that the DGSE thus carries out with an agent or one of its employees, it always associates
smiles and cynicism with it, indeed.
 Recruitment, this very trying time in the life of some employees of the DGSE and of all its
agents, is also a foretaste of what awaits the one to whom the idea would come to disobey, revolt,
betray, or even to express implicit disrespect toward the hierarchy. Possibly, the American reader
may compare the whole process to an extreme and highly sophisticated form of hazing, which may
last several years as the DGSE never renounces once it ordered this kind of mission. Then the reader
who knows about masonic rites will notice that the same rite of passage is reproduced, symbolically
only however, during the initiation ceremony of a Freemason in French liberal lodges. All this limits
to psychological ordeals and effects exclusively, and always with a focus on prolonged and intense
frustration and nothing else. So much so that, all along, everything happens to the recruit remains
invisible or unremarkable to ordinary people around, neighbors chiefly. Yet all the woes of the
World seem to fall on the recruit for no clear reason, and always “coincidentally” and
“accidentally,” as if a “curse” that some in the DGSE call colloquially “scoumoune”. The exact
words describing the shocking facts never must be uttered and are replaced therefore by others
intending to trivialize their real gravity.
The recruit must see his recruitment as a trauma—it is an actual and definitive trauma, indeed—
and be overwhelmed by “the power of the State” in order to alter the perception he has of himself,
of the World, of the society, and of everybody around him, people from which he is thus brought to
understand and to admit he can expect no help nor even compassion, but indifference and
selfishness instead. Recruitment aims “to bring the rookie into the mold,” as it is commonly said in
the DGSE. It is the definitive end of a life for a new one, the disappearance of the recruit from the
society of ordinary people, with no trace left of him in the case of a recruitment as full-time
employee at the headquarters. For the recruit must indeed relinquish any social life on the Internet
as well. This detailed explanation helps the reader understand the cause of the clone-like mindset of
most DGSE employees and agents, which otherwise would be perceived as irrational and
unexplainable. That is why it is also easy to guess if a DGSE employee is doing well or not, just by
paying attention to his demeanor and face. Displays of irrational fear or of depression are recurring
signs, including with persons known for their particular resilience.
There is however a clear difference between the recruitment of the agent, an outsider, and that of
the ordinary employee, an insider, because the former is called to be a clandestine person with no
colleagues, whereas the other is not lonely.
The recruitment of the field agent is a hostile one from the inception. Again, one must not
overestimate the part taken by the variety of circumstances, some absurd, the others bureaucratic, to
understand the psychological dimension of the ordeal the field agent must go through. For it can be
compared to the initiation rite that takes an individual from a “normal life” to a “double life,” one
being a facade and the other a true but underground existence known to no one. In the latter
instance, the recruit knew that his recruitment would not be a sinecure, yet he could not figure how
far things go to the one who must become a “secret agent”. Indeed, the latter “enthronement” costs
dearly to the recruit because he must also lose with it what makes him a human being; that is to say,
his free will without which he is a soulless body envelope, a people that is no longer. The American
reader would say “a zombie” possibly, but this would be inaccurate since my choice of the word
soul does not include mindset and adaptiveness to the other rules of the normal society. As I referred
to earlier by resorting to the metaphor of a “strangler collar,” recruiters leave no chance to the
rookie to deny what he perceives, soon or late, as a terrible fatality that befalls him because it is “for
life”.
The future agent experiences his recruitment as a traumatic and definitive break, a radical caesura
separating what he newly perceives as two worlds, the first being the “real world” that the DGSE
taught him, and the second being the world he left forever, now newly presented to him as “virtual”.
My use of the words real and virtual should not be taken lightly as mere literary style. For all field
agents, and employees of the DGSE alike actually, are taught constantly to see the society of
ordinary individuals to which they belonged before as a realm of futilities, arbitrary conventions,
and deceptive appearances; a “movie set,” in sum. Therefrom, the latter all hold its inhabitants as
people “mesmerized by the virtual world,” “sleepwalkers,” and “ignorant persons” unable see the
realities of what is happening around them. It is noteworthy that this new peculiar perception of life
is supported largely by an additional indoctrination of political nature, which rejects chiefly
consumerism and a large variety of mores, habits, and notions that all must be seen newly as
“bourgeois conventions”. Everything is organized so that the recruit thus perceives the space,
society, and time in which he newly evolves as agent. The DGSE desires this mindset for all its
future agents, so that a special relation of control of one individual, the agent, by another, a case
officer generally, be established definitively.
To sum up the explanations above from a detached and rational standpoint, the process of
conversion actually is the “installment” of cognitive dissonance in the mind of the agent. This is
what happens to the full-time employee either, but along a different and softer recruiting process.
Then all this comes to explain the true reason of the running jokes among DGSE’s employees, more
cynical than funny as often in this agency, saying, “they come from another planet,” or “they are
extraterrestrial” or even, “they are the little green men.” The latter metaphors are not entire fantasy
though, for it refers, more seriously and opportunely, to the green color of the military, although
there is another meaning that is more cryptic, and another shade of green I featured on purpose on
the cover of this book, exactly. The latter shade of green that is not military, and which has no
equivalent in the French military paraphernalia either, will be explained in the chapter 24, once the
reader will know some other important notions beforehand.
I would not contradict the reader who finds all this is madness. It is madness, indeed, especially
since those who let themselves be caught by it, henceforth, become unfit to the society of ordinary
people. Yet, the reader must note attentively, this madness is nothing but an appearance that is the
visible outcome of a very rational perception actually, itself supported by an all scientific and cold
approach of which the recruiters know little themselves, if ever, except the psychiatrists of the
DGSE who supervise all recruiting processes from a distance in some office. At its core, the policy
in recruitment of the DGSE that its experts set up says the following.
The DGSE is not looking for people the way most ordinary businesses and public bodies see it.
Instead, this agency considers it is looking for sane and performing brains that move fit, sane, and
autonomous bodies, without any concerns nor interest whatsoever pertaining to the other notions of
humanity, individuality, right to self-fulfillment, empathy between people, and so on, because it
perceives the latter as abstract, superfluous, and parasitic considerations in state’s affairs and in the
trade of intelligence. The goal is to harness the maximum performance those brains are capable of,
which other perception, therefore, implies to get rid in them of all parasitic notions cited above,
since they impede or pollute uselessly their intellectual capacities. The employee in intelligence and
the agent must never be left any opportunity to reconsider what they are doing according to the scale
of values and moral that the society of ordinary people sees as norms logically explainable and most
elementary principles, without which the social fabric would yield to chaos, obviously.
The approach, as described in other words and metaphorically, is the same exactly as that of
someone who buys a good used computer and who re-formats its hard disk to make it blank, and
then installs a new operating system and the software he needs to do his job in the best possible
conditions. All this explains why the DGSE has no concerns whatsoever, likewise, for everything
the recruits may think of the way they are handled, trained, indoctrinated, and then run as agents and
hired as employees. Then, this all-scientific perception the experts in human resources of the DGSE
have of the inner workings of the human brain, which is in no way analogous to that of a computer
of course, will be explained extensively in the chapter 9 titled, “Manipulating & Handling”.
The explanation above applies to the recruitments of all people this agency hires and handles,
from agents, employees, and executives. Thenceforth, the reader who wants to understand all
notions and explanations in this book must always bear the latter notions in mind. Then, if my so
detached description of the recruiting processes in the DGSE, in a few pages and in explicit not to
say crude terms is obviously hard to believe to someone who never heard of it before, it becomes
credible and even overwhelming when actually experienced every day along a course of several
years.
RECRUITMENT SUB-TYPES AND ALTERNATIVES
First, there are hybrid-recruiting processes that begin in elite units of the military during special
and very demanding trainings.[50] Are particularly concerned the military units of the COS and a
few others. Then we find an all-clandestine and informal category of training programs thought for
recruits who must not be aware to be recruited by the DGSE, as they are selected to become
“unconscious agents”. Many such recruitments are conducted under pretenses of ordinary
“vocational trainings”. Public and private professional schools or other ordinary bodies supervise
some, and some others do not have any rational justification because they are recruitments under
duress in the facts. Yet they all have the same characteristic to imply hardship and a military-like
discipline to their candidates, presented as an alibi coming to justify training styles and daily life
conditions that are not expected to exist in a civilian and normal environment. In those conditions,
recruits often are lodged together with their trainers or their employers, which provision enables the
full monitoring of their privacy, and thus a thorough knowledge of their characters, as in the
military, in sum.
The two most common pretexts or “formal aims” of those particular trainings are French
compagnonnage (“journeymanship”), and French cooking schools, as surprising as the reader may
find it. For a military-like perception of the craft of French cook is commonly taking place in great
French restaurants in France and abroad, and many of their owners actually are contacts of the
French intelligence community. In addition, a large number of French great chefs are liberal
Freemasons, or / and are former compagnons (journeymen), precisely. Commonly indeed, young
men and women trained in great French restaurants are submitted to a discipline more demanding
than in many ordinary regiments of the French Army, and to daily bullying, while their obedience,
behavior, stamina, and loyalty are constantly monitored, appraised, and repeatedly challenged. They
learn to address their hierarchy in a very formal way about similar to that in use in the U.S. Marines
Corps, for comparison. Alike, hardship and various forms of abuses are integral to the training,
which can go as far as beatings. Any attempt to oppose resistance is welcomed with implicit or even
explicit threats to be blacklisted for life in all great French restaurants, which is true since French
great chefs behave together as an informal brotherhood, the latter bond being strengthened by
French liberal masonic membership in numerous instances.
All along, the learning of French cooking comes to support an indoctrination process of French
pride and patriotism. Good receptiveness and compliance will count for much in the final appraisal
of the trainees. The latter are tricked constantly and put to the test about it, and those who do not
seem to be receptive to French national values will be penalized in their careers, as during their
trainings, already. Incentives are examples of successful careers and attractive salaries in restaurants
and hotels abroad, which at the same time come to encourage them to expatriate.
To exemplify the latter point, for long, the French intelligence community—DGSE abroad and
DGSI in France in particular—has a large network of contacts and agents in the French
multinational hotel group Accor. Frédéric de Pardieu, one of my former colleagues I was in touch
with for a decade, was once sent on a mission in Indonesia with a cover activity of manager in a
hotel of the Accor Group, although he had not any experience in this field. For long, either, Club
Med, a chain of vacation villages in a number of locations around the World, usually exotic, is a
cover activity provider for all kinds of young agents sent for short or even long missions, and for
testing future flying agents in real situation. To the point that, in the DGSE, someone who says on a
casual conversation, “I was working for Club Med when I was young,” is a humorous and cryptic
way to mean, “I began to work / was trained very early”.
A French cook who went through the hardship of learning his job in a great restaurant
successfully, an experience lasting for several years, can hardly figure he did about the same as a
recruit of the DGSE. His certified professional capacities, and his highly-demanded skills will make
up for a good légende since they are all true, to find a position abroad where, some years later, other
fellow countrymen will ask to him some “little helps” having little relevance with cooking.
Anecdotally again, one of my ex-colleagues, Philippe Raggi, a DGSE counterintelligence officer
and former analyst on Indonesia, did his training as cook in a small restaurant in Hong Kong, which
eventually became his cover activity in this Asian region at that time. Upon his return to France, he
was given a new and entirely different cover as researcher at the National Institute of Geographic
and Forest Information–IGN, a public body with close and historical connections with the military.
Recruits who do not give up during those very trying trainings do so by virtue, again, of the
following psychological mechanism to be explained soon, which this time is not entirely rational.
Those people are all thus recruited because they have a poor educational level, to begin with.
Then they may be intellectually weaker than most, or they are on a quest for self-esteem and for
recognition because they are frustrated already by who they are and what they are. They may have
been manipulated in a way they cannot even figure and still less fathom. Most of them, at some
point along their ordeals, lose ground with rationality indeed, yet this is expected. For the
indoctrination that goes along the process consists largely of absurd demands, orders, and
expectations, imagined and designed to breed, and ultimately to warrant, their blind obedience,
indifference to humiliation, loss of self-esteem, and readiness to execute any order at once and
faultlessly, without shirking nor qualms, therefore. Additionally, the esteem they are still capable of
must be devoted exclusively to either an authority that may be a person in particular or an abstract
notion such as “the country,” “the organization,” or “the cause,” according to a plan they must not
perceive.
To help the reader figure how all this is possible, when those who failed later are asked why they
did go so far in their pursuit of a rational objective they could even not see any longer at some point,
they nearly all give the same answer, “I just wanted to see how far I could go”. That is all! In
passing, these psychological phenomena and processes that generally leave in disbelief anyone has
no previous experience in an elite military unit, have been remarkably reproduced in fiction in the
French film A Question of Taste (2000) aka A Matter of Taste. That is why I recommend to the
reader to watch this film, considering however that its director Bernard Rapp did his best to present
in 90 minutes a journey that normally spans several months at minimum, and whose ordeals are
more subtle and numerous for a same conditioning to occur.[51]
Along a number of years, I saw occasionally the transformation of recruits on their 30-35 on
average, who experienced this recruiting process successfully. I found it as surprising as impressive,
and even scary, I confess, because those thus trained people indeed stampeded to the one who
trained and called them no longer by their names, but by whistling them in the end. Yet none of
them showed any shame for what they were become before the witness I was, as if they were
unconscious of the absurdity of their new selves. It was as if they had lost their faculty to reason
rationally, and dignity especially, although they otherwise were perfectly able to carry on a normal
conversation. However, when trying to hint about the extreme form of their irrational obedience,
they all quickly understood where the conversation was heading, and they instantly dodged the
subject, each their own way. The latter point shown that their transformation had not significantly
impaired their intellectual capacities, therefore. Some subtle characteristics in their demeanor they
shared though, made up for a mental stereotype; a pattern that, therefrom, is relatively easy to
identify in other people, thus betraying the peculiar experience.
As a relevant aside, since then I spotted with surprise the latter pattern in a number of well-known
French senior civil servants and public personalities. When noticed, it may deceptively suggest a
long experience in a French elite military unit because my further and personal inquiries about this
other possibility, for the sake of mere personal curiosity, often proved inconclusive or disproved the
latter assumption, leaving valid the sole hypothesis of a particular training that occurred earlier in
their lives. Herein I mean someone who is introduced as a person endowed with important
responsibilities and authority over a large staff, such as minister, is not normally expected to have
the demeanor of an inhibited third-rate servant. The odd discrepancy, when noticed, never fails to
strike who knows the pattern and its cause.
Nonetheless, the reader is going to see that this training process is also carried out in still more
informal ways than in professional schools and explicit apprenticeships. As first example, there is a
recruiting process similar to another practiced by the Russian intelligence community nowadays,
which I know because I actually experienced it as recruit while in my early twenties. Below I
explain how it unfolds, told as a synopsis for simplification because it would be too long to describe
in detail.
Before the process can start, the recruit must have been put in the situation of economic and
social precariousness I described earlier, in order to weaken all his psychological defenses
accordingly, and to deprive him of alternatives when placed in difficult situations. The preliminary
stage is set through arranged circumstances, identical in their principles to these of a hostile
recruitment. Therefore, the financial situation of this recruit is desperate, and all his acquaintances
and friends deserted him, or they live too far. The goal is to isolate the recruit psychologically; that
is to say, to close all possibly exits allowing him to escape his arranged situation, exactly as if he
were jailed in a virtual cage. Other arranged circumstances brought him to a place where he knows
nobody. Typically, he went there for a job that did not last for long, as his recruiters planned, and
now he has not enough money to afford again a housing in the city he came from.
He is looking for whatever odd job he could find in this spot, only to survive since he can hardly
aim more at this point. He could not know however that a wealthy man who lives in this same area
is his future recruiter, “waiting” for him. Whatever the arranged coincidence is, the desperate young
rookie and the wealthy man must meet together as if “by happenstance”. Thereupon, the latter
proposes to the former not only to hire him full time at once, but also to lodge him, daily meals
included. The job is an odd and badly paid one, which is to help the wealthy man in a variety of
little services and works of no significances, such as minor repairs, gardening, cleaning and tidying,
going to small shopping and to the post office, and so forth. Of course, the recruit has an
intelligence and skills that would allow to him to do much more complex and abstract tasks, but the
goal of the plot contrivance is to arouse in his mind a feeling of worthlessness, and to break his self-
esteem.
The desperate young man accepts the offer because he believes his situation cannot but be
temporary. The wealthy man knows this, obviously, because he is an accomplice of the recruiting
team, and an active executive or agent of the DGSE or of the DGSI working in the field, due to the
sensitivity of this particular type of recruitment. He also is a local personality with numerous
influential connections in the greater neighborhood, which naturally include the police, the
Gendarmerie, and a local masonic lodge. With all this, the latter enjoys all required power to
guarantee that “his new servant” will not leave him until his training be over, starting with crafting
for him a reputation of “immature and unstable person whom he shelters out of benevolence”.
The wealthy man is going to show up with his power before his recruit, in the aim to impress on
him in all possible ways, and thus to assert his position of lordship in the relation. For example,
when they go somewhere by car together, the wealthy man rides his upscale car fast and in a
brusque way, unlike any other normal person, and he does not tell to the recruit where they are
heading. The latter details, minor, superfluous, or absurd in appearance actually are integral to an
arranged psychological environment aiming to arouse further a feeling of helplessness and of
vulnerability in the mind of the recruit. At the same time, the wealthy man is going to show to the
recruit how a “kind and charitable man he is,” because charming him is integral to the method, but
at the beginning only. The additional particularity is subsumed in a preparatory stage of the
recruiting process aiming to familiarize the recruit with the particular relationship he must have with
a case officer eventually, though not necessarily if ever the goal is not to recruit him as field agent.
The rookie is lured to believe “he is lucky to meet this man at the very moment he is in dire need
for help”. Despite the uncertainty of his new situation, he succeeds in finding confidence and a
slight feeling of safety in the comfortable mansion of his master. He even finds confidence in his
future because “he learned” that his benefactor is well acquainted with many business owners and
managers in the region that is still unknown to him. The old wealthy man actually said he could help
him find a decent job fitting his real skills, but on condition, “of course,” he demonstrates his
honesty, integrity, and “what kind of worker he is”. Therefore, the recruit is showing the best of
himself since he has no alternative, both as a person and as employee.
His first weeks at work go by in this setting; that is to say, analogous to an apprentice cook who
landed in a restaurant where there is no other trainee to befriend. The setting has been defined to
make him feel very alone, and he is in actuality. If ever the recruit still owns a car, then he will not
enjoy this means of transportation for long as it provides him an unwarranted freedom of
movement. Soon he will not be able to pay anymore for ensuring it and for costly repairs
consequent to a sabotage actually. Nevertheless, his new employer has an old bicycle for him, and
he says disingenuously that it is “good for health”. Hardship suavely mixed with cynicism begins at
this stage, done to be unsettling all along the recruitment.
About two months later, the mood of the landlord changed. For the recruit, something is clearly
bothering the old man, yet the former could not say what it is since this change of behavior has been
planned anyway. Because of this, the relationship between the two men is becoming stale and more
formal than before, and even ominously ambiguous at times, for the landlord now uses to behave
noncommittally, as the theory of the method says. Therefore, the recruit redoubles his zeal in his
efforts to serve his master well, even better than before. He is lured again, this time to believe he
alone is the cause of the change, in some way he could not fathom perhaps, “unless it might be a
new challenge of a sort,” as expected again. Indeed, the notion of challenge must be bred in the
mind of the recruit, exactly as in an elite military unit. Actually, the old man / intelligence officer is
moving the goal posts to drive gradually his recruit toward mindless and ever-greater obedience,
and to put his stamina to the test at the same time.
Still a few months later, the mood of the landlord worsened, obviously. It is a frustrating and
stressful situation to the recruit, still as expected. The young man does not know what else to do
anymore to please the landlord. In spite of the enormous and sincere efforts he has shown, he is now
receiving more and more criticism, though always in the form of dishonest allusions and cryptic
second-degree sentences he is often unable to understand, not to say always. For worse, the landlord
once accused him to having searched his desk drawers, which is untrue, of course.
At the end of a year, the landlord is no longer the same man the rookie had met at the beginning
of their peculiar relation. Now the latter behaves as a despot nothing ever seems to satisfy. This
situation stresses the recruit to the point that he often has trouble sleeping. At this stage of the
process, two or three more pages would not yet be enough to tell all the petty humiliations and
frustrations the recruit has been going through. Yet the worst is to come.
As the landlord likes guns and hunting, now he is also behaving as if he had in mind to shoot the
rookie, indeed. The latter acting is done in an ambiguous way and, of course, unbeknownst to
everybody in the neighborhood who holds this landlord in his fifties as “the nicest man one could
find on earth”. Moreover, the latter resumes disingenuously his erstwhile kindness when in presence
of visitors, conspicuously since they are witnesses. Meanwhile, the recruit sent hundreds of
applications to as many companies in the country, and he begged repeatedly the representative of
the local employment agency and the social worker, to no avail since they are ignorant accomplices
either who receive precise instruction from their hierarchies, without further precisions. They
resume their job mindlessly as most public servants do, after all.
I make a pause at this point to explain that, in France, the access to the position of social worker,
however insignificant this professional activity may seem to be at first glance, must not be
abandoned to random circumstances. For social workers are held as influential “opinion leaders”
among the large social class of the poor and the needy, and any of them may be called to cooperate
in domestic intelligence and in “talent spotting”.[52] In short, a French social worker also has a role
as social vigilante. Overall, in France, one has to be wary of people who make their occupational
activity with “helping and assisting the poor and the needy,” as it is seldom truly unselfish in the
end, although the real aims of it are not necessarily about recruiting snitches.
To say, the recruit is now so stressed, and even afraid, that he is thinking about hitting the road
penniless to face the dailies of a homeless, for he has no place to go indeed. His needy mother, a
widow, is finishing her life in a retirement home or else, or another analogous situation suits the
circumstance similarly. Overall, some would observe, this entirely arranged relationship somehow
reminds the film Sleuth (1972), a masterpiece on the theme of manipulation, in which the landlord is
Andrew Wyke, played by Laurence Olivier, and the young recruit is Milo Tindle, played by Michael
Caine. This film is a must-watch because everything in it is based on the implicit power and
credibility that social status and fortune confers, especially in Europe.
This is at this point that luck, this thing the DGSE prefers to call “providence,” customarily,
manifests itself as one of the young man’s good friends from earlier times found him on the Web,
“coincidentally”. Now, this other man about the same age as the recruit is proposing to him to come
to join an association that owns a vineyard in Southern France—this is one scheme among countless
others possible. No wonder whether the rookie is going to think twice before embarking on a new
journey toward the unknown. He is so desperate, ready to accept anything, and to go anywhere he
hopes he could find moral relief. Money is now a secondary concern to him. Yet he does not know
that his providential friend is an accomplice in the plot actually, although this new actor is unlikely
to know the landlord personally, due to the rule of compartmentalization in the process.
On a morning, the rookie is packing to leave the comfortable but now so “sinister mansion,” it is
as if its owner had become a normal and nice person again, overnight! The landlord even paid
generously for his train ticket when he took him to the railroad station, aboard his expensive high-
end car he also rides normally again. Thus, ends the second stage of the recruiting process.
The third stage is going to unfold in the association of the good friend. Actually, this is a social
association advocating left-leaning values, as countless others of that sort that exist in France. In it,
the recruit is going to learn living and working in a communitarian society. He is also going to learn
how “the rich and the almighty and capitalism in general are bad to the society”. Did the recruit not
see this with his own eyes and at his own expense, already?
If he goes through this new stage of his recruitment successfully, then he is going to go back to a
normal existence eventually, either as associate of a startup that will prove to be a success, or as
expatriate with a managerial position in an NGO, between other possibilities. Maybe, he will even
become a rich and powerful person someday, and an agent undercover heading a front organization
of the DGSE at the same time; thus “he will advance masked”. In any case, he will remain faithful
to “those who saved his life,” of course. He will always be ready to serve their cause because it is
his cause, henceforth. He will do this secretly, “underground,” because he also knows how much
“the rich and the powerful are hypocrite, dishonest, and cunning”. He will do as his comrades of the
association taught him; that is to say, he will do his best to pass himself for an all-ordinary
individual not interested in politics, in order to best deceive and trick men as the landlord who lured
and harassed him. In other words, he will behave this way out of mere and selfish revenge in reality
and in his mind, a new conduct justified by a nobler alibi. He appears to be sincerely convinced not
only that it is “his duty to save the World from this scum,” but also that he has been given the power
“to make a significant contribution to this noble mission”. He thinks he is no longer a naïve young
man, but a tough and worldly-wise “shadow warrior”. Never would he admit the reality of his
manipulation and of his becoming no more than a true believer, even if he were confronted with
overwhelming evidences of it.
The reader understands, of course, that the recruit of the story above never will be told that the
landlord actually was his recruiter acting for the French intelligence community. Nor that the
political underground organization he is proudly serving is one of its fronts, unbeknownst to most of
its members either. Anecdotally, still about this method, in the 1960s and 1970s in particular, the
Soviet KGB in France, and also the SDECE, created or penetrated fancy secret societies such as
orders of Templars, Rosicrucians and similar, as means to recruit influential yet naïve French
personalities as unconscious agents. The advantages of such societies in the context of intelligence
activities is that they supply a justifiable alibi i.e. formal aims for secrecy, conspiracies, and plots
that are the real aims. The latter process guarantees a motive for an agent, since the DGSE makes
mandatory that all its agents must have a good one coming to support their commitment, as it will
be explained in detail in the chapter 7. Obviously, agents of this type must not claim “they work for
France,” and still less “for the DGSE,” in the eventuality of their arrests and next questioning. They
do not anyway as they are made unaware of a reality they would never honestly admit.
Numerous DGSE agents are indoctrinated by being exposed to narratives including the notion of
“saving the World” and a belief in the butterfly effect. Those ignore they work for the DGSE as
agents either. It is not uncommon however to see full-time employees in the DGSE, conscious,
therefore, who yet think they “work for saving the World”. For the pattern us vs. them in
indoctrination is part of an expected esprit de corps, built by resorting to the groupthink
psychological phenomenon. Moreover, it should be noted that this indoctrination in a recruitment
process is the same in principle as that used by radicalised Muslim prisoners in European prisons to
convert others. The trick can be summed up as the tactic of “the providential rescuer” that I will
describe in the chapter 9 from the more technical angle of behavioral biology, the behavioral science
the DGSE relies on for everything in HUMINT.
The example of the earlier anecdote shows also how it is possible to train, and then to run
unconscious agents and under-agents for years, although they would never admit that this is what
they truly are, since they cannot know it themselves. From the viewpoint of the specialist in
behaviorism, the training process still lays largely on the fundamental principles previously
presented in association with two diagrams, although its form may seem different at first glance.
The latter remark owes to the fact that the psychological conditioning of an individual, and more
especially the changing of his scale of values, cannot be carried out effectively otherwise than by a
prior destruction of his four fundamental and elementary needs: self-actualization, esteem,
love / need for belonging aka belongingness, and safety.
This recruiting process is quite common in France today and since the early 1980s at least, for all
I know. However, early evidences of the practice are found in Soviet Union shortly after the
Revolution of 1917. At this earlier time, young occidentals who committed to Soviet communism
and who tripped to the Soviet Union, first were stolen all their belongings and exposed to hardship.
All complains they could express about were dismissed, trivialized, and turned down as harmful
expressions of an all “capitalistic materialism” and of “egotism”. The disgruntled went back home,
whereas those who “understood the logical and salutary doctrine of sharing,” and who kept going
on, were eventually taught “a new vision for the future of the World” before they were sent to
“serve the cause” back in their home countries.
Striking the mind of a recruit by exposing him to sharp contrasts between extreme forms of
poverty and despair and similarly extreme form of wealth, is a highly effective method of
political / ideological indoctrination. As an aside, it is also used with certain success in influence
and propaganda for the masses, through repeated exposures to press articles, literature, and films
presented in sequences intending to feature the same contrast. The method was perfected and
rationalized eventually, in scientific terms I use in this book. In today’s Russia, the method is used
under a slightly different form, in farms usually, to indoctrinate and to train to blind obedience
young people shortlisted to occupy senior managerial positions in public service and in the private
sector eventually. It is also in use in China for the same purpose. From the viewpoint of the DGSE,
which is the same as that of Russia for that matter, the object of this rather elaborate contrivance is
not to serve a doctrine deemed noble, but to undermine the authority of foreign political institutions
in the context of economic warfare, by means of influence, disinformation, and agitprop;
subversion, in short. This often happens in France either, more especially when training super-
agents. Businessman and French-Russian super-agent André Guelfi thus was trained, when he was
made poor and hired as chauffeur by an agent who acted as his despotic and abusive master, beating
him with a cane at times.
Toward the end of their trainings, recruits expected to become super-agents even learn what they
must and must not buy once they will be empowered with high positions and wealth. This goes as
far as defining what the right price is for certain items suitable to their standings, such as suits, shirt
ties, watches, etc. From recollection, circa 1999-2000, the maximum recommended price for a pair
of dress shoes for a super-agent was in the surroundings of 3000 to 3500 French Francs (460 to 540
U.S. dollars at that time, when the minimum legal monthly wage was set to about 7,000 Francs, or
$1,076).
The effects on individuals submitted to prolonged trainings of the sort previously described may
be spectacular, especially with those who had an extrovert and easygoing personality before the
process began. The vim they displayed in the early days fades and gives way to a weary familiarity
with mistrust and boredom. They are entirely different people after that. Exceptions exist, but they
are scarce as they concern particularly resilient characters or / and with a good knowledge in
cognitive science, and who, under the latter condition only, may be able to see that they are tricked
and put to the test in reality.
With recruits who badly react to this method, possible resulting troubles may extend to
depression, symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, and post-traumatic stress disorder–PTSD. Despite
the close monitoring of those trainees, some happen to have accidents consequent to lack of sleep or
fatigue,[53] agitation, or bouts of extreme violence obviously followed by feelings of shame and
regrets. Some attempt to suicide, even. Doubt subsists about accidents during those trainings
because they may be caused by a bout of self-destructive behavior in reality, also frequent in the
DGSE past the stage of recruitment.
I saw firsthand a dramatic change in a woman recruit, then on her late thirties. It should be said
that, in addition to it, she had been submitted to an arrachage; that is to say, a staged execution that
took place in a wood by a night while tripping in a third-world country. The latter event certainly is
one of the main causes of her definitive trauma; she was “discharged” from work in intelligence
thereafter, and never recovered.
In the 1980s, a maximum tolerable rate for such accidents in training not to be exceeded was set
to 7% or so a year, the same as in military elite units at that time. Expert psychiatrists of the DGSE
are asked to shortlist carefully candidates they are entrusted for the latter good reasons. Then, if this
agency does not hesitate to run real risks with its recruits during their trainings, yet it is always
ready to intervene promptly with appropriate means, discreetly and anonymously however, when an
imminent risk of suicide or accident is obvious. However, this care also depends on how high this
agency values the recruit.
With respect to certain specialties or missions, the expected reaction of the recruit may be to yield
to a particular form of compensation in the sense psychology attributes to this word, expressed by
passive or active violence inflicted to others. The latter phenomenon may become addictive, easily
and quickly since it has a real therapeutic virtue against stress and prolonged psychological
suffering. The DGSE knows well the phenomenon that also occurs with its employees working in
offices. The French Ministry of Defense acknowledged it in the 1970s, after the U.S. Department of
Defense first discovered it accidentally. At that time, certain soldiers who had experienced difficult
times in combat in Vietnam, yet returned home in apparent good mental health and did not need any
particular therapy, whereas others who fought in same units and went through the same ordeals were
not, inexplicably at first glance. The discrepancy puzzled the psychiatrists of the U.S. Army for a
while. Further investigations on the abnormally resilient veterans revealed they had compensated all
along their assignment in Vietnam, by inflicting unnecessary violence and by behaving badly even
against their brothers in arms.[54] The French Ministry of Defense began to study the effects of
stress in operational situation in the 1960, with an important contribution, first, of physician Jean
Rivolier, and then of military scientist Henri Laborit, whom I will present in the chapter 9. Relevant
to the facts above, the following may surprise the reader even more, possibly.
Discipline and obedience to authority enforced by recourse to violence is as old as the humanity,
and it is even common in animals. For long, violence has been institutionalized and codified as
integral to rites of passage in the military, and even in schools, universities, fraternities, and
sororities since the Middle Age in Europe. Its use in modern and bureaucratized intelligence
agencies was not adopted in all countries until between the two world wars, as Colonel Walter
Nicolai, Chief of the German military secret service, Abteilung IIIb, during the First World War,
explained it in an interesting essay on intelligence and counterespionage in wartime, he wrote in
1923.[55]
In the French intelligence community, the formal discovery in the 1970s of compensation as
cause of wanton violence, not truly motivated by the need to enforce absolute and prompt
obedience, therefore, did not arouse any concern, however. On the contrary, wanton violence was
tolerated and even accounted for as long as it limited to bullying, not to say counted on in
management methods. From the early 2000s, when psychological violence in management was well
known and mastered, it was exported to the Gendarmerie and to the police, and even experimented
in real situation in several publicly owned French companies.[56] However, not all the latter bodies
are military in wartime, and the introduction of this new form of management caused a sharp and
concerning rise of the rate of suicides among their staffs, and the apparition of an unprecedented
phenomenon in the concerned civilian companies that the French media called “suicide in the work
place” thenceforth.
Yet I reckon that people in the DGSE who revel in inflicting psychological violence to others are
rather rare, overall. In all, I have known two people only in more than twenty years who had fun
with other’s sufferings, indisputably. One was a counterintelligence officer, and the other was
entrusted responsibilities I was unable to know since I never had any business with him. However, I
have seen countless other people who found visible relief from witnessing the suffering of a target
or the demise of their colleagues, indifferently. The latter case of passive violence seems to be rather
relevant to the other psychological phenomenon of schadenfreude, in my opinion. It comes to little
surprise, actually, that a large majority of people in this agency quietly disapprove psychological
violence and the recourse to permanent fear as ways to enforce discipline, since they often are
unnecessary and even counterproductive.
Now, I add the true cases of two young recruits, a man and a woman on their late teen, which
happened in the 2000s. Both failed to understand they were recruited, in spite of their outstanding
intellectual capacities.
The DGSE spotted the boy while in his early twenties because he was highly intelligent yet
suitably vulnerable in some respects. He did not graduate high enough, a fact whose consequence
was he could not claim a position he truly deserved. It should be said that the DGSE “helped” him
to fail twice for two consecutive years at his second-year examination at the university. The first
time, he was victim of a bacterial infection that drove him to the emergency. One year later, on the
eve of the same event, one of his “friends” said, “He would be terribly upset if he did not come to
his birthday party”. The next morning, day of the exam at the university, the recruit was bedridden
in a terrible state, consequential to intentional food poisoning, accidental in his understanding, of
course. Note in passing, he could not possibly believe he actually was poisoned, if ever, as the
DGSE has a byword about this, saying that when a plot contrivance has been made too bold and too
grave simultaneously, then its target excludes the hypothesis saying it is intentional, by assuming
that “it is just too big to be true”. All along this book, the reader will see that “too big to be true” is a
tactic commonly derived to many other and entirely different methods and goals.
 Finally, the student gave up on his first year of graduate studies he attended for more than two
consecutive years because he and his parents at last ran out of money, also as expected since this
was arranged either. Thereupon, he set to look for a job, and he quickly found an odd one paid at the
minimum wage in a company where he obviously made new friends, as the recruiters planned. The
friends were young people adrift, lucky to have landed the same position in this company, a call
center. In passing again, hiring for a while a future agent in a call center is another recurring and
typical pattern in recruitment in the DGSE because it is a way to embolden him with talking and
dealing with unknown people. This is the about the same as sending them working for a while in a
vacation village of Club Med. Actually, the goal of this particular provision is to train future agents
to feel at ease with talking to strangers, and to teach them how to win their confidence and lure them
without remorse.
From that moment, the recruit began to hang out in bars with his buddies who were agents of the
recruiting team in reality. That is how he was trained to behave differently, more casually, and to
become an uncouth guy at ease with rude language and under-the-belly humor, just to fit in his new
low social middle; that is to say, in keeping with how the profile of the average field agent must be.
In short, and for the record, to be streetwise, to have a good nerve, to have a low self-esteem, to
have no qualms with committing morally disputable acts, to disregard the notions of morality and
ethics of the “real world” of ordinary people, and to avoid developing sincere bonds with whoever is
not his brother in dupery, are all patterns common to a large majority of field agents of the DGSE.
At this stage of his life turned goalless, the recruit was suggested to pursue a career in the
military. As if coincidentally but not in reality, the father of one of his colleagues, a non-
commissioned officer in the Army, arrived “at the right time” to recommend to him to enlist in “a
rather exciting military unit specialized in video surveillance”.[57]
After a few years in the Army, everything was done for him to leave, though no one formally
asked him to. His superiors gave to him a hell of a life without clear reason, since he was a good and
ever obedient private. I will also explain, later in the chapter 9, why not simply firing him as it is
again a pattern in French intelligence to push a target into making the first step “from his own”.
Five years had passed since our student left the university and at this point he had been amply
assessed and trained. Yet another “unfortunate succession of events” made him jobless and
penniless, all expected conditions to drive him toward a wealthy middle-aged man who at once
posed as his benevolent savior. This man in this other circumstance had to become his first case
officer.
All along his five-year journey, the young recruit never suspected at any moment he was being
recruited by the DGSE as agent. For he believed “this is not how such a thing happens,” as “testified
for” espionage films that one of his “friends” often invited him to watch at home. The goal of the
latter provision was to draw discreetly and astutely his attention on a few true spy tricks, and to
educate him on twisted plots and elaborate forms of treachery.
The young woman of the second anecdote has a personal story somewhat similar to that of the
young man we have just seen. In her case, she had troubles at school since her preteen years. That is
why she was referred to a psychologist. Against all expectations, the examination established that
her problem with school and learning was caused by her precocity; her IQ was 156 by then.
When she entered her seventeenth year, one of her “friends” a little older than her told her about a
student exchange program between universities of different countries, called Erasmus.[58] “It is a
unique and wonderful experience,” said in substance the friend, enthusiastically. As in the previous
story, the good friend invited her to watch L’Auberge espagnole,[59] a French comedy film whose
scenario tells the story of French students who enlist in the European Erasmus program, and then go
to study in Barcelona, Spain. No matter how smart the girl was, she was unable to see that she was
being tricked already. She enrolled in the program upon her watching the movie, and she was
accepted quickly, of course. Still better, it was okay for Barcelona, as in the movie, because, it must
be explained to the reader, this city is become for a number of years a hub of spy-training and far-
leftist indoctrination. In addition, she obtained a scholarship allowing her to lodge on the spot.
Three months after her arrival in Barcelona, the monthly payment of her scholarship was
interrupted for no clear reason. When she asked why, she was told that the problem was a simple
delay in payments, yet no one could tell her when her bank account would be credited again. Her
situation was obviously catastrophic, and thus made suitably stressful; she did not know what to do,
as expected. In the meantime, she had met and befriended a student on the Barcelona campus who
was five years older than her. The man in question was a highly intelligent character of Italian
origin, very nice, turned out homosexual who accepted himself as such—he was a Romanian agent
in reality, a detail of importance for later in this book. This sexual orientation is important in such
case because it aims to prevent the likelihood of a love affair prejudicial to perfect manipulation and
recruitment. The man introduced her to his friends, who at once offered to host her, miraculously,
for she was unable to pay her rent any longer and had to leave her condominium at the end of the
month. She even had planned to give up her studies and to go back to France.
With her new friends in her new place, she spent “exciting and unforgettable evenings”. She
began to smoke cannabis and to drink local spirits more than reason, as they all did. This is how she
stopped attending courses at the university, finally. For, in the meantime, she found an odd job on
the spot in an import export startup created by Pakistani immigrants, thanks to some connections of
her fake homosexual friend, again.
When she returned to France, about a year later only, her parents did not recognize her anymore.
She had become inexplicably shallow and had an obvious and concerning inclination to seek profit
to other’s expense, including with her own parents. In addition, she declared to be lesbian
henceforth. She newly lived with a girlfriend a little older than she, with whom she shared her rent.
She did not seem to bother at all about how disappointing and shocking her parents could find all
this; she now seemed so cold, so affectively detached.
In Lyon, where she lived with her girlfriend, she found a small, trying, and poorly paid job, in a
call center again. At the same time, she began to portray herself as a far-leftist hardliner, and to
partake in all kinds of demonstrations and rallies in support of varied minorities. She met a young
man, a computer genius in his way, who taught her how to mess up American merchant sites. She
began spending whole nights on the Internet after her returns from bars where she drank tequila
with her friends. Shortly after that, the mother of one of her friends became “fond of her”. In return,
the girl, who at that point of her recruitment was becoming a woman, started to call the lady “her
second mother”. The charismatic and smart lady on her early fifties introduced herself as astrologer
and sophrologist. Therefore, she gave to her advices about what she should and should not do, who
she should or should not see, etc.
Soon after the happening of this new relationship, her friend the daughter of the lady left Lyon to
resume her scholarship in another city. Neither the mother nor the daughter bemoaned this
separation, for they were even not relatives at all in reality—this pattern often occurs in recruitments
and manipulations the DGSE commonly conducts. Later, the now grown-up and highly gifted
recruit was told the truth about the latter reality, which event marked the final stage of her
recruitment, when the “mask falls,” at last. Yet the lady astrologer and sophrologist was not a case
officer; she was a psychiatrist of the DGSE tasked to figure out what this highly gifted female
recruit was fit to next.
The reader might be surprised to know it happens that someone be submitted a second time in a
lifetime to a recruiting process, or even more. The more often, one has to go through the ordeal
again before being granted access to a superior degree of knowledge in intelligence, called degré de
conscience (awareness degree), or to certain responsibilities entailing higher trust and access to
highly sensitive matters. Or else as a form of punishment for bad conduct, or to “re-educate” an
agent upon a long sojourn in a foreign country.
I personally underwent the ordeal twice. The first was the about the same as that of the young
desperate man who was sheltered by a wealthy person, when I was in my early twenties. The
second, much longer, will be eventually described by pieces to exemplify other methods and
explanations. Additionally, I had to go through a staged summary execution with guns and a
baseball bat on a night by the edge of a pond—an arrachage—and several death threats, including
one in a riding car with a small and very particular pocket syringe supposed to contain a deadly
poison.
More to the surprise of the reader, perhaps, it is not rare that the intelligence community submits
senior officials in public service to a softer and particular version of this ordeal, either before their
accessing to high positions in public service, or as punishment and re-education. The ordeal is
familiarly called traversée du desert (desert crossing), and it is even publicly known under this same
name, though French journalists who report about it always abstain from asking by which
extraordinary ways such a thing could happen to a rich and powerful individual. They simply write,
typically, “X at that time was doing his desert crossing,” and that is all.
This challenging ordeal also serves as a litmus test to see if a foreign intelligence agency did not
recruit and corrupt them. For someone who has a good reason to feel guilty of something is likely to
overreact in a way that will prove that something is wrong with him, when tricked into believing for
months that his loyalty is questioned, for example. When the thus discovered fault is of minor
importance, e.g. of financial or sexual nature, then the fact is welcomed as additional guarantee of
loyalty to be carefully safeguarded in his dossier secret, since it can serve as threat or deterrent at
any time eventually.
At this point of my explanations, the reader is probably curious to know whether the French
intelligence community is resorting to scientific and more sophisticated ways to tampering with
other’s minds. Well, the DGSE and the DGSI neither uses LSD or similar substances and sci-fi-like
things such as stroboscopic lamps, electrodes, isolation tanks, and what not. However, the DGSE
resorts commonly to the use of the oral form of haloperidol[60] during the early stages of certain
recruiting processes. When this happens, the recruit, employee, or agent is brought to meet an expert
psychiatrist of the DGSE under the formal pretense of an ordinary consultation. I can tell in detail
about it from personal experience because one never forgets it.
When haloperidol is used specifically in the frame of a recruitment, the recruit is brought to
remain in touch with an examiner psychiatrist for about one year through a series of frequent
meetings and phone calls. As the series of meetings is reaching its end, the psychiatrist gives
formally to the recruit the order to take haloperidol thrice a day, a drug sold in French pharmacies
under the brand-name Haldol. The psychiatrist gives to the recruit a written official prescription for
it, for the recruit must buy the drug in an ordinary pharmacy of his choice, by himself and at his
own expense. In passing, the latter provision aims to forestall the ever-possible risk that the recruit
decides to blow the whistle and attempts to incriminate the DGSE and his examiner psychiatrist.
Whenever this happens, the examiner psychiatrist, who indeed has a cover activity relevant to his
profession, is thus given a valid argument further substantiated by the nature and ordinary purpose
of the drug. He simply claims the recruit is “an ordinary patient with a mental disorder”. Blowing
the whistle would be a bad idea, therefore.
When the recruit obeys the order, the following weeks, the psychiatrist further instructs him to
rise weekly his take of Haldol from three drops three times a day the first week, to more and more
each following weeks, and so on, and on, up to a point at which the recruit is no longer able to
behave normally, still less to resume his professional activities. All along, the recruit is not told that
he is left free to stop his “treatment” at any time, actually. For as the physiological effects of the
drug prescription range from mild to very handicapping along with the steady increase of the takes,
to the point of entailing serious health troubles that can extend to death in case of overtake, this
imposes the following dilemma on him. Which consequences may arise if he refuses to obey any
longer the orders of the psychiatrist? Is he supposed to wait for the psychiatrist to ask to him to stop
the treatment at some point? Nonetheless, the psychiatrist will remain mute if ever he asks such
questions, even when he expresses his concerns about the obvious danger with weekly rising
prescription takes to considerable quantities at some point. In any case, the test with Haldol must
also mark the end of the series of tests with the psychiatrist, by putting a radical end to the affective
bond that the recruit often feels for him.
I had to submit to this medical treatment during my second recruitment test in the 1990s, at a time
I had to go to work by car in Paris. At this period, much of my professional activities focused on
training officials to technical matters and by small groups of one to six. I understood at some point
that my “students” were abnormally tolerant with the teacher too somnolent I had become. It was
part of the test with Aldol, actually, yet I could not know this.
I decided to stop my takes of Haldol on the day my psychiatrist gave to me a strange telephone
call, to order me to raise my takes to thirty drops thrice a day. “Why not drinking the whole bottle
straight,” I remember I thought, then. I was taking fifteen drops three times a day at that point, and I
behaved as a sleepwalker as a result of it. Making my daily thirty miles with my car to go to work in
this condition, and the same to get back home on evenings was quite an ordeal: much the same as
after drinking a large quantity of strong alcohol, I remember.
I once heard of a recruit in his late twenty who, while under the same treatment, had a grave car
accident on a night he was heading back home. He remained handicapped for life, thereafter, due to
multiple and complicated fractures of the pelvis and in legs. I was not told what happened to him,
thereupon; a position as analyst behind a desk, I could only assume.
The other reason for asking a recruit to take this drug is to resume his interviews while the effect
of the drug weakens his psychological defenses. If ever he was hiding some incriminating facts,
then he is much likely to betray himself with one slip of the tongue. That is why DGSE employees
and agents who fall under suspicion of betrayal may be asked to “consult a psychiatrist” who,
thenceforth, prescribes to them the same drug, Haldol.
As I said earlier, this part of a recruiting process is time-consuming to an expert psychiatrist, and,
again, it would be quite costly if paid for by a private company. That is why it concerns particular
categories of individuals called to occupy either highly sensitive or / and executive positions (e.g.
counter-intelligence, Security Service) in the DGSE, the diplomatic corps, or else who have been
shortlisted to become super-agents.
Snitches, many agents, and even employees are recruited through blackmail and setups that may
take place either at the inception of the recruiting process, in the meantime, as its final stage, or even
before the recruiting process begins. Below, I present succinctly some typical schemes of it,
fictional yet inspired by true stories.
A young woman was placed in a social and economic situation of great precariousness, thanks to
the cooperation of some public services and contacts, which setup led her to a depression. This
handicap made up for a suitable weakness that favored the involvement of this girl in particularly
degrading sex, and her sexual exchanges were filmed unbeknownst to her. The same plot
contrivances reproduce frequently with male rookies, but with video recordings of homosexual
intercourses because men fear less for their respectability to be seen having sex with multiple
female partners simultaneously—it is even rather the opposite, for that matter. I learned incidentally
that Serb immigrants, often used as henchmen in dirty tricks, are called to execute this kind of
missions when on the French soil.
A mature sex-tourism enthusiast was filmed or caught red-handed having sex with a minor. In
this other case, the degrading nature of the object of the compromise is associated with the threat of
a heavy criminal penalty, of course.
A young student believed he compromised himself through staged accidental circumstances that
brought him to partake in a grave criminal offense. That is why and how he resigned to accept his
recruitment, lest of a punishment for a fault that exists only in his mind.
A young female rookie agreed on compromising herself under the threat of seeing her parents
evicted from their home. The French intelligence community, criminal police squads, and even the
customs, often use a first treat of this kind concerning relatives, in the aim to coerce people into
becoming snitches or even agents.
Threats the French intelligence community most frequently resorts to are about sex, relatives put
in dire predicaments, common law offenses, staged frauds (to unemployment benefits and welfare),
staged loss of one’s employment, and arranged debts (already existing or arranged as part of the
recruiting process).
Recruiting someone under threat is never set and formulated by a same person, but by two at
least. One threatens, always implicitly and ambiguously because blackmail is punishable by law,
while an accomplice is waiting for the target to “come to see him spontaneously,” and to listening to
his “suggestion of cooperation,” since that is what the recruit must “understand by himself”. The
evidences of a blackmail thus arranged are particularly difficult to bring in a justice court, the more
so when the recruit has been put in a situation prejudicial to his credibility, which is always the case.
The possibilities left open to the newly recruited “asset” (source or agent) range from the
unconsciousness of the process in which he engages against his will, to suspicion, to full
consciousness. In the relationship between the recruiter (or case officer) and his asset, the
asymmetrical battle of wills, and the choice of states of consciousness that is offered to the latter
leads inescapably to a sophisticated version of a master-slave relationship. Many sources and agents
are offered the slight psychological relief to believe they are “playing a game,” more particularly a
gigantic and real role-play from which they never get out. Some of those who are caught in this
situation end up believing it sincerely. Thenceforth, they often idealize fantastic perceptions of their
“new selves” for want of being any longer able to love whom they actually became, i.e. individuals
who have irremediably lost their free will.
It is also remarkable that the DGSE and the DGSI use regularly, with the participation of some of
their more or less young agents with suitable psychological profiles, the theme of role-plays,
dungeons and dragons and derivatives because it may be the first approach in their recruitments. In
those other cases, the unreality of role-play mingles gradually in a vagueness one could describe as
“artistic,” with real actions involving ordinary people outside of the “game”. Of course, the third
parties are targets, chosen to be spied on, manipulated, or harassed and stalked.
 The reverse is true, as the DGSE and DGSI may also expect a psychological shift of their agents
of minor importance towards a particular theme of a role-playing game, in the contexts of common
missions of domestic intelligence, counterinfluence, and counterintelligence in particular. Either
way, the modalities and rules of role-playing games, as well as the ordinary and extraordinary
behaviors of their most ardent followers, bear many similarities with the real world of espionage—
which, by the way, for long, many spies called colloquially “a game”.[61]
The virtual world of role-playing games indeed can coexist easily and closely with the real world
of ordinary people. Role-play players can identify easily with the fictional characters they have
created for themselves or that a “game master” attributed to them. In the latter case, the game
master is an agent acting upon instructions of a case officer, and the players acting under his
authority are “under-agents”. Usually, those role-play players / under-agents form clusters of “close
friends,” from which must emerge the abstract notions of “exclusivity,” “brotherhood,” and “shared
secrets”. Thenceforth, the group becomes exclusive enough to justify demanding and binding
expectations to those who want to join it; that is to say, ordeals, rites of passage, and the like, which
all come to serve as alibis of other recruitments. Partaking to pretenses of such role-play groups also
fosters a rewarding sense of individuality, and of “difference” from the “outside world” of those
who are unaware of this unfolding, and who are pejoratively perceived as “uninitiated people”.
Note that a reversal of the perception of the reality is taking place from the viewpoint of the role-
play players, which actually is cognitive dissonance from a psychological standpoint and strictly
speaking. At this point, we are back to the notion of “real world” vs. “virtual world” commonly
taught to agents and employees of the DGSE. However, in this other context, it is used to
manipulate expendable henchmen, too immature to be eligible to any need-to-know and to submit
durably to the strict rules and discipline of spycraft.
This is how numerous missions can be carried to their terms, without the DGSE or the DGSI
having to worry about their being suspected as the organizers or betrayed by their under-agents,
since the latter are not agents from a formal standpoint. They know nothing about the activities of
the agency they actually serve, as far as they honestly know.
Anecdotally about fooling people to make them unconscious under-agents and unconscious
agents, some decades ago, the SDECE was looking for naïve people who believed in UFOs, flying
saucers, and other little green men. For those had the best alibi to give to the police or the military,
in case of their being caught red-handed while spying on and photographing activities in secret Air
Force bases abroad. They thus did all the work for the real spies who simply had to wait for their
reports and pictures of the “sensational discoveries” they made, all without any compensation of any
sort.
In the 1970s, the French Gendarmerie backed officially Jean-Claude Bourret, then a famous TV
journalist and co-Chief Editor of state-owned TV channel TF1, in their deliberate intent to tell the
French public that extra-terrestrials indeed were visiting the Earth aboard flying saucers and other
amazing vessels. It was no joke at all; news about UFOs thus were broadcast regularly and very
seriously, and then print media in France made up for the echo chamber effect to occur. It actually
was a gigantic hoax, of course, staged by the French intelligence community and directed against its
own population, which lasted for several years. At that time, it was often question of a U.S. military
base known as Area 51, where the U.S. Air Force was testing spy jet planes, in reality. All this then
much interested France and the Soviet Union, which together had an ongoing cooperation in
aeronautics and space signed earlier in June 1966. As a result, many genuine curious tripped to the
United States in the goal to photography “the extra-terrestrial vessels that the U.S. Air Force was
testing and hiding from public knowledge,” the ensuing narrative said.
Recruiting a foreign national in his country as source is an entirely different process because
there, of course, the DGSE cannot count on the cooperation of public services, government
agencies, and the GOdF, nor on large contacts’ networks in the private sector to help build around
the recruit a “social bubble” separating him from the society of ordinary people. Neither the
recruiter will enjoy the aid of a recruiting crew to put his recruit under duress. At least, the recruiter
can count on advices and useful information that the DGSE will provide him with from distance.
That is why one form of corruption or coercion must take place at some point, regardless whether
the future agent or even source is willing to cooperate sincerely and harm the national interest of his
own country, on behalf of whatever cause or for whatever personal reason. Again, the future asset
must not understand his recruiter is looking for a way to secure firmly and definitively their
relationship. Possibly, the former will never see things that way, should he ever remain loyal to his
recruiter and commit to “his cause”; for the recruiter is interested in a long-lasting and fruitful
cooperation, of course, whereas he must be wary of the apparent sincerity and depth of commitment
of his future asset. Maybe, someday, the asset will change his mind or he will not want to cooperate
any longer in spite of his faith in the cause because he will be afraid of something or because of
family reasons or of health problems or, commonly, because he wants to immigrate to France for
good. In the latter case, he would no longer be of any usefulness and would become an unwelcomed
liability. In any of the latter cases, the recruiter and the DGSE together run the risk that their asset
be tempted to blow the whistle because he wants either to confess or repent or else, out of guilt
regardless. Obviously, neither the recruiter nor the DGSE wants such a thing to happen, ever. It
would be harmful to the reputation of France, and it could even provide the injured party with a
justified opportunity to ask for compensation.
The reader who certainly heard the strange words “asset” and “liability” in the context of
espionage stories, at this point is provided with a clear explanation of their meanings. An asset is an
agent who continues to serve usefully, whereas a liability is another who must remain under
monitoring, although he no longer is of any usefulness, and solely because of the secrets he holds,
so, at a loss anyway, exactly as a DGSE retiree. That is why the recruiter and the case officer must
do their best to keep sources and agents as assets, and secure this status with threats in reserve,
should the need to resort to blackmail arise.
In most instances, the deception of the future asset is formulated in the manner of the confession
preceding a disappointment in a love affair, for recruiting a source or agent abroad implies the
decisive moment when his recruiter removes his mask. Here my use of the word “mask” is not pure
literary style in the context because the mask, African, of theater or else regardless, is a recurring
symbol in the culture of the DGSE. Innocently used as an interior ornamentation, its presence and
second-degree meaning in an office or house will be understood correctly by initiates only, as a
metaphorical representation of the double life of his owner. As an aside, the DGSE has a special
fondness for painter Modigliani, in reason of the lifeless faces of his characters suggesting masks,
and because their physical features often seem dehumanized and cold.
All the ambiguity of this other recruiting process owes metaphorically to the preliminary weaving
of a “spider web” by the recruiter, to capture and to immobilize his recruit. The interaction between
the recruiter and the future asset must take the form of a blackmail at some point anyway, in order to
produce an unfair exchange of services because it is out of question to the DGSE to pay in cash for
human intelligence. From a legal viewpoint, the approach can be very clear because the future
source or agent did the awkwardness to compromise himself. For without being aware of it, yet the
latter slipped slowly but surely toward the dramatic moment when he found itself forced to accept
the unacceptable. The first request for service, innocuous in appearance, actually is the
compromising act; that is to say, the threat of his own blackmail. This is how the future asset is
brought to become one because he has already been an asset without being aware of it. A
recruitment of this type takes place along two successive stages.
1. The future asset understands at some point he is put on test. Yet he does not quite grasp the real
reason for it, and he resumes the relationship because of his assumption that being tested is a logical
step preceding access to a special privilege, whatever it is (joining an exclusive circle or a company,
being entrusted special responsibilities or secrets, etc.). For everybody act and go forward in their
interactions with other people by assuming that this will be rewarding in some way, and by
presuming of one’s superior intelligence and moral capacities to overcome possible difficulties
arising on the path leading toward this expectation. Most people hold reciprocity for granted in any
interaction with balanced and civilized other people, but this is not how thing go on in intelligence,
and the less so from the viewpoint of the DGSE.
The future asset fails completely to question his own assumptions, although this attitude is logical
because if not, then he would be an excessively distrustful individual and much of a loner. Thus, he
cannot conceive that his life actually is analyzed thoroughly in order to make him a source or an
agent in the service of a foreign intelligence agency, unless, of course, he was previously
enlightened on how an agent is recruited, although even this would not yet offer to him absolute
protection against this threat.
2. He is considered an asset definitively, and he has advanced far enough to the center of the
spider web that has been woven for him, already. At this point, it is possible to his recruiter to
engage in a game of unspoken and improbable metaphors, allusions made to strike the mind and that
must be understood later only, years of even decades later, usually. In short, all those things, never
clear, must convince the asset, who at this point is become an agent or a source formally and
definitively, that he is at the center of “something that overwhelms him” to a point of inhibiting his
capacity for discernment and his psychological defenses.
This fall of the future asset to chaos and to a state of permanent uncertainty is important to the
recruiter, for it stigmatizes a paradoxical situation saying, “If one must be recognized as a spy to
really be a spy, yet one does not necessarily need to know this”. Indeed, in sources in particular,
there is often a share of uncertainty in their consciousness that they indeed are spying.
Contrary to a clandestine political relationship in which the stake is a commitment under
conditions of mutual security between two individuals, the decisive moment of the recruiting of an
agent occurs in the form of his sudden domination by his recruiter through a collusion, and
according to a process deliberately made vague—fuzzy logic again—, so that any logical
understanding of the event is about impossible. The collusion is an implicit blackmail in the facts,
especially regarding the law of the real world of free men. The recruiter must ascertain that any
attempt to expose him publicly, by his asset in the first place, can be denied easily and then surely
be turned against the accuser. Indeed, the DGSE most often and typically resorts to charges of
paranoia, schizophrenia, or of conspiracy theory as defensive weapons against allegations,
accusations, and exposures pointing toward its responsibility.
Recruiting a source or agent may also take the form of coercion by force, thought of as an
“abduction”. In this other case, the implementation of the recruiting process, carefully planned, lays
on a ruse that must exceed the intellectual capacities and the will of the individual who is ignorant
of practices in intelligence. All self-will must thus escape the latter. Typically, this quick recruitment
is an invitation made to the recruit / target to go to see “a good” or “influential friend” by car, who
purposefully happens to live in a remote and lost spot. The target must not know the latter detail, not
to arouse his concern or suspicion. Once there, it turns out that the good friend in question is a
foreign diplomat or a mobster, real or role-played, and this is made obvious deliberately. Therefore,
the target feels trapped because he did not go there with his own car, and there is no bus or subway
station nearby to go away, even no neighborhood. The target, who thus is about to become a source,
can hardly do more than politely resign to accept a drink, and “why not an invitation to dinner?”
Photos and recordings will be made dutifully during the meeting, which all purport to serve as
compromising evidences eventually, given the particular identity or notoriously bad reputation of
the host and of the other guests. If ever the target is involved in politics, is a senior official or a
military, then his entrapment through a simple setup of this kind indeed is a disaster that may result
in the end of his career. For whether he really did something wrong or simply made the mistake not
to be suspicious and cautious enough is of little importance. Those records, plus the comments of
journalists who may have a stake in it, will be good enough to convince the ignorant public of the
most incriminating hypothesis.
Here is a rule: never ever accept an invitation somewhere if you do not have and drive your own
car. Often also, your absence is arranged through such circumstances to “make your home”; that is
to say, to enter your house and search it when you are away, to make a copy of all your computer
data, install some spy program on your computer, to conceal spy microphones therein, and why not
hiding evidences connecting to some wrongdoing you knows nothing about. For those who are
hosting you thus take the control of your time, and they, only, decide at what time exactly you will
be back home. In general, when someone you do not yet know well wants to invite you somewhere
as a passenger of his car, this must be taken as specious, by default.
In all cases, the ambivalence between the voluntary act and the bondage of the agent or source is
more complex and less definite than it seems at first glance. In reality, the two situations merge to
form a combinatorics specific to each relationship between the recruiter and his recruit, which must
be understood on a case-by-case basis. From the recruiter’s viewpoint, a recruitment must
necessarily be a commitment, voluntary or forced regardless. For it does not matter, in the absolute,
whether the commitment is sincere or not, since the DGSE (and the DGSI as well) do not believe in
the reliability of patriotism and loyalty alone. This is why a recruitment must be part of a
psychological pathology engendered by the setting of an extreme environment, itself made of
constraints, in order to foster true subjection or to make it the inescapable outcome.
Remarkably, all psychological mechanisms and intricacies presented heretofore are based on the
action of the recruit, which means that it is all or almost about behavioral biology from the
viewpoint of the DGSE, analogous only and not similar to classic behaviorism in English-speaking
countries. We shall see in the chapter 9 that behavioral biology differs in a number of respects from
behaviorism.
 WHILE RECRUITING WOMEN IN INTELLIGENCE
There is an ambivalent attitude in the all-manly decision-making staff about recruiting women,
and as far as I could see or understand, the pattern appears to reproduce in other intelligence
agencies in the World. The DGSE is doing consistent efforts to attract women indeed, but those
attempts often are clumsy or rather fit the tiny minority of tomboys of the dogged type. Yet this
agency manages to recruit many good-looking and balanced women behaving as a majority,
especially since one must avoid catching the attention of everyone in the trade of intelligence.
Many are highly skilled and / or highly educated individuals who, therefore, are selected to work
on technical and scientific matters and the like. Yet women are seldom fit to work on hard-science
specialties such as computer engineering, electronics, mathematics, etc. On one hand, I am aware of
the political incorrectness of the latter statement, of course. On the other hand, I taught and trained
scores of people for four years, men mixed with women on their thirties on average, and I am not
yet ready to indulge in self-delusion—as testifies for my publishing of this book, to begin with. All
on the contrary, women often feel more at ease with soft-science disciplines, such as psychiatry,
psychology, anthropology, and the like. Women in intelligence actually have the faults of their best
qualities, meaning they are passionate and more mature than men are, overall. The following
explanations and comments tell more about this point.
One may easily find recurring stories, biographies, and autobiographies of female flying agents in
the French literature on intelligence, which in this specific case began to appear in French
bookstores in the 1990s, when the DGSE became interested in recruiting women more than usual.
This agency is not going to recruit more women just because it is trendy with respect to gender
equality. The reluctance of the DGSE to communicate with the public is the cause of the yearly
release of new books on the completely outdated and well-worn story of Mata Hari—the reader
heard of her I assume. The pattern reproduces with half a dozen of other already well-known French
espionage stories. The exception for the last thirty years being the autobiography of Dominique
Prieur,[62] first woman to have been hired in the Service Action of the DGSE, allegedly. However,
Prieur’s career in this service knew a short and sorry end that the American reader would find
analogous to the fictitious story of G.I. Jane. Beyond that, published stories of women who were
successful in French intelligence are to be found in the fiction genre, mostly—in which at last they
are numerous, nowadays!
I recollect of intelligence agencies in other countries that distinguish themselves by hiring women
as their directors; the case of Stella Rimington as head of the British MI-5 from 1992 to 1996 comes
first to my mind. Nonetheless, the DGSE sees all this as no more than daring expressions of political
correctness for the sake of domestic policy, although there are indeed women who are entrusted
managerial positions in this agency.
Is the DGSE sexist?
Yes, I think so, but not all French male spies share this attitude and, again, this agency craves
female recruits for valuable reasons to be soon explained. Between one quarter and one third of
people who work in and with the DGSE are women, according to some senior executives endowed
with the right to express in the media; I join the consensus. The DGSE is overwhelmingly male,
therefore, especially when it comes to managerial positions since this agency favors ex-members of
elite units to fill the latter positions, to begin with. One should not indulge in self-delusion about the
topic: no matter how many males agree with proponents of feminism, most men still work mostly
with men, and most women with women. Of late, in early 2019, I read a serious press article whose
author quotes a poll saying that 69% of women with jobs are in female-dominated occupations in
the European Union, i.e. in which over 60% of workers are women.
Similar propaganda for recruiting women in spycraft materializes as recurrent TV historical
documentaries, and films on famous female members of the French Resistance in WWII.[63] A
“forerunner” of the latter films but whose setting is contemporary has been Nikita (1990). Nikita
was a praiseworthy fiction for showing certain realities in the DGSE that, still today, are just as they
were thirty years ago certainly, save for the spectacular action scenes, of course. The other French
film Secret defense (2008) shows realistically how the DGSE recruitment of a female operative may
be conducted, and what happens to her eventually. As an aside, Secret défense has the unusual
particularity to involve authentic DGSE specialists as actors playing fictitious characters of this
intelligence agency—some I knew personally as colleagues, such as Eric Denécé, and others from
reputation.
 Female recruits also have the physical disadvantage of their advantage, if I may put it that way.
Here lies, perhaps, the reason of all those French books on Mata Hari. It is true that the DGSE uses
easy women to seduce and to dupe men through “honey traps,” but this does not mean that all
women this agency hires must be coerced into having sexual intercourses during their trainings.
Attempts to seduce female recruits during their recruitments and trainings are as true as logical,
simply because the same is done with males. In both cases, it includes attempts with homosexuality
and with other twisted sexual suggestions that a majority of us finds weird and unwarranted. One
could even say that the DGSE displays an annoying and insulting obsession with this, not to talk
about “sexual harassment” when it is thus testing its recruits. Nonetheless, this agency needs to
ascertain who its recruits truly are because certain of their character traits may turn out to
weaknesses potentially harmful to themselves. It is out of question that a DGSE employee or agent
falls into a honey trap … in theory, of course.
In the DGSE, the truth about sex and intelligence is, this agency does not commonly coerce its
agents into sleeping with anybody. When it needs someone ready to do such a thing on demand,
then it picks up people who are naturally prone to go to bed easily. Then the recruit who has this
natural ability or inclination indeed will be invited to have sex with unattractive partners in the
context of his / her training. That is why the DGSE is interested in such people, and why it monitors
the sex market in this endeavor. For example, the DGSE and the DGSI have numerous contacts in
the middles of prostitution and porno film industries. These agencies hire commonly porn actors and
actresses for tricking more or less influential personalities, simply because those professionals are
the best with that, and they do not care to be video recorded while they are having sex.
At some point in my career in intelligence, in the early 1980s, I met a colorful individual in his
fifties—who in passing strongly reminds me of Robert de Niro in Casino, today. This man then
lived with a wealthy and exuberant woman about his age—sort of brunette version of Sza Sza
Gabor in the TV series Green Acres—who ran a network of high-end prostitutes working for the
DGSE, more or less consciously, I suppose. He was an agent in permanent touch with the French
underworld and a member of the GOdF and, much less commonly, of the Order of the Knight
Templars. In the late 1970s, he had just bought a property in the small town of Bassou, in the Yonne
département, a part of which he converted into a masonic lodge still active today. He was the owner
of Le Tonneau, then one of the biggest bars in Place Pigalle in Paris, his cover activity for
everything including procurism.
In the 1990s, and still today, probably, the French domestic intelligence closely monitored a large
network of prostitutes who worked in partnership with the Hotel Méridien of the Porte Maillot, in
Paris, and with a nightclub located underground the Palais des Congrès across the street. The sexual
performances of countless businessmen and other VIPs from all countries were photographed, and
thus they were compromised in this hotel.
The subject provides me the opportunity to tell my reader that there is an authentic and long-
lasting culture in the French intelligence community of photographing, filming, and video-recording
people in such compromising situations. The aims of it, always the same, are to gathering material
evidences expected to serve eventually as threats in exchange for faultless subjection, obedience,
and loyalty. Compromising pictures often are brandished years later, at the most unexpected
moments, generally.
I saw such incriminating photos snapped in the late 1960s. They showed two young women of the
French elite having sex with an attractive agent. I was not told who those women were, yet I was
explained that their photos had been snapped discreetly late at night in a large room located in the
underground of the Whisky à Gogo, by then a well-known cabaret of Saint-Germain des Près for the
elite. At that time, some young heirs of the French affluent society previously shortlisted were
invited to come down in this suitably converted cellar, upon the closing time of the cabaret upstairs.
There, they were casually encouraged into discovering what an orgy is. Alcohol and drugs had
previously conditioned them into accepting the invitation of a particular sort, with all the enthusiasm
they were expected to demonstrate on pictures.
People of the affluent society who have peculiar sexual tastes are more commonly video-recorded
in certain foreign countries, Thailand and Morocco in particular when under-aged partners of both
sexes are required. The dossier secrets, not only of foreign individuals, but also of many French
personalities are filled with evidences of the latter kind. Then we find other sorts of incriminating
facts of financial nature, or completely fabricated espionage stories involving complicit foreign
spies and their agencies France officially denies she has a good relationship with. Iran comes first,
and then we find Russia, Romania, Serbia, Syria, and even China.
 However, the DGSE wants to recruit women for other reasons unrelated to sex. When there is a
need to contact a target—tamponner or “bump into” in French intelligence jargon—women often
are better achievers than men. Women are doing well with winning other’s confidence. They have
this capacity to charm men and their like as well, which men have not so. This is not all about youth
and advantageous features, therefore. Additionally, women are still very convincing at deceiving
others when ageing. Most of us find difficult to resist the begging demand of the charming old lady.
Empathy is a human quality in our society, but it is a weakness the DGSE hardly tolerates in its
employees and agents.
Probably, the reader will be surprised to learn that this agency, and the French intelligence
community as a whole, hires an unusually elevated number of women each time they need to harass
someone. For women often display greater strength and stubbornness than men when they are
entrusted this kind of missions. In France, particular statistics revealed that sentences handed down
by courts whose juries are predominantly female are always more severe than those with a majority
of men. It has also been found that women often are harder, more persisting, more effective, and
especially more zealous than men in the activities of order and justice. See with women activists!
However, women have the dual advantage of being more receptive than men to indoctrination,
which often makes them exceptionally aggressive and irrational individuals. The reason for this is
that if women are equal to men from an ethical standpoint, they stay as psychologically different of
men as they physically are, whether this pleases my reader or not, again. For women are much more
receptive to passion than men are; they see and feel things that men can hardly do, and the reverse is
true. On average, women invest greater passion and care in many things they think about and do
than men prove capable of, and they are much more receptive than men are to abstraction. Men are
hardheaded, and they often see as unimportant, superfluous, and even irrational the many things for
which women care and pay attention. Experienced police officers know this very well; all those who
often are brought to interview witnesses will tell you that women naturally pay attention to many
details in people that men overlook, typically.
In an entirely different realm of considerations, men yield to violence more easily than women
do. That is why women have a statistically proven inclination for poisoning when they kill, whereas
men favor guns and edgy things. Men who resort to violence are not necessarily unbalanced: many
who did it simply were unable to resist an innate urge common in their gender, likewise noticed in
males in a majority of other species, whereas women resort much more rarely to physical violence.
In the United States in 2018, the Federal Bureau of Prisons claimed 6.9% only of women in the total
inmate population. This striking fact comes to explain why psychiatrists who commonly work on
the inmate population remark an abnormally elevated rate of antisocial disorder in criminal women,
when compared to men. Physical violence is not at all a normal reaction in women, but …
One other thing of particular interest to the DGSE is that a woman who is a political or religious
fanatic often is a shrew that must be dreaded for her mercilessness. It is hard to “deprogram” and to
reason such a character once she is so, not to say hopeless, I am sorry to say.
That is why, in several cases of terrorism involving women, certain intelligence agencies, German
in particular, resigned to kill them discreetly, whereas they let ordinary justice gives prison
sentences to their male partners, who indeed calmed down with age. I am not implying that women
the French intelligence community recruits are unbalanced individuals. I mean that an elevated
number of them, when compared to the population of ordinary women, do not have any qualm with
inflicting psychological violence in particular, nor when carrying on manipulations that this will
result in tragic consequences, including for other women, children, and elders. I happened to face
this reality in a number of times as a target after I quitted the DGSE. Those women who were doing
their best to trick me shared this characteristic to seem completely unreceptive to any statement
challenging their indoctrination, thus leaving me with the feeling that I was facing dangerous robot-
like people.
From a purely personal standpoint, and from firsthand experience, I am much more wary of a
woman spy than of her male colleague. By default, I always consider her as an individual with
antisocial disorder, for the effect and the danger are the same as if she has been indoctrinated only,
anyway. Then I keep on acting so pending unquestionable evidence to the contrary hypothesis.
Female spies are merciless and cold-minded “killers” in the figurative sense of this word, and
literally they may are so.[64] Still from personal experience, I would attempt to convince or to reason
a male spy posing as my foe, but I would deem pointless to do the same with his female colleague.
American actress Barbara Bain in the famous TV series Mission Impossible played very
realistically, I find, the role of many French female spies I met: dutiful, visibly committed, cold-
hearted, and sternly noncommittal on demand, as a robot can be, I would go as far as saying. Many
among this minority prove capable to invest much more of themselves than men can in the harm
they do to others, with no apparent remorse and even with an unmistakable satisfaction sometimes.
Several behavioral patterns, recurring in women with hybristophilia aka “Bonnie and Clyde
Syndrome,” are found also in certain female French spies. In those instances, the DGSE—or any
false-flag body—act as if a “collective partner” that stays successful as the passive substitute of a
violent individual. Note that all I just said is not my personal opinion, but that, unanimous, of the
men of the DGSE; even the TV series The Bureau, and previously the film Secret Defense, both
involving the participation of this agency, underscores it conspicuously and realistically.
Overall, this inclination for passion, common to nearly all women, appears in their works in
intelligence and makes them spies very different of men. On one hand, I understand that the woman
who is reading me may find all I just said unfair or unflattering to her genre. On the other hand, I
remind her that the DGSE is not focusing on kindness in women this agency recruits as intelligence
officers and field agents, but on the behavioral patterns of the minority I just described. Then this
agency relies heavily on receptiveness to political indoctrination, in particular. Additionally, I
noticed that men in French intelligence who prove able to challenge women at the previously
mentioned regards are aged under 30 and freshly recruited in a large majority of instances. When
growing older, violence in men often becomes dispassionate, done perfunctorily as a duty as any
other or even as a chore, contrary to women who, all on the contrary, remain passionate and are
hardening with age, while learning to display more composure in action; they never calm down, in
fact. Women, intelligence, and warfare once reunited together are as nitroglycerin, and it is very
difficult to separate again the components once they are mixed.
Technical Training
Of course, there are school-like technical trainings and theoretical courses. However, secret
classrooms where young recruits receive full and complete day-to-day trainings courses collectively,
including the use of gadgets, weapons, explosives, and the encryption of secret messages are clichés
of cinema that do not correspond to any reality in the 21st century. Exceptions relate to military elite
units, 1st RPIMA and 13d RDP the more often, to other special squads of the Gendarmerie, and
more particularly to the Service Action of the DGSE, whose members later become field agents,
case officers, and intelligence officers of this agency. This is especially true when those people get
older and are no longer physically fit to partake in very demanding para-military missions. People
of the latter category only have skills similar to those seen in operatives of action movies. A
significant proportion of flying agents indeed began their careers in intelligence in specials forces,
such as the 1st RPIMA, 13d RDP, Commandos Marine, Commandos de l’Air, 1st RCP, and other
similar military units that are under the official command of the COS since 1992. They receive more
trainings and theoretical courses sometimes given in classrooms.[65]
Overall, the DGSE organizes two types of courses and trainings.
1. Collective courses in classrooms on very varied matters that actually do not necessarily relate
to intelligence. For example, full time employees, contractors, and agents may also need courses
and trainings on computer engineering, photo retouching, accounting, journalism and writing,
economics and finance, politics, theory of warfare and strategy, anthropology and social sciences,
nuclear or oil engineering, etc. However, there are also more particular matters, such as parsing for
establishing psychological profiles and finding true motives in people, criminology and forensic
science, mathematics and logics applied to deception and active measures, cryptology, negotiating
behavior, psychology, diplomacy, fundamentals in arms trade, etc. There are intensive physical
trainings in groups on martial arts, self-defense, and street fighting techniques, which teachings mix,
actually. One of my ex-colleagues was given even singing lessons to become more self-assertive in
meetings with foreigners because he lacked self-confidence and charisma.
2. The most often there are one-to-one courses and trainings, either because of a need for greater
secrecy or because the matter is too specific to be taught to groups. Those courses and trainings are
given to satisfy specific need-to-know in all cases. They may relate to maters as varied as mastering
a particular espionage device, a specific computer software or an advanced technique on a particular
computer software in the context of hacking, advanced techniques in photography, video-recording
and sound-recording with particular devices and signal-enhancing software, shadowing and evading
monitoring and surveillance, working through screens, computer and cell-phone hacking, special
tips and tricks and other do-it-yourselves, manipulating individuals and fundamentals in psychology
and behaviorism, arms training, paragliding, drone-pilotage, etc. Such courses are given either in
safe houses or on site in the shop or office where the teacher runs both his cover activity and his
secret trade, or else in isolated spots in the countryside, typically. Courses implying the reading of
classified documents and watching classified videos occur in DGSE units and cells located in public
service buildings, such as ministries, the National Bank, a police unit, publicly owned companies,
and also in intelligence units working under a private cover activity protected by heavy security
measures, such as high-end watches and jewelry, for example.
A particularity of the DGSE is that this agency owns and runs commonly a number of civilian
and ordinary training centers, each with a dual purpose: doing business and self-financing by selling
courses to ordinary people, and using readily available infrastructures for training C and B
categories staff on open and closed intelligence. It is not uncommon that a course on special
techniques be given to DGSE employees in a classroom, while ordinary customers are attending a
normal course in another in a same training center that is its cover activity. The latter do not notice
anything abnormal as classroom doors are closed during sessions, since DGSE employees and
agents look and behave as the ordinary individuals they are supposed to seem. The sole noticeable
particularity with such training centers being, courses in them often are given in their classrooms
during weekends, on a Sunday afternoon, typically. Overtime is not paid since “working in
intelligence is a patriotic duty and a sacrifice for the country,” but exceptions exist.
Another particularity of the DGSE and of the DGSI is to frequently organize collective courses in
certain large and well-known public universities, the latter lending a classroom for one hour or two
for this special circumstance, thanks to connections, complicities, and partnerships that these
agencies commonly enjoy.
The French intelligence community created its first specialized and official universities recently,
no earlier than in the 1990s, which teach in the fields of foreign languages, computer engineering,
telecommunications, and economic and financial intelligence. Two at least teach fundamentals in
intelligence, prepare certain recruits to work in intelligence agencies and to occupy positions abroad
in consulates, embassies, NGOs, and private companies working in sensitive sectors. They are the
École Supérieure d’Ingénieurs en Électrotechnique et Électronique–ESIEE (Higher School of
Engineers in Electrical Engineering and Electronics), and the Université Paris-Est Marne la Vallée–
UPEM (University of Eastern Paris and Marne-la-Vallée). Then we find more generalist schools and
colleges, below.
The Institut des Hautes Études de Défense Nationale–IHEDN (Institute for Higher National
Defense Studies) is a military college in Paris. Created in 1963, this prestigious establishment is
open to civilians, but it rather is a general education institution on the theme of defense. In 2010, the
IHEDN merged with the Délégation Générale de l’Armement–DGA’s (Directorate General of
Armament), and the Centre des Hautes Études de l’Armement–CHEAr (Centre for Higher
Armament Studies). Remarkably, in 1995, the IHEDN launched cycles on economic intelligence
and similar targeted seminars, which novelty betrays a still growing trend in French foreign
intelligence.
The Institut de Recherches Internationales et Stratégiques–IRIS (Institute for International and
Strategic Research) was created in 1991 in Paris. Equally prestigious and focusing on foreign
affairs, geopolitics, and strategy, the IRIS introduces itself as both an association, a think tank, and a
school since 2002, when it created IRIS Sup. Many among the most renowned French specialists in
geopolitics and strategy, and chief analysts of the DGSE are affiliated to this establishment. In
partnership with the ESC Grenoble (specialized in management studies), the IRIS delivers a
certificate in defense, security, and crisis management.
The European School of Political and Social Sciences–ESPOL of the Catholic University of Lille
was created in 2012. ESPOL proposes a European certificate in political science, and a master
degree in European and international studies.
For staffs under military status, there is the Centre de Formation Interarmées au Renseignement–
CFIAR aka CFIARS (Joint Intelligence Training Center) of the DRM, in Strasbourg. This military
school in which everything is classified focuses on advanced degrees in foreign language learning.
Yet it does not train spies solely to prepare them for working abroad, for most of those who are
trained in this establishment are expected to translate foreign telecommunications interceptions, and
to listening in underground facilities all day long to foreign telephone conversations with a headset.
Many agents (in particular) of the DGSE are sent abroad to study matters pertaining to their
future missions and specialties, based on their profiles. In this case, we find anthropology and other
particular branches in social sciences, particular areas in finance, human resources, electronics, IT,
data mining and analysis, etc. Those educational programs the more often unfold in European
countries outside of France. Some recruits go to study in other continents, and more particularly in
such other cases in Britain, the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, and others. Those study
trips abroad include language and cultural habits learnings.
Staffers with specialties in security and counterespionage receive police-like training courses
given by police officers and gendarmes, in the Gendarmerie Fort of Rosny-sous-Bois, mostly.
Recruits expected to work in domestic intelligence, and more particularly as signal technicians and
computer engineers in telecommunications interception also are trained by the Gendarmerie either,
in one of the three main training centers or schools of this corps. These are the CNFPJ, the CNFRO,
and the CNFSICG, all on the same Gendarmerie campus of Rosny-Sous-Bois, in Paris’ suburbs.
The CNFSICG has a specialty in telecommunications and computer engineering with a focus on
Linux, which is the nearly universal operating system of the French intelligence community today.
The Gendarmerie also trains specialists in surveillance, shadowing, and discreet housebreaking at
the training center of the GOS. This military corps also has the IRCGN in Pontoise, which gives
courses on criminal investigation and forensic police. Then there is the STI for those who must
learn modern car opening, carjacking, and sabotaging cars by resorting to electronic and computer
tricks and techniques—do not buy a modern car filled with electronic, if you are a spy, and look
instead for pre-1980s cars or any other with no electronic inside, much more reliable additionally!
I open a parenthesis to quote one of my ex-colleagues, Eric Denécé, former Commando Marine
and intelligence analyst at the DGSE, currently Director of the Centre Français de Recherche sur le
Renseignement–CF2R (French Center for Intelligence Studies), and creator in 1999 of the magazine
Renseignement et operations spéciales (Intelligence and Special Opérations)—with whom, as an
aside, I happened to talk in the early 2000s on the question of teaching in intelligence and of PR and
communication.[66]
“Since the mid-1990s, interest in intelligence studies has grown in France, resulting in a surge of
publications, seminars and training sessions on the theme. It is tempting to see in this surge the birth
of a ʻFrench School of Intelligence Studiesʼ. But such a school of thought, if it even exists, is still in
its infancy [Jan. 2012].
“Nevertheless, there is a growing awareness of the importance of intelligence as a subject for
study, signaling a major shift in the French mentality. This change comes on the heels of the
geopolitical upheavals of the post-Cold War era which have made intelligence an essential
instrument for an understanding of the new geopolitical landscape and consequently for scoping
future threats. France, like other world powers, cannot afford to overlook such a transformation.
“Those seeking to promote this sea change in the French psyche have had to overcome the
inherent reticence of the French people and their political leaders towards a profession that is still
viewed pejoratively, a phenomenon that explains the longstanding contempt shown towards it.
Above all, the academic community has come to the study of this ʻmissing dimensionʼ[67] in French
research in a singularly fragmented fashion.”[68]
Office employees in the DGSE are continuously updated on matters such as the unfolding of
foreign affairs, technical and scientific breakthroughs, and on new techniques, tactics and strategies
in intelligence (French and foreign). Those teachings the more often are collective, done in
classrooms, and introduced as conferences. Then there are film screenings on classified matters, and
even movie and TV series screenings commented by specialists. The genres of those films range
from espionage, politics, thrillers, and even to sci-fi. The “second reading” aka subtexts of Star
Wars, The Matrix, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Harry Potter, and The Prisoner are
explained there in a worthwhile and real-world fashion that make pass Variety and IMDb for media
for retards or preteens, I am sorry to say. In my case, I learned to spot and to decipher subtexts in
movies on one-to-one courses with an expert who initially trained as psychoanalyst.
Certain employees and contractors who joined a liberal masonic grand lodge learn intelligence
matters, and even tricks and methods in HUMINT on special sessions organized by particular
masonic branches called fraternelles (chapters). Then we find a rather rich knowledge informally
acquired through casual conversations between colleagues and co-workers, and mixing usual
gossips with rumors, internal breaking news of the succulent sort, personal testimonies, shared
opinions on hot topics, etc.
 All employees and agents who do not work “officially” in a service of the DGSE, and even field
agents, are seldom concerned with James-Bond-like gadgetry and gears. The rule of the need-to-
know that I will explain in the chapter 4 is accountable for this drastic limitation. Furthermore, the
DGSE considers that the less an agent or a contact abroad knows, the less he runs the risk that a
foreign counterespionage services frames him as a spy by analyzing his behavior; he must behave as
any ordinary individual. Then, the DGSE does not want to run the risk that a foreign
counterintelligence agency know about its technical capacities, techniques, tricks, mastery in certain
areas, tactics in intelligence, and priority objectives of the moment.
As much as possible, the field agent sent to work abroad must be a streetwise, handy, and
imaginative character, capable to cope with this technical handicap entirely by his own. If ever he
really needs to know a particular skill to execute his mission while he is abroad already, then this
problem is debated and considered carefully before sending someone to train him on the place, or
asking for it to an agent who is there already. Additionally, a field agent, agent, or contact, once
abroad must also avoid buying certain goods, such as a portable shortwave radio receiver, even if it
truly is for leisure activity. For any counterintelligence officer would inescapably consider this as an
incriminating clue, regardless whether it truly is a hobby or an all-personal fancy.
Spies abroad still use portable shortwave radio receivers today, despite the large secret
communications possibilities that the Internet is offering. For in nearly all countries, local
counterespionage agencies are in capacity to monitor stealthily the Internet traffic of any individual,
which includes all websites he may browse, and even TV channels he watches when DSL or cable
connected. For the moment, however, there is no technical means to find geographically someone
who is listening to radio communications, and the less so to which frequency. This old way to safely
receive secret instructions is still relevant today, simply because it is not “connected”. On the
contrary, any attempt to send secrets messages with this same means of communication is highly
likely to be monitored, and to be geographically located thanks to radio direction finding. The latter
subject will be tackled on again in a next chapter.
No one in the DGSE, insiders included, is left free to choose his career path and educational
program. All staffs are always ignorant of their future positions and career evolutions; such things
always come as good or unpleasant surprises, and the particularity comes to sustain an already
permanent feeling of uncertainty about everything.
One important part of the recruiting process of the future flying agent, i.e. highly trained, is to
strengthen his capacity to overcome anxiety and to keep calm in stressful situations. That is why he
is trained first to do petty thefts in various outlets and supermarkets on the French territory. Those
situations are real because the recruit indeed must feel the fear to be caught red-handed, with as
penalty his possible arrest by the police, real either. Then, as he has been brought in a situation of
economic precariousness, his incentive and motive are, he must steal to eat and to dress, indeed. In
the first days of this peculiar training, the recruit has a coach who trains him in the field and again in
real situation about how and where to spot spy cameras and security guards in plain clothes in large
stores and malls, and on how to evade these means of surveillance. The coach really steals things in
front of him, to show to him the right methods and behavior. Of course, he is not told that, in case he
or his coach is caught, then the security staff of the store will not call the police. Then he is asked to
steal alone, without any backing.
Above all, the latter experience will endow him with all boldness and physical courage he did not
have before. Usually, this kind of training program, made in urban environment to train a civilian
spy, even though he often is a military, is associated with the obligation to live as a homeless for a
period ranging from one to two months, in winter. Therefore, he is put in the obligation to sleep
outside in streets or in improvised shelters. The thus staged situation of urban survival in harsh
conditions is also set to oblige the recruit to put his imagination at work, and to see things and
understand behaviors that most ordinary people fail to notice. Every day, he must find suitable
solutions to eat, to wash himself, to sleep, and to dress. He must keep the physical appearance of
any normal citizen despite his homelessness; that is to say, to remain clean on him, shaved,
conveniently dressed, and in apparent good health. For example, his coach told him not to bother
washing his socks and underwear, but to make profit of his newly acquired skills to steals new ones
every day. The recruit is constantly and discreetly monitored in all his moves during this training,
and he must report about his health and his survival activities about once to twice a week. Overall,
this training is remarkably similar in its principle to another, carried out in a military and wartime
simulated context, i.e. behind enemy lines, in the 13d RDP.
 I underwent this training program in Paris in 1982. The man who trained me to steal was driver
for officials and executives working in the defense and aeronautics and space industries, and he had
been sent to live in Ivory Coast before he returned to France. The supervisor to whom I regularly
reported about my odd dailies earned officially his income from the renting of an apartment to
Olivier Todd, a renowned journalist and writer. He had begun his career in the DGSE while in the
1st RCP, and then stirred to working in intelligence with a first assignment in a French embassy
under the cover of porte-serviette (pouch carrier). I did all this under the fictitious identity of a
Lebanese born in Beirut, with a corresponding doctored passport, and so I caught a Lebanese accent
for the special circumstances and learned a little Arabic. Yallah!
Later, and according to what the recruit will be expected to do once the latter training ends, he
may also be trained to burglarize varied types of premises, starting with unprotected apartments and
houses, then with other houses this time protected by more or less sophisticated alarm systems. An
agent who has been thus trained, acquired by the same occasion all necessary skills and knowledge
to evaluate the level of difficulty of nearly any theft or break-in, this time in the contexts of
espionage and sabotage activities. This does not mean necessarily that he will be entrusted such
missions eventually, but rather to provide his thus acquired expertise with an initial assessment of
their feasibility.
Recruits expected to work in domestic intelligence and defensive counterespionage receive an
entirely different technical training program. First, they must learn many things about certain public
services, banking, and even telecommunications. For they will have to know where to look for when
they will need to know as much as possible on an individual living in France, and which means are
available to him for interfering with the professional activities and privacy of this target. That is
why they are brought to work for short periods, ranging from a few weeks to a few months, in
varied public services such as the internal revenue service, the post office, the social security
administration,[69] the main public energy provider EDF, and one telephone and Internet provider.
They also attend courses and trainings on telephone and cellular phones tampering and on
computers and Internet hacking. For example, they must be able to unlock a cell phone, to change
its operator, and to install in it a spying application (Trojan horse).
Firearms trainings dear to James Bond film lovers are not part of all training programs, all
specialties combined, except security, counterespionage, and agent’s handling. As I said, DGSE’s
employees and agents are not expected to kill anyone; intelligence is not conventional warfare nor a
police job. Yet a number of concerned spies were or are military, and so they have been trained with
various guns already.
Most guards of the Interior Security Service have been trained as gendarmes first, which puts
them in about the same situation as other military at this regard. Counterespionage specialists and
case officers are invited to do a little target shooting with police officers as instructors through
informal and friendly invitations, enough to obtain an official license to buy a personal gun with
their own money, or several if they can and want to.
On a general basis, trainings and particular courses do not follow the recruiting process, but at the
same time, and then all along a career and little by little, very informally and the more often through
one-to-one sessions. For three to four years, I gave some such courses to many employees of the
French intelligence community, but also to many officials working in ministries, public services,
state-owned television and radio stations, and to many journalists.
As this chapter suggests it, the DGSE is concerned with training and teaching its full-time
employees all along their careers, and on a broad range of matters and particular subjects that are
not necessarily relevant to intelligence per se. Everyone is encouraged to learn constantly, yet many
things are still restricted to those who have a need to know those matters, of course.
SPECIFICs AND PARTICULARITIES
As surprising as it may seem, agents and staff concerned with domestic influence and
counterinfluence do not learn any theory on French cultural heritage, called patrimoine national
(national heritage) but which can be reduced to patrimoine (heritage) in this specific context. For
they are recruited on their already existing knowledge and on their political orthodoxy, of course. In
short, they are supposed to know more or less about the French cultural heritage before their
recruitments, and that is all. If my reader remembers everything I explain in this book, then he will
rejoice to know more than most of those agents,
 For example, a recruit who is naturally demonstrating strong interest in music or in cinema or
both, and who is knowledgeable on these subjects indeed, is likely to see his career in intelligence
be stirred toward a specialty in the general field of influence and communication warfare. Along the
course of his recruitment and training, he will be introduced to specialists in the field, on one-to-one
meetings and teachings generally, simply because this branch employs a limited number of experts.
The task of the mentors and teachers will be to lead him towards a still more specialized area of a
knowledge he masters already.
Then, on those occasions he will be initiated to more or less secret matters, little by little, along a
hermetic process I will describe in the chapter 4 on security and compartmentalization of
knowledge. Ultimately, this whole will make up for this close but unofficial connection between
kultur, knowledge, national cultural heritage, and indoctrination of the specialist. All teachings are
mixed with leftist political indoctrination at one moment or another, anyway. The French
propagandist must believe in his own propaganda, indeed; that is to say, in his own lies—this I
never could, and so I faked it at times. I must make an aside about the latter specifics, below,
because it is an important point that concerns numerous other cases and people. I alluded to it once
only while summarily describing super-agents in the earlier chapter.
People who must hold important responsibilities in business, public service, politics, intelligence,
and who must access higher degrees in the GOdF must pass a particular and informal examination
on which they must express frankly their beliefs, values, and stances. The process is so informal
that, often, the would-be incumbent is unaware of the importance given to his answers, which he
delivers through a succession of casual conversations apparently accidental. The leftist stance must
be obvious in the answers. Distrust and even resentment toward the United States in particular is
expected. In a number of inescapable instances, the expected satisfactory answer is obviously
irrational; it could not be supported by any valid premise possibly, simply because it is a dogma.
That is how one not only is brought to lie to others, but also to himself, consciously. From this
particular come those visibly pre-formatted arguments and speech-style, sounding as a poem a child
is dispassionately and awkwardly reciting by heart in a classroom. The observing listener may
notice the pattern in the talks of French public servants sometimes. Those who succeed in being
convincing yet still sound as the other typical call centers style. This improves with age, though the
awareness of telling groundless dogmas remains true.
My elder brother who worked in counterintelligence was a good performer with it. However,
during a diner with other Freemasons and myself, he once told about an exam of this kind he had to
submit to, very formally before a committee in a masonic lodge. He said, “at some point,” I quote
him in substance from recollection, “too much was too much. I said to everyone that the rant is
pointless, since we all know perfectly what it is all about. We all are brothers, here. Therefore, I fail
to see why we would have to lie to each other and to fool ourselves”. Apparently, the consequences
for his outburst of sincerity were none.
If ever the recruit expresses a pronounced interest in American culture and arts, which often
happens, unavoidably, due to its worldwide popularity, then the coincidence will not be necessarily
worrying or eliminatory. Instead, the recruit will be softly and astutely encouraged to focus his
interest on the “alternative culture” of the latter country; that is to say, on all American artists who,
on purpose or not, loaded their works with leftist political contents and other anti-establishment
claims. Then learning may go as far as to finding leftist patterns and meanings in art works, which
truly were unintended and consequential to a personal partisan interpretation. For if anyone is
entitled to interpret anything his own way, the only truth admitted by those who have no idea will be
that of “who speaks the loudest,” to that effect. Taking Norman Rockwell as example, the emphasis
is put on his political opinions said-to-be communist, rather than on his works, even if one has to go
to great lengths to find communist propaganda in the works of this artist, in my opinion. So much so
that the recruit will be gradually indoctrinated a particular vision of American arts and culture,
which certainly is not the same as that of the average American.
More than that, the reader might again be surprised to learn that, in the DGSE, those who from
France are working on intelligence and offensive counterintelligence in the United States each year
organize joyful meetings in some villages of the Paris’ suburb. There, they celebrate Halloween and
Thanksgiving. During those events, we danced on country music tunes, and technicians in signal
interception and analysts disguised themselves in cowboys or in Native Americans. American flags
and streamers adorned the walls of the hall. The last of those parties I attended took place in the
Gretz-Armainvilliers’s town party hall, about six miles east from Paris, in plain sight, therefore. Yet
who cared or could understand? All this for the sole purpose to staying culturally immersed in a
foreign society we spied on all year long. Whoever sees this for the first time, and who knows the
real reason of it, inescapably finds it somewhat surrealist. Such a paradox, indeed.
Upon his joining a cell or a large unit, the recruit meant to be a specialist in influence learns
gradually the use of culture as means to influence people politically. Simultaneously, he learns to
spot foreign influence in everything, ranging from songs to pictorial and literary works, symbolism,
cinema, and advertising of course. This is how, along a course of several years, he will become an
influence or counterinfluence specialist since he must specialize. The perception of culture in
French domestic influence and counterinfluence is not taught formally through a linear educational
program one would expect to find in universities.
In the late 1990s, a common practice during the recruiting process was to give to a young recruit
a VHS cassette—now a DVD or a pirated copy on a USB key, I assume—of The Shadocks, and then
to casually ask to him his opinion about this French cartoon series, “in passing”. The odd plot
contrivance is made on instruction of the psychiatrist who is analyzing the recruit, for the fictional
society of The Shadocks may be perceived easily as a cartoon satire of the stringent internal rules
and of the general mentality inside the DGSE. The psychiatrist will make an additional assessment
of the profile of the recruit, according to comments and remarks the latter made on The Shadocks!
For the recruit actually is tricked and not told about the political content that was slipped into this
series of the 1960-1970s. Depending on what the recruit says, he may be deemed unfit or not yet
ready to occupy certain positions in the DGSE, as full-time employee in particular. The latter
assessment is highly likely if ever the recruit says, “I love The Shadocks cartoon series,” and the
contrary if ever he found it “boring or unpleasant to watch”. For anyone who enjoys watching at
least a few episodes of The Shadocks is thought highly likely to feel closer to the right of the
political spectrum!
The same test during the recruiting process is reproduced with the 1967 British TV series The
Prisoner, and all comments of the recruit about it are carefully considered; this actually is about
unsettling and highly monitored work environment and spycraft.
For reasons of which I know nothing, the DGSE regularly sends agents in countries of Central
Asia. I know of one DGSE agent who tripped for several months to Nepal,[70] and of several who
went to Mongolia.[71] Some recurrent patterns suggest, in the latter country they rather went there to
undergo additional trainings, possibly in connection with Russia, but again for reasons that remain
unknown to me to date.[72] Today, EIREL (Joint School of Intelligence and Language Studies) in
Strasbourg is putting the accent on the teaching of certain languages of Central Asia, of which, as an
aside, my ex-colleague Jean-Claude Gardin at some point became a familiar, of Tajikistan in
particular and in connection with Russian intelligence, apparently.
During the training of its future executives, the DGSE introduces in its doctrine a concept saying
that “intelligence is war” and that, since then, “civilian casualties” should be taken as a normal and
logical consequence. Indeed, I have seen some of my ex-colleagues who, following this
indoctrination, went as far as to indulge in self-delusion by worshiping pictures of medieval soldiers
and knights or of Napoleonic battlefields and related cult-like behavior. In the context of
intelligence activities abroad, that is only part of a set of eclectic values, and none can logically
connect with the others since they all have been picked up there and there for the sole recurrent
reason to justifying the unjustifiable from a moral standpoint. Therefore, I can deliver some others
to the reader, pell-mell, which all share to have been extracted from their entirely different original
contexts, including the Bible, even though the DGSE abhors Christian religion.
“Attack is the best defense”. “All who will take up the sword will die by the sword”. “Stand close
to your enemy”. “You are entitled with the right to do anything, except to be caught up”. “The State
has its reasons which reason knows nothing of”. “War is the continuation of politics by other
means”.
 4. Protection of Secrecy, Compartmentalization, Security.
CLASSIFICATION & NEED-TO-KNOW

T he English-speaking reader who not familiar with the realm of intelligence figures probably
that the enforcement of discretion and secrecy consists of a very formal oath signed down a
contract, and that about everything is secret bears a conspicuous stamp “SECRET”. I do not know
how secrecy is enforced in the United States and in the United Kingdom, exactly. It just seems that
the U.S. intelligence community is recording dutifully all its greatest secrets on documents and
Power Point crystal clear explanations. Things are more complex than that in France for a number
of reasons I am going to explain, unexpected to the reader in some instances, doubtless.
First, the protection of secrecy is enforced in two different ways that are, “formally and
explicitly,” and “informally and implicitly,” which I think could translate and be understood in the
United States as “secret” and “hush-hush,” respectively. In France, the most sensitive secrets just
cannot be classified legally for particular reasons that do not apply in the United States, certainly.
As a first and easily understandable example, the nature of the special relationship between
France and Russia forbids the constitutional enforcement of secrecy about nearly everything is
relevant to this particularity. For its scope is in no way official still at this time, and it can hardly be
anyway, although France and Russia signed formally a number of bilateral agreements since June
1966 at least, some of which implying permanent exchanges of sensitive matters, and even of highly
specialized staffs. At the moment I am typing this phrase, more than 1,000 Russians are working at
the French space base of Kourou in French Guyana, South America, and an unknown number of
French are working on aeronautics and space matters in Russia. More will be explained about all
this in the chapter 23, with a focus on intelligence, obviously.
Then we find particular measures serving the protection of secrecy, which have been adopted a
longtime ago, from the period of the First Empire to the early 19th century, and then perfected and
generalized from the birth of the Third Republic from the 1870s on. The current use of an official
protection of secrecy in France, as the reader may figure it, with clear degrees of classification, laws
on espionage, and corresponding sanctions, was not enacted before April 18, 1886, exactly. At about
the same time, French intelligence was being bureaucratizing and organizing in directorates,
services, and bureaus, and telecommunications interception was doing its debut in this country.
To the least, I can be clear about a unique provision that applies to all particularities and cases
relevant to security clearance, saying, in substance, “One may be entitled to know secrets in
proportion to the trust he is given”. Then trust is established from a variety of facts and variables,
unofficial for most, ranging from tests on one’s loyalty, personal stakes in never revealing secrets, to
one’s impossibility to reveal secrets under some threat. The three latter conditions may apply
simultaneously to an individual when the level of secrecy / responsibility is very high, though not
necessarily. Additional provisions of the intricate sort often are added; the reader will discover those
either.
Then the way the protection of secrecy is enforced is different from one realm of activity and
specialty to another. Having current access to highly sensitive information is not the same in the
technological and scientific sector as in an intelligence agency, although both are relevant to the
national interests of France, happen frequently to mix closely and are classified according to the
same rule when officially. Then the number of secrets an individual is brought to know along years
is also taken into consideration, especially when they relate to intelligence and politics. The director
of an intelligence agency himself is not entitled to know absolutely everything his employees know;
we will see in detail why and how. Because of one good reason, or of several minor reasons that
together becomes a major reason, an individual may see his access to new secrets being denied
abruptly at some point; thenceforth, he will not know more highly sensitive facts than those he
knows already.
Access to elevated levels of secrecy is not necessarily determined by seniority, experience, or
level of responsibility. The head of the State in France is largely ignorant himself of many secrets
concerning his own country, for a particular rule says that he, as the Director of the DGSE, for
example, has no “need to know” everything. That is all to the good because “we never know what
may happen”. Does the President of the French Republic really need to know in detail how the
DGSE conducts all its missions and operations? What usefulness could be to the Director of the
DGSE to know the names of all sources and agents his agency runs? None, objectively.
 No one in France knows all secrets. Actually, the latter are held collectively by a large number of
people who concert and act together in the service of the interests of the country. They are instructed
not to share those secrets between themselves, in order to better protect them, precisely. This is
called “cloisonnement,” which translates literally as “partitioning” but more exactly as
“compartmentalization” in intelligence in English speaking countries. Additionally, in order to
guarantee that the secrecy will not be breached, those people are made implicitly aware that the
positions they hold and their career depend also on the privilege they are entrusted with holding
secrets that few other people know. Whence the aphorism, “Secret is power,” in passing.
One assumption the reader must get rid of to understand what secrecy is in French affairs and
intelligence, is that of “a neat caesura that would exist between intelligence affairs and all other
activities and domains”. Most people wrongly assume that the activities of an intelligence agency
are at the image of its headquarters: a gathering of buildings isolated from the rest of the society by
high walls, barbed wires, guards, and surveillance cameras. In France, all these stringent and
impressive security measures actually protect intelligence activities of an administrative and
bureaucratic nature essentially, and the latter are even not all concentrated in this place anyway.
For the record, French spies are working scattered throughout the country, though with an
important concentration in Paris and in the suburbs of this city, it is true. Thus, they cannot know all
their colleagues and what each is doing exactly, which comes as a first elementary measure of
secrecy. If each French spy daily commuted to the headquarters of the DGSE, boulevard Mortier,
Paris, then it would be easy to other foreign intelligence agencies to take pictures of them stealthily,
and to know where they live, and their real identities in the end. French agents, case officers, and a
number of other specialists never go to the headquarters of the DGSE in their lives, simply because
they do not need to know what there is in this place to execute their tasks and missions. Neither
there is a need to go to this place to discuss important and sensitive matters, as the TV series The
Bureau suggests it deceptively. The latter can be done advantageously in the comfortably furnished
cellar of a private and anonymous house in the countryside, and it happens frequently that way, for
that matter.
In fact, the need of a distinct place for the DGSE to have headquarters is justified by reasons of
administrative nature mainly, especially today since very large quantities of information and
documents can be digitalized and stored in computer data servers. For the main official mission of
the DGSE is to inform the political apparatus on things that cannot be heard on television and read
in newspapers, let alone the correct synthesizing of all news abroad that journalists cautiously
abstain from doing so. In its headquarters, the DGSE gathers pertinent facts coming from a large
number of services, units, cells, and individuals, to make from them reports and recommendations
to the presidential palace, ministries, public bodies, and even the French private industry and
economy. The degree of sensitivity of those documents is evaluated there, and indicated on them
accordingly, exactly as in TV series and documentaries. In France, degrees of secrecy when stated
officially are the following, from lowest to highest.
First, we find Diffusion Restreinte–DR, or “Restricted,” which is not a classification degree, but
an indication of low-level protection. The main purport of “Restricted” is to make the user aware of
an expected discretion when handling the information formally covered by this indication. Then we
find the real degrees of classification

Confidentiel Défense–CD, or “Confidential Defense,”

Secret Défense–SD, or “Secret Defense,” and

Très Secret Défense–TSD, or “Very Secret Defense,” which is the highest and very
rarely encountered.

The indications of secrecy above are in use in civilian public bodies, in the military, and in public
and private, industrial, and technological, sectors when they connect to defense at some point, with
a large majority of levels “CD” and then “SD” documents. To be officially entitled the right to
access these levels of security clearance, one must submit a filled form titled “94A”—formerly
titled “65A”. Fields to be filled on this form relate to things such as name, birthdates, places of birth
of one’s parents, grandparents, and whether there are foreigners in one’s family. Then the Haut
Fonctionnaire de Défense et de Sécurité–HFDS (Senior Defense and Security Official) is competent
to clear individuals at the Confidentiel Défense and Secret Défense levels. Then the Secrétaire
Général de la Défense et de la Sécurité Nationale–SGDSN (Secretary General of Defense and
National Security) is the only one official qualified to granting a “TSD” clearance.
In civilian public and private bodies and businesses, a security clearance is requested to the
Fonctionnaire de Défense et de Sécurité–FDS (Defense and Security Officer). A large number of
civilians, officials and elected politicians, scientists and engineers working in public services and
civilian companies have a security clearance. A security clearance is delivered within two to three
months, typically, and it remains valid from five years for a “TSD” clearance, to ten years for the
“CD” and “SD” levels.
First generation immigrants can be cleared at the “CD” and “SD” levels. Then, as in the United
States where exists a particular level of secrecy called NOFORN (No Foreign Nationals), there is a
Spécial France–SF (Special France) corresponding sub-level in France.
Notwithstanding, to be granted a security clearance, even at the highest level, does not mean one
is allowed to see all documents thus classified because the provision of compartmentalization of
secrecy aka need-to-know overrules security clearance. The latter is called formally besoin d’en
connaître, literal and exact translation of “need to know”. For practical reasons, thenceforth, I will
use the expressions and noun “need-to-know” and “compartmentalization” in this book.
People entitled to carry and to receive officially classified documents have to respect the
following rules and measures of security.
“A classified document or material may be carried by authorized persons at the appropriate level,
or by internal staffs of the service or organization holding a Décision de Sécurité Convoyeur–DSC
(Carrier Safety Decision) only. The latter decision does not grant a carrier (courier) any access to
classified information, however.
“When carried, the notions of classified information, processes, objects, documents, and
computer data or files of a secret nature are subject to the following provisions.
“They all bear a red stamp indicating their level of secrecy. Classified documents must be
received formally upon their delivery and recorded separately. Outside operating periods and in any
case at the end of the day, classified documents must be stored in a safe or strong cabinet.
“However, all carried classified documents are packaged in double envelopes with maximum
security and safety measures. Receipt of the document involves the examination of the physical
integrity of the container and registration of the document. The outer envelope, covered with plastic
and numbered, must not bear any mention that might reveal that it contains a classified document—
except an anonymous wax seal, as this happens. The inner envelope in strong paper contains ʻA
slipsʼ and ʻBʼ for the packing slip. The A slip is kept by the recipient, and the B slip must be
returned to the issuing service upon signing (acknowledgment of receipt).
“A classified document cannot be faxed or scanned for electronic routing.
“A classified document on computer support (CD Rom for example) can be read on a computer
not connected to a network only.
Actually, the carrier presented above often is a gendarme in uniform, sometimes a low-ranking
commissioned officer of the Gendarmerie.
“When the document is sent on a digital medium (USB key or disk), it must be processed
according to its classification level. In practical terms, this medium can be used to view or to print
documents on a dedicated computer that is not connected to a network only, except trusted and
“airgap” secure networks, i.e. Intranet. Otherwise, the following procedure must be followed.

1. Above a certain level of confidentiality, the computer must be in a protected

room.[73]

2. Disconnect all wireless connection tools (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth).

 3. Turn off the computer and all its peripherals.

4. Disconnect the network cable, any modem, and any cable connecting a device
except the local and personal printer if ever there is one.

5. Turn on the computer and printer.

6. View, and print if necessary.

7. Do not try to save the document on any medium (hard disk in particular) or on
another device such as a USB key.

8. Then turn off the computer and the printer again.

9. Reconnect cords to the network and devices.

10. Power on the equipment.

“Classified documents cannot simply be discarded after use. They must be destroyed
appropriately so that they cannot be reconstituted even piecemeal, and authorized persons only can
proceed to their destruction. The main modes of destruction are incinerating, grinding, and
shredding. For example, a computer hard disk having contained classified information will have to
be cut into pieces by shearing. All destructions must be recorded on a registration book, and there is
a special procedure above the Confidentiel Défense–CD level.”
As says another rule for certain sensitive documents one is not supposed to work with or on, one
is allowed to read it in presence of its official holder and in a closed office only.
When in foreign countries, the document must be transferred through specialized military mail or
diplomatic bag. Transport is done by an authorized carrier or habilitated person for mail under
40lbs. The letter must bear a seal mentioning, “Par valise accompagnée – sacoche” (By
Accompanied Pouch – Mail Pouch).
Note that the stringent rules above apply to certain very official administrative bodies and
buildings only, such as intelligence agencies headquarters, certain areas and cells of the Ministry of
Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of the Interior, a number of other intelligence
agencies, certain departments of the Ministry for the Economy and Finance, and consulates and
embassies, between other few examples.
Actually, the classification levels we have reviewed are rarely used internally in the DGSE, for
two reasons at least. The first is that all employees of the DGSE working at the headquarter, janitors
and cooks included, have a Secret Defense–SD security clearance at minimum because everything
and everyone that can be seen in its buildings is classified to this level of secrecy. Therefore, when
we see in video documentaries showing realities, or in fictions, documents on desks in the DGSE
headquarter bearing the red mark “CONFIDENTIEL DEFENSE,” it means they have been printed
to be sent to other public bodies, and not for internal use, as this level is below the SD classification
level, and its indication would be pointless or absurd otherwise.
Internally in the DGSE, and in the French military intelligence agency DRM, there is another
system of classification also printed in red ink, which is not really one from a formal standpoint,
presented below in the same order of importance.

Urgent–U (Urgent).

Très Urgent–TU (Very Urgent).

Très Très Urgent–TTU (Very Very Urgent).

Flash–F (Flash).

After that, we find a very particular and specifically French means for protecting the secrecy of
sensitive information, in use for centuries, called blanc, or “blank,” which the reader would
translate as “blank copy,” probably. In a large majority of instances, and more especially in nearly
all DGSE intelligence units and cells working in secrecy under varied public and private cover
activities, staffers use blancs in the larger sense of this word, which bear no headers nor stamps that
could suggest their real sensitive nature nor who their authors are. For they relate to sensitive
subjects or pieces of intelligence, whose natures are considered too sensitive and potentially very
damaging in case, ever possible, of their accidental disclosure or loss. A highly sensitive document
cannot incriminate anyone gravely, and it cannot be used as evidence in a court or when leaked to
the media if there is no mention on it of a credible author. No one will ever take seriously what it
says or reports, simply for wants of any information on its origin. Thus, and paradoxically, an
unofficial blanc often relates to an information that is as sensitive as an official SD or TSD
classified document. The formal difference between the two types is that the former cannot
incriminate its author in any fashion, whereas the latter does.
There is even a higher degree of secrecy, likewise informal, which commands to never write or
type a highly sensitive information, and more especially secret instructions and orders, and to
formulate it orally only, instead. As actual example, with rare exceptions, this book exposes a large
number of sensitive information that never were officially classified, simply because their
classification in itself would constitute an official acknowledgement by the France of their actuality.
As a matter of fact, this paradox is increasingly encountered in some other countries, each time
sensitive tasks and the handling of sensitive information are entrusted to private companies usually
called “contractors”. This come to explain, in Anglo-Saxon countries in particular, the purpose of
the colloquial expression “hush-hush”. In other words, the permanent denial of a fact or
responsibility and the inexistence of any document relating to it is a way to turn round the problem
of an ever possible leak, i.e. “one cannot reveal a secret that does not exist”.
The two particular measures of protection of secrecy above are the cause of the paradox that the
higher degree of secrecy one is entitled to, the fewer red-stamped documents one will see!
Even in certain buildings sheltering secretly units and cells working on highly sensitive matters,
security provisions are very discreet and even camouflaged because the State denies their existence
and what is debated and happening within their walls, to begin with. People working in most of
those units and cells are instructed never to use words and acronyms pertaining to the field of
intelligence, starting with the acronym “DGSE”. So that even in case a person with no security
clearance sees one of those secret yet anonymous documents accidentally, then he would hardly
understand their complete meanings and implications, and he would throw them away, probably. For
example, during the late 1990s, in such particular undercover unit, I was shown some technical
photos of a secret and particular flying espionage device that did not bear any official stamp or
particular indicating they were property of the DGSE. However, the level of security in this unit was
highly elevated, under the pretense—camouflage is a more suitable word as we will see in the
chapter 12—that the building where it was working was the design department of Fred, a renowned
French high-end jewelry manufacturer. In fact, I never saw red stamps “secret” otherwise than on
documents of a military nature, exclusively, and the sole exception in civilian official middle was an
old investigation file typed in the early 1960s. Other highly sensitive documents I saw, relating to
personalities and high-ranking officials, bore no indication of secrecy whatsoever.
 In the goal to protect secrecy, and more especially to deny anytime the responsibility of the
DGSE and France in its most sensitive involvements and undertakings, the necessary learning of
certain secrets is subject to a peculiar teaching method I explain, below.
Knowledge and learning in this agency come gradually and slowly along a lifetime, as an
“endless initiation,” or as in the Freemasonry, would exclaim the thus enlightened reader. This is
especially true for intelligence officers, cases officers, certain agents of the higher sort, and for
valued contractors who are not formally hired. Those people acquire a particular knowledge about
France and on the World in general with respect to foreign affairs, simultaneously. This rather
generalist knowledge is not supposed to reach the minds of the public, although the spies of all the
most advanced countries know it either.
The teaching method consists in resorting to unspoken metaphors, passing references, and other
double meanings, simply because it relates to secrets that are even not supposed to exist. The slow
and gradual accumulation of this secret knowledge may easily and metaphorically suggest a piling
up of “layers” of secrets, yet unclear “pieces of knowledge” that thus overlap and add to each other
along years of acquired trust. Together, those “layers,” each formally called degrés de conscience,
or “awareness degrees,” form the general picture of a situation that makes sense over time,
gradually. Then this gradual access to secrets is another and parallel way to raise up silently the
ladder of an unofficial and informal hierarchy in knowledge.
In my attempt to provide an accurate description of this peculiar teaching that even those who are
concerned with find difficult to understand at times, it will help the reader figure, metaphorically, a
large sheet of tracing paper with the drawing of a mechanical part on it. He is told that the latter is a
“component of a secret machine” of which he has no need to know more “at this time”. Yet he needs
to know how this part works because he is entrusted its “servicing”. So, he does it because he feels
honored to be trusted by the owners of the secret machine, even though he cannot possibly figure
the rest of it. Then, a few years later, he is given another similar sheet with another component
drawn on it, for he has been doing a good job with the servicing of the first, and he never told
anyone about it, as expected. Now, if he superimposes these two sheets of tracing paper he is
entrusted, he can understand, at last, that the first part is supposed to “feed the second with
something”. Yet he still does not know much more about the whole machine, but he is happy
anyway because he is now entrusted greater responsibilities and he enjoys greater consideration
from the owners. In other words, he rose up a ladder of an informal and secret hierarchy that must
not have any official existence.
Along the following years, he will be given other plans, and always-greater responsibilities, again
because “he did a good job” and never told anyone about the existence of a secret machine. All he
can do about the purpose of the secret machine is to hazard some guesses. It seems to be “a jet
engine” or a “turboprop,” maybe; he would need to see more plans to figure this out. Maybe, he will
live long enough “to know it all” someday, if he shows suitable capacities, discretion, and
intelligence to take care of the secret machine in its entirety. He is happy with what he got because
he knows many things about the machine that his colleagues do not. He may consider that each plan
he was given, each time entrusted him a higher awareness degree, which is a reality because this
also grants certain other privileges, such as the implicit consideration of senior executives and
access to key members in the Government. “Secret is power, and trust is the reward;” that is the rule
of this so particular rule.
Another metaphor the reader is certainly familiar with is that of the hero in fiction who is
entrusted mysterious things, apparently unrelated to each other, such as a key with a number on it,
incomprehensible rhymes written on small pieces of paper, a broken watch locked on a precise time,
and the like. At the end of the story and not before he will find out what the whole of these things
means exactly because they must be pieced together correctly to make sense. The only way to do
this is to get through extraordinary and bizarre ordeals, and to show patience and tenacity. The trick
is meant to creating mystery and suspense, things made to overwhelm the mind, again.
In the DGSE, the goals with this particular method are to enforce a secret hierarchy, and to never
naming things that one is not supposed to talk about openly and explicitly, even with one’s closest
colleagues. It is not so important in the absolute, if ever one piece only of a highly sensitive
knowledge is lost or leaked because as taken alone it will never make any sense to someone who
does not know all the others. This way of protecting secrecy is far more effective than eye-catching
“TOP SECRET” red stamps.
 Sometimes, resorting to the method above actually is a trick to keep someone under one’s
authority: an agent, an under-agent, or even a source. Many case officers successfully run their
agents for long years thanks to narratives and tales the reader would find similar to Benjamin Gates
and Indiana Jones’ stories. Thus, the real aims, highly sensitive, remain protected against their ever-
possible disclosure by someone who is not trustworthy enough or who is unable to grasp their full
implications.
End of metaphors and back to reality: the awareness degree that an intelligence officer must have
to continue his job with effectiveness can be likewise described as a capacity acquired by
experience and in prolonged contact with intelligence work. It purports to help seeing the real aims
hidden under the formal aims, necessary to take the right decisions in emergency and to guess truths
behind excuses, alibis, narratives, and even to suspect correctly and quickly that an individual
apparently ordinary is a spy in actuality, based on his professional activities, demeanor, and other
specifics. Additionally, awareness degrees are as many accesses to a knowledge made clearer
gradually about how politics and foreign affairs really work; that is to say, realpolitik. Finally,
awareness degrees are as many advantages a spy has over the uninitiated, especially when he is
expecting to manipulate him and to recruit him as agent, under-agent, or source. In English-
speaking countries, spies name colloquially this special knowledge “witchcraft” sometimes because
this other metaphor suits well the comparison between the abilities of the ordinary people and those
of the spy. As an amusing aside, if taken as a metaphor, the Harry Potter film series much sums up
how the career of a counterintelligence or security officer unfolds; but that is a conceit of mine, of
course.
For the two past centuries, the French intelligence community has been a dedicated practitioner of
another particular method to guarantee the loyalties not only of many of its agents, but also of the
members of the elite, political, financial, and even cultural. It is called dossier secret, or “secret
dossier”. A dossier secret is filled with much more information than an ordinary police individual
card or file. In its principle, it is a files folder that may contain photos, copies of original documents,
sound and video records of morally and / or legally disputable and compromising facts with regard
to the privacy of the interested. This collection of facts is made in view to secure a leverage for an
eventual use that may never happen; that is to say, a guarantee of loyalty and unofficial and secret
obedience with respect to the interest of public affairs or else. The compromising evidences could
be called colloquially, “skeletons,” and the folder that contains them, “cupboard”.
The dossier secret would have been invented and its name coined by Minister of Police Joseph
Fouché between 1799 and 1810. Since then, the system of the dossier secret has always been the
most efficient ploy to secure the loyalty and obedience of all French politicians and prominent
personalities in France, up to the President himself since he is a party man elected by the public.
From the late 19th century to the WWI, the 1st Bureau of the 3d Division of the Police kept the
dossier secrets. However, the Chief of the police was not granted the right to access their contents
because he, too, was a party man and often a politician himself. Between the WWI and WWII, the
RG took over the safeguarding of the dossier secrets, and since the end of the WWII, the SDECE,
and then its successor the DGSE, that is to say the military, took over the responsibility. Since then,
each dossier secret is filled with intelligence often collected by the police, the Gendarmerie, the
Brigade financière, the DGSE, and intelligence units of the police and the Gendarmerie with a
specialty in domestic intelligence. Ex-senior DGSE executive Maurice Dufresse was entrusted the
responsibility to fill and to keep dossier secrets. I will quote his testimony about the practice in the
chapter 23, at an opportune moment; the reader needs to know other facts and fundamentals before
this.
COMPARTMENTALIZATION OF ACTIVITIES
All particular provisions taken to protect secrecy derive from the adoption by the DGSE, some
decades ago, of the doctrine of active measures, to be explained in the chapter 12, and exemplified
by other explanations and through a number of anecdotes in this book. This explains why the inner
workings of the DGSE do not match organizational charts, and descriptions of formal and
bureaucratic-like chain of command that this agency sometimes leaks to the media and on the
Internet. Actually, everything outside the DGSE headquarters truly works much as the French
clandestine Resistance during the WWII did, mostly due to tight compartmentalization and secrecy
in this agency. Everything must appear as what it is not in reality, and the reverse is true. All this
results ultimately in a specific French approach of intelligence, much different of what it is in the
United States, actually closer to Russian concepts and mores, though important differences remain
in the perception that France and Russia have of spycraft, respectively, as we shall see either.
Besides, strict specialization does not really exist in the DGSE in reality. A specialist in foreign
intelligence may be called to carry on domestic and foreign counterintelligence occasionally or the
reverse. An analyst may be called to help in surveillance. A specialist of a region of the World may
be called to shift to influence or counterinfluence activities, etc.
To help the reader understand my explanations in this book, the hierarchical organization of the
DGSE mixing employees under military and civilian statuses is a follow, from top to bottom.

1. Director of the DGSE, appointed by the President of the Republic, and assisted
by a

2. Deputy Director, who generally is in charge of the security in this agency, and has
often been a military of the Gendarmerie corps for this reason. In passing, the same
provision applies in ordinary regiments of the military, although it remains unofficial
and untold to date.

3. Directors of Directorates, who each can head one or several Services whose
responsible bellow them are called

4. Chiefs of Service, who each head large bodies clustered in specialized sub-
services, units, and cells hiring full-time employees and contractors.

5. Regional Chiefs of Regions in territorial France, heading small groups of staffers.

6. Chiefs of Stations abroad, who may head small groups of staffers.

7. Exterior contractors, either working in small clusters or alone under varied

cover activities.

8. Consultants, who are professionals with high skills in the civilian middle and in
highly specific areas.

9. Supervisors (controleurs), tasked to supervise the works of case officers and

intelligence officers, and to check their validity.

10. Intelligence officers and case officers, working alone under varied cover
activities, though some such intelligence officers may have a planton (orderly) in
charge of their security and tasked to assist them for minor tasks.

11. Barbouzes, who often are ex-military in special units and serving on a more or
less regular basis, especially in shadow and dirty missions and operations.
 12. Contacts, formerly called “Honorable Correspondants–HC,” who are trusted
individuals acting out of patriotism, and former employees of the DGSE or ex-
military or police, helping occasionally and on demand.

13. Agents, field agents, flying agents (operatives) and super-agents acting in France
and in foreign countries.

14. Under-agents and sources, who are supplying intelligence or carrying on other
particular missions and tasks, often without knowing clearly which interest they are
thus serving, exactly.

The DGSE enforces the need-to-know both within full-time office staffs and outside with
contractors, intelligence officers, case officers, and agents. Compartmentalization means that an
employee must never talk in detail about his work to any of his co-workers, except to his direct
hierarchical superior, and even not above this level. The rule applies to senior managers up to the
Director of the DGSE. The Director of the DGSE himself has a need-to-know what his directors of
directorates are doing, but he cannot bypass the authority of a director of directorate to look by
himself at what a chief of service is doing because the latter only is granted the right to oversee the
specifics of what his service is doing. Then the same rule applies to a director of directorate, who
must not look at the details of what the chiefs of units or cells of the service(s) under the
administrative responsibility of his own directorate are doing. If a director of directorate wants to
know something about the latter, then he must ask for it to his direct subordinate the Chief of
service, who alone has a need-to-know details of that order. Thereof, it comes to no surprise that a
Director of directorate has no right to ask for details about the ongoing activities of any of the other
directorates and their services that are not under his direct authority. Only the Director of the DGSE
is entitled to ask and to obtain the latter information, but he must ask for it to the concerned Director
of this directorate, and to no one else below this rank. The same applies to the Chief of a service
who cannot go to see one of his analysts and ask to him where his intelligence comes from exactly.
As constraining as it may seem, this strict rule has the virtue to limiting the “sum” of highly
sensitive details that any employee in intelligence can possibly know, be he a senior and highly
trusted executive regardless. If ever this rule did not exist or was not strictly enforced, then simply
abducting or bribing handsomely the Director of the DGSE would be good enough to know
everything or almost about the works of this intelligence agency, beginning with the names of its
most important sources abroad, and the same remark applies to a Chief of service.
The caesura between directors of directorates and the staff of their respective services they
administratively command seems to be the deepest. Another rational explanation for this state of
things says, a Director of directorate and his assistants are part of a body responsible for
administering staffs and their needs, and for ordering specific tasks and missions to their services,
and then for transmitting the synthetized results of this work to the political apparatus via the
Director of the agency. This senior executive has no business in being in direct touch with the
various units responsible for producing this activity. This means that if a chief of service is still
integrated in “production,” i.e. the service he is responsible for from an administrative viewpoint
because he is in more or less direct and permanent touch with all his subordinates, yet his director
above him is completely and even physically detached from it. The latter rule applies because a
director of directorate has close and regular relations with the directors of other directorates already,
and with the Director of the DGSE with whom he daily concerts to organize the works of the entire
intelligence agency, administratively.
Arrows indicating flows of communication on the diagram on the next page show that there is no
reciprocity in production exchange even within a same service, and that no one can bypass even a
single link of the chain of command. The same diagram does not show “exterior consultants,” who
each may be in touch at varied levels of responsibilities in the hierarchy, and according to their
levels of expertise. For example, the chief of a cell has exterior consultants with highly specifics
expertise relevant to his occasional needs, and he can interact directly and physically with them—a
highly specialized engineer, scientist, or historian, as examples.
 However, if a Chief of service also enjoys the collaboration of his own consultants, the more
often he will interact cautiously with them through “intermediaries” who are his direct subordinates,
which means that he happens indeed to meet those consultants in person, on a case-by-case basis.
Then this does not mean that exterior consultants know reciprocally the real jobs and positions of
those they thus meet and help in person. At best, they know or guess they are interacting “with the
DGSE,” or even with “a representative of an unknown agency of the intelligence community” or of
“some ministry”.
It happens of course that the chief of a service visits one of his units, just to make sure that
everything seems to be working normally and smoothly, that the rules of work are respected there,
and that the premises are clean and properly equipped, etc. Again, following the previously
mentioned rules of the need-to-know, he is not entitled to sit behind an analyst’s computer screen
and to peer at what he is doing exactly, nor at his paperwork.
Understanding the rule of compartmentalization is easier when it is called “need to know”. The
Director of the DGSE needs to know if a given foreign country is secretly preparing for war, but he
does not need to know in the absolute who exactly in the government of this country betrayed this
secret. This complementary information would be of no practical usefulness to him anyway. If ever
the President asks to the Director of the DGSE how he knows this secret, the latter will simply
answer, at best, that his intelligence agency “has a valuable source in the government of this
country”. That will be all because the President has no interest in detail such as the identity of a
source of the DGSE. The Director of the DGSE could not provide the President with this
information anyway, since he does not know it himself, due to the internal rules I just explained.

Because of all those security provisions, years of professional experience in French intelligence
are required to figure out certain aspects only of its inner workings, and one can do this rather by
crosschecking data and guesses, and then through deductive reasoning, exactly as any chief analyst
does. The rule of compartmentalization aims to limit to a strict minimum what each employee and
executive really needs to know to carry on his daily duties and to execute his missions. However, no
matter how well this precautionary measure is enforced, a human being cannot behave as faultlessly
as a machine. Rumors and gossips, passing reference, allusions, winks and nods, mistakes, and
accidental exposures also exist in an intelligence agency, exactly as in any other governmental body
or private company.
Now, the reader understands that the staffs of a service of the DGSE, up to the Director of a
directorate, are as ignorant as the public can be of what the other services of the DGSE are doing
exactly. Those people are even completely ignorant of where their staffs are working, just because
they do not need to know this to carry on their duties. In point of fact, the reader may assume with
confidence that administrative staffs of all directorates of the DGSE are working in its headquarters
of Boulevard Mortier, which include operational staffs receiving all refined intelligence that the
political apparatus needs and asked for. That is to say, the synthetized intelligence on which further
courses of action in clandestine activities are set up and ordered, in accordance with the cycle of
intelligence.
Then we find other services tasked to carry on other aspects of the management of human
resources, infrastructures, particular services such as accounting, etc.
SECURITY
In the late 1970s, in the SDECE, counterintelligence aka CE, and the Interior Security Service
aka Service de Sécurité–SS (Security Service) were subsumed in a generalist body called Service de
Contre-Espionnage et de Sécurité–SCES (Counterespionage and Security Service). The head of the
SCES generally was a high-ranking officer of the Gendarmerie (colonel or general) in permanent
touch with the Director of the SDECE, with the official function of Deputy Director. The SCES was
dissolved in 1981-1982, when the SDECE was renamed DGSE and profoundly restructured,
“officially” under the lead of freshly appointed Director of the DGSE Pierre Marion. In reality, it
was an upheaval that owed to considerable changes in the French Government, following the
coming of the Socialist Party and of the Communist Party in power, in addition to other important
facts that the reader will discover later in this book.
Still in early 1981, there were no official and clear rules in the SDECE on the measures of
security and compartmentalization. Since 1982, counterespionage i.e. offensive counterespionage is
separated from the Security Service in this agency. Counterespionage is integrated in the larger field
of counterintelligence, whose mission has been redefined since the adoption of the doctrine of active
measures at the same latter period.
Since then, the DGSE has a Service de Sécurité (Security Service) with two distinct categories of
staffers: one being the Service de Sécurité Extérieur (Exterior Security Service), and the other the
Service de Sécurité Intérieur (Interior Security Service). The latter in particular is a detached unit of
the DRSD, whose staff is largely made up of military recruited in the Gendarmerie.[74] Until circa
2005-2008, the Exterior Security Service was made up of military wearing uniforms, yet officially
recruited by a private company owned by the DGSE, and it was put more or less officially under the
authority of the Interior Security Service. For years, guards of the Exterior Security Service at the
DGSE headquarter had the particularity to wear odd gray-green uniforms much alike those of the
East-German VolksPolizei, without equivalent in the history of France. The oddity has been the
subject of countless questions in the DGSE, never answered, and of remarks and running jokes of
the bittersweet sort. Who designed this uniform so foreign to France has remained a mystery to
many, including the agency’s top executives.
Today, the Exterior Security Service is a particular escadron (squadron) of the Gendarmerie under
the authority of the DRSD. Its gear knew a considerable overhaul, with a Gendarmerie French style
uniform at last, and Heckler und Koch–HK 9mm German submachine-guns. Its staff enjoys
technical means for searches and inspections of clothing, luggage, and vehicles.
Overall, the responsibility of the Security Service is hovering between that of a counterespionage
service and that of a security department in a supermarket, except that its field of action extends to
the discreet monitoring of the privacy of full-time employees, including their leisure and activities at
home, and even their relatives, friends, and acquaintances. People working outside DGSE premises
are thus watched either.
As shown on the diagram on the next page, the staff of the Security Service is separated distinctly
into local offices, one per service, and one Gendarmerie officer per unit, called Officier de Sécurité–
OS (Security Officer). The Director of the Security and its managerial staff are working at the
headquarters of the DGSE either, in immediate proximity to the Director of this agency.
Security officers who are assigned the surveillance of a particular unit or service cannot legally
intervene in another. At the top of the hierarchy of the Security Service, independent to all
directorates, the same system of compartmentalization applies. There is an Interior Security Service
in the directorial building, which monitors the activities of the directors of directorates, their
assistants, and office staffs. The Interior Security Service is a quiet but zealous and much dreaded
police force in the DGSE, and it is in capacity to monitor stealthily all activities in each building.
As the Interior Security Service enjoys the status of gendarme, in addition to this of military hired
officially by and under the command of the DRSD, it has access to all ordinary means of police
investigation, including scientific police techniques and assistance that the Gendarmerie provides.
 There is a trick in the DGSE to catch red-handed an employee suspected to smuggling sensitive
documents. It consists in marking paper documents entrusted to him with a tiny and invisible
radioactive yet harmless substance (radium), which will trigger a Geiger counter concealed at the
exit for ordinary staffers. As this exit is an electronically locked full height turnstile, then this
counter may be connected to it, to lock the turnstile automatically while the employee carrying the
detected radioactive substance is crossing it. Thus, the turnstile imprisons the culprit, and an alarm
rings until the Security Service unlocks this access and proceeds to his arrest. The Interior Security
Service also has concealable Geiger counters it uses to discreetly identify a culprit through “brush
contact,” in order not to alert him and to carry on further investigations onto whom he is handing
sensitive documents (real or made bogus for this special circumstance).
Any employee of the DGSE is supposed to report to his hierarchical superior about anything he
may find suspicious. Then this information is relayed to the local correspondent of the Interior
Security Service when outside of the headquarters, or to the Security Officer inside, who dispatches
at once an investigator to interview this employee in order to assert, first, the seriousness of the
testimony. When the DGSE suspects it has been penetrated by a foreign agent—popularly called
“taupe” (mole), or sous-marin (submarine) in French intelligence jargon—or that one of its
employees is leaking sensitive information, then the Interior Security Service is assigned the task to
finding out the culprit.
The Security Service occupies special place and status within the DGSE because it never
cooperates reciprocally in intelligence activities with any of the other services, and its members
must not engage in personal relationships with the staff it watchdogs. Its members are seen as
isolated individuals and as a dreaded interior police force collectively. Most security officers
enlisted in the French Gendarmerie before the DRSD recruited them. The latter keep their status of
gendarmes, which quality entitles them the right to carry arrests, and to carry a gun if need there is.
[75] As everything an intelligence agency may do is a secret whose revelation entails dire
consequences to its leaker, intimidations and implicit threats by the Interior Security Service to
staffers are common.
For long, the DRSD was called colloquially Sécurité Militaire–SM (Military Security), after its
old name Direction de la Sécurité Militaire–DSM (Directorate of Military Security) from 1961 to
1981. Overall, the DRSD is a much more secretive equivalent to the Military Police in English-
speaking countries. Since the time it was named DSM, it has always been responsible for the
background checking and investigation on recruits of the SDECE and DRM staffs. For example, my
first official contact with the SDECE when I enlisted in this agency was a commissioned officer of
the DSM with rank of commandant of the Marine Infantry troops of the Army.
The DRSD exerts a determining influence over everyone’s career in the DGSE and the DRM
because this agency defines the limits of the need-to-know for each staffer, up to senior levels. It
also gives a final approval or denial to promotions, regardless of merit. Below, I quote Claude
Silberzahn, Director of the DGSE from 1989 to 1993, who did the blunder to reveal this fact in a
book he published in the mid-1990, even if he gave a false justification for it.
“ … I was amazed to hear, ‘Mr. Director-General, it is useless to give this extra to Commandant
X. It is better to give it to Commandant Y to whom it will benefit, whereas it will be to avail to X,
although he is indisputably very good here and much better than Y … He’ll never be Colonel
anyway’.
“Incredible! At thirty or thirty-five, an officer is on the right track or no longer exists; dices are
thrown. If he did not get through the compulsory courses, if he did not join the École de Guerre
[War School] when it was timely, then his career is over”.[76]
In reality, the trouble was not about whether “Commandant X” did the War School or not; there
was something else this director never knew, possibly. The practice is as old as known since the
scandal of the “Affair of the Cards of Denunciation” in 1904, as we shall see in the chapter 16. The
true motives just changed slightly since the beginnings of the French-Russian relationship in
intelligence in the late 1950s, as we shall see in the chapter 23 with the other affair Thyraud de
Vosjoli aka Affair Martel, and with a score of other cases I report in this book. In the DGSE, one is
better never express any sympathy for the United States, or inversely one’s dislike towards Russia.
That is not yet all because membership in the leading liberal freemasonic grand lodge GOdF is a
determining factor in one’s career. The latter particular will be explained in detail in the chapter 16
on intelligence and freemasonry in France.
The theoretical and official area of competence of the DRSD covers the Armed Forces, the DGA,
[77]and defense and security related industrial companies of all sizes, plus the civilian space and
aeronautic sector; that is to say, the French military-industrial complex. Then come the surveillance
of activities and infrastructures considered strategic in France, such as nuclear energy and energy
networks, water supply, railways, oil industry, ports and shipping, railways and airports, parts of
clothing and textile industries, automotive industry, and mining, all activities being referred to
internally as OIVs and SAIVs.[78] Remarkably, nothing is ever said officially about the mission of
security of this corps in intelligence agencies, and none of its former members ever published his
autobiography to date, so much so that even the acronym DRSD is completely unknown to the
public.
In 2017, France would have been hovering between the ranks #3 and #4 in the list of the world
leading arms sellers, competing with Germany in the official neighborhood of $2 billion and
something a year, on average.[79] In passing, this explains why it is not uncommon in France to
stumble on job ads specifying CD and SD security clearances as prerequisites for civilians in the
private sector. In 2018, the French military industrial complex employed approximately 450,000,
including 80,000 civilians.
It is true that the SGDSN and the ANSSI assist the DRSD in its mission to monitoring and
insuring the safety of the OIVs and SAIVs.[80] In actuality, these two other agencies remain largely
bureaucratic, not to say only bureaucratic. The menial tasks of surveillance and investigation in the
field fall on the shoulders of the DRSD, with the regular help of the Gendarmerie and formally by
special branches of this other military police corps, and by certain elite units of the COS such as the
4th RH, the Commandos Marine, and the Commandos de l’Air. The Gendarmerie has one such
counterespionage and security branch for civil aviation (Transport Aérien), one for the Direction
Générale de l’Armement–DGA that acts as a security and counterespionage force, and one for the
protection of nuclear weapons. Then special squadrons of the Gendarmerie Départementale carry on
the security of civil nuclear power plants and related scientific research.
The DRSD is a body with a full-time staff hovering between 1,400 and 1,600. Its headquarters are
located 27 boulevard Stalingrad, Malakoff, in the Southern suburb of Paris. It is no coincidence,
therefore, that the DGSE has several of its services hidden under varied cover activities in Malakoff
and Montrouge in particular, and in other towns nearby and along the Southern suburbs of Paris, in
the same area. The latter figure must be understood as the core of this agency, working largely on
tasks of the administrative and investigative order behind desks and computer screens, with a large
majority of non-commissioned officers internally called Inspecteurs de la Sécurité de la Défense–
ISD (Defense Security Investigators). Still included in this workforce, we find a national network of
bureaus internally called antennes (antennas).
Then the DRSD enjoys the assistance of an additional network of official correspondents in the
military who are not formally included in its staff, although they are called Officiers de Sécurité–OS
(Security Officers). In each regiment and military base, the deputy commander, with rank of
lieutenant colonel, typically, fills the role of Security Officer in permanent contact with the DRSD,
which rule is not made public and is even covered by secrecy.
 Regional Security Officers of the DRSD are official correspondents of the DGSE and of the
DRM for recruitments and voluntary enlistments of military by and in these intelligence agencies.
The DRSD, very military in its soul but imbued collectively with a police mentality, qualifies as
an investigative security and intelligence agency or counterintelligence agency more exactly. It is
formally included in the French intelligence community as military police with a specialty in
preventive counterespionage, which does not preclude defensive counterespionage, however.
Actually, the DRSD takes the initiative by its own to execute offensive missions that are not
specified officially in its attributions. Herein I am referring implicitly to counter-interference and
counter-subversion within the military and agencies of the Ministry of Defense, and in the military
industrial complex alike.
Remarkably again, the men of the DRSD wear no insignias nor uniforms other than those they
had in their regiments at the time of this change in their careers. DRSD commissioned officers often
made their debuts in elite units or in the Gendarmerie, due to the sensitivity of their missions for
which they must be counted on faultlessly, but not exclusively. The DRSD does not proceed
formally to arrests and custodies, and that is why it calls its close partner the Gendarmerie when
needed. Its men investigate commonly in the field in plain clothes or in uniform, as they see fit.
They take care to keep the locations of their workplaces (“antennas”) secret when not in the
headquarter, whose addresses limit to military postal codes and to their aliases, as they never give
their real names to their sources, agents, and contacts. Completely unknown or almost in civilian
environment, the DRSD all on the contrary has always enjoyed in the military an eerie aura it
cleverly cultivates. Then its regular and close cooperation with the Gendarmerie provides this
agency with a large network of correspondents who may be called for help in discreet
investigations, interrogations, and arrests.
The DRSD and the DRM also happen to cooperate closely together, which fact provides
implicitly the former agency with intelligence capacities abroad via military attachés posted in
embassies, in addition to Security Officers working under diplomatic status. The privileged relations
the DRSD enjoys with both the DRM and the DGSE offers to it additional access to their far-
reaching capacities in telecommunication interceptions, presented in the chapter 22 on COMINT.
Finally, the DRSD has an additional large network of informants and contacts in the whole military
and in public and private bodies of the military industrial complex. The latter provisions result in an
important and implicit role of this agency in domestic intelligence, by extension.
I would not be able to give even a rough estimate of the total number of official and unofficial
correspondents, informants, and contacts the DRSD has on French continental and overseas
territories, and abroad in embassies, plus in countries having military or intelligence partnership
with France. However, the aforesaid facts suggest more than 100,000. Therefrom, the reader
understands that with all capacities the DRSD currently enjoys, plus the policy of intelligence
pooling between agencies, this intelligence agency has a direct and fast reaching power in domestic
intelligence that very possibly excesses that of the DGSI, although its mission is essentially passive.
While hazarding guesses of that order, surges an old pattern of eerie influence in both military,
security, intelligence, and even political affairs pointing out the important responsibility of the
DRSD in the undisturbed Russian presence and influence in France. Herein I am alluding to a
recurrence of security presence or even intervention that precedes collusions to the benefit of
Russia, in a remarkable majority of instances not to say typically. This book reports several such
cases, of which the latest is the double case of breach of security known as the “Benalla affair,”
presented in the chapter 23. To which I may add the little-known introduction of candides (candid
men) in the military industrial complex from the early 2000s.
In a nutshell, in 2000, was decided internally in the Délégation Générale de l’Armement–DGA
(General Delegation for the Arms Industry) to implement the placement of one trusted independent
person with a particular ability to see the overall picture in problems, objectives, and ongoing R&D
projects in each French major company of the French military industrial complex. Each of those
individuals had to be known under the vague name and position of “candide”. The latter provision
did not imply any rank in any hierarchy, but a role analogous to these of “special advisor to the
President in governmental affairs” or “neutral observer of the UNO,” to give the reader the best
comparisons that come to my mind. Thus, the “President” of my metaphor would be the company in
which the candid is posted, and the “UNO,” the DGA. The final beneficiary would be the military-
industrial complex, collectively; that is to say, the national interest.
 Of course, a high security clearance had to be bestowed upon those candides to grant them access
to everything in the companies in which they are posted, including R&D. Then the candides were
expected to be in permanent touch with each other for exchanging ideas and opinions between
businesses, in the aim to foster lateral thinking in the entire military industrial complex, and to nip
in the bud cases of exactly similar R&D projects occurring simultaneously in two or more different
companies unbeknownst to each other. Thereof, the mission of those candides to encourage
companies to partner in their efforts for the common good of France’s research in military,
aeronautics, and space sectors.
On one hand, the no-nonsensical argument supporting the idea was to solve the universally
known problem of vertical thinking in industry, by encouraging companies to trust an independent
observer permanently present within their walls. The observer would be an individual endowed with
an extraordinary capacity in seeing the overall picture, made possible by his membership to an
exclusive network that “knows it all” collectively. On the other hand, the DRSD failed apparently to
see that, by granting to a handful of selected people a complete access to all most sensitive scientific
and industrial secrets, this opens implicitly a breach in the compartmentalization and security of the
entire French military-industrial complex. In other words, it is tantamount to offering on a silver
plate to all those candides the opportunity to be the best spy ring ever in the history of military,
scientific, and industrial espionage. Perhaps, the explanation to the bizarre provision is to be found
in the chapter 23 on the Russian-French relationship; the reader will make up his mind about it
while discovering other facts relevant to politics and Soviet and then Russian intelligence activities
in France.
I once met one of those candides, who was given a tiny office in a highly sensitive department of
a large company with a specialty in telecommunications, which was also a cover activity of the
DGSE. Indeed, the witty and smiling man on his fifties could go everywhere in the building and
chat with anyone freely. Additionally, he was the sole employee having an Internet connection in his
personal office. However, his laptop computer was not connected simultaneously to the highly
secured Intranet network of this department, and he had no personal account in it, at least. I knew all
this because I was working in the Security Service at that time, precisely.
In passing, the American reader noticed in the provision of the candides the implicit denial of free
competition and enforced collectivization in the French military-industrial complex, mixing public
and private businesses, and the military.
Now, I tell the funny anecdote, below.
While I was working as Deputy Director in a cell whose cover activity was computer software
publishing, in Paris downtown, I was once called on unexpectedly by an unknown man on his
forties who introduced himself as a representative of an association or something; this was unclear.
The vocation of the association in question was “to educate the staffs of French computer
companies on the danger of computer source code theft, and on how to protect oneself against it”.
For the sole sake of my amused curiosity because I understood at once who this man was exactly, I
welcomed him and walked him in my office. There I let him talk for about ten minutes. When he
paused, at last, I told him tongue in cheek and with a stare he was supposed to understand, “Well,
you know … I guess I know well everything you are talking about already. So, I think we must have
something in common together, even if we are probably not working for the same firm”. The man
answered, a bit confused, “Oh, I am sorry, I didn’t know that. Okay then, we are not going to waste
our time any longer together; goodbye”. Actually, the man was one of those DST “evangelists”
(now the DGSI) who at that time were tasked to visit all new French companies and startups whose
activities involve innovation in technology and sciences, and universities, in order to educate them
on the prevention of foreign technological espionage.[81]
The necessary provisions guaranteeing secrecy and security in DGSE’s premises have been
redefined on a case-by-case basis since the adoption of the doctrine of active measures, and of the
subsequent privatization of intelligence services in particular, allowing their camouflage under very
varied appearances. For it was admitted that many specialties did not necessarily need to be exerted
in highly secured bunker-like buildings, as show the examples, below.

Maintenance and repair of office computers.[82]

 Specialists in influence and counterinfluence, who can deny plausibly their secret
activities at any time by claiming “political activities and activism”. Workers of this
category are called “trolls” or “State trolls” popularly nowadays, and they are particularly
active on social networks.

All staffs responsible for infrastructure maintenance.

Surveillance and shadowing specialists, who became workers in private detective

agencies, security companies, and courier and delivery agencies.

Technicians in equipment and gadgets for espionage and surveillance, who became
salesmen-technicians in high-tech gadgets, equipment for the movie industry, spy gadgets
and gears for civilians private detectives, and sound and video technicians.

All economic intelligence specialists, who became employees in consulting companies

and law firms.

Intelligence analysts, who became researchers in think tanks, study centers,

universities, private schools, and training centers, or even specialized journalists and
civilian scientists.

Chief intelligence analysts, who resumed their cover activities of professors in

advanced schools, universities, and think tank and NGO’s members.

Many counterespionage specialists in industrial espionage, who became quality

engineers and ISO-certification consultants—a French particularity in counterespionage.

All recruitment specialists, who became employees and consultants in placement and
recruitment agencies, headhunters, or management and HR consultants.

And so on, and on. Notwithstanding, there was still a need for protecting physically and
discreetly all those anonymous buildings, offices, shops, and repair shops, against ever-possible
intrusion attempts of ordinary criminal nature, at least. Technical solutions to this problem were as
simple and effective as

business premises in apartment-buildings where employees of the intelligence

community live,

accesses to the premises restricted by two successive doors with digital code locks,
each with a different code number,

silent alarm and video surveillance systems with automatic sound and video
recordings from the moment of intrusion on, and permanently connected to “private”
 security companies nearby and, of course,

the old and usual rule of discrete and innocuous landmarks on or about doors,
furniture, drawers, folders, etc., as ways to spot an intrusion attempt or a search.

In office where activities are particularly sensitive were adopted most of the security measures
commonly in use at the headquarters of the DGSE, as in its directorates and services settled
elsewhere. These are

individual offices with high security locks and personal keys,

collective rooms and computer intranet-router rooms with mechanical security

combination locks, access to floor corridors restricted by badge door entry systems with
date and time of entry computer-recorded,

office cabinets with digital code locks, and date and time of openings recorded for
collective cabinets and, of course,

high-end fire protection systems with electromagnetic fire doors in floor’s corridors.

The DGSE is particularly afraid of fires because it experienced devastating such accidents. That
is why the Interior Security Service of the DGSE has the particularity to be additionally responsible
of protection against fire. In each large and highly sensitive premise of the DGSE, there is a strong
concern for the risk of fire, since the happening some decades ago of a fire that destroyed a quantity
of very important archives. Ironically, and oddly, the gravity of the fire owed mainly to the long-
delayed access of the firefighters to the inside of the DGSE headquarters, as no one except vetted
staffers is allowed to cross its checkpoint, still less entering any of its buildings. That is how and
why the fire was extending dramatically while the firefighters were waiting outside in the street for
an exceptional right to enter the place and do to their job! After that, each firefighters who had
crossed the checkpoint had to fill and sign the standard form—then “65A” type—for national
security positions at a Secret Défense–SD level, and to commit never to utter a word about
everything they saw while they were extinguishing the fire.
In spite of sophisticated measures against fire that were adopted, thenceforth, there has been a
second fire in the headquarters of the DGSE on the night of February 28 to 29, 2016, which, this
time, did not propagate beyond a “technical room”. However, the incident caused the temporary
technical layoff of about 1,000 employees, thus suggesting that the technical room in question
sheltered a computer server containing a large quantity of sensitive data.
Security provisions for computers in intelligence cells and units of the DGSE are the followings.
Individual computer terminals, with no data storage capacity, no disk readers or any other means
of data storage, including sealed USB ports or similar, are all connected to computer servers through
an Intranet network. All Intranet routers and servers are secured in TEMPEST protected rooms.
“Customarily” and officially, the DGSE headquarter has its computer servers working about 130 ft.
down in one or two of the three underground floors of its buildings. Desktop computers and other
personal terminals never are shut down because they are also used when idling for code breaking
through distributed computing network. Still in 2000, the latter provision applied to all units and
individuals working outside the headquarters, and to other buildings sheltering large services.
In the DGSE headquarters and in exterior facilities’ services in which highly sensitive
information is daily processed, the use of personal computers, printers, and scanners, are denied to
all employees, senior executives included. Everyone must send one’s data to be printed to collective
laser printers located in “printing and copying rooms”—one “printing and copying rooms” per floor,
usually—through the Intranet. The latter provision allows the round-the-clock automated
monitoring of all printing works, which is one of the tasks of the Interior Security Service.
With the exception of small domestic intelligence, influence, and counterinfluence cells, the
premises of all main services of the DGSE have a small number of ordinary desktop computers
connected to the Internet, each located in “printing and copying rooms”. Those are “collective
computers” not connected to the Intranet, available to everyone for professional and occasional
consultation of open sources. However, the saving of this public external information is tedious
because it cannot be done by means other than a paper printer, in order to prevent any accidental or
deliberate transfer of computer programs such as “Trojan-horses” and viruses.
There are numerous intelligence units and cells in Paris and its suburbs in particular, and then
everywhere in the country, with a secondary concentration in Lyon. Many are hidden in buildings
whose highly secured accesses are justified opportunely by other true and irrelevant cover activities,
therefore publicly known. This security provision has been made possible through particular
arrangements with the military of course, and with ministries and public services having a natural
need for securing certain of their annexes. Those secret cells and units thus are located in places
such as airports and marine ports, national museums, annexes of the French national bank, some
well-known private banks, and even in private business similarly suitable, such as renowned high-
end jewelry and watchmaking companies. Below are some examples.
Nearly all of the most important French ministries are sheltering intelligence units of the DGSE.
Then we find the Commission nationale des titres-restaurant, the Française des jeux that is
responsible for national lotteries and cards-to-scratch games, Centre National du Cinéma et de
l’image animée–CNC, Cité des sciences et de l’industrie, Louvre national museum that shelters and
provides cover activities for the DGSE in various specialties ranging from foreign intelligence to
influence and counter influence, Hôtel des Invalides, which has an historical record with sheltering
a counterespionage unit, and above all the domestic telephone tapping headquarters, and some
bogus annexes of the Ministry for the Economy and Finances scattered throughout the country.
In the 1990s, the regional branch office of the Bank of France of Marne la Vallée, in the Eastern
larger suburb of Paris, sheltered a cell with a specialty in financial counterintelligence. For years, an
important intelligence unit has been located underground in a technical department of Crédit
Agricole, one of the main French private banks, in the surroundings of the large telecommunications
interception station in Taverny, to be presented in the chapter 22 on COMINT. There is a technical
unit of the DGSE with a specialty in spy gadgets and equipment, located in the building of the
design department of French jeweler Fred. A DGSE unit is located in the offices of LVMH leading
French luxury goods conglomerate, in the Grande Arche building of La Défense, Puteaux—in
which there is also a ministry.
About all places I enumerated above have in common to have activities justifying stringent
security measures, restricted accesses, and checkpoints, without catching the particular attention of
the public, therefore. That is on these criteria, precisely, that the DGSE and other intelligence
agencies select those infrastructures to shelter their services, units, and cells. The same rule applies
to facilities sheltered in ordinary military bases and barracks.
The French intelligence community has a big problem with computers and computer software,
just because they are overwhelmingly American made. For long, France tried to make its own
computers with Bull,[83] its partner computer company. For decades, Bull has been working closely
with the Ministry of Defense, and with the DGSE in particular in a common effort for breaking
foreign encryption codes, those of the United States and its allies chiefly. However, many DGSE
units and cells working undercover continued purchasing U.S. computer products. In the early
2000s, the DGSE was still buying and using Compaq desktop computers for several of its services.
Silicon Graphics computer stations and servers were already in use earlier, still for encryption and
code breaking. Then some privatized intelligence cells used Apple computers for a reason I explain
extensively in the chapter 27. The U.S.-made computer software on those computers often were
outdated versions, for the DGSE considered that updating them was a risk, lest the U.S. intelligence
community would be privy to a secret “backdoor,” even when not connected to the Internet
—“airgap” it is said in technical jargon. Therefore, the DGSE is helping reciprocally Bull and other
companies[84] to develop its own computer software, Linux operating system compatible (Unbutu
nowadays).[85]
For decades, the DGSE has been constantly improving Taiga, a computer database-management
system of its own that is its main multipurpose computer tool. The name Taiga has been chosen
after the Russian word тайга, meaning “boreal forest” or “snow forest,” a biome characterized by
coniferous forests consisting mostly of pines, spruces, and larches. The analogy with intelligence
data gathering stems from the fact that the taiga is the World’s largest biome apart from the oceans.
Security measures resume with full-time employees themselves, in a way serving their need-to-
know and the protection of their cover activities, simultaneously. Thus, they are never sent any letter
of employment or layoff notice with “DGSE” headers, still less one announcing new activities in
another intelligence branch. Nobody is ever going to say something as, “Hello, I am the Deputy
Director of the Agitprop Unit of the Disinformation Service against the United States, and I will be
your new responsible from this day on”. Instead, from firsthand experience, we were expected to
“understand” we were going to go to work in another branch when, all of a sudden, all our
colleagues became inexplicably distant, while we were introduced to new others who behaved
warmly. Then we were brought to “understand” that the cover up in which we had been newly hired
was doing influence or espionage against a particular country in reality. Similarly, we were
“supposed to know” how to identify our hierarchical superiors by waiting for the coming up of
people who behaved accordingly.
Everything is implicit, very rarely explicit, still for the sake of the best security and secrecy. Even
in large services working exclusively in intelligence, as in the COMINT service and in the
Directorate of Economic Intelligence, there is no hierarchical function nor name on office doors, but
a number. Only the Exterior and Interior Security Services have a full list of the names
corresponding to those numbers. To exemplify this stringency in secrecy and in the enforcement of
the rule of the need-to-know, I tell the anecdote of a DGSE full-time employee under military status,
below.
Years after he left his signal intelligence unit, he asked to some of his ex-colleagues for knowing
the meaning of an acronym he heard and saw at work repeatedly. It turned out that the acronym in
question actually was the name of the unit in which he had worked for years. Simply, he did not
need to know this to carry on his job.
In many instances, it may take years before one knows what his own job is about exactly. As time
goes by, one thus accesses more “layers of knowledge” and finds one’s marks in this so particular
middle that much resembles a gigantic underground conspiracy. This comes to explains why recruits
are much assessed on their capacity to cope with the unknown and with unsettling situations. The
unsurprising effect of all this is that many people in the DGSE and in the French intelligence
community in general, behave in a way intending to suggest they “know more than you”. In the
facts, it often turns out to be the opposite. Authority laying on the number and importance of secrets
one knows is ingrained in French culture. Secret is power in this country, a means to assert one’s
authority upon others when money cannot be called upon. Ironically, the best way I quickly found
out “to know more than the others” in the DGSE was never to ask any question, and never to seem
interested in secrets was even better. Inescapably, when you thus behave, many cannot help
themselves let slip striking facts, just to show you that “they know much,” again in the expectation
to have an implicit ascendancy on you.
When meeting colleagues in public places, there is an obvious need to limit / censor one’s verbal
communication. The DGSE trains its recruits on how to communicate in such circumstances, “in
code,” by resorting to a mix of innocuous second-degree sentences, metaphors, and nonverbal
language.[86] Nonverbal language consists in associating one’s thus limited talk with varied types of
knowing smiles and facial attitudes, inappropriate and weird in normal circumstances between
ordinary people. For the rule says, one has to avoid by all means to let slip words such as “secret
agent,” “spy,” “DGSE,” or even “CIA” when in presence of ordinary people, even though these
words and acronyms gained certain popularity nowadays.
In DGSE jargon, when one wants to say that somebody, seen on TV for example, “is a spy,” one
says, “He is special” instead. For long, many said, “He is a moustache” (and not “he has a
moustache”). This is too much already because someone who is not in the know could possibly ask
an embarrassing, “What do you mean by, ʻhe is a moustache?ʼ” When an unknown colleague, so a
DGSE employee, executive, or even a trusted contact must come for a meeting, one introduces him
as “a good person” while giving a stare, whereas an aggressive foreign spy is “a disturbed individual
one should be wary of”. If the latter individual is not aggressive or just strongly suspected to be a
foreign spy, then he is described as “a suspicious people one should not talk to,” while giving the
same stare. When somebody wants to say something as, “Hey, it looks like this guy I met
incidentally is working with the DGSE too!” instead he must say, “I believe this person I met by
happenstance must be working with the Ministry of Defense”[87].
Other similar provisions are taken each time two spies or more are expected to identify each other
in a gathering of ordinary people on an evening party, in a company, NGO, or whatever. Unlike
freemasonic secret signs, those identification signs are seldom the same as additional measure of
safety; they are “one-time identification signs”.
The reader might think the cleaning of the premises where French spies are working could be a
vulnerability. Not that so; on the contrary, even. A peculiarity with housekeepers, all women, is that
they are chosen and tested illiterate; that is to say, not intelligent and educated enough to read pieces
of paper, writing boards, and other secret things they are brought to see. Most are immigrants from
third world countries, but the loyalty to their new country has been put to the test. By the way,
another peculiar rule is that DGSE employees who work alone at home, such as analysts, typically,
are provided with the weekly free service of one of those housekeepers. The same rule applies to the
personal housing of senior executives, of course. However, the latter provision must not be
understood as a perk of the job, for those housekeepers are instructed to act as watchdogs and to
report at once about anything they might find abnormal or unusual, such as a visible health problem
with an employee or his unlikely absence on the scheduled day of her service. The warnings are
communicated to the Security Service forthwith, which proceeds accordingly. Until the mid-1990s,
senior executives still enjoyed this cleaning service daily. It has been reduced to a weekly
periodicity service, thereafter, to reduce staff and infrastructure costs, as the housekeepers are paid
at a civilian and decent rate. As an aside, the costs of personal housing for senior executives have
been constantly reducing since the 1980s. Some who enjoyed a comfortable house were moved to
large luxury collective buildings guarded by a zealous private security staff, and one gardening staff
for all tenants.
The DGSE has devised special provisions in case France would be suddenly invaded and
occupied, or in case Paris might be destroyed entirely, indeed. First, there is at least one escape
tunnel under the headquarters of this agency, which would lead to a church nearby, allegedly.
Second, important employees—which means including those who are not necessarily senior
executives—are introduced to others who live and work in southern French cities, so that they can
get to know each other and stay in touch in order to form a secret resistance organization, should
this extraordinary need arise. They can formally identify each other not only with code words, but
also with entire particular subjects unlikely to be brought on coincidentally in ordinary
conversations. As true example, a conversation about the comparative performances of two types of
rather exclusive loudspeakers for hi-fi lovers, which, additionally, are no longer available on the
market for years.
 5. Human Resources.
M any scholars, experts in foreign affairs, diplomats, historians, strategists, and even
economists agree upon the fact that the former division of the World into two blocs of countries,
each roughly called East and West, brought some benefits with its fears of a generalized nuclear
war. Indeed, the end of the Soviet Union brought down with it the reassuring notions of friends and
foes in international politics, which had theretofore allowed us to locate our landmarks, to know
who’s who, or “almost” in a few particular instances. Not only the post-Cold War period failed to
bring any peace, but it thrown the World in the eerie dark waters of a Dantean marsh, in which no
one can possibly ascertain the intentions and mood of the massive and undetermined shapes moving
under its surface. In 1991, in France, the worse stole the victory to the better, contrary to everyone’s
hope. This seemed to happen overnight, by “the fault of the First Gulf War,” the French media told
to the masses, accompanied by unexplainable shortages of vegetable oil, sugar, and pasta, between
some other vital commodities a priori unrelated and for a little while.
Then journalists and some thinkers began to say that the World was undergoing a deep change,
which characterized in France as rampant collective “schizophrenia”. At that time, the metaphor
was coined for wants of the term “political correctness” that was not yet as popular as it is today,
lest no one was daring enough to go as far as dubbing the illness “doublethink”. “Cognitive
dissonance” was too sophisticated to the masses or its possible causes too obvious to the taste of
some.[88] A few years later, the masses were clear-sighted enough to see that the World leaders of
the post-Cold War all clung to a fantasy of universal peace and goodwill around a common table
under which kicks were raining.
In countries the most involved in this “New Cold War” supposed to exist only in the most fertile
imaginations until about 2017, ruled civilians are the most exposed. They are those who have to
suffer the consequences of constant political denial and media self-censorship. They must often
receive the hardest blows while they are forced to say that they are acts of God, under the threat of a
charge of delusion or conspiracy theorist. A side effect of the “war that did not exist” spread
maliciously further and deeper in the society of ordinary citizens, and crippled it: there was no
reason to limit trade and other exchanges with foes, since they were “allies,” “partners,” and even
“friends”. Everywhere in the World, the symptoms of the schizophrenia, mild at first, worsened to
reach the more concerning stage of severe “paranoid schizophrenia”. In fact, the apparent mental
illness was the visible side of a desperate self-defense against foes and threats that everyone was
forbidden to point out and name openly, thus fueling a hypocrisy accepted as a new paradigm, out of
sorry and silent resignation. Indeed, the end of the Cold War caused disappointment, and today we
do not watch documentaries on the fall of the Berlin Wall with the joy and relief of those who
destroyed it, but with nostalgia as the thrilling hope for the bright days to come for long is gone.
Today, in a number of occidental countries, it is a known and even commented fact that people
tend to no longer flock and stick together as they still did barely more than twenty years ago, to
oppose the unsettling new threats of after the Cold War. They feel forced to split to flee uncertainty
and dangers; the fear of the neighbor is spreading in Western countries. It is little exaggeration to
say that they “suicide” socially. Divide ut regnes (Divide and rule), Caesar was quoted as saying,
which byword Napoleon Bonaparte took up and put into practice not only in France, but also in all
countries his troops conquered.
Since that same year 1991, France expanded increasingly her range of actions in domestic
intelligence and counterintelligence in order to monitor and to minimize the ever-possible
consequences of foreign businesses settling on her soil to tout and sell their goods and services. One
of those methods is to encourage or compel those companies to recruit as much as possible its
executives and employees among French nationals, under threats of stringent trade union
regulations, actions, and strikes set and organized under whatever pretenses. When those foreign
companies refuse to comply or just drag their feet, the domestic intelligence forces raise the
pressure by resorting to agitprop, black propaganda, and disinformation coming as false motives,
accusations of “xenophobia,” pretenses of “unwarranted and ethically unacceptable refusals to go by
the rules and culture of the host country,” real or alleged poor work conditions and tax dodging, and
so on, and on. Enormous taxes, administrative controls of all sorts, oddly frequent or even
permanent to the point of hassle accompany the aggressions. The methods target U.S. companies
having activities in France, especially and unambiguously.
 Since the early 2000s, Amazon replaced Microsoft as a priority target of the DGSE, especially
from October 2011, when the former company exported the concepts of the Kindle book and self-
publishing at no cost to this country. Theretofore, the State and its intelligence community had ever
been wary never to let unknown people publishing and selling books, still less to let an American
company introducing them on an equal footing with authors that the cultural elite and the
mainstream media had established for centuries in France, alone and customarily. This, indeed, was
perceived as a provocation, an unmistakable evidence of deliberate interference in French domestic
affairs, a clear act of information warfare.
In short, it is a matter of compelling the unbending private company of the enemy country, or that
of a “disgraced” one, not to also importing its culture because it would be a “deadly disease”. As the
reader can easily imagine, with this obligation to recruit as many indigenous workers as possible, it
is understood that informants of various public services are among them. Coincidence (?) makes
that a distant and young relative of mine worked for Coca-Cola France for a while; I quickly
understood she had been anti-American indoctrinated before she actually was planted in this
company. Eventually, she was moved to Suntory beverages, to her relief, she said. Spies make spy-
families as a contagious disease does, alas.
Heavy fines and exorbitant taxes are not the annoyances the foreign company should dread in
France, however. The most potent disturbances are the trade unions and their shop stewards, agents
provocateurs, henchmen, and snitches, each endowed legally with a right to dispute in any business
anything does not fit strictly the rules and regulations written in small characters in the 3,762 pages
of the French Labor Code (Code du Travail). Those learn how to influence and to bully employees
who are not yet trade union registered, how to set them against CEOs and their managerial staffs,
and how to breed discontent and to sow dissent in any business. This is another way for the
schizophrenia of international relations to rush into the daily lives of ordinary employees, and to
contaminate those who resist the peer pressure that urges them to rally leftist activism. As a result,
all those people who just wanted to make a living and to live peacefully find themselves trapped in a
professional atmosphere of reciprocal distrust, constant pressure, maddening office conspiracies,
and infighting. Then the disease spreads outside of the workplace, inevitably.
The situation of the foreign company under the maddening yet denied surveillance of the host
country spreads to French private businesses either, for the latter are thought “likely to be penetrated
and spied on by the enemy,” reciprocally. Regardless whether the foreign company having activities
on the French soil is no more than an ordinary competitor, a cover activity, or a front indeed, it does
not change anything to the suspicion. That is why the French domestic intelligence apparatus wants
to have informants and watchdogs in French companies either, exactly as the 2d Division of the old
French police did 140 years ago, when the scapegoats of the moment were Prussia and England.
Today, the motto justifying the quixotic underground resistance against the dreadful foreign
windmills is “protection of the economic and technological heritage”.[89] For long, the provision has
been coined and made an important additional mission in counterintelligence and counter-
interference. Of course, the protection of the French industrial and economic heritage, by resorting
to an enormous network of informants planted in it, concerns only those whose activities and
expertise are deemed likely to interest foreign competitors, and those identified as OIVs or / and that
fall in the SAIV category.[90] The problem is that the latter criteria make them innumerable in the
end. One “natural” solution the French intelligence community found out to guarantee the safety of
French companies is to arrange the placing of ex-military in managerial positions, justified by
formal aims saying, “The best experience in management is military”.
On one hand, it often proves tricky to impose an ex-serviceman in a civilian company, since
experience proved that it is not that simple to implement this provision in public services, already.
For example, the French Navy sends mails to the main energy provider EDF repeatedly, begging to
hire its servicemen on early retirement in priority. On the other hand, countless French private
companies have one executive at least with membership in a French liberal masonic lodge, which
makes up for the safety provision, already. A significant percentage of MSE’s owners and managers
in France is liberal Freemasons. Thus, the protection of the national economic and industrial
heritage is relatively secure, “the hush-hush way” and at no cost.
One could say that the situation, turning Orwellian today, breeds more paranoia in the already
existing schizophrenia. Not in the medical sense the terms convey, of course, the reader understands
it, but together as an overwhelming evidence of a pervading spy mania and of an obsession with
conspiracy theories. The excess cripples the French economy and public services, symptomatic of a
state of war, be it silent and non-lethal, in a time of official peace.
In passing, knowing the existence of those tens of thousands of informant workers provides the
reader with a clue of the formidable extent of State surveillance and interference in private business
in France, and of the nature of the ultimate ramifications and far-reaching capacities of the domestic
intelligence apparatus in this country. They are the furthest from a tree trunk made up of a few
intelligence agencies under the command of the Ministry of Defense. The big branches and roots
underground are the other of the ministries of the Interior, Economy and Finance, and Justice,
shaping together an omnipotent and omnipresent spy machine that is not supposed to exist either.
The liberal Freemasonry locates everywhere in the massive and complex body; we will see how in
the chapter 16. The metaphorical comparison is my own, since the intelligence apparatus in France
pictures itself sometimes as the all-seeing-eye, and some other times as a spider since since
eavesdropping has been made common practice, whereas the public for long sees it as an octopus.
This introduction, despite its length, yet could not possibly allow the reader to figure out the size
and ramifications of the tree; it will claim the complete reading of the Part II of this book. Before
the teaching of this knowledge begins, he must first discover the nature of its substance. Below is a
description of the main actors and components in human resources of the French intelligence
apparatus, starting down from informants, snitches, and unconscious agents, up to the director of the
DGSE, since this agency is its sap.
CLANDESTINE HUMAN RESOURCES
The mouchard (informant) is the name given to the “little snitch”. He often is an ordinary
citizen with no training nor any skill in intelligence, who supplies information deemed of interest,
spontaneously or on demand. In most instances, the mouchard does not really know who is and
what is doing his correspondent. Exceptions of course are those who send mails to the agencies or
public services of their fancies. On a case-by-case basis, the official or agent who collects such
confidences leaves the mouchard with the plain liberty to assume whatever he wants of what he is
doing and to whom he is confiding exactly. Very often, the mouchard takes himself to a game he
imagined. Some believe they are transmitting valuable information to the police or to the internal
revenue service or to an “influential acquaintance”. Or else, to a representative of his trade union, a
journalist, a political party or ONG, or to a “fellow country-man” mistakenly confused as a foreign
spy, in the case of the so-called “false-flag recruitment”. Nonetheless, sensors of this inferior
category all long for a recognition of their little helps, even when they deny it: simple recognition of
principle or small venal services returned, except of course those, numerous either, who do it under
some threat.
In France, the intelligence communities and police services do not reward financially their
informants and snitches, on the disingenuous pretense that “patriotism is not for sale”. The former
may happen to pay foreign sources and agents abroad, but never for long as the first payment or any
other kind of reward must be the treat of the blackmail to come. Many of those sources argue
patriotism as they crave the consideration of those who are endowed with the extraordinary power
to transform their tips in events. Those who gather the information that informants collect are never
fooled, and they never rely on trust alone anyway. There are plenty of examples and anecdotes in
this book telling about the psychological aspects and managerial practices of the French intelligence
community; it is a rich field, full of surprises.
The source is this link of the chain of intelligence that is called hastily agent. Usually, the
source holds a position that grants him regular or occasional access to information of interest,
deserving to be called intelligence. Source is a name that may designate indifferently a second-rate
technician in a factory, a prostitute, a police officer, a scientist, an employee in an intelligence
agency, a colonel, or a minister. When a source is an employee in an intelligence agency, some call
this individual a “mole,” whereas the DGSE calls him a sous-marin, or “submarine,” but the term
applies as well in the case of a senior public servant or military. The source serving from abroad,
who generally is a native of the foreign country targeted, is given an evaluation note allowing to
know at first glance the likely value of the intelligence he provides; that is to say, the credit he is
given. The source abroad may be run either by an agent acting under the command of a case officer,
or by a case officer directly. Very exceptionally, senior intelligence executives, up to the Director of
the DGSE, may want to handle a source personally if the intelligence he transmits is of
extraordinary value, even though a rule forbids this, in theory. A source may also be a French
national or a foreigner working in France (expatriate) in a foreign company or organization
(political, religious, or else) that is of interest to the DGSE, or he may be in whatever other capacity
to report about matters of similar interest.
A source may act for various true reasons, and this point is of paramount importance in the eyes
of the DGSE, for he is someone who betrays either his own party or country at the benefit of
another, or / and who cheats on people who invested their trust in him for whatever other reason.
Often the source considers he is not betraying anyone because he thinks “he is doing something
good” for his country, the World or whatever, out of unselfishness and of some belief. Therefore, he
often is an individual ideologically committed, or else he may be unaware to be a source because he
believes he does no more harm than to confide in an individual he trusts: a friend, a relative, his
lover, his boss, his labor union representative, his psychoanalyst, etc. The conditions of recruitment
of a source are explained largely in this book, with true examples at times.
The contact (formerly called Honorable Correspondent–HC) ranks higher than the mouchard
and the informant in consideration, and even of the agent in many instances, for he acts out of
patriotism, willingly and strictly, and he is fully conscious to do this in the service of his country.
The job of the contact is not to spy on but to help occasionally, as described, below.
When in a foreign country, a contact may help an agent in various ways ranging from temporarily
lending to him a vehicle, to arranging for him to meet with locals of interest, serving as courier to
pass small amounts of money and instructions or else, to teaching him the fundamentals on local
habits and customs of the host country.
A contact must not partake actively in spying activities, nor in anything that might be
compromising at some point because his presence in a foreign country is very helpful. He is
considered as an asset, but he does not have to cope with the rules and promiscuity of the DGSE. In
most instances, a contact is a French national, native or foreign naturalized, who immigrated
longtime ago and settled for good in a foreign country. Some took early retirement in a sunnier and
calmer spot because they were fed off with life in France and their former activities that they found
dull at some point. There, typically, they created a small business activity, a shop, bakery, restaurant,
or the like, to make their livings and not to have to cope anymore with the agonies of subordination
and commuterism.
Among those contacts, some succeed in their professional activities and they are making good
money or even big money. Some others stay rather inactive and anonymous because they are
content with their retirement pension; they play pétanque on Saturdays mornings with their fellow
compatriots and locals. Some others immigrated with big money they made from selling their
business in France, which comes as a retirement of a sort. Contacts of the latter kind, in particular,
often are the most active and helpful, at least because they are smart, lively, and even streetwise
generally, and so they are good in building networks of influential acquaintances in the host country.
Some worked full time formerly in the French intelligence community, and they were trusted
enough to be left free to expatriate or were encouraged to do so on purpose. Contacts seldom are
young people, therefore. They may provide useful and inconsequential open source intelligence,
such as the general mood of the local population about an ongoing national election, popular gossips
about particular issues, and the visible developments of a particular business located near the place
where they live. Sometimes, they even managed to have good and friendly relations with the police!
As most contacts are French nationals, they often have relatives, acquaintances, and good friends
who remained in France and with whom they chat regularly by telephone and on the Internet, and
physically when they come back to France for a short vacation trip. One of the latter people is
working with the DGSE or himself is a contact of this agency himself who remained in France.
Otherwise, contacts may talk regularly by telephone with a close relative whose telephone line is
tapped, so that they are even not aware to be in touch with the DGSE and to feed this agency with
intelligence, or else they may assume this at least, which in English-speaking countries is a guilty
attitude known as “willful blindness”—I guess because there is no French equivalent to this
expression.
The agent (same orthography in French) is described in the Lexicon already, and often he
appears in this book anyway.
The Officier Traitant–OT (case officer) oft-called “traitant” (handler), or “mac” in French
intelligence slang, does not content himself with taking pieces of intelligence from his sources and
agents. For one says that the case officer must “keep a tight rein” on them,[91] exactly as if they were
no better considered than dogs, and as dehumanized “weapons” in the DGSE, specifically. Indeed,
this agency sees its agents as “tool of war,” and therefore as expendable and replaceable individuals,
[92] although this perception is not that true when the agent is an operative holding the privilege to
have been trained thoroughly at a heavy cost. In all cases, a good case officer never must be or seem
attached affectively to his agent(s), while he must lure him to believe that this aspect of their forced
close relationship is “not quite true”. From the collective viewpoint of the DGSE, the value of a case
officer is greater than that of his agent, yet this does not imply that the former cannot be expendable
at some point.
In most instances, a case officer, although he is working under the direct orders of an insider
called contrôleur (supervisor) in the DGSE, must preserve a credible cover activity for himself,
which must not take all his time. That is why he often is a retiree, the holder of a fictitious position
in a large company or public service, or an annuitant who receives his income from invested capital,
real estate rents, life annuities, interest on capital or market income, etc.
In a large majority of instances, the French case officer is male, and he has a military background;
thereof, the use of the word officer even when he was non-commissioned officer in the military. The
DGSE is working hard to find out, select, and train female case officers, either with the intent to run
female agents, or males when they appear to better interact under female leadership. In any case,
affective or sexual relationship between the case officer and his agent is forbidden. Male case
officers, and recruiters alike, who run / recruit female agents and sources, and who are expected to
be physically in touch with them, sometimes resort to the simple trick of claiming they are gay.
Though assimilated to an executive, a case officer does not necessarily have to complete higher
education, yet he often has experience, past or active, in management. He also has been chosen to
execute this very particular task because of his psychological profile, for which the ordinary and
daily fulfillment of his work would seem impossible if not psychologically painful otherwise.
Indeed, the dependable case officer must be an individual who does not attach to others, who has a
weak empathy, and who never binds himself durably and sincerely of friendship with anybody. He
often is a loner, yet he must not be an introvert. He must not be likely to feel any remorse for the
psychological distress of the agents he handles. He is, in a large majority of instances not to say
always, an unofficial full-time employee in intelligence who never goes to the headquarters. That is
why his work’s meetings with his hierarchical superior, the contrôleur / supervisor, are always held
in anonymous and neutral places or at his own place.
Often, the case officer did not have the chaotic existence that is the ordinary lot of flying agents,
agents, and snitches, or he held managerial positions regularly when he was an agent himself. He is
an individual who always enjoyed discreet “protections,” because to be a case officer is a privilege
from the collective point of view of the French intelligence community. The latter profile means that
either he belongs to a bourgeois or prominent family, or / and that he showed faultless commitment
to the French left-leaning political values and blind obedience in addition to his particular mindset.
For three reasons, a large majority of French case officers have membership in the main secret
society, the GOdF, with the degree of Master Mason at minimum. The first of these reasons is that
particular moral and political prerequisites condition the access to membership in the GOdF, in
addition to close examination until accessing the degree of Master Mason. When in the DGSE,
accessing the latter masonic degree implies more and special ordeals that are in no way masonic,
designed to put the loyalty and obedience of the candidate to the test. The second reason is that the
masonic membership of a case officer allows easy, justifiable, and constant monitoring and control
over his privacy, mindset, activities, and relationships, since he is not working in a DGSE building
and under the permanent monitoring of the Security Service. The third reason is that GOdF
membership provides a case officer with an easier—but controlled—access to useful and
professional connections he needs to perform in activities in human intelligence. Additionally,
membership in the GOdF is an effective protection against justice, and against the possibility that a
disgruntled agent or someone else attempts to expose publicly the mischievous character he truly is.
However, since the case officer is an unofficial employee of the DGSE enjoying an exceptional
freedom of movement, this agency must keep some effective ploy in reserve against him, just in
case. A serious threat must be brandished against him at any time, should he do a grave fault or
refuse to serve any longer for reasons of his own. Anyway, both the intelligence community, the
Freemasonry, and a supervisor warn the case officer freemason on the consequence of the latter
possibility. Regardless of how privileged he may be, the case officer must submit to a certain
amount of stress, as all other agents, employees, and executives do—the reader will see why, in a
next chapter.
 The barbouze belongs to a particular category of agents that actually is the French state mafia
under the command of the DGSE via its intelligence officers. Did the reader ever wonder about
whether France would have a mafia of her own? I present it now, and I will do again with true
anecdotes, in other chapters of this book. A large majority of barbouzes are ex-military in special
units, and more particularly in a regiment of the COS or in the Service Action, which are about a
same body, actually. To understand who the barbouzes are exactly, and what their typical profile is,
first it is necessary to trace their historical origins.
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, many free-fighters of the Resistance were
recruited by the DGSS, the agency ancestor of the DGSE, created by Jacques Soustelle, a personage
I will name again in the next chapters. After this agency was re-named DGER in October 1944,
former hero of the Resistance André Dewavrin aka “Colonel Passy” was tasked to reform this
second intermediate and short-lived agency. The latter event happened in early 1946, when
Dewavrin purged the new French foreign intelligence service of a large number of unfit employees,
as we shall see with corresponding facts and figures in the historical context of this story, in the
chapter 23. That is how several thousands of those thus fired people found themselves with no job
and not knowing what else to do, overnight. For the war had used about all of them to do violence
and dirty tricks against the Germans and French who had collaborated with the latter, and to lead a
life of the adventurous and daredevil sort. These behavioral characteristics made them unfit to
retrain in another public service or to start a new and peaceful life in the private sector. Many of
them saw no difficulty in starting a criminal career. However, as they had been made knowledgeable
in spycraft, the SDECE hired many of them as unofficial and occasional contractors to execute tasks
that this agency found too daring and risky, or highly damaging to its image and to the image of
France in case of their exposures. Herein I mean things such as physical aggressions and sanctions,
burglars, blackmail, racket, procurism, drug trafficking, money counterfeiting, hard interrogation
and torture, kidnappings, and assassinations. Soon, the SDECE found itself in the obligation to
create a particular service tasked to coordinate and to manage the works of those mercenaries of the
most unbridled sort, which was named Service des Opérations Spéciales–SOS (Special Operations
Service), in addition to the six services only that this agency had in the 1950s. That is why the SOS
was also known as “Service 7,” led by Colonel of the Army Marcel Leroy aka “Leroy-Finville”.
The SOS was dismantled in 1965, due to scandal about a political assassination for which this
service was the sponsor. Nonetheless, the henchmen the SOS had hired for more than a decade were
still there, and they had even recruited and trained others.
In the meantime, in 1958, many such goons of the politically indoctrinated sort had joined the
SAC and the Mouvement Pour la Communauté–MPC (Movement for the Community) led by Pierre
Lemarchand, and created in 1959 by Jacques Dauer, Louis Joxe (father of socialist Minister Pierre
Joxe), and Louis Schmittlein, to fight the OAS during the Algerian War. It seems that the use of the
word “barbouze,” to name unflatteringly those violent and ruthless militiamen appeared in the
French media shortly after, in 1961. For they were quickly known as responsible in affairs or
tortures, assassinations, and bomb plots against the OAS that the Government of De Gaulle ordered
unofficially to the SDECE. However, the existence of the barbouzes as henchmen of the SDECE
resumed after the Algerian War in 1962, and after the SAC was dismantled in 1981, until today and
since the SDECE changed its name for DGSE.
The barbouzes in the 21st century are numerous and particularly active on the French soil in
domestic affairs with executing missions such as blackmailing, burglarizing, bugging places,
sabotaging vehicles, threatening targets designated by the DGSE, counterfeiting, drug trafficking,
running prostitutes used for honey traps, money-laundering, staging false summary executions in
the expectation to make someone confess or cooperate, partaking in social eliminations, and
physical eliminations. Even, some of them are legit police officers. In other words, and to best sum
up all this for the American reader, it would not be exaggeration to say that the quality the DGSE
expects from a good and reliable barbouze is to go by the rules of an exactly opposite version of the
Ten Commandments.
Since the 1970s, the missions given to barbouzes extend to softer tasks, such as running
businesses in France and abroad for various purposes, being locally present to lead barbouze’s rings,
supervising or assisting sensitive missions and operations occasionally and anonymously, and
providing funds and various kinds of illegal assistance. To fulfill the latter needs, the DGSE
arranges commonly to settle or to buy sound businesses of the SME type for those mercenaries,
presented to them as rewards for their dependability and loyalty on the long run. Those in the latter
case are very rarely younger than 35, and they are in their 40s to 60s typically. If barbouzes often
seem to enjoy the comfortable standing of the lower upper class, with a typical fancy for black high-
end German cars and bourgeois houses, many of them vegetate with little paid activities of the
menial sort. Would the reader be surprised, if I reveal that some among the latter category of the
unfortunate are paid officially as caretakers and operators in crematoriums?
Nonetheless, there are a number of typical features in the character of all barbouzes, which make
them rather easy to recognize. These are their frequent statuses of ex-soldiers in elite units,
familiarity with paramilitary operations and with the mores of third-world countries and hardship,
their disregard for moral, their uncouth and streetwise attitude and extreme distrust toward others,
their lack of education and intellectual refinement, and a number of other little things that soon or
late clash with the appearances of normalcy they sometimes struggle to keep. They are unattached
people who stay rarely for a lifetime with a same partner. They often express favorable stances
toward far-leftism, even when their standards of living and characters are telling the exact opposite
without any apparent difficulty in the contradiction.
Having met a number of barbouzes along more than two decades and having been given some
courses in psychiatry in parallel, I can say that most of those strange bedfellows fill the criteria for a
diagnosis of antisocial disorder. However, I found a minority only with narcissistic personality
disorder. Thus, the latter pattern makes them different characters of case officers because the
barbouze is of the mobster type typically, while the case officer is of the con artist type overall.
Therefore, the barbouze is rarely a toxic personality, all on the contrary to the case officer who
invariably is. The barbouze always acts on order and does not waste his time with people he does
not know, whereas the case officer is looking constantly for opportunities by his own and, not so
rarely, for his personal interest, due to his exploitative nature.
Nonetheless, all barbouzes are authentically dangerous individuals with complete unconcern for
other’s demises and sufferings, exactly as case officers are. They have been shortlisted and recruited
because of this psychological profile, precisely. Female barbouzes are extremely rare or perhaps
even inexistent, as I never met any I could identify as such with an absolute certainty. Those whose
personality could fit the pattern were partners of male barbouzes, only.
INTERNAL STAFF[93]
Before I name sedentary employees and executives of the DGSE, the reader must know that they
are hired and paid for according to the three distinct broad categories of competencies and
responsibilities, A, B, and C. This makes a significant difference, for example, with the official 15
grades of the GS pay scale in use in U.S. intelligence agencies. It would not be false to assume that,
wholesome, the three letters denote an upper class, a middle class, and a lower class of employees,
respectively. Accesses to the B and A categories are conditioned theoretically by the passing of an
ordinary university degree or of a public service exam, which entitles the recipient with the much-
coveted tenure. The provision is modelled after a French military rule that imposes to recruits to
have a baccalaureate degree[94] at least before entering the officer school, in addition to the passing
of summary psycho-technical examination tests. Tenure offers some advantages, such as a guaranty
to keep one’s job until retirement, a rise of salary, enlarged responsibilities, and some other little
perks. As the reader may surmise, the access to this permanent position as official paid by the state
is used commonly as bait to coax fresh recruits into submitting to indoctrination and to be zealous
people.
A recruit who accessed both tenure and A category ranking obtains them after about five years of
hardship, trainings, indoctrination, and very demanding tests. His starting gross monthly salary is in
the surrounding of 3,000 euros or about 2,300 euros net and before income tax, and so about 2,000
euros after income tax (about $2,500). Accessing the A category implies a master degree at the very
minimum, and a PhD. or similar preferably. A psychiatrist of the DGSE once told me that one on
more than 600 shortlisted candidates succeeds on average.
Accessing the A level does not entirely depend on an outstanding intellectual performance, but
rather on a mix of political commitment and exceptional resilience to varied ordeals. The former of
the two latter prerequisites is not official at all, and recruits are told nothing about it, as it is out of
question that they fake it. Those who fail are offered C categories positions as contractors,
regardless of their intellectual capacities and diplomas, indeed, and it is out of question to resign and
to backtrack to look for better in the world of the ordinary people outside. That is why those
unfortunate recruits take it as a first punishment, obviously, and it is a foretaste of the life of paucity
they are going to lead until their last day.
 Any C category employee starts his career with the minimum legal monthly gross salary of about
1,500 euros, or 1,150 euros net (about $1,400), but at least there is no income tax on low salaries in
France for the moment in 2019. The DGSE pay system encompasses a set salary plus a little bonus
of about 10% as a compensation for varied minor expenses such as transportation.
Not long ago, between April and June 2017, the DGSE took the unprecedented initiative to
recruit openly by online ads. In addition to this, at about the same time, the recently created PR
service of the DGSE obtained from the mainstream media the publishing of several flattering press
articles and television reportages, still in the expectation to fulfill its current and rising need for
workforce. Thus, many facts on this agency were publicly revealed, but many others were lies, by
omission especially and typically as it was out of question, of course, to do any harm to the image of
this agency that is not good already.
The ads lied in a way about the duration of the recruiting process, by rendering vague certain
statements. To say, the DGSE specified that the candidates would all earn 3,000 euros “net” a month
“upon their recruitment,” which stands off as an attractive income for young workers in France
nowadays. In addition, the agency specified a “recruiting time of about five months”.[95] In reality,
the latter time is that of the shortlisting process and does not include the tests of the recruiting
processes that I described in the chapter 3. So, the DGSE used deceptively the word selection
(admission) in lieu of pre-selection (shortlisting). Then one of those ads further specified that the
recruiting process, that is to say, the real and untold journey that may last up to five years, unfolds
as a “role play game”. The latter specific is poorly informative to young unenlightened people
though but not false in the absolute, yet deceptive by comparison with the realities I shall explain in
this book. In any case, no one is hired in the DGSE after five months only of examination and tests,
regardless of the salary. In the most optimistic case scenario to the candidates, they will be
“approved” upon a recruiting process spanning two years at the very least, and so as C category
employees and not paid the announced salary, therefore. It is out of question to the DGSE to give
3,000 euros a month to each of those 600 future recruits, at the very least because a large majority of
upper-scale analysts with years of experience do not earn such a salary themselves. They are ranked
B category, typically, and so they earn less than 2,000 euros a month, raw.
Otherwise, the PR campaign focused on the “fight against terrorism” to describe the current
missions of the DGSE, save for a short and vague phrase that the Ministry of Defense itself
published, stating, “The DGSE opens new recruitments to better protect the security of the national
interests and French expatriates”.[96] Nothing was ever said about intelligence, counterintelligence,
and related activities, and thus the agency resumed its denial of the latter missions. However, the
DGSE specified the profiles and skills this agency was looking for at that time, mixed with few
dubious positions certainly introduced for deception. Those were, quote,
“IT and telecom project managers, database engineers, design & application development
engineers, telecoms and IT, core network engineers, project management computer consultants and
their assistants, computer security engineers, crypto-mathematicians, programmer analysts, telecom
technicians in signal and information systems, linguist operators, translators, editorial analysts
(geopolitics, financial circuits, energy goods, ballistics, etc.), public procurement writers, technical
support professions, and supervisory agents [supervisors]”.
Overall, all specialties above are indicative of an important need for staffers working in
telecommunications interception, which is true and even largely known today, as we shall see in
detail in the chapter 22, dedicated to COMINT. Further, the ads, and some press articles said that
600 new positions were to be filled by 2019. A few months later, a TV reportage broadcast on M6
TV channel said that the DGSI recruited massively too, with a first objective of 1,200 new staffers.
One of the biggest challenges the DGSE has to face since the early 2000s in particular, is to hire
enough brained staffers to collect, decipher, translate, and analyze the enormous amount of raw data
it intercepts on submarine telecommunication optical fiber cables. As this is so difficult and
expensive to do, France has been forced to collaborate with Germany in her very large-scaled
COMINT ambitions and program, expected to be operational in the 2020s. Again, the maps
illustrating the chapter 22 on French COMINT will allow the reader to grasp the important
capacities of the DGSE in this area.
Back to the general subject of DGSE staffers, a number of those who prove unable to access
tenure may remain unofficial contractors for three years, typically, sent to work in intelligence units
and cells with a cover activity in the private or public sector in the context of the privatization of the
services I previously described. A number of them who all believe they failed, later are offered
opportunities in public or private companies or in NGOs in France or abroad, for it is out of
question to leave them on their own after they learned secret knowledge. Many of those who
succeed, and access tenure, come to realize at some point that the job is not as attractive as they
figured initially. This is an unexpected and complete reversal of situation in the eyes of those few
selected. As surprising as it may seem, many outsiders of the DGSE know much more than what
many of its insiders do, contrary to what they assume and provided they are smart enough to access
the “privilege”.[97]
In general, French intelligence agencies and the police and the Gendarmerie alike do not give
permanent official statuses to individuals who do not seem to be fully at ease and compliant enough
to work for long in a highly secured and very demanding professional environment. Sometimes,
they are fired because it appears they would be of greater usefulness elsewhere, and with an entirely
different specialty. This is in one of those circumstances that failure turns out to be blessing in
disguise. As long as a recruit demonstrates his good will and does not make any mistake, then he is
not going to fall in disgrace just because he is unfit to a specialty and a position that someone he
does not know had chosen for him, especially when he demonstrated both extraordinary tenacity
and strong leftist commitment.
The DGSE holds the extraordinary power to arrange for a recruit of particular interest to obtain a
diploma for him, regardless of his performance in a school or university. One of my ex-colleagues
who studied at the École Nationale d’Administration–ENA, Paris, failed her final examination.
However, she was offered to get her diploma, nonetheless, provided she would do one parachute
jump, and that is how she graduated. In a certain sense, anyone graduated at the ENA can be seen as
a zealous servitor of the State; the same remark applies to other school Polytechnique, as both are
much socialist in spirit.
French intelligence agencies organize internal concourses allowing their employees to access a
superior ranking category, as in the military. Often, in this other case, concourses and their outcome
are arranged in advance, unbeknownst to the concerned student themselves.
Any would-be-recruit approved for running for an executive position in the DGSE must submit to
a long additional psychiatric examination, carried out by a psychiatrist expert with a knowledge in
intelligence activities and specialties. When this particular physician approves the recruit, he has
enough authority to submit a recommendation on what the latter is able to do and should not be
expected to do. For example, “Is this recruit rather a character of the outgoing sort, likely to be a
good agent abroad, or a sedentary and introverted intellectual who will feel perfectly at ease as
analyst working every day in a small office?” Or else, “Do his moral values make him fit to work in
intelligence in partnership with spies, or rather in security or counterintelligence to catch spies and
terrorists?” That is not yet all, as there are the discreet tests and examinations done unbeknownst to
the recruit, very numerous, as earlier explained in the chapter 3.
The employee in intelligence. There are in the DGSE two distinct types of insiders: the
contractuels (contractors) who work inside the DGSE for a term of three years, and the titulaires
(tenured) who remain working in this agency for a much longer period or until retirement. In
DGSE’s technical and administrative jargon, the former are called agents contractuels (contractor
agents), and the latter agent titularisés (tenured agents). Some call them fonctionnaires contractuels
(officials under contract) and fonctionnaires titularisés (tenured officials) respectively. Both uses are
correct, and they imply an administrative perception of the trade of intelligence. For the average
DGSE employee is hired first as contractor, and then he can obtain his tenure through a concourse if
he is proposed the opportunity, about as in any other ordinary French public services. Then some of
those concourses such as that of intelligence analyst are specific to the DGSE, of course.
Things are a little different to those who are hired under military status, since they simply are
administratively mutés (transferred) from one ordinary military unit to another that is less so. The
employee under military status enjoys the privilege to be called “non-commissioned intelligence
officer” or “intelligence officer,” which always sounds more flattering and promising than “official”
or “agent”. Besides, the DGSE has the power to make any ordinary soldier a commissioned officer
with whatever rank overnight, up to lieutenant colonel, as we will see later in this book with a true
example.
In passing, if my reader wants to call me “Lieutenant colonel,” “General,” or “Doctor,” then I
would not mind as the three have no real value in France, in the absolute. Once in the 1980s, France
indeed awarded the Legion d’Honneur to a dog—I am not kidding. To say, in 2012, I published a
book under the pen name “Lieutenant-colonel X,” and it has a good overall note of close to five
stars on Amazon.fr from more than 80 comments since; that is to say, much better than the
autobiographies of all former directors of the DGSE and other “ex-senior executives” of this agency
to date. In truth, I always remained a first class private, and I do not have even the equivalent of a
high school degree as I left school at thirteen with the lowest note among close to 1000 students.
This was in no way a handicap to me when I gave conferences in reputed schools. I was even given
a black belt in street fighting when I once lost the yellow one that I always had from the first day of
my training.
All the civilian employee or even executive can do against this discrimination in perception
between military and civilians is to say that he is a “C,” “B” or “A” contractor or tenured agent
(“agent titulaire de catégorie A” to name the most enviable of these three possible levels of
responsibility), with corresponding salaries. Then he can be Chef analyste (Chief Analyst) or Chef
d’Unité (Chief of Unit) or Chef de Service (Chief of Service) between other examples, and past a
number of years of experience, of course. Then the salaries of all those employees can know slight
raises according to their years of experience in their respective ranking categories. As I earlier
explained, raising up the ladder depends largely on the approval of the Security Service, always
based upon unclear and sensitive criteria, among which sincere and tested leftist political
commitment counts for much.
To be hired in the DGSE does not change much to the military, and he may work in this agency
for a few years as contractor either; he, too, must pass a concourse to obtain his tenure. Military who
do not access tenure may be called or proposed to go to work in another intelligence agency such as
the DRM, the DRSD, the GIC, or even the more enviable SGDSN where employees with an above-
the-average IQ and who are rather fit for a desk job often end up. Civilian contractors may rather go
to work in the DGSI or in another intelligence agency, but also in the SGDSN for the same reasons
as above. Civilians and military alike may be “sent” to work in a private or public civilian company,
often in human resources or in security, or even in a particular NGO, such as the UNO, the
UNESCO, or the OECD, in France or abroad. Some may be sent to work abroad in some French
private subsidiaries. In the latter case, they obtain by the same occasion an unofficial position such
as contact, agent, or case officer. There they can monitor the recruitments of local engineers and
executives who are of interest to the DGSE as sources, for example, or they may enlighten the
managerial staff with intelligence sent from Paris, so that the company they work for garners better
chances to succeed against its local and foreign competitors. Or else they may be sent to work for a
foreign company through particular arrangements, which other situation makes them agent
d’infiltration (“penetration agents” aka “infiltration agents”). If ever they prove able to stay in such
foreign companies, then they will become agent en place (agents in place). The luckiest among all
may become super-agents (same orthography and meaning in English).
The DGSE recruits formally people in the aim to make them field employees, such as flying
agents or case officers, from the start. In the latter case, those must submit to thorough trainings,
which include the teaching of tips and tricks in spycraft to be explained all along this book.
Operatives expected to be trained thoroughly in intelligence and to be sent abroad, and case officers
alike, are politically indoctrinated in France, but they were shortlisted for their left-leaning stances
first. The DGSE does not thus select, trust, and train, individuals who stand for the two extreme
ends of the political spectrum, nor exponents of rightist values in general.
Many future agents deemed fit to be field agent abroad and infiltration agents are trained in
spycraft in the foreign country where they must settle successfully first, or in another place
elsewhere in the World prior their sending working in real situation in a target country. A flying
agent may be sent to learn additional knowledge and skills, chiefly a foreign language, in one or
several countries before he is sent in the country where he must carry on serious intelligence
activities. On the same occasion, his loyalty, natural inclinations, abilities, and skills are discreetly
monitored, and he is put to the test again, in real situation this time.
In all instances, training a flying agent or a case officer is a long process that takes several years,
and this duration depends of the difficulty and interest of his future missions, and on his qualities, of
course. For he must go through varied and repeated ordeals simultaneously, which aim to hardening
him and, again, to put his loyalty and stamina to the test. All this may easily take five to ten years of
hardship and learning, yet for a disappointing outcome from the point of view of the recruit. In most
instances, he will be cheaply rewarded and paid, regardless of his skills, intellectual capacities, and
education. Exceptions to the latter rule exist, but they remain scarce because they often concern
heirs of influential families. A large majority of flying agents is recruited in military elite units and
is retrained eventually to carry on intelligence activities in civilian environment and in the industrial
and business sectors. In any case, entering the DGSE upon a debut in a military elite unit often
proves to be a determining over all civilian recruits. The winning combination for success in the
DGSE is experience in a military elite unit, in addition to sincere and tested commitment to
socialism and anti-Americanism, well above all diplomas and any high IQ.
Many French field agents are foreigners who were recruited either while they were living in
France, or abroad. The DGSE is looking for recruits of the latter type because the advantages they
offer are to be fluent in one or several foreign languages, and to be less likely to be framed as
French spies by foreign counterespionage agencies. Among some examples, I may cite that of the
foreigner who enlisted in the Foreign Legion upon his arrival in France, for an individual in this
situation knows little about life in this country since he experienced a military life in a secluded
middle. Therefore, he will be thought less likely to be spotted and framed by a foreign
counterespionage service when he will settle abroad. Such field agents may be given fictitious
foreign or French identities (identité fictive) after a minimum mandatory term of service of five
years.
The analyst, or intelligence analyst, (analyste, in French) is doing a desk job exclusively. The
role of analyst is to monitor the activities of a country, an industrial sector, an economic and / or
financial sector (macroeconomics, political economy) or finance in general (banks and financial
markets), military issues and military industry and engineering. This list is far from to be
exhaustive.
The analyst collects and consults the latest information on the field that the intelligence agency
trained him to study, that is to say one hundred pages a day on average, and he surrenders a note de
synthèse (synthesis note) of his analysis to his Chief Analyst. At the lowest level (first instance
analysis), the analyst is just skilled and smart enough to make the mise-au-clair of raw data and
intelligence he is fed with daily. At a higher level, his educational background allows him to spot
with pertinence interesting bits of information, to make deductions, and to draw inferences from this
gathering of intelligence comprising about 90% of open sources at the very least, and 10% of closed
sources in the best of cases. This better skilled analyst is a researcher-specialist, in the facts. The
raw data and intelligence that an analyst receives daily come from varied sources. The closed
sources are stolen by agents or intercepted by the COMINT and IMINT branches of the DGSE, and
the 90% or generally more open sources are a flow of information publicly and daily released in the
media and books, on the Internet, and on reports. However, a small part of this open source is “gray
information” that the public cannot easily access although it is not highly sensitive or has not been
formally classified.[98] Analysts learn—and so the reader, too—that not so seldom the pertinent
gathering and careful synthesis of a batch of open sources may lead indeed to the discovery of
highly sensitive intelligence. This is possible on condition of course that they hold a basic
knowledge allowing them to determine what is highly likely to be true, what can possibly be true,
and what is highly unlikely to be true, mere supposition, disinformation, hoax, or irrational
statement based on mere beliefs.
That is why the good analyst must have the sound mind of a Sherlock Holmes, shaped by
rationality and relying on logic exclusively, while he must equally take into account that people at
all levels of the society, that is to say, up to political leaders, happen to make important decisions
based on false information, beliefs, dogmas, and poorly supported assumptions. Herein the analyst
must have a mind entirely different of that of most sources and many agents who, on the contrary,
base their decisions and actions on beliefs, dogmas, deceptive assumptions, or personal agendas. To
any intelligence agency, the latter conditions entail the dilemma of a necessary logic and rationality
that seldom is compatible with the equally necessary ideological commitment and patriotism of the
candidate shortlisted to become an analyst, since all commitments and all patriotisms are based on
myths and narratives irrational in essence.
Generally, analysts do not know the real identities of the human sources they receive intelligence
from, yet they must be provided with enough clues on their reliability, or else they may guess which
hierarchical positions and responsibilities they hold by relying on deductive reasoning at the very
least.
The rule of the need-to-know says thatthat the case officer or the agent know who their sources
are. As a source abroad is an asset who can be very valuable, the number of individuals who know
his true identity are reduced to a minimum—his handler alone, actually. The latter information is
kept in a safe in case the handler dies unexpectedly, is affected by an incapacitating illness, or is
replaced by another.
 The analyst, however, may be invited to interview contacts and even agents who live in the
country of which he is a specialist, on occasions of their tripping to France for example. In the mid-
1990s, I once saw the interview by a group of specialists of a young French agent who worked in
the United States for Pixar Animation Studios. Later in my career, as strategist, I interviewed
several nationals who worked in the United States in the computer industry, as computer developers
or company managers—I will tell about those people and meetings in the chapter 27 on French
intelligence activities in the United States.
Actually, as far as I could see and understand, the rules defining compartmentalization between
sources and agents on one side, and the DGSE and its staffs on the other side, are not exact and
invariable, and rather variable geometry in the facts and on a case-by-case basis. In other words, the
level of secrecy surrounding the identities of sources, agents, and contacts, is defined according to
informal criteria that depend on arbitrary decisions, considerations, assumptions, tactical or political
decisions, accidental or deliberate leaks inside the agency, or whatever else. All this makes me
saying that a source is running the risk that his anonymity be compromised at any time, completely
unbeknownst to him and contrary to all promises of safety that he may have been made in this
regard.
As in all intelligence agencies in the World, the quality of intelligence for long is ranked with an
alphanumeric code, defined by a matrix with a letter in abscissa for the quality of the source: from
A (trusted) to F (reliability unknown). The number in ordinate gives the value of the information:
from 1 (confirmed) to 6 (non-evaluable accuracy). Thus, if the source is a general or a minister, the
odds for a piece of information he gave be ranked “A1” are elevated, whereas a source who claims
“He has free access to the Minister personally” without further evidence of the privilege may be
ranked as low as “F6,” possibly. As about a source who is a mid-level manager at the headquarters
of a foreign intelligence agency, the information he provides is likely to be considered as enfumage
(deceit / “chicken-feed”) in the context of a deception operation, so “F6,” too, or perhaps “E3” in
the best of cases. Often, an intelligence agency distrusted mistakenly a sincere source who gave
highly valuable information. The case of Fritz Kolbe during the WWII is the best historical example
of such mistakes.
Then the value of intelligence in the DGSE (and in the DRM) is otherwise roughly noted on
synthesis notes in percentage of reliability and according to the following increments, starting down
from “non-recoupé” (“not cross-checked”), to 50%, 80%, to 100% reliable, thus simplified once the
value of a sensor (source or agent) has been established according to the previously explained
matrix system. In this respect, the cross-checking of a piece of intelligence itself has a value that is
conditioned by the diversity of the sources of information. This means that two different sources
giving a same information does not offer any guarantee of reliability if both are working in a same
body such as a ministry or a military headquarter, and that the validity of this information must be
cross-checked by comparing it with what says a source working in another body or with other
consistent facts. Intelligence is not an exact science, but a help to make an opinion and a decision,
which often implies a share of uncertainty.
If he is a specialist in a country or region, the analyst must have been there physically, long
enough to be a familiar and to figure out with accuracy what his sources are telling; exactly as being
an analyst specialized in aeronautics entails the prerequisite to be an engineer in this field or to have
a consistent professional experience in it, obviously. Then the analyst may go back to this country
occasionally, as tourist and without doing any espionage activity since it is not his job. For he must
have enough and fresh insight to put the information he receives in its right context, social, cultural,
economic, historical, and present. Five years only or even less are enough for a country to change
considerably in many respects and to mislead the analyst in his appraisal of the possible
consequences of an event.
Anecdotally, since most chief analysts have a cover activity of university professor or think-tank
specialist / expert, it is very frequent in France to see them being interviewed on television about a
conflict that just broke out, on the outcome of a popular election in a given country, on terrorism, or
else. None of them introduces himself as “intelligence analyst in the DGSE,” of course. I even saw
some being regularly interviewed on foreign TV channels, in Switzerland in particular. Many of
those experts publish essays on the subjects they work on. Some French publishing houses are well
known (internally in the DGSE) for their willingness to publish books written by intelligence
analysts, such as Éditions L’Harmattan, Editions Ellipses, Editions Economica, Les Éditions
Lavauzelle, and Éditions La Découverte.[99]
 The analyst often is recruited “in the civilian” upon his graduation in an ordinary school or
university or in the military, about indifferently. Since the 1990s, the French intelligence community
opened several schools and universities teaching intelligence matters and the specialty of
intelligence analysis, as we have seen earlier.
In any case, an analyst in the DGSE submits to discreet examination and assessment (background
checking for him and even his relatives, friends, possible vices, etc.), and to various tests ran
unbeknownst to him. If this first evaluation is positive, then he must submit to formal psychological
and psychiatric examinations, simply because his expected acumen must not be biased in any way:
so, no belief in UFO, World conspiracies, ghosts, astrology, and the like. “Conventional” religious
beliefs are “just tolerated” however as they are inescapable. Investigating on Muslim terrorist
activities are better conducted by someone who is a Muslim himself. A small minority of specialists
on the United States is Christian believer—only one of my ex-colleagues was, and he was not
analyst.
The recruit expected to be analyst is asked his opinions about intelligence and spying, of course,
and his loyalty to his country and morality are put to the test. Finally, he is called to pass an entry
examination as analyst, which may be considered as a formality since the real aim of this ultimate
ordeal is to introduce him to his future job.
Country analysts often are second and even sometimes first-generation immigrants, since they
must be fluent in their languages, especially when the latter are rare or of the “exotic” sort.
Preferably, they must even know slang words, local dialects, and local cultural particularisms and
mores. If he becomes a country / region analyst, then he must learn realpolitik in general and on the
country that he will be supposed to know “by heart.” Political realities as reported by the media
seldom tell that such or such country is ruled secretly by another, unbeknownst to its entire
population. The result of it being that the opinions and ambitions of their puppet political leaders
must be relativized, therefore, let alone the media of this country that are even more misleading in
this respect—though foreign propaganda and disinformation may betray true aims and concerns of
interest.
In spite of the fact that second instance analysis is a highly specialized professional activity
requiring a solid cultural and academic background, the entry salary in the specialty is the minimum
official French wage, plus a small bonus and some perks common to all French intelligence office
workers. The perks are not very attractive as their purpose actually is to balance a low purchase
power common to all French intelligence workers, especially when they work in Paris. For example,
still in the early 2000s, there was a special discount store located in the Northeastern part of Paris,
near the ring road, where DGSE workers went to shopping because it is located not far from the
headquarters of the DGSE. In addition, there are regular Groupon-like unofficial purchase
opportunities on various goods, new and “pre-owned,” ranging from wine to appliances, computers,
clothing, etc. Otherwise, at the same period, the word was given to buy one’s groceries in Leader
Price discount stores in particular!
With the exponential growth of computer technology and of the Internet and online information
and telecommunications, intelligence analysis has been relying increasingly on online computer
automated search of data, data mining and statistics, and artificial intelligence to process very large
quantities of raw intelligence (textual, vocal, and pictorial) daily stored in large computer servers.
The pertinence and accuracy of these new research tools vary according to the nature of the studied
subject. With respect to politics, macro-economy, and foreign affairs, all deductive reasoning and
forecasts still depend on the analysis of decisions and predictions taken by leaders, experts, and
advisers, who remain dependent themselves on their own perceptions and misperceptions in
international politics. Moreover, History abounds in cases of decisions and actions, whose responses
logically immediate yet were delayed unexpectedly for very varying durations. Then, in many of
those occurrences, such delays were long enough to see accidental and influential other events
happening in the meantime, which either precipitated the expected responses, cancelled, or delayed
them. For any decision-making in the aforesaid fields may also be influenced considerably by
random events of natural origin, unpredictable, therefore, but that must taken into account either.
Those unpredictable events and completely random incidents each may be rare to the point that
some “never occurred before”. The number of those that are already known and provisioned, and
their equally known—if ever—lesser or greater probability to occur together result in the highly
likelihood to influence or even to elicit political and economic decisions, and spontaneous social
upheavals. Actually, this accidental factor has been formally and recently (2007) rationalized by
Lebanese American statistician and former trader and risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb, under the
name “black swan theory”. From my own initiative and for long, I named it “the unknown factor”.
As a general principle, everyone beyond analysts should keep in mind “That is not because we
decide to ignore chaos that chaos is going to forget us”. Then the French intelligence community
continues, nonetheless, to rely on the all-human parameter of insight supported by mere intuition;
that is to say, in an unpredictable way, ironically. Intuition is taken very seriously in the DGSE.
To sum it all up, not all politics and economics are necessarily rational and / or predictable.
General trends in the society, international in their nature and scope, and whose existences, courses,
and evolutions are well known and seem inescapable, remain themselves likely to be stopped
abruptly at any time by such variables, as History teaches us again. That is why the chain of the
above-enumerated variables in political, economic, and social forecasting makes intelligence
analysis an uncertain task that cannot qualifies as science.
The Chief Analyst (Chef Analyste) is considered a genuine expert about a country, a region of
the World, or of a scientific or technical field. Typically, he is a former university lecturer or
currently is a scientist, a historian specialist, an aeronautic engineer, etc. He is ranked at an
executive level in reason of his great knowledge in his specialty, and he demonstrated his ability to
seeing the overall picture of a given problem in a weighted way, in addition to his outstanding
analytical ability. However, in the DGSE, all such qualities and abilities are not necessarily
rewarded accordingly. His specific expertise and his intelligence, above the average, must enable
him to evaluate with the greatest possible accuracy the validity of the synthetized information
(refined intelligence) that his analysts process for him. For intelligence on a given subject that the
DGSE collects from various sources often is incomplete and / or inaccurate in varying respects. As
the archaeologist who has to figure the missing part of a drawing on an old broken pottery, the Chief
Analyst must have a large knowledge in his specialty to be right on the nature of the missing part of
an information. In point of fact, intelligence analysts in the DGSE liken themselves collectively to
“archaeologists;” they learn formally this perception of their trade, indeed.
Finally, the recognized expertise of the Chief Analyst allows him to formulate an opinion on what
consequences the intelligence he has collected may have on the more or less long term, a task that is
not so remote from that of a strategist. In other words, he must be capable to formulate highly likely
guesses and forecasts whenever possible, and so he must be much more qualified than an analyst is.
The Strategist (stratège) is many persons at the same time and he often is a polymath. He is a
privileged worker who is in touch with numerous people of the intelligence community. That is why
he hardly perceives himself as an “insider”. He often is perceived as a character not to say an
eccentric because what is perceived as eccentricity with him truly is his particular intellectual
capacity to formulate thought-provoking questions, statements, and ideas, which may go as far as to
questioning the tenets of the intelligence agency he is working for, dangerously for his career at
times. Paradoxically, the oft-encountered problem with the strategist is his capacity to see the
general picture of a situation, and his innate and unabashed mania to question every statements that
are not supported by indisputable premises, for the latter characteristic shelters him from accepting
at their face values all dogmas his intelligence agency preaches. Therefore, he hardly fits in the
mold as his colleagues and superiors do, who owe their admissions and positions to this blind
acceptance of the current state of things, and to their willingness to enforce it further, precisely. The
exceptional freedom of thought the strategist enjoys owes in part to the cautious unwillingness of
his superiors to let him for too long staying in touch with people of a same intelligence unit, and in
part to their will to try his capacities in other fields where problems also are waiting for their
solutions. Unavoidably, the latter practice clashes with usual provisions in the compartmentalization
of sensitive knowledge since it violates the sacrosanct internal rule of the need-to-know.
In the DGSE, the solutions that have been found to solve the tricky problem of hiring full time
strategists are either to let them be outsiders working under whatever cover activity, or to dismiss
them at a point where it is considered that “they know too much already,” and to send them working
in another governmental agency or private company having ties with the intelligence community
close enough to resume their monitoring. Or else to succeed one way or another in bending them
into giving to the rules and tenets of the agency, which will bias their recommendations, therefore.
[100]

Among the special provisions taken to limit the access of an individual to too many sensitive
matters at the same time or along a career, employees and executives in intelligence who consult
strategists are instructed to formulate their questions and problems in veiled or metaphoric terms.
Thus, they substitute names and things with slightly different others to elicit hypotheses, ideas and
concepts only, for wants of exact and precise responses to their real yet highly sensitive problems.
The strategist in intelligence is not informed of the results of his works, with as consequence not to
let him learn from his mistakes. Thus, if ever he is dismissed, he will never know why exactly
I should admit honestly at this point of my explanation, that those think tanks in intelligence,
similar to those in common existence in the United States since the creation of the Rand
Corporation in 1948, did not yet exist in France when I left. For all I know, or rather I guessed at
that time, this absence owed mainly to an obscure question of intellectual elitism considered as
incompatible with the left-leaning culture of the French intelligence community. Additionally, the
idea of think tanks was perceived as “too American,” as I was once told unambiguously. Moreover,
the DGSE was reticent with making several strategists working together. I knew however of the
existence of a group of six thinkers who worked outside of the DGSE, officially paid for by the
French telephone and Internet company Orange.[101] Today, as far as I can see, the French
intelligence community at last surrendered to the obviousness of the profits that “private” and
independent-minded think tanks may yield. Their number seems to be steadily rising, even.
Another tricky question, which the DGSE for long acknowledges as such, at least, is the natural
impossibility to train someone—an analyst, for example—to become a strategist, however
wondering about this may seem stupid. The talent-spotters of the DGSE are quick to identify them
because they know which of their recurring patterns in characters are. This intelligence agency is
deploying consistent efforts in its endeavors to find out and to hire such workers. It began to
surrender to this other evidence not until the late 1980s, apparently. Before the happening of this
change, it stuck to an informal rule saying that a trusted strategist could not be someone else than a
scholar coming from a good social middle. All other candidates having the intellectual traits of a
thinker were dismissed and regarded with contempt as “jacks of all trades” and “Mr. Know-it-all”.
[102] I understand that some may question the latter remarks, but they derive from what I witnessed
and experienced firsthand for years.
The Chief of Service (Chef de service) leads the staff of a service under the direct responsibility
of a directorate,[103] itself placed under the administrative supervision of a director of directorate.
He often is a former commissioned officer in one of the three main military branches (Army, Navy,
or Air Force), or sometimes a former gendarme, police officer, civilian engineer, or even a scientist.
He may also have been a lawyer or a judicial officer. In all cases, he has been immersed for long in
a bureaucratic middle and he is a national. He owes his managerial position partly to his thorough
knowledge of the service’ specialty he leads, previously acquired through experience, and partly to
his ability to manage large staffs and to perform multiple and varied tasks simultaneously. Of
course, he preferably is a self-assertive and charismatic individual, the latter fact implying he must
command individuals (chiefs of units) who may be more competent than he is in the considered
branch. Usually, he entered the intelligence agency and his service, or another one, early in his
career. Necessarily too, he has a sincere passion for what he is doing, and that is why he is always in
close and permanent touch with his subordinates, ready to fix any problem at any time. In sum, the
Chief of service must have the profile of a charismatic military group leader, although he has a mix
of military and civilian workers under his command.
The Chief of service comes often from the little bourgeoisie of the middle class, and so he did not
have to work and to borrow money to buy his home. In point of fact, those heirlooms will dissuade
him from attempting to defect, if ever such an idea comes to his mind—he would have no hope to
recover all this or to enjoying it anymore after that. Individual property, and real estate more
especially, are important in the eyes of the DGSE when this agency is envisaging to promote
someone to an executive or sensitive position. The latter fact is true because this ownership calls for
a material bond in addition to family, i.e. a stake that constitutes a serious motive of loyalty. In the
DGSE, however, making somebody the owner of his home is a thing that can be arranged easily and
very quickly, as I saw it several times.
Nonetheless, this senior executive is equally aware that chances for a chief of service to access a
directorial position one day are next to nothing. For to be named director of a directorate or director
of the DGSE depends on quite different and sometimes odd considerations, once more defined and
decided by the Security Service above anyone else, and despite official claims that the political
apparatus alone would decide of who occupy these senior positions.
The Director of directorate (Directeur de direction) is an individual who began his career at a
relatively young age, either in intelligence, the military, diplomacy, sciences and technology, or in
another public service—this enumeration is not exhaustive—, upon his completion of postgraduate
studies in a large majority of instances. He never climbed the ladder by sheer arduous work in the
directorate he commands, contrary to the Chief of Service who is his direct subordinate.
As for his experience in intelligence, he acquired it either in the military or when he worked as
diplomat with the Ministry of Foreign affairs, as director of research in a scientific civilian body, or
as Chef de poste abroad (Chief of Station). In sum, he acquired a strong experience in management
above all, and in close and permanent touch with highly minded and educated people exclusively,
yet outside the intelligence agency where he is working. Of course, he is the owner of a significant
real estate heritage.
His senior executive position in intelligence has been planned. That is why his professional career
was oriented so that he could acquire all necessary knowledge to the perfect fulfillment of his
managerial functions as quickly as possible.[104] My American reader would rightly say, he was “on
the fast track” from the inception.
The Director of directorate is not at all in direct and permanent touch with the staff of the
service(s) under his command, but outside of it, and again because of the rule of
compartmentalization. He is working at the headquarters, in the directorial building with the
directors of the other directorates, and with the Director of the Agency with whom he is in daily
touch. This particular provision must allow quick concerted decisions, actions, and responses, under
the command of the Bureau of the Director and his Deputy Director and assistants.
The Director of the DGSE is officially chosen and appointed by the President upon
recommendation of the Ministry of Defense and approval of the DRSD.[105] Frequently, he was
picked up when he was still a high-ranking officer in the military (General, Admiral). In the course
of his experience in the military, he became familiar with the subject of intelligence (military in his
case), and in touch with the DRM and the DGSE, and about what is called “special operations,” i.e.
the sending of elite troops abroad in contexts of more or less discreet military and paramilitary
interventions in certain countries—African in most instances—and in the other contexts of armed
interventions under UNO / NATO command.
It may also happen that the Director has been an official of the diplomatic corps, which middle
allowed him to become familiar with intelligence issues, to meet regularly with French and foreign
intelligence officers, and to acquire great expertise in foreign relations and realpolitik. In addition to
all this, he has been solicited frequently in various, subtle, and insidious ways to betray his country,
a professional inconvenience and multiple pitfalls he proved able to overcome. Some were
Intelligence Chief of Station abroad. Finally, he offers as additional guarantee of his loyalty the
possession of a personal fortune, inherited in a large majority of cases, which binds him firmly to
his country.
The reader may be tempted to conclude that the DGSE is articulated around a pyramidal
hierarchy that is altogether classic. Actually, things are more complex than that, and they are even
complicated by the fact that one should take into account the French-German partnership in
intelligence, and most of all the highly influential and tricky special French-Russian relationship.
As I said, the DGSE is largely influenced by the Russian approach to intelligence, and this
explains why this agency commonly accepts the notion of “generalist,” exactly as in the other sector
of medicine that commonly accepts generalist physicians, although hospitals are compartmentalized
in highly specialized services either. In those hospitals, we also find generalists with no definite
specialties in particular areas, who yet do not hold managerial positions. In the DGSE, a similar
culture may extend to about all levels of its organization because it is welcomed and even expected.
When this agency recruits someone, its skills, particular areas of knowledge, and intellectual
capacities together defines in which branch he will be directed to learn more, train, and work to
become a highly specialized expert ultimately or a brilliant generalist. COMINT tends to breed a
majority of highly specialized professionals, whereas HUMINT engenders generalists naturally.
Recruits with no definite particular area of knowledge begin their career as “generalists,” though
not necessarily. Then, they are stirred at some point to a specialty for which they appear to have
affinities, usually: a country in particular, security and counterespionage, influence and
disinformation, etc. There are two broad categories of recruits: those such as engineers who
graduated in very particular areas, and those with a diploma of similar significance but rather
generalist in essence, such as political science as it frequently happens. Some specialize for a while
in a particular area, and then become bored by it and specialize again in an entirely different branch.
A minority among them never specializes definitively.
 However, from the viewpoint of the Security Service that much matters, the status of generalist
poses a problem with respect to the compartmentalization of sensitive knowledge. That is why
generalists do not stay for long full-time employees in the DGSE. Many become exterior
consultants with no clear status, either individually as member of a think tank or of some front
organization. Those particular people are gifted because if they were not, then they would be
imposed a specialty from authority.
The apparent paradox with those generalists is that together they indeed exert great influence on
the policy, procedures, missions and operations, strategy, and future orientations of the main
missions of the DGSE, although they are not formally bestowed upon any clear responsibilities and
rank other than a high awareness degree. The latter particularity, which one may see as a sign of
disorganization or loophole, is integral to the doctrine of active measures in reality, so that an enemy
has a hard time with finding out who are the spymasters and the brains.
Notwithstanding, the point with this system—which is correct—is that a capacity for
commanding and leading does not necessarily goes on a par with a matching ability to see the
overall picture of problems and to find out weighted solutions. Otherwise, the largest industrial
companies would use MENSA as their favorite recruiting pool to find out their managerial staffs.
 6. Insider’s Lives.
A s seen from a social angle, the DGSE is a hyper-organized beehive-like society in which the
stability of the community must prevail over the well-being of its individuals. The importance of
this constancy is such that it must win over the moral, ethical, and religious criteria of the world of
ordinary people. Doubtless, the public opinion would be outraged to discover the realities of the
lives of the men and women who work in and for this agency. That is why this aspect is a state
secret itself. The sorry consequence of this situation is a common recourse to forms of threats and
retaliatory measures that could hardly be seen elsewhere than in mafias and similar criminal
organizations. This explains why the media reports so few cases of betrayals or grave faults within
the French intelligence community, although its members that also are its vulnerabilities are
numerous.
My choice of the word “insider” in the title of this chapter owes to my need to simplify complex
realities, for the statuses of the different categories of officials and collaborators are associated with
a variety of qualifiers, some of them being as unclear as their missions are from the viewpoint of the
public. In addition, my own definition of this word in this particular context extends to all DGSE
staffers who are working outside of the headquarters and under cover activities, although in those
instances they may be easily dealt with as “outsiders,” on a case-by-case basis.
As an amusing aside to the reader who, perhaps, remembers the 1975 thriller Three Days of the
Condor, starring Robert Redford as “Condor,” I precise that the “American Literary Historical
Society” in New York City, in which he is working as analyst at the beginning of the plot, resembles
strikingly the typical DGSE secret cell working undercover in the 21st century, save for more
modern desktop computers and printers, of course. As “Condor,” many such young employees in
Paris downtown also come to work on bicycle, simply because their incomes would not allow them
to own a car or even a motorcycle, and not by personal choice.
One could separate all those individuals into two generic groups that the DGSE would
acknowledge, doubtless: civilian and military insiders who both are working under military-like
rules, and “mercenaries”. Senior executives in the DGSE consider that agents indeed are
“mercenaries;” this is the term used exactly, unofficially and commonly. I believe this perception of
the external “contractor” lays at its origin on Machiavelli’s mercenaries in The Prince because, as in
this agency, Machiavelli says that the mercenary is unworthy of consideration. He is taken as a man
without loyalty that a Prince will be well advised “to get rid of after use”.[106]
The reader understands that DGSE employees and spies cannot be compared in any way to
people working in a business or even in an ordinary public service for the sake of making a living;
this perception of French intelligence would be misleading. The reality, in this respect, is rather
similar to a humanitarian NGO in which ideological commitment has to take precedence over the
notions of wages and career, or else, and perhaps more exactly, to a religious monastery. However,
as this reality is never explained to those who are interested in a career in intelligence, and who
often believe it is financially rewarding, logically since it claims higher intellectual capacities, the
daily lives of all DGSE employees are bitter from their own viewpoint, without exception.
That is why fundamentals in the motives of DGSE employees and others working in the field will
reduce to my summary and personal presentation of a general notion, once brilliantly rationalized by
French sociologist and philosopher George Sorel in his Reflexions sur la violence (Reflections on
Violence), first published in 1908; that of the myth as indispensable support to all ideological and
political commitments. Without a myth associating historical realities with a supernatural or / and
imagined narrative, the dogmatic commitment and beliefs on which the esprit de corps must take
root, i.e. “us vs. them,” would not exist. Without the latter, the DGSE and its spies would be nothing
but a gang of barbarians with no faith, law, clear goals, and real masters, from the simple agent and
up to the Director.
So, the understanding of the notion of esprit de corps the reader has in mind does not apply in this
particular context, since it is superficial in the facts; it is nothing but a thin layer of camaraderie,
easy to scratch. Herein we are quite far from the other notion of “band of brothers” of the military,
at least because of the rule of “mutual watchdogging” I only hinted in an earlier chapter, imposed
for the sake of this safety of the collectivity that has to prevail over everything else. Therefore,
esprit de corps must be understood as part of the narrative supporting the myth, only, without any
ambiguity from the viewpoint of the detached observer. Yet the concerned colleagues must believe
in the reality of this esprit de corps that is not. In point of fact, the particularity will be exemplified
many times in anecdotes I tell in this book.
For long and until recently, the SDECE and then the DGSE maintained a cult-like veneration
toward certain of its founders, all ex-members of the Resistance in the WWII, Gilbert Renaud aka
“Colonel Rémy,” and Colonel Paul Paiolle in particular—those who preferred the allies of the West
in wartime, such as Colonel André Dewavrin, were dismissed, forgotten. Paillole was head of the
French counterespionage in wartime, and main founder of the all-military Amicale des Anciens des
Services Spéciaux de la Défense Nationale–AASSDN (Special Services of the National Defense
Alumni Association), created in 1953.
Remarkably, since 2005, the DGSE is attempting to launch again a cult of a sort for some, a
dozen or so of its “former” and even active employees, executives preferably and logically, who
since then write books and make regular appearances in the mainstream media. The novelty should
be understood as integral to the equally recent creation of a public relation service in the DGSE in
the early 2000s, and to the launch of promotional campaigns aiming to recruiting more spies and
specialists in COMINT. In truth, the latter novelty owes to a slight change in the narrative and to a
recent need to support the myth with enticing true and living heroes of our modern time.
Inside this agency, the myth and its associated narrative may be slightly different from one
employee to another, however, and then greatly different between a C category employee and the A-
ranked executive. People who volunteered in intelligence did not all do it spirited by the same
motives, to begin with. Upon their effective recruitments, they are never fully enlightened on all
reasons justifying all missions and objectives of the DGSE, simply because their sensitivity often
claims higher levels of knowledge and awareness degrees available to senior executives and to
some lower ranking employees and contractors having a particular need-to-know and an already
long experience. At the simplest, and indeed as a rule, employees below the A category rank learn
to abstain from asking the reasons justifying the daily tasks and missions and long-term operations
they execute; exactly as in most armies in the World, after all, the reader might possibly exclaim.
However, contrary to what happens in the military, the DGSE considers collectively that it is of
paramount importance to know the exact reasons of the commitment of each of its employees,
regardless of what it is exactly, as for its sources and agents. The reasons actually are and must limit
to a mix of abstract motives that the employee had when he enlisted in this agency, completed with
the indoctrination that went along his recruitment and training. That is to say, largely metaphysical
in essence because knowing exactly what the reasons are, and ascertaining their strength, together is
a provision in internal security against ever possible mindless leaks of sensitive information, and
betrayal, of course. Herein I mean, since employees of the C and B categories in particular are
rewarded rather poorly for what they do, that is to say, much less than what they would obtain with
the same skills in about any other business, then they could hardly find incentives and real stakes
beyond the fear of the sanction.
In the light of the explanations above, the reader can now understand why the DGSE
indoctrinates and encourages its employees in their zeal by resorting to myths and narratives.
Slight discrepancies in beliefs and motives are visible on occasions of casual chats between
employees, as we shall see all along this book. Then comes the thorny question of reconciling the
reasons of a daily task or of a mission with its lot of morally disputable effects and long-term
consequences, since about everything an intelligence agency does, not only is morally disputable
from the viewpoint of the society of ordinary citizens, but is also punishable by their laws. It is not
easy to everyone, on one hand, to cope every day and for years with approving the rightfulness of
the law of the ordinary society, while, on the other hand, to endorse and even to partake actively or
passively in lies, deception, and treachery, sometimes even against one’s country, and in theft and
murder sometimes against one’s fellow citizens. Machiavelli explained and even justified the
contradiction in moral, ethics, and law in The Prince and in Discourse on Livy. Dante did it too in
De Monarchia, and Giovanni Botero in The Reason of State. In France, Chief Minister Cardinal
Richelieu first employed the concept of the reason of State in the early 17th century, and all
successive kings, emperors, and governments approved with enthusiasm the all-simple and miracle
solution to the thorny problem of moral in politics until today in this country. However, another
particular rule in the DGSE says that the justification to one’s disputable activity by the reason of
State is rather unwelcomed, for several reasons I explain pell-mell.
Not everyone accepts and easily endorses the reason of State, even in an intelligence agency, and
more especially its younger employees. Citing the reason of State as the justification for one’s
actions and daily activities in intelligence is hazardous, since this points out “the State” and more
precisely one of its intelligence agencies as the responsible or sponsor, unambiguously. The DGSE
counts firmly on self-censorship about that, and it expects that all its people who do involve in
illegal activities in its service cite whatever other motive or justification instead—to the surprise of
all those who just learn this. The more so since it is not so rare that the DGSE, or another French
intelligence agency, has a hand in illegal activities that could not possibly be justified by the
national interest, as we shall see in this book in a number of occasions.
All previously mentioned particularisms, and some others to be developed in the next chapters,
oblige the DGSE to adopt suitable policies in the management of certain categories of its human
resources, therefore, on a case-by-case basis. All this justifies my need to introduce the following
aside in my explanations, which should help the reader understand other concepts and subjects in
French intelligence that will often arise eventually.
All balanced human beings have an understanding, more or less correct, of the meanings of the
words “ethics,” “moral,” “common sense,” and “decency,” especially nowadays as they are being
daily reviewed and even challenged and questioned. Notwithstanding, a large majority accepts at
least the most elementary obligations of “self-restraint” that this other notion conveys. Even those
claiming that “ethics and morality are noting but products of religious beliefs, outdated, and
irrational,” yet are indignant in the depths of themselves about theft, cheating, deception, and
murder. Exceptions rot in penitentiaries or have a shorter-than-the-average life expectancy. In any
case, we are all forced to acknowledge that the most elementary principles of criminal laws in all
civilizations and countries have always been established on ethics, moral concepts, and values
formalized, codified, and conveyed, by religions or by philosophical currents assimilated to them,
regardless of their origins because there is indeed an indisputable universality in the principles they
teach. At some point, we are forced to acknowledge, ethics and morality are inseparable from
religions, even when we do not subscribe to any, for History, and modern History in particular, teach
us that any government that attempts to eradicate religion has to prepare for the disappearance of
these ethics and moral values that, therefore, must be replaced by bureaucratic law, rules, and
regulations decided and enacted by officials who can even not fit in the definition of a myth if there
is no religion to be called upon. Today, this fact is epitomized by the attempt in Europe to create a
global and unifying government and a concept supporting it, in abstentia of any myth and of a
history that could spirit it, only sustained instead by a flag and a narrative designed and enacted by a
tiny minority of elected officials and technocrats. There is indeed a European history, but there is
nothing in it, no myth and even no common culture, objectively, that could support the idea of a
common and unifying identity capable to breed a strong and sincere belief. Instead, we find endless
rivalries and wars that began back to time immemorial.
Common identity without a myth to support it transforms inescapably and ultimately any would-
be-nation into a despotic regime in which freedom of thought vanishes, since no one can any longer
locate the red line between wrong and good. Laws, and even the word “justice” itself must not be
confused with moral because, quite often and everywhere in the World, laws and justice serve
interests and practices that are in complete opposition to moral. In point of fact, we find laws, a
justice, and courtrooms in the most despotic regimes and in all banana republics. Herein laws
actually are rules defined by ruling elite to serve their own interest or the interests of the country
political in essence, and not moral and ethics.
The latter remarks are true, simply because an official, and a fortiori a group of officials, cannot
challenge mythical characters and heroes whose stories purport to show this line in a way that
everyone among the masses, and not a tiny minority of jurists only, can easily and quickly
understand. The contrary expectation is incompatible with the human nature, itself defined by the
intangible characteristics of the human brain, as we shall see when it will be question of
manipulation. In a would-be-nation of this artificial kind, the words and notions “bad,” “good,”
“reckless,” “prejudicial,” “indecent,” “moral,” and “immoral” become impossible to define, up to
the point of being considered as “irrelevant,” “obsolete,” and even “risible” sometimes. As a matter
of fact, seldom the nouns and adjectives above appear in the modern texts of laws and regulations,
simply because in them they would seem absurdly simplistic or ingenuous to their secular authors.
No matter how founded may be the claim that science and progress question the myths sustaining
religions, we are forced at some point or another and soon or (too) late to admit that nations that
make them premises supporting the enforced suppression of religion are doomed to failure. The
same is reciprocally true to all would-be-ruling elite who attempt disingenuously to use religion as
nothing more than a tool of political power, for this aim is an excess, exemplified between the 12d
and 15th century by the Inquisition of the Catholics and recently by the Sharia of the Muslims, that
transforms religion into a narrative supporting despotism in reality, hich in turn is questioned
forthwith with reciprocally founded claims of irrationality. Actually, religion is rational enough to
access the value of a scientific fact each time we want to explain the birth and shaping of societies
and nations, and this opposing argument is even more rational than any secular political doctrine.
That is why it is impossible to most of us to engage sincerely and durably with groups of people
in actions that those ethics and morality strongly condemn, unless we be provided with a substitute
making for an about acceptable alibi of rational nature, but temporarily only since its strength never
last as long as that of a religion of irrational nature. Nonetheless, the myth and its associated
narrative remain necessary to support any secular doctrine substituting religiously inspired ethics
and moral because Man has sufficient capacity for abstraction to take at their face values myths and
dogmas as alibis justifying the vilest and most unpleasant duties he may be asked to do. These
myths and dogmas will be made-to-measure for his mind or even by his mind, always in a way that
must arouse passion, to which he is the most receptive; that is to say, this part of irrationality that
yet exists in the minds of all balanced people. For without passion, this particularity of the human
mind that originates in the neocortex and limbic system of the brain, whereas (selfish) reason is
driven first by few, simple, and innate fundamental drives originating in the reptilian part of this
brain in which the id locates, Man would have been unable to evolve enough to build civilizations,
societies, and other organized bodies. How ironical it is, not to say contradictory, that religions
sustained and brought Mankind for millennia to societies advanced enough to invent and promote
the highly codified secularism that is destroying them! In passing, all these facts make me an
enthusiastic exponent of religion although I do not believe in any myself.
While watching the news on television, every day we see that it is possible to us, humans, to do
harm spontaneously against our neighbor in the name of completely abstract justifications that
however we find acceptable, whereas this is absurd, truly and indisputably, as soon as we reconsider
this from a wider angle. The latter observation pinpoints the endless struggle between passion and
reason that exists in each of us. Surprisingly, when the justification seems excessive or
incommensurate even to our irrational motives, we still have this capacity to defend our point by
honing further its alibi with stronger and more elaborate claims, even though abstract notions, all
imaginary in reality, support them again. That is how and why many of us are capable to go very
far in violence to defend something designated arbitrarily as our “territory,” “fatherland,” “honor,”
“leader,” “god,” or even the honor of a gang or of a sport team to which we do not even belong.
Again, in several of these instances, a careful examination of the motives would quickly expose
their absurdity—inasmuch as the definition of the word “absurdity” has not yet been questioned
either. This is how many of us can steal, deceive, and even kill on the pretense of an amalgam of
abstractions we acknowledged completely arbitrarily as “noble” and “virtuous”.[107] The two latter
adjectives express irrational concerns, to begin with, unless they allude to vital issues such as
hunger, thirst, the need to save our likes from an impending danger, of course.
However, History again teaches us that it is thanks to irrational pretenses of this sort, precisely,
and to their associated violence, as Sorel explains, and English historian Arnold Toynbee either with
numerous and sound supporting evidences, that rich nations and civilizations were built and thus
allowed the emergence of science and technologies. Yet the validity of the latter striking conclusion
would remain disputable and disturbing if not completed with the following explanations.
The reader must note that there is never any room for selfish interests in all the above-enumerated
justifications for violence, which fact makes the psychological phenomenon still more irrational—
actually, there are some in the absolute, but this will be explained in a next and more relevant
chapter. The reader can notice that someone at the inception imagined these irrational motives, since
they are abstract claims and notions stimulating the human brain in a coherent manner; that is to say,
arguments conspicuously devoid of any sustaining premise, a priori.
Indeed, in a majority of instances, a motive strong enough to arouse unselfish passion and
violence is nothing but a narrative supported by no logical premise or even no premise at all, which
we will call “formal aims,” in this plural form. The narrative is imagined from scratch to attain an
entirely different objective we will call “real aims,” since they are several too, generally. However,
sometimes, I will be forced to limit the real aims to one, and to use its singular form, aim, since
there is one only in the absolute, as we shall see later from the scientific viewpoint of behavioral
biology, the favored behavioral science of the DGSE. For the real aims are too rational to a large
majority, and they are impossible to justify with abstract arguments known to arouse passion and
unselfish commitment. Words and notions such as “patriotism,” “justice,” “liberty,” and “love” are
such abstract arguments, whereas the other words and notions, “profit,” “conquest,” “power,” and
“domination” are not, and they can hardly connect to ethics and moral in any case.
The method of the formal aims to reach the real aims has been used successfully for ages in
politics, foreign affairs, and security affairs, and it will continue so with similar success. I exemplify
the validity of the method with three true examples of formal aims of the latest actuality everyone
knows, each followed by their real aims not everyone necessarily knows and accept, below.
We are formally debating about how to enforce greater controls and surveillance over populations
to better fight terrorism; whereas what is truly at stake is how to make those populations accept
stringent domestic spying for nipping dissent, unrest, and foreign interference in the bud. We are
formally arguing about the costs of copyrights and the intricacies of their varying definitions from
one country to another, fees over broadcasting audiovisual contents abroad, the definitions of
geographical “regions” in the entertainment industry, and splitting the Word Wide Web in “regions”
that are “Intranets” and as many “walls” in the facts; whereas what is truly at stake is how to limit
imports of foreign media content and culture or to censor them outright to limit and even stop, if
possible, cultural interference in a global context of information warfare. We are formally
pretending to fight with passion for giving greater representation to women and punishing
discrimination against minorities; whereas what is truly at stake is how to prevent foreign hostile
powers from giving reasons and support to these minorities against their governments in the
expectation to overthrow them.
That is why the DGSE, as all other intelligence agencies in the World and even as most
politicians and rulers, resorts commonly to the method of the irrational formal aims that must drive
people to partake in the fulfillment of the rational real aims they ignore. The recourse to formal
aims is recurring in intelligence activities, either to corrupt people to one’s benefits or to recruit
sources and agents, and the more often to deceive large groups of people in the context of agitprop,
influence, and disinformation actions and campaigns, as we shall see. However, the managerial staff
of this agency also resorts commonly to formal aims to spur the loyalty, willingness, and zeal of its
employees of lower ranks. The latter applies the more so to the outsiders who are contractors,
contacts, agents, and sources.
Thus, the DGSE deceives a large majority of its insiders about as much as the agents it recruits
under a false flag, however this may seem excessive. For if the reader were given the opportunity to
enjoy for a while a frank and explicit conversation with a French spy, or even with a full-time
employee of the DGSE, then great would be the chances to him to be surprised by their avowed
motives supporting the zeal and aggressiveness they show in their duties. As examples, a majority
of the younger employees of the DGSE picture their agency and themselves as good people waging
a secret war to establish humanist values in their country and in the World, or to fight some evil
forces, even when those are in no way harmful in their forms and intents; even quite on the contrary
in some instances. The pattern in beliefs is found again, not so seldom, with experienced executives,
simply because the indoctrination to which they submitted at the beginning of their careers proved
strong enough not to be altered by the “updates” to their awareness degrees that told them the truth,
at last. In any case, the managerial staff of the DGSE, up to its director, is made up of people who
each express strikingly different beliefs and motives supporting their commitments, although the
claimed aims to be reached remain the same in all cases.
The real aims in management, which must result in the behavioral traits of each of the insiders of
the DGSE, standardized indeed, be him low-ranking employee or head of service, are a blind
obedience coupled with a readiness to serve an authority that itself has no other formal aims than the
reason of State to propose to reach its own real aims.[108] The DGSE has “faith” in the value of an
individual having both the latter characteristics—quotes added because the meaning of the word
faith must be relativized, as we shall see eventually. For the patriotism that is attached to the reason
of State, as faith in anything, cannot be innate of course; it must be acquired through a mix of
learnings, implicit or explicit regardless, and then the German notions of kultur and heimat come to
support the whole of it. The DGSE teaches its men and women a military belief saying,
“Determination and persistence are superior to wit when united”.
The DGSE is a two-class society. Those of the B category, between the C’s and A’s, who in the
ordinary society would belong to the middle class, however are assimilated in this agency to the
lower class of ordinary employees, and they are constantly reminded about this. The enlightened
reader remarks it is the same in the French military, in which non-commissioned officers are not
tolerated in the exclusive midst of the commissioned officers. The former are sent back to their
cradle, unambiguously, that of the privates who did not join as Aspirant (Officer Aspirant). This
seems to be in complete contradiction with the dominant leftist stance preaching equality in this
agency. It should be said that the notion of social classes is perhaps stronger in French
progressivism than in capitalist societies, and that it is strengthened by a strict enforcement of a
chain of command I described in the chapter 4.
In the DGSE, the upper class of executives sticks to a French saint-simonian perception of
socialism, fully understood as such or not as it is of no importance in the absolute. The other class of
the ordinary employees and middle-ranking executives stands farther to the left, unambiguously,
although “communism” is a word no one would openly accept in this agency. The latter peculiarity
is very French; the reader who would experience living in France for a year would notice it in the
lower class already. In an overwhelming majority of instances, the posture is no more sincere than it
was seventy-six years ago, in reality, when much more than fifty percent of the French population
claimed its stance for Marshal Pétain and its belief in the project of the great and unified Europe of
Adolf Hitler. Both are the formal aims of easily interchangeable political doctrines since they have
been thought to arouse a same passion. The real aims stay the same either: conquest, power, and
ruling.
In 2010, when former Chief of Service Maurice Dufresse aka “Pierre Siramy” was giving an
interview on Canal+ television channel, I could not but agree with his personal perception of the
DGSE at the end of his twenty-five years of service in this agency. He said, with a sincerity that the
Ministry of Defense made him pay dearly eventually, that many of the tasks he had to execute not
only were morally questionable, but also they often served the personal interests of some members
of the French ruling elite in reality. At some point, Dufresse exclaimed, “But; we are the French
KGB!” A few weeks later, Dufresse said again, on a second interview, that he perceived the DGSE
as “a little North-Korea”.
Working in the DGSE may easily leave anyone with an exacerbated sense of anonymity and
conspiracy that bears striking resemblances with what history books tells us of the French
Resistance during the German occupation. Only the Director is hired officially in the DGSE, and
then the mainstream media alone decide who has been indeed agent, chief of service, and director of
directorate; all the others are liars or delusional folks. The rule for regular and mandatory physical
health checks says that one must go to a particular place at a precise time, outside of the
headquarters, all details decided by the DGSE and transmitted via one’s hierarchical superior. This
is typed on an ordinary medical piece of paper, and the medical center is all-ordinary either.[109] For
long, employees and executives of this agency under military status belonged officially to the 89e
Bataillon des Services (89th Battalion of Services), a half-fictitious French Army unit. Then,
following an authentic or deliberate blunder in the Ministry of Defense, I could not say, the names
of several officers who belonged to this unit were leaked to the media. Therefore, the official unit of
the military of the DGSE changed for 44e Régiment d’Infanterie (44th Infantry Regiment).[110]
This sense of a clandestine existence and of permanent deception is further sustained by a relative
distrust of French landlines and cellular telephone, although the DGSE has a full unofficial control
over these means of communication, as we shall see in the chapter on COMINT. There is in this
agency an authentic fear of the NSA, and of Echelon its worldwide telecommunications interception
network, but no one bothers about the Spetssvyaz, its Russian counterpart that is even a taboo. I
remember of a regional DGSE executive who did not even want to have an inboard GPS navigation
system in his car, lest “the Americans might track my moves,” he said.
I do not take up any information available on the French version of the Wikipedia page on the
DGSE because even though some are correct, it is riddled with incomplete, missing, inaccurate,
misleading, or fake descriptions for a good reason I will explain in the chapter 11 and elsewhere.
When trying to figure out what this agency is and what it does, based on what the latter page says
with an amazingly polished richness, it does not resemble at all the DGSE I worked with for twenty
years, and I am sure it makes my former colleagues smiling.
Working with the DGSE also leaves anyone with the feeling that everything is unfolding in slow
motion; what is done in one year in a dynamic private business seems to take ten in this agency—
though I know that people who work in the CIA feel the same.
In the light of all this, the reader understands why people who work in the DGSE may easily have
the frustrating feeling to be unwillingly involved in a large military conspiracy rather than in a
governmental agency. By comparison, what one can see in films and on television on the U.S. FBI
suggests that people working with this other agency have a comfortable job, as its special agents are
even given FBI cards with their real names on it, which is unthinkable in the French intelligence
community.
Too often, relations with executives and the unfolding of events strongly remind film scenes in
The Godfather and Casino, indeed. Ordinary laws, moral. and ethics are dismissed constantly and
even trivialized with a disturbing cynicism one would rather expect to hear in a prison. In the
DGSE, displaying kindness about any issue indeed is perceived as a concerning sign of weakness.
To say, many French spies confuse toughness with violence and even with cruelty. Sometimes, I
heard colleagues talking in a trivial way about anecdotes of appalling violence, or even bragging
about when they were their authors, proudly introduced as marks of manhood and toughness.
In point of fact, and anecdotally, I cannot but remember vividly another of my ex-colleagues, a
former military in an elite unit, who once confided me he partook in the massacre of the Tutsis
ethnic minority in Rwanda in the early 1990s. Though he seemed to be a tough character imbued
with an all-military mentality, this peculiar event in his life had visibly impressed on him. From
recollection and so in substance, he said his military unit raided small tribal Tutsi villages where
they were ordered to fire at will on everybody they could find out sheltering in huts, women and
children included, no matter what. For it was of paramount importance to get rid of all witnesses.
“This has been the most challenging time in my life, but on the spur of the moment we didn’t have
much time to think about what we were doing,” he added, still in substance from recollection.
For a while, I believed this man, who then was on his late thirties or early forties, had been
bragging and kidding me in spite of his apparent sincerity. At that time, the mainstream media had
not much reported on the implication of France in the Rwanda War. Much later and recently, I
understood at last that this man told me the truth very possibly, when I came across news on similar
accounts and rumors about past disputable commitments of the French military in the affairs of this
country, at the same period he had specified.
From all this stems an overwhelming and permanent feeling of doubt and insecurity, of course,
thought I admit it is an all personal perception since some of my ex-colleagues seemed to cope well
with it. Often, I wondered about what they genuinely thought about all this because no one would be
daring enough to deliver one’s deep and sincere thoughts openly in this middle. True friendship is
an impossible thing in the DGSE for all the latter reasons either, as I knew that expressing my
sincere thoughts about anything would have been reported, inescapably. When I left this agency,
indeed I found myself completely and definitively alone. I had to face the tragic reality that not only
I did not have a single friend anymore because I never had any, but also that I had to be wary even
of my relatives.
Then there was this strange yet unrelated phenomenon I became aware of years later only. I had
done so many different things simultaneously in my career, all or almost interrupted in full course,
and I experienced and witnessed so many peculiar events and met so many people that I could only
remember those that struck me the most or the latest. Later, much later, was I able to find the silver
lining of my activities in the DGSE. Little by little, and more particularly when I undertook to write
this book that forced me to remember everything, every details, the comprehensive gathering of
those innumerable recollections brought to surface at last, many I believed forgotten for good. That
is the paradox with working in the DGSE: events seem to unfold in slow motion, and the
particularity of each is so striking that it overshadows the earlier ones and relegates them to
oblivion. In the months following my departure, I could hardly remember more than what I
experienced before the previous year; the latest recollections seemed to have wiped out the earlier
ones. Little by little, I realized that so many events and facts I had thought minor at first glance,
often were important actually, mostly because they explained others that for long had remained
obscure to me. No one in this agency is encouraged to remember the past; forgetting everything is
strongly expected, logically in an intelligence agency, after all. There is one thing that people
working in intelligence never forget: experience.
LOYALTY
The DGSE never relies on mere trust, nor expects it from anyone reciprocally. This posture
compels everyone to redouble with caution in everything and with each word one uses, lest to be
misunderstood and then suspected of something, and it goes farther than self-censorship because it
reminds of thought suppression in dystopian novels and films. This explains why even spies who
are working in offices and who do not have to dread the danger of being unmasked, however must
cope with an apparently unavoidable and tiresome need to behave as a person truly they are not, and
to express opinions and show tastes that are not theirs. Everyone in this agency is monitored
constantly in one’s opinions, moves, and loyalty. A slip of the tongue in a desultory conversation
may be reported; a fortuitous encounter in a street with a person unknown to the agency may be
seen and trigger an investigation. Last but not the least, the DGSE makes a point with formatting the
tenets of all its employees, in accordance with the previous explanations on the formal aims, and
even with checking whether one would be aware of things he is not supposed to know; thereof, the
“Why and how he came to know this secret he should not?”.
French patriotism of course is expected from all employees and managers, and then one’s
opinions about such or such country are taken into consideration, carefully either. Chatting casually
about these subjects is walking on eggs. France is not really an independent country. First, she
belongs to the European Union; second, her government and the DGSE have friendly relations with
foreign countries that the public ignores. The reverse is true about official allies that truly are prime
targets. Even talking with a colleague about a subject implying a particular notion may be a mistake
because he is not supposed to know this detail. Upon a mistake of this kind, he may be instructed to
never seeing you again after that, lest of a breach in the compartmentalization of knowledge.
That is why the best trick everyone resorts to in this agency is to abstain from expressing any
opinion about certain countries and subjects, and to remain ever ponderous or vague in one’s
statements. Claiming one’s support to the European Union is even not safe because the French
Government and the DGSE express a marked distrust toward some country-members of the E.U. It
has always been true with the United Kingdom in particular, due to the special relationship of this
country with the United States. On the contrary, expressing a favorable opinion about Germany is
always a safe bet, regardless of what the media say on the diplomatic relations between this country
and France. Outside of the E.U., one should cautiously abstain from expressing any negative
criticism toward Russia; however, it may be risky to express openly one’s sympathy for this country
either, though not necessarily, depending on whom you are talking to. The slope gets even more
slippery with Iran, Syria, and China. The shifting nature of partnerships and friendships in foreign
affairs further compels one to be very cautious with the subjects of diplomatic relations and foreign
affairs, anyway.
To sum things up, there is a permanent atmosphere of spy mania in the DGSE that does little to
help do one’s duties, and one must cope with groundless conspiracy theories of all sorts that often
arise. Indeed, one may be formally asked to investigate on a colleague because “there is something
bizarre with him,” each time without further specifics, knowing that the demand actually may be a
litmus test and that any answer to it may result in a reversal of roles. Refuging behind an “I have no
idea” is not a good idea either.
A number of true anecdotes in this book will exemplify all this. The fear of “the traitor under the
bed,” to paraphrase an expression the American reader knows well, is justified by the nature of
Man, especially in an intelligence agency. The media bring to us daily cases of politicians who shift
parties and allegiance, of senior executives in private companies who go to the competitor, of
couples notoriously united who yet divorce, to everyone’s surprise. As a result, the DGSE always
ensures it can trust its men and women by resorting to ways and methods it considers more reliable
than all pledges of allegiance.
Anecdotally about the latter remark, I once asked to my psychiatrist examiner why we did not
have to fill and sign more papers than a security clearance form. Why not a formal contract of
engagement? He smiled at me while answering, verbatim, “Because anyone can tear a contract;”
that was all. On one hand, the much leftist DGSE considers money as a suspicious thing; standing
by this peremptory tenet is “mandatory.” On the other hand, this agency is basing everything it does
on the assumption that money is of paramount importance in everything. That is because it makes a
point with paying its employees cheaply, and with avoiding to paying for intelligence in both senses
of the word. Even just giving a “thank you” comes as if at a cost that must be considered. The
apparent contradiction justifies the following explanation.
Banknotes, gold, and precious stones are not fascinating just for what they are except to some
disturbed minds. Money grants well-being to its holder, social safety first and in particular. No one
can dispute that the tenant must dread the owner, that the employee with a modest income must
dread his dismissal, that the one who walks on foot must dread cold, heat, and fatigue, that the poor
must fear disease and the affections of old age, that the jobless must fear divorce and the loss of his
children and be content with the partner whom he would certainly not have chosen had he had the
larger choice that money can afford, regardless of beauty, age, education, and intelligence. Everyone
knows that wealth shelters from all the latter worries, and that it frees the mind enough to dedicate
itself to more interesting subjects than tomorrow’s petty contingencies. Therefore, the French
intelligence community chooses individuals who do not have to struggle financially to appoint them
as executives, generally. Thus, they will be less vulnerable to the offer of the enemy. More
prosaically, the DGSE, as the wise man, would never entrust the custody of its wallet to a hungry.
From the elementary principles above, follows that the population of ordinary Frenchmen has a
mistaken belief of what the DGSE is, and assumes this agency pays its employees as other public
services and private companies do. The reality is that nobody gets rich while working in
intelligence; exceptions are only appearances of exceptions, even not exceptions. I tell the (not so)
funny anecdote about this, below.
In the mid-1990s, I once was called to pay visit to a regional bureau of the RG about the
background checking of my wife. There I met with four RG police officers packed in a tiny office
cluttered with piles of files because cabinets and desks drawers were full already. As the ambiance
was friendly, one of the men who was on his late thirties asked to me casually, “By the way, how
much money do you make?” I answered, a bit ashamed, “Well, not much. About 15,000 francs a
month,[111] but I am an unofficial contractor”. Then he and his three colleagues looked at each other,
and he said, bitterly, “You should not complain, I have been in the firm for ten years, I am a tenured
official, and I make 12,000”.
WAGES
The wages of C and B category employees are very low, just enough to satisfy basic needs,
especially for someone who has to work and to live in Paris. The salary of the A employees remains
much lower than in the private sector, as we have seen, and even lower than in any other public
service when with similar education, skills, intelligence, and responsibilities. From the viewpoint of
the DGSE, a surplus of purchase power is likely to be transformed into an area of physical freedom
and, therefore, seriously complicate the ordinary monitoring of an employee’s privacy. For example,
a bonus or an “extra” would allow this employee to leave for a short vacation trip in a distant
country, carrying in his mind a share of secrets that cannot be extracted temporarily from his mind.
This would require a significant extra cost to his monitoring, therefore, because a foreign spy might
recruit him during his stay abroad and thus makes him a source.
I said, he who is poor of material wealth must dread all sorts of dangers, moral sufferings, and
authorities of all sorts over his free will. This is why, precisely, the DGSE maintains its employees
in an ever-greater material dependency when going down the ranks of the hierarchy. The finances of
each are subject to a scrutiny that the uninitiated would find extraordinarily meticulous, calculated
and controlled to the penny, just enough to satisfy the most basic needs and nothing else. The
management of expenditures devoted to leisure, indispensable to mental balance, is not abandoned
to personal fancies. The contingency, since it is perceived as such in this context, is planned and
managed collectively as much as possible. The French intelligence community considers that an
individual whose resources exceed his basic needs can drown easily ever-possible illegal income in
the mass of the legal one, and thus evade any reliable control of its origin.
The latter explanation gives me the opportunity to say that if ever the reader asked to me what the
most often encountered behavioral pattern in French spies is, I would answer, “stinginess”.
Typically, the employee of the DGSE is an annoying bean counter, even when one can see a
thousand of euros in banknotes of fifty and some exclusive banking cards in his wallet; this
remarkable purchase power is not his in reality. He is entrusted the 50 euros banknotes temporarily,
should the need arise to pay écrans (screens) in the frame of his mission outside, and therefore,
either this employee is a field agent or an intelligence officer. As about the banking cards, this
possibility comes to confirm he is an intelligence officer, a case officer, or a super-agent.
The DGSE does not want its Security Service to be saturated with countless enquiries on the
origin of the money its lower rank employees have; it would lose all its effectiveness with this, and
its raison d’être, consequently. In this respect among others, we have seen that the DGSE is akin to
a complex and fragile mechanism that hardly tolerate any useless or superfluous cogwheel or the
slightest speck of dust. Its perfect functioning requires faultless servicing, and the wear or breakage
of any of its fragile organs must always be anticipated and replaced before it occurs and makes the
others grind to a halt.
I remind the reader that I am talking about insiders in this chapter; that is to say, people who have
a desk job at the headquarters or outside in some service. According to criteria I would not be able
to explain clearly, some DGSE executives and even employees of lesser rank are made rich
“overnight” through arranged and various circumstances, in particular when they quit this agency
officially. I have known several such lucky colleagues, but none of them would tell how much he
was thus “given”. For it was clear that they all truly resumed their activities in intelligence or at
least in influence, as contacts or else. I even knew some who seemed to know in advance that they
would leave with enough money to enjoy a comfortable life.
Then how much do I mean when I say, “rich”? According to my estimates and to the dollar
exchange rate of the mid-1990s, it ranged at this period from $800,000 to a staggering $7,000,000.
Army colonel Pierre Lethier wrote, in a book he published in 2001, he was awarded a phony
commission on a deal for $19,600,000 when he left the DGSE,[112] which seems to be a record.
However, in 2007, Lethier was found guilty in a scandal known as the Elf Affair, after the name of
the now defunct French oil company, and he received a sentence of fifteen months of prison and
$1,750,000 in fines. The latter facts suggest he was still working for the firm, and he was only
entrusted this huge amount of money in reality.
Many among such leaving employees are rewarded a house or estate, through a phony sale
agreement whose amount either is ridiculous or is never paid, “usually”. One of my former
colleagues thus had a 860 square feet apartment located Rue du Bois de Boulogne in the costly 16th
arrondissement of Paris, near the Avenue de La Grande Armée, through a life estate contract for
which he did not pay a single French franc. Another one, a regional DGSE executive who happened
to be my stepbrother, bought a castle, of which the townhall where it is located bought at once half
of the land included with it for the same price he had paid for the whole of it; so, zero French Franc
again. Additionally, he could afford the deal thanks to an earlier one with a company contractor of
the Ministry of Defense, on which he was paid in the surroundings of $6,000,000. Another
colleague, who was my hierarchical superior for a while, was rewarded with a mansion and a
vineyard in Tuscany, Italy. However, I remember of someone who seemed to be sure he would have
a vineyard near Nimes, France; yet he had nothing at all in the end, for a reason he was unable to
explain. For want of further explanation, still today, all this is a lottery to me. Cases as these above
remain rare anyway, and I have known a majority of employees and executives who left after
decades of hard work to resume a frugal life in a modest housing, regardless of their ranks and past
responsibilities. The reader notices, this system of rewards clashes with an all-French unease with
money. All I can say about this is that I cannot tell more than what I saw or was told through
gossips, which does not imply I can also explain it all with an absolute certainty.
One of the best known and most striking examples of this French contradiction, which the reader
knows certainly, is Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the World Monetary Fund. In 2011, the
spectacular arrest of this leading figure of the French Socialist Party, on charge of sexual assault in a
posh hotel in New York City, drew by the same occasion the attention of the whole World on his
marked taste for the lavish lifestyle of the most uninhibited proponent of capitalism. I could tell
about countless examples of French who, on one hand, claim to be on crusade against inequality and
the evil of money, but who, on the other hand, enjoy the ownership of castles, exclusive cars, and
wear expensive watches and jewelry. About the latter discrepancy in the French progressive
thought, at least I can explain that, again, if grass-root socialist supporters agree to sacrifice
themselves for the formal aims, their leaders do not see an ounce of rationality in doing the same for
the real aims.
I testify that some of those employees of the DGSE who were rewarded unexpectedly and
generously, yet never did any outstanding accomplishment either. This fact does little to help
understand the hidden reasons underlying the rewards. However, I conclude on the subject by
delivering some clues suggesting the word “reward” did not apply to all such cases, perhaps. For
several of their recipients bought apartments, houses, and expensive estates they actually shared in
co-ownership with partners who, remarkably, all were members of the GOdF. The peculiar
provision is done through a French system of collective ownership known as Société Civile
Immobilière–SCI,[113] whose main known interest is tax dodging.
CONTRACT OF EMPLOYMENT
Full-time employment in the DGSE never gives rise to official contracts and salary sheets with
headers of this agency, simply because there is a need, obvious, to avoid any accidental risk of
public and formal identification of a spy on a credit application or else. That is why all such
documents and red tape are drawn up by various bodies, from ministries to the military, public
services, and private companies that thus collaborate unofficially with the DGSE.
As a rule, all DGSE employees must be unable to bring any evidence proving they belong to this
agency and are working every day for it, except the Director as the President appoints him to this
position officially. Thus, those who would like to escape and find another job or testify publicly
about what they are and do, would be answered by the media or by a book publisher that what they
say cannot be taken at face value since they are unable to provide any material evidences of it, even
though any French journalist would believe them after less than five minutes of interview.
Those who manage to publish something about their past activities in intelligence actually are
introduced discreetly to publishing houses and journalists by the DGSE or by the Ministry of
Defense, via trusted journalists of the mainstream media; that is to say, agents and contacts. When
this happen, it means that the DGSE vouches everything those “former spies” say and reveal. The
shattering revelations actually are not, and the palavers include a few lines of lies by omission and
deliberate deception because this agency warned them of harsh penalties, if ever they say more than
what has been agreed. Those who “decide to speak and to say everything” often serve consciously a
mission of public relation of the DGSE that come to them as a reward for good services in reality.
Exceedingly rare exceptions are spies or ex-spies who decide to act as they please and out of the
approval of the DGSE, once the media made them public personalities. This happened in 2010 with
Maurice Dufresse aka “Pierre Siramy,” when he retired from his position of Chief of a service in the
DGSE upon a career of 25 years in this agency. I cite Dufresse, who died in this year 2019, a
number of times in this book for the latter reason.
Today, the special provision of censorship may fail to prevent leaks of sensitive information since
the happening of self-publishing through Internet document transfer, that is to say, out of the control
this agency indeed exerts over the French media and book publishing industry. The first examples of
this kind that comes to my mind are myself and this book.
HOUSING, HOLYDAYS AND ELSE
At this point in the presentation of the life of C and B categories employees and A category
executives working full time in official buildings and outside under cover activities, it is noteworthy
that the location of their housing is imposed on them through arranged circumstances that must
appear as ordinary and coincidental. The interested are not fooled with the more or less discreet
contrivance, except those who are just recruited. Those places are apartments in buildings,
gatherings of individual dwellings, and tiny studio apartments in particular neighborhoods or
“villages”.
As the security and monitoring of the privacy of all those individuals is a rule, an old and
practical solution to cutting the heavy cost of it is to instruct them formally to keep an eye on each
other, and to organize collective recreational activities in order to prevent any friendly and
prolonged contact with ordinary people. Additionally, the thus arranged friendship between
coworkers allows the spotting and reporting of suspicious behaviors and abnormal spending, and, of
course, to teach them a little on notions such as spotting “tailers,” some elementary safety measures,
and the practice of neighborhood watch.
For long, senior executives in the DGSE, i.e. directors of directorates and heads of services,
enjoyed comfortable and spacious housings. However, from the early 1990s they were moved in
collective buildings of high standing with guards paid for by private security companies. As
example, one of those residences in Paris has two main entrances; one is 36 rue du Docteur Blanche,
and the other, 19 Boulevard de Montmorency in the 16th arrondissement.
C and B categories staffers often live in metropolitan areas where young delinquents and gangs
hanging on in streets are numerous. For example, one such area is located in Paris, along the
junction between the Boulevard des Maréchaux and the Boulevard Mortier; that is to say, a few
hundred yards south of the DGSE headquarters. The youngsters acting as “anonymous invisible
security guards” are paid for with drugs previously seized by the police, or else they work in
exchange for not being arrested and sentenced for their past petty crimes. Thus, their sole presence
deters strangers from wandering in those areas and keeps the curious away. The same youngsters
often are hired for harassment missions, as we shall see in the chapter 10.
Holidays away from home are possible, but they take the form of organized group travels,
preferably by bus, or they are individual stays under the discreet supervision of contacts who own a
real estate or a boat. Often, a coach travel transforms into a collective “study trip” upon the bus
entering a foreign capital, when the driver goes tour the headquarters of intelligence agencies, police
headquarters, and certain embassies while naming the places and commenting on them explicitly as
if they were famous historic spots.
DISCIPLINE
 The DGSE and other intelligence agencies under military status enforce an iron discipline that
actually rests more on fear than on patriotic and ideological commitments, since the latter have the
real function of alibi, as previously explained. Recourse to fear and threat to maintain discipline is
far from to be a recent invention in the DGSE, as it eerily reminds of accounts of what life was like
in totalitarian communist countries, especially since leftist beliefs and anti-Americanism are next to
a requisite to be admitted in this agency.
Incentive and rewards are scarce and of the symbolical sort; penalties and punishments are quick
and harsh, and seldom are they given explicitly and officially. For the latter must be both
disconcerting for ingraining further fear in the mind of the culprits and come as example for the
others, who understand quickly what is happening to their unfortunate colleagues. The form of the
sanction takes up entirely on the French version of behaviorism, behavioral biology, on which
human resources and management rely in this agency.
Last but not the least while talking about discipline, a peculiar rule, I confess I found particularly
disturbing, is the expectation from everyone to trivialize everything is unpleasant and
uncomfortable, up to moral suffering, hazardous situations, accidents resulting in physical harm, and
even death. There is more to the point because joking about all this is a welcomed and even
encouraged attitude. Many let themselves be caught at what they take as “a game” and resume it in
all circumstances when outside of the so particular middle. So much so that no one knows where the
limit in trivialization is, if ever there is one. Whatever may happen to a colleague, it always is “no
big deal”. There is a rational justifying the weird more, which the reader unenlightened in uses and
customs in the realm of intelligence is going to find hard to believe or absurd. Actually, the DGSE
dreads that feelings of compassion and kindness might evolve to a return to the scale of values of
the exterior world of ordinary people because if so, then this mood might evolve further to the more
concerning problems of dissent, protest, disobedience, and worse. What matters is that the spy
machine works faultlessly, regardless of any other concern, and that the staff that services it obeys
mindlessly in all circumstances and keeps on going.
PROTECTION OF SECRECY AND SANCTIONS
Confidentiality and security justify written and signed commitments to the holding of
professional secrecy, which step begins with a request for a level of security clearance, handwritten,
certified true, signed on the form “94A,” and submitted either to the HFDS, to the SGDSN, or to an
FDS. However, numerous employees working under the cover of private business sign an all-
ordinary civilian work contract that includes an innocuous paragraph on the oath to loyalty and
secrecy. For the oath of secrecy about the real activities of the recruit remains unofficial and secret;
exactly as in the Freemasonry, one could say. Should the need arise, the document will be used some
day for the official accusation of “breach of contract”.
In the DGSE, sanctions for disclosure of sensitive information are very rarely official and known
to the public, especially with employees recruited under civilian status. When someone talks, he
may be arrested and interrogated by the DGSI upon a request from the Security Service of the
DGSE, which latter body delivers its first observations and conclusion on the exact nature of the
fault. The DGSI is responsible officially and legally for conducting counterintelligence missions,
investigations, and arrests of French civilian nationals. Neither the DGSE nor its Security Service
can proceed to arrests and custodies officially, and they are unwilling to cooperate with the civilian
justice anyway. Instead, the Ministry of Defense introduces itself as the sole plaintiff.
Employees under military status can be sentenced by a military court, officially and legally,
because the latter are neither accessible to journalists nor to any civilian people, due to the classified
nature of everything might be said therein. Thus, trials are carried out in secrecy behind closed
doors. However, in a very large majority of cases, sanctions for misconduct are not decided
officially and legally by any justice court. The established seriousness of the fault and its sanctions
are irrelevant to the scale of values of the official justice, to begin with. What is a serious crime
according to the law of ordinary citizens may be downgraded to minor fault or pardonable mistake
from the viewpoints of the DGSE and of its Security Service. There is no lawyer, no trial, and the
culprit is not demanded to justify himself, still less to defend his case. Actually, the wrongdoer often
is neither fully aware of the gravity of his fault, nor is informed formally and clearly about it and of
his sanction to come. Rather, he must understand for himself that he has committed a fault and is led
to find out, in fact, what exactly his punishment is. The strange justice is thus enforced because
many rules could not be written clearly and explicitly, since they are in complete opposition not
only to the codes of law of the normal society, but also to the French Constitution itself.
 As example, disagreeing openly or implicitly about internal rules and regulations, or even on the
common consensus on doctrine and political orthodoxy, is seen as a fault whose gravity has to be
probed. Then the corresponding sanction ranges from a simple warning that is always alluded only,
to temporary “social exclusion” and harder work conditions for an unspecified time of several
months at minimum, to the downgrading of one’s position and responsibilities that may be
definitive, possibly. As example, a fault may be repeated expressions of personal pride, seen in this
agency as a concerning warning sign of need for personal independence and individualism. The
usual sanction for the latter sin is temporary withdrawal of one’s privileges and perks, and
downgrading of one’s position and responsibilities for a term of one year, at least.
A long sanction is no more officially referred to than tomber en disgrace, or “falling in disgrace,”
without further indication as to who exactly decided so. Reciprocally, someone whose career and
consideration are visibly rising or who is rewarded conspicuously is said to be en état de grâce, or
“in state of grace,” again without any specifics on why exactly, and who decided of the exceptional
consideration and corresponding reward.
At least, a rumor that quickly evolves to corridor gossips advises everybody in the agency to keep
one’s distance from someone who is known to have fallen in disgrace, which comes to harden the
ordeal to the wrongdoer, obviously. Even though the fault and the corresponding sanction given are
never clear, it happens that the colleagues who know the wrongdoer personally or who are working
with him be formally asked by someone above them in the hierarchy to “keep away from him,”
without further specifics.
The gravest faults are a clear and staunch refusal to obey any longer to the hierarchy, quitting
unilaterally the DGSE and attempting to evade its monitoring, intent and attempt to reveal to the
public sensitive information, and, of course, secret cooperation with a foreign power. Harsh forms
of punishment that may go as far as the death penalty sanction all the latter faults. The variety of
sanctions for prejudices of this extreme gravity and the unfolding of their processes will be
explained in the chapters 10 and 11 and exemplified with true cases and anecdotes.
As in the society of ordinary French people, employees of lower ranks are sanctioned more easily
and promptly than those holding higher statuses and responsibilities, and the nature and duration of
the sanction vary accordingly either. Whether a sanction will be decided and carried out or not
depends on the value given of the employee (usefulness and performance), on the extent of his
knowledge of secrets, and on particular consideration and protection he may possibly enjoy in the
innermost sphere of an invisible hierarchy. However, the similarity in inequality of treatment in the
enforcement of the peculiar justice with that of the ordinary society in France[114] is no longer true
when the fault is considered grave. That is to say, when it concerns the conscious and deliberate
leakage of sensitive information, and what this information says or alleges, exactly.
Another peculiarity is that, sometimes, when a grave fault such as giving information to the U.S.
intelligence community or to an agent of a country allied to the United States—the U.K., Israel, or
Japan, in particular nowadays—it is sanctioned instead on the pretense of intelligence with another
country: Iran, Romania, Serbia, and China, typically for the past thirty years. The reason coming to
justify the oddity is that sanctioning officially someone on charge of spying for the United States or
any of its true allies would obviously constitute the implicit admission that France is not as allied to
this country as both claim it officially. Later in a next chapter, the reader will discover which are the
real stakes to France, exactly, for stressing with so much insistence she is indeed an ally of the
United States, on the contrary. Pending this moment, I can say that Russia refuses to assume the role
of the more logical foe due her will to pose as a friendly country in the whole Europe, in the eye of
the public in particular. Nonetheless, affairs of French spies who would have cooperated with Iran,
Serbia, Romania, and China fool no one among foreign diplomats and intelligence services.
Indeed, the perception the DGSE has of a fault may extends to the closest relatives of the culprit,
who always are affected by the sanction in al cases. In the chapter 11, I will present the true case of
the innocent mother of a wrongdoer, sanctioned to inflict further moral pain in an indirect fashion to
the latter because he managed to quit France and thus to escape the justice of the DGSE.
Today, French historians cannot write any detailed account of what French intelligence was
exactly before the WWII, nor even just naming with certainty the directorates and services of its
agencies in those earlier times, and who their chiefs were, for relevant records never existed or were
destroyed. It is known that archives disappear regularly in the DGSE, which fact, in passing, draws
suspicion and rumors on the causes of fires at the headquarters of this agency. A few decades ago, a
large and suspicious fire also happened at the headquarters of the bank Societé Générale, which
destroyed a considerable quantity of archives, documents, and loan contracts concerning highly
sensitive business operations of the DGSE in France and in other countries, allegedly in connection
in one instance with the purchase of U.S. film company Metro Goldwyn Mayer.
work environment
Working in the French intelligence community has never been a sinecure, especially in the DGSE
and other intelligence agencies placed under the authority of the Ministry of Defense. Alike, police
intelligence agencies of the Ministry of the Interior are known to give a hard time to their C
category employees in particular, and even to treat them badly. I once witnessed a non-
commissioned police officer who, from his office, yelled at one of his subordinates exactly as if he
were calling his wayward dog, X, au pied! (X, at my foot!); it was even not a joke of bad taste. The
resigned subordinate who was not even young complied obediently as if it were all normal.
Anecdotes and rumors of bullying and abuses in the Security Service of the DGSE are common
either.
The first striking details in DGSE’s offices, perhaps, are uncomfortable office-chairs without
arms below the rank of senior executive, tiny school-like desks for employees working behind
computers, and badly practical and outdated computers, software, and related equipment. It may
surprise the reader that the latter facts, which often mix opportunely with micro-management, are
not only imputable to financial concerns, however true the latter cause happens to be. In the French
intelligence community in general, there is an intentional and enforced culture of hardship and
cheapness in everything. Obviously, this clashes in a striking manner with the slightly above-the-
average IQ and skills of most desk employees. The peculiarities are an additional cause of cognitive
dissonance, quite common in this agency, which not so seldom results in its employees becoming
proponents of frugality in everything, caught in what they take as “a game,” again.
In my personal case, I never really had to cope with those excesses or never for long, fortunately,
and this possibly explains why they shocked me the most. The latter opinion could not be unnoticed
possibly, I think, and it may explain why I was not called until late in my career to apply formally
for a position at the headquarter.
The few explanations and justifications I was given for those very demanding work conditions
derive from all-military principles in management, saying that submitting one’s troops to hardship
greatly stimulates their ardor, strength, and violence against the enemy. Herein we find again the
greater commitment and violence that a leader expects from his followers when he resorts to formal
aims based on a myth and a narrative, further aroused by induced frustration. In point of fact, nearly
all if not all senior executives in the DGSE read or learned, at some point in their careers the
“Clausewitzian trinity” in Carl von Clausewitz’s treatise On War. The trinity is “composed of
primordial violence, hatred, and enmity.” In the 1960-70s, former CIA officer Miles Copeland Jr.
best enlightened us on the way to make this violence reaching its apex in the minds of those who are
recruited to be warriors. At a point in his interesting book, The Game of Nations (1969), Copeland
talks about the making of the first terrorists in Egypt by Gamal Abdel Nasser when he was not yet
president of his country. Copeland’s description focuses on the same kind of intelligent and
educated individuals the DGSE is focusing its interest on as recruits, and on methods in training I
found surprisingly similar to those that specialists in behavioral biology of the French Ministry of
Defense devised in the early 1970s, coincidentally or not. In point of fact, the latter methods are
applied commonly in trainings in intelligence and in that of soldiers of the special military units of
the COS since. That is why I found pertinent to quote Copeland, below, as his explanations are
about the same as the theories of the DGSE on the recruitment of highly minded but poor and
desperate people selected to join a certain category of field agents, nowadays.
“It is perhaps hard to us to accept the point that violence is best conducted by terrorists, rather
than by ordinary people turned violent by circumstances. The participants of even our worst riots
could hardly be called terrorists; Nasser-inspired riots in scab countries, however, got most of their
force from terrorists—or, as they are called by Nasser’s political activists, ʻfanaticsʼ.
“A ʻfanaticʼ, in Nasserist political jargon, is anyone who abnegates self and who will go to any
lengths, regardless of harm to self in the interests of a cause. He is a loser by definition, but he is an
important weapon by the hand of the determined non-fanatical—one who intends to ʻliveʼ for the
cause, in other words. Nasser can count on him to go on losing so long as he prevents the enemy—
the scab by achieving his purposes. The fanatic’s game, in other words, is similar to the game of
ʻchickenʼ; it is as though he were saying to himself, ʻI know I’m not going to win: I’m probably
going to die, but I’ll bring you down with me.ʼ
 “A player of limited resources such as Nasser is understandably tempted to use fanatics, whereby,
as has been proved time and again in history, small minorities can cause majorities to make
concessions to them out of all proportion to their numbers or the strength of their arguments—if,
indeed, they have any clear arguments at all. When entirely on their own (and this is rare), fanatics
sooner or later make such nuisances of themselves that the majority clamps down on them, paying
whatever price it takes. In the hands of non-fanatical leadership, however, they can become a
weapon of flexibility and finesse. They can be brought to a halt just short of suicide, while their
willingness to go to suicidal lengths is so manifestly genuine that the opponent cannot know where
they will halt—or even be sure that they will halt. The nonsense they talk can be polished up so that
it not only makes a modicum of sense, but seems to be on a high moral plane.
“So long as the more vocal members keep their mouths shut (or can be kept away from direct
contact to journalists), a fanatical movement can be excellent public relation material. They are a
ʻvaliant body of men fighting for their beliefs against overwhelming oddsʼ. They are sometimes as
valuable dead as they are alive. They are beautifully expendable. There also is the advantage of easy
availability. In any country where frustration is general, they are bound to be fanatics, or latent
fanatics just latent to be awakened by the right messiah.
“Young men are educated to use their brains (and to abhor physical work) and are made aware of
the comfort the twentieth century has to offer—an awareness that is heightened by Western films
and television; but they soon learn that there is no need for their brain—and that even if they find
employment in some intellectual pursuit, their pay will be no more than a fraction of what it would
take to live the way films and television have taught them that westerners live. In our own culture
we are brought up to believe that anyone, even somebody processing mediocre intelligence, can rise
from sharecropper’s cabin to the presidency of General Motors, provided he has the ability to work
out a sensible career for himself and a determination to stick to it. After arguing this belief with
dozens of Middle-Easterners, however, I am convinced that except for a lucky few the majority are
doomed to lifetimes of being what they are taught to want. The only way open to them is to sacrifice
their own interests and attach themselves to a holly cause—particularly one that is against
something and so best gives vent to feelings of frustration, which are by nature negative
feelings.”[115]
I do not mean all employees of the DGSE would be trained in a manner similar or even just
analogous to the description Copeland made of it, above. My point instead is to draw the attention
of the reader on the enormous power of frustration upon the mind of the educated Westerner, and on
how it works when the goal is to breed sufficient violence in his mind to make him a highly
effective and trusted fighter. If my other concern had not been to quote a thinker or our time, whose
arguments on the causes of frustration he cites are well known to the psychiatrist of the DGSE
today, then I would have cited Frederick II of Prussia instead, better known than Copeland is in this
agency.
In his Political Testament the philosopher-king of Prussia wrote in French in 1754, he insists
similarly on the virtue to submit soldiers to hardship and frustration, still in the aim to eliciting from
their minds the greatest possible combativeness on the battlefield. For a few decades, the
psychiatrists of the DGSE of course have a more scientific approach of this psychological
conditioning, which I found more opportune to present in the chapter 9, dedicated specifically to
manipulation and to the handling of sources and agents.
The way the DGSE manages its human resources has its disadvantages. How often I witnessed
the physical impossibility to carry on one’s work or even the failure of a mission because of this
sole reason. Aggressiveness is the offshoot of pain, an all-military culture never thus explained and
justified even inside French intelligence agencies because doubt is one of its ingredients. A
comparison that would help the reader understand how this reality happens, and which impediments
it may entail on a daily basis, are the work conditions of the cops in the TV series The Wire, in
which the filmmaker put the emphasis on similar induced frustration and its effects on the minds of
the police officers, to a point that it challenges the plot itself, I found. Below is one of the most
demonstrative true examples I could tell about this.
In the late 1990s, some restoration works and overhauls were done in the relatively large building
where the managerial staff of the COMINT service of the DGSE was working, in Malakoff,
Southern suburbs of Paris.[116] Good-looking meeting tables and similar desks of an honorable
quality not only were ditched, but they also were broken to pieces on the spot to ascertain no one
could take them for personal use. The same was done with the bar, closets, and other furniture of a
rather cozy cafeteria underground. Instead, meeting and audio conference rooms were equipped
with brand new but ostensibly cheap and small individual modular tables, and office chairs of the
uncomfortable type. The cafeteria was converted into an additional and similarly cheap, stern, and
poorly lightened conference room. The weird measure did not owe to some financial impediment of
the moment, therefore, for the event was nothing more than part of a new managerial policy the
DGSE decided in 2000, when the privatization of the services and massive recruitment were
underway, already. As I previously alluded when talking about personal housing, certain bonuses
and perks that executives enjoyed previously knew noticeable cuts, and some had disappeared in the
early 1990s.
As surprising as the reader my find it, at times, the inner workings of the DGSE happen to be
exceptionally informal, not to say casual in spite of the stringent rules I previously explained. Below
are some examples of it.
An analyst, therefore an employee highly specialized in a particular field, is allowed to express
his opinion about an issue completely unrelated to his specialty, and he will be heard with attention
if ever the pertinence of his ideas appear to be obvious. Through the same circumstance, a low-
ranking employee may be brought to meet an executive several levels above his direct hierarchy,
unbeknownst to him however, thus bypassing the normal chain of command. Overall, in France, a
mix of social origins, educational background, and political opinions comes to limit strictly the
accesses to the upper ladders of the hierarchy and responsibilities. Nonetheless, the highest levels of
the hierarchy in the DGSE remain available to suggestions coming from “the bottom”. However,
when such suggestions prove their usefulness, this will not be followed by any promotion to their
inventors. They will remain stuck in their lower-ranking positions, even if their insights are solicited
again. More to the point, never they will be rewarded in any way for the exceptional service they
thus render. French are no proponents of meritocracy in general and by mores; they consider social
origin and political opinion, first.
PRIVACY
In the light of the aforesaid, the reader may possibly ask, “What consequences a so tight control
upon employees may entail when it comes to friendship, love, and sex?” The answer is the
intelligence community is anxious to monitor and to consider with renewed scrutiny all
relationships of these natures either. The DGSE in particular is wary of the unenlightened outsiders
who may intrude accidentally in the privacy of its employees inside as outside, since it perceives
such people as many potential breaches in the protection of secrecy. The reader has seen that the
first measure the DGSE takes to limit the risk of leakage of sensitive information consists in the
reducing of the purchasing power of all its employees. A personal purchasing power thus limited
does not allow a large choice of leisure activities, obviously, and it comes to reduce drastically the
number of opportunities that someone has to make friends and acquaintances, and to find the partner
of his choice the more so. The formal aim justifying those demanding restrictions actually is a leftist
internal culture advocating the rejections of materialism, individualism, and hedonism in all things.
Once the context and particular conditions above are known, it comes to little surprise that sport
activities as cheap as running, trekking, soccer, basketball games, and martial arts with colleagues
not only fit the expectations of the managerial staff, but also the necessity of physical exercises for
people who often spend their whole days on office chairs and with no exposure to daylight for many
of them. Gardening is encouraged first because it is another way to reduce expenditures and “to
have a healthier nutrition,” says the narrative. Then the psychiatrists of the DGSE say that gardening
has the additional virtue to be relaxing after stressing work conditions and activities. This comes to
explain, in passing, why it is not uncommon to see an office employee in this agency with the
calloused hands of a laborer!
On one hand, one would be surprised to see how easily people who yet are not stupid let
themselves be caught in those arranged circumstances, especially since spies are expected to spot
suspicious coincidences. On the other hand, they understand that not submitting to the implicit rules
would yield nothing good to them in return, and that even complying half-heartedly would not yet
be enough. The latter attitude repeats itself countless times through various circumstances, as a mix
of extreme secrecy and strong discipline shapes an internal culture of the implicit, often unsettling,
in the DGSE.
Then come board games, playing music instruments, model-making, computer software
development, painting, bowls (pétanque) in summer, sewing and knitting for colleagues for the most
frequently suggested leisure activities of the more sedentary genre. Board games and playing music
instrument in bands, in particular, offer the other advantages to reinforcing relationships between
colleagues, to breed stronger bonds among staffers, and to promote further team spirit. In all cases,
the goal is to deter employees to look for acquaintances outside of the intelligence community.
In the DGSE, romances and civil unions are arranged commonly, exactly as in some oriental
countries. They are expected to happen between colleagues for the sake of security, again. Then
there are several alternatives and combinations in the odd provision, though difficult to me to
enumerate exhaustively. As first example, partnering with someone who works in a more ordinary
public body, who is a military, or who is a close relative of someone holding a position in the French
intelligence community currently or formerly, can be tolerated or even encouraged, very possibly.
The relationship will be approved with a simple silence, though on a case-by-case basis as the
biography of an official working in an ordinary public service may pose a problem, possibly. Should
the latter concern arise, then a colleague sent by the hierarchy warns the employee. The reasons
invoked may not always be the real ones, especially when the points of contention found in the
biography of the would-be-partner limit to possible risks, whose certainty actually is impossible to
assess.
I often witnessed a kind of arranged civil union in particular that I found weird and whose exact
reasons remain unknown to me to date as they appear irrelevant to security concerns—perhaps the
insightful reader will express his idea about it in his critic to this book. Many employees of B and
even A categories have an enduring and seemingly unbreakable union with partners they truly do
not love! Two such persons I was acquainted with for some years confided me their moral sufferings
about this situation. However, both always remained mute and embarrassed each time I asked why
they did not simply break with their partners. Repeated chats on the subject ever ended on this
mystery as the arguments supporting the worries were justified and easily understandable.
One, a B category employee, had engaged in a civil union with a woman his age who has a
serious psychological issue in addition to severe alcoholism. To say, she hides vodka and gin in
plastic bottles for mineral water in a vain attempt to conceal her addiction. The other, an A category
executive, confided me he resigned to accept living and even marrying with the unattractive and
boring daughter of a poor peasant. In the former of the two cases, the hapless man was beginning to
drink too, openly in his case, in his expectation to thus alleviating his bouts of despair as immersing
in his job no longer relieved him. In both cases, bouts of depression were obvious.
I could tell about other cases of the same kind exactly; that is to say, of unrequited love seemingly
enforced as the partner in each of the couples was sincerely in love with the other. One among the
most striking examples I witnessed is the daughter of a former French president who belongs to a
prestigious lineage of the French noblesse, and who graduated in political science. Yet she ended up
in the DGSE, by choice certainly, since she could choose any other professional activity she wanted,
I assume. She married an unattractive and uneducated baker’s clerk, to everyone’s surprise. The
man was made rich through arranged circumstances and was given the reputation of a “self-made
man,” thereupon.
In a number of such cases, the odd partners are children of rather wealthy parents. At some point
or from the inception, in those strange civil unions, the odd partner was brought to carry on
occasional desk jobs of the simplest sort for the intelligence community. As other example, the
daughter of a poor farmer—not the same person I told about earlier—did not have even a high
school degree and was a simple-minded character with no real interest in anything. Yet the Ministry
of Defense hired and trained her early as photographic laboratory operator; she developed photos
films of French atomic bomb tests in the Mururoa atoll. Her husband, a sly but brutal man who
began his career in an elite unit of the French Army, worked in counterespionage and reached the
degree of Master Mason in the GOdF.
Possibly, the reader is wondering about my wife at this point of my explanations, don’t you?
Well, I married twice and, yes, I did not understand until years later that I did not meet my first wife
by happenstance. We divorced less than two years after we married, due to our incompatibilities in
character about everything or thereabout. As about my second wife, I married a few years after my
divorce; that is to say, thirty years ago, now. We are still together and sincerely love each other, in
spite of the multiple problems and restrictions my departure from the DGSE and from France
caused. For a number of reasons, I know with an absolute certainty it was impossible to the DGSE
to arrange our first encounter. Ironically, I met my second wife a few days after the DGSE was
attempting to introduce me to a new partner through arranged circumstances again, which I spotted,
this time.
 As my second wife was a foreign immigrant, her background was checked, obviously, by the RG
in particular and in the early 1990s. Yes, the DGSE expressed its disapproval about her and this
agency even attempted to break our relationship for one year, thereupon. Happily, my wife never
worked in intelligence, mainly because she is unfit indeed for any position in the trade, and due to
her very independent-minded character. Besides, she is unable to cope with implicit communication,
passing references, complicit winks and nods, and all those things the DGSE loves; all this makes
her run away, indeed. We would have divorced otherwise, inescapably, at least because of my
unilateral, real, and complete resignation from the DGSE, and escape abroad. Besides, being a
foreigner, my wife does not feel any homesickness for France, fortunately. However, almost all her
sisters and brothers who immigrated to France either married with military and police, or were
eventually recruited as agents, and the same with their children! As a result, we can no longer see
each other, today, for this sole and sad latter reason, given my exceptional situation of fugitive.
My elder brother, who worked nearly all his life in counterespionage, did not meet his wife
coincidentally either. He and she remained together for thirty-four years, until they separated
because they could not divorce officially, due to constraining legal and fiscal intricacies that the
DGSE arranged again. Some anecdotes I tell later in this book will provide me with opportunities to
explain how my relationship with my brother also ended, for the same reason as above essentially
not to say only. Analogous difficulties arose with my mother with whom I maintained a good
relation in spite of great difficulties, until she passed away.
Dating a foreign partner may easily raise concerns, except when the person has been given bona
fide already or is a registered immigrant. The case of an employee or agent who falls in love with a
foreigner while on a mission abroad is an issue, obviously. It may quickly transform into a problem
entailing a justified fear of security breach, and the impediment must be solved one way or another
forthwith. The foreign partner may be sincere and honest, yet she cannot be considered as “safe” as
long as she did not do something detrimental against her country of origin or is not vulnerable to
some threat, or else, or in addition preferably, did not commit to France and to French values. When
the latter prerequisites appear impossible to meet, then the foreign partner is deemed a “suspect,” no
matter what, and all provisions must be taken to break the unwarranted relationship. I did not have
this problem with my wife because as political refugee she had to flee her country, already; a sad
irony as today and for a number of years she is running away and hiding with me, again.
I have known a sad case in which an agent sent in the United States fell in an apparently
indefectible love with an American woman he brought to France eventually, and even married. The
woman was from the upper middle class, with parents owning attractive real estate though they
were not millionaire. Soon after the wedding, she fell ill from a grave brain tumor from which she
died in a matter of months. Thereupon, the widower was introduced to a rather unattractive woman
who worked with the intelligence community as C category worker. He resigned to marry her, at
last, yet he never recovered emotionally from the loss of his first wife, to the full knowledge of the
second who seemed to accept the embarrassing situation. Thereafter, he became a full-time
counterintelligence employee and rose to a middle executive position.
Another likely problem with a foreign partner, though very rare, is that of an enquiry evidencing a
close relative who work with a foreign intelligence service or who is suspected to have close
connections with an organization of this type. Therefrom, two possibilities arise: either the affair
must know a quick end, or it is seized as an opportunity to attempt an offensive counterintelligence
operation. I will tell about a case of this kind in the chapter 27, which however was a plot
contrivance from the inception, involving an arranged affair again. DGSE employees and agents
with field jobs in particular very often divorce, especially when they married before they joined this
agency.
For long, religion has been a problem in the French intelligence community, and more especially
in intelligence agencies of the Ministry of Defense. French spies who are religious believers exist,
but they constitute a small minority. One among the first points DGSE recruiters investigate, not to
say the first, is whether a spotted talent believes in God or not, and whether he is a Christian
believer in particular. That is not all, and by far because the recruit is put to the test for several
months with insisting attempts to interest him in the Roman Catholic Church in particular and to the
Bible, and to convince him to convert. As I am an atheist, then I would not be able to say what
happens exactly when the recruit is thus brought to embrace the latter religion. I can only guess the
recruiting process is not cancelled, and is carried out along a different path, since there are Catholic
believers in the DGSE and in numbers in the French military.
 In my case, I learned on occasions that believing in God would have put some restrictions in my
career. I cannot know if things are different today, while taking into account a relatively recent
change of attitude with regard to religion in Russia and because of the close relations between the
French and Russian intelligence communities. At least, I know that still in the mid-1990s, the test on
Christian religion was the first to be done in the first stage of the recruiting process.
Sex ranks second after religion or about the same, with a logical focus on homosexuality. Then
sexual tastes of the peculiar sort are suggested, and corresponding provocations are staged during
recruitment, brought upon straightforwardly on “friendly” conversations and “fortuitous
encounters”. I am alluding to bondage, sadomasochism, love with multiple partners, pedophilia, and
even bestiality!
As about politics, a candidate whose opinions and viewpoint on the society would be close to
those of an American conservative will be dismissed or be “kept in reserve” in the aim to
manipulate him in the context of a penetration mission, possibly if he has a good brain, university
degrees, and comes from a decent middle. Anyway, he will be considered as an “expendable” of the
most despicable sort and dealt with carefully.
The question of the European Union in the DGSE remained unclear until I left, in spite of the
French-German partnership in intelligence. My personal feeling about this is the DGSE sees more
the E.U. as an opportunity or leverage, on a case-by-case basis, than it commits to its values and
political agenda. In short, and to be clear about this point, this agency sincerely appreciates the E.U.
as a means, but it does not see it as an end, absolutely not. This explains why seldom I talk about the
European Union in this book, beyond comments of historical nature.
If DGSE employees are unwilling to talk about their personal problems, a rate of health troubles
unusually encountered in the ordinary society betrays a hidden reality. First, there is a relatively
large number of suicides and depressions, higher than in the French police where it is notoriously
high, already. Then come psychosomatic illnesses, all resulting from stress or depression, ranging
from cardiovascular disease to ulcers, diabetes, and other disorders of the immune system and their
consequences. Then we find an abnormally high number of skin conditions such as herpes and
eczema, and frequent cases of asthma and allergies. I once met colleague, a woman on her late
thirties, whose arms were covered with bad scares of cuts and burns that obviously betrayed self-
injury disorder. She was “awkward and did all this while cooking,” she claimed.
The facts above justify routine medical and psychiatric mandatory visits, every one to two years
on average. My last psychiatric examination, with an old physician who was no longer officially
active because he retired a few months earlier, turned casual at some point. As the short visit of
about half an hour was nearing its end, he asked to me, tongue in cheek, “So, you don’t think you
are Napoleon, for the moment? Fine, then; good wind”.
Medical treatments are dispensed in cases of extreme necessity only, and they are of poor quality,
generally. Dental care, in my case, limited to quick extractions and makeshift repairs of my dental
prosthesis with glue, with a slap in the back as a friendly bonus.
On one occasion and incidentally, I noticed that physical trainings that may be very demanding
and sometimes hazardous actually are demanded without prior medical assessment. Individuals
expected to be sent to dangerous countries have to submit to the fingerprinting of their feet, so that
in case their body be found without hands, there is still a chance to identify them thanks to their
footprints. While considering the progresses accomplished in DNA identification, I can only
suppose that the peculiar provision is no longer in use, today.
END OF ACTIVITY
Whoever is recruited by the DGSE will never come out of it, even at an age one normally retires.
Again, the reason for this is that nothing can erase on demand years of secret knowledge stored in
the mind of a spy. Most secrets cannot be made public before very long and some forever, even in
the hypothesis of a political upheaval. In point of fact, a recent provision on the protection of
secrecy extended the duration of classification in France to 150 years, which leaves little hope to
retirees to talk a little about their careers in the DGSE, someday. If all spies, analysts, cryptography
experts, counterintelligence officers, and executives of the DGSE could enjoy their complete free
will and full liberty of move from the day of their leave, then nearly everything they know would be
public knowledge, it is true. That is why their retirement is one among the trickiest issues of the
French intelligence community, and of the DGSE in particular. All those elderlies are liabilities in
facts, and some of them make of themselves thorny problems at times.
 Retirees must be monitored, therefore, and their freedoms of movements must be limited one way
or another either. Their leisure activities and realms of interest are somehow “supervised”. Some
behave suitably once left on their own however. Many create small associations, or they run for a
mandate of mayor or member of the town council, typically; a sizeable minority of French prefects
are former employees of the DGSE. Some continue serving the intelligence community at home and
at their own expenses, to the relief and satisfaction of their former employer. As example, they help
in recruiting processes and teach fresh recruits on various fields. I have known of two who wrote
several books, one on technical subjects and the other on his past activities. Yet they stored their
manuscripts in some place at home because they knew they could not publish any. A former
colleague told me about a retired cryptographic specialist by the name of “Bloch”, well known to
the DGSE cryptographic community, who could not help but continue his work at home, even
though it was no longer of any practical use.
Anyway, contacts and other retirees help the DGSE coping with this situation, and encourage
veterans in their hobbies and expectations, within the limits of their thus reduced possibilities.
Inescapably, some make themselves problems; “stones in the shoe” of the agency. They may
become unstable or mentally ill, or else they may want to spend their remaining days in foreign
countries where they might be corrupted and debriefed by some foreign spies. Some drink and some
stray; they talk too much with strangers, recklessly. There are special establishments for those who
are dangerously losing their mind.
Those who are looking for spending their remaining days overseas are introduced to trusted
persons who live in one of the territories and islands France owns. Everything is done to attract
them in those places where, happily, active military work in intelligence and live with other retirees.
They are Reunion, Tahiti, Guadalupe and Martinique, Saint Martin and Saint Barthelemy, and
Guyana, and some African countries. The liveliest are suggested to go to a foreign country to open
some small businesses, and once there they become contacts abroad, of course. As such, they can be
of great help to spies, keep an eye on them, and report about their moves and moods.
Those who behave unsuitably though they are mentally sane, not only put their freedom at stake,
but also their lives, indeed. Typically, they are suggested to go to live in the French countryside, in
an old house that needs repairs, lost in the woods or similar. Once they moved there, further
provisions are taken to make sure they cannot go back where they came from. Most of them
renounce at some point to the restoring of their new home as they realize that the project is harder
and costlier than they figured. Thenceforth, the hard conditions of living in a house that needs
repairs, loneliness, and prolonged boredom do little to keep them healthy, which actually is the
outcome the DGSE expected. I have known three cases of the latter kind. All landed and then died
within a couple of years in the same lost region, the département of Creuse. As an aside about the
latter very rural region, between 1997 and 1998, the French and Russian counterespionage debriefed
British MI5 defector David Shayler in a lost spot of Creuse, in exchange for a shelter and hearty
food. However, the Russians decided to dump Shayler who had become insane consequently to the
ordeal, and he went back to Britain, where things did not improve for him, to put it mildly. Instead,
they kept other defector from the MI6 Richard Tomlison, who is enjoying Russian-French
protection and has been retrained as private pilot in Southern France, near the residencies of several
Russian nationals.
DGSE employees and agents who go on early retirement are offered positions in public service or
in semi-private or private companies, under more or less direct monitoring. Belong to the category,
former full-time insiders whose early retirements actually are continuations of their intelligence
activities in the other context of the privatization of the services or long missions in France or
abroad.
The reader understands that people the French mainstream media introduce as “ex-employees”
and “ex-agents” of the DGSE remain under the authority of this agency, nonetheless. As “publicly-
known spies,” they help this agency in its ongoing campaign of public relations. Anything they can
say about their past activities and about intelligence in general is obviously self-censored or biased,
let alone frequent cases of plain propaganda, disinformation, and deception.
Statistics on the average life expectancy of DGSE employees and agents are not made public, but
such data exist, I assume, and there is no doubt it is abnormally low. Not because the danger
naturally inherent to spycraft abroad would be high, but due to the hard and long-lasting work
conditions I describe in this book.
 The DGSE has an obvious problem with the running cost of monitoring its discharged and retired
employees and agents. On one hand, I was surprised to see that many of my ex-colleagues seemed
to fail to think about this question. On the other hand, I think their daily activities overwhelmed
many of them, enough to make them unable to fathom the coming of this ineluctable end and its lot
of uncertainties I describe. The chapter 22 on COMINT will provide me with an opportunity to tell
about another sort of retirement that will surprise the reader, doubtless.
The dailies of the full-time employees of the French intelligence community are hard anyway,
and this situation is even the more striking when put in contrast with the notions of democracy and
individual freedom that France is claiming. Those people, and flying agents the more so, are
divested of nearly all their fundamental rights France yet claims to enforce. This is why the myth
and dogma on which I was insisting at the beginning of this chapter make up together for a
necessary belief in the gradual acceptance of a frugal life presented as a virtue, the formal aim, and
never as a technical imperative in the protection of secrecy, the real aim. The expected result of
which being that the drastic reduction of individual liberty favors reconciliation between employees,
from which an esprit de corps and a greater assiduity at work must arise as there is not much else to
do with one’s time for want of freedom and money, anyway. Again, all this lies on discoveries in
behavioral biology. We, humans, and animals alike, are equipped with a central nervous system that
dictates to us to act, even when it is impossible, which often leaves us with the only available option
we would probably have rejected, had we been given a larger choice.
 7. Clandestine Lives.
The birth of the flying agent, or agent volant, in French),
known as “operative” or Non Official Cover–NOC, or
“illegal” when foreign in the United States, is accomplished in
pain, as a childbirth. However, to a large majority of them, this
is only the beginning of an existence made of daily
renunciations until the end of their lives. Just as insiders who
work in offices, an agent of this breed cannot really regain his
complete freedom until the day of his passing away. This fact
explains the relatively large number of suicides of agents, and
their varied psychosomatic illnesses that stress and depression
cause. Admiral Pierre Lacoste, former Director of the DGSE
from 1982 to 1985, said, “Agents wear out as batteries do”.
[117]

So, the French flying agent does not resemble at all the
character that most Americans and their inspirer Tom Clancy
fancy, as we shall see. Then the reader must not confuse flying
agent and field agent. The former is a thoroughbred operative;
the latter is of an inferior breed, although he works in the field
either. Many intelligence officers also work in the field, and
then we find couriers who have been thoroughly trained to
spot and to evade surveillance, but whose job limit to quick
deliveries abroad when they are not doing menial tasks in their
homeland. We find a range in quality in the species, obviously.
There are smart field agents, and uneducated and complete
idiots at the opposite end of the spectrum, indeed. My
descriptions and explanations must be pondered accordingly,
therefore, and that is why I happen to define what kind of
person I am talking about when I introduce an agent in the
anecdotes of this book.
The French “top spy” may be a super-agent, largely
presented in this chapter, who is a highly trained agent posing
as a full-fledged businessman, typically, working under the
limelight with this cover activity, and not in the shadow. The
flying agent is the complete opposite of the super-agent for the
latter reason. He—more rarely she—is an antihero, much of
the kind of those Russian spies that the American media and
books on the Cold War describe. In truth, flying agents
become “top-spies” only by the grace of journalists and
writers, as the latter always tend to make dramatic descriptions
of them, as recently with the case of Russian operative Anna
Chapman painted as a “James Bond girl,” to cite one example
among the most striking that the reader may possibly know,
already.
Actually, agents of the more “ordinary” breed in many
instances are ordinary people who were entangled incidentally
at some point in their lives in schemes they could barely grasp.
Those can do little against the fate that thus befalls them. If the
reader can recollect the unfortunate “Roger Thornhill” aka
“George Kaplan” in the Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by
Northwest (1959), then he will be close to what the latter
reality may be. In the next chapters, I will present the
mechanism of unrequited coming into spycraft, and the varied
plot contrivances that can make this magic a harsh reality.
Then we find the foreigner recruited on the spot as “agent”.
What makes the difference with a “source,” is that the former
does not necessarily hold a position or has an activity that
makes him ready to provide good intelligence. Therefore, he
may be expected to do a large variety of tasks, most of minor
importance and that do not relate necessarily to stealing
sensitive information or to sabotaging things. For he may be fit
to specialize in influence, agitprop, scouting, surveillance,
counter-surveillance, burglars, or simply serve as “mailbox”.
Yet never will he train extensively in spycraft because he also
is an “expendable”. Nonetheless, all agents lead a Spartan life,
except perhaps the super-agent who yet may experience a sad
end, possibly. All but the latter are submitted deliberately and
purposefully to hardship and put under the authority of an
ever-demanding handler, as we are going to see. In my
explanations, I will specify “flying agent,” “field agent,”
“agent,” or “source,” when needed.
The agent learns to become one in the field for the most
part, and he will continue to act in accordance with the
scientific facts and methods first discovered by Russian
physician and physiologist Ivan Pavlov. Then specific methods
relevant to behavioral biology apply; I will explain them in the
chapter 9 on manipulating and handling. The latter specific
means the agent will obey to implicit orders, all made obvious
along a simple process of binary communication consisting in
repeated punishments and rare rewards. The method is as
someone who is forced to continue on walking under short and
repeated electric shocks, no matter how despondent and tired
he is.
Thus, he will learn how to execute his mission, of which
often he knows little in reality; that is to say, by avoiding the
punishments that his handler the case officer brandishes
permanently in front of him. Actually, never an agent is given
an explicit order or an explanation on the final and real aims of
his mission. He is told some formal aims instead; those he
believes in and commits to since the day of his recruitment. He
will be told real and serious arguments very exceptionally, and
upon completion of his mission, if they are not too sensitive.
At best, he will understand by his own, if he is smart enough
for this and if he was entrusted some awareness degrees.
Along the course of the agent’s mission, punishments
always are inflicted on him promptly, though those are not of a
physical nature, for they actually are various restrictions,
arranged petty problems, and additional hurdles that make his
dailies more unpleasant than they already are; all things that
make his mission trickier than it should be. In this sense,
punishments are counter-productive, paradoxically. Rewards
are scarce or cleverly distilled, in the aim not to relinquishing
to the agent the slightest opportunity for distraction in his
mission, nor any means that might allow him to escape the
absolute control of his dailies, even temporarily. He must not
be brought to believe he is “good at doing what is expected
from him,” and thus assume he can take some liberties in his
relationship with his hierarchy, such as procrastinating, for
example.
All instructions he receives must be obeyed promptly, in the
image of the trained dog that stampedes instantly to the first
whistle. The psychological dimension of the handling of the
agent is based on action, on a true yet irrational belief in
intuition, and on the consummate knowledge in manipulation
of his case officer. The running of an agent begins with the
denial of his self-fulfillment, as I explained in an earlier
chapter on recruiting and training. Therefore, anyone is
recruited as agent loses at the same time his privilege to be
considered and treated as a human being, and all respects as
such he deserves vanish. For obvious reasons, the DGSE
always shows particular eagerness to deny that aspect of the
lives of its outsiders, in a greater measure than it does with its
insiders.
It is noteworthy, at this point of my explanations, that the
romantic and intellectual French flying agent on his training is
suggested the reading of a German literature fitting his hapless
condition. Why John Le Carré, who has been agent himself, is
still so fond of the romantic Teutonic literature, if his posting
in Germany during the Cold War was not enough already to
justify it? The French flying agent is recommended Goethe
and The Sorrows of Young Werther in particular, Hermann
Hesse with The Glass Bead Game and Siddhartha in
particular, and Heidegger in philosophy. There also are Danish
father of existentialism Kierkegaard, and French Raymond
Queneau[118] with his Zazie in the Metro. Indeed, fun is
nowhere to be found in the literary menu. The matter always
turns around “growing up again” the way the DGSE wants,
credited with bildungsroman of the romantic and existentialist
genres, the whole being seasoned with classic music with an
emphasis on Joahn Sebastian Bach because rock and roll and
modern pop music don’t do it, definitively. Yes, the word
“brainwashing” would not be excessive to sum up the process.
This agency considers that an agent without a known and
serious motive cannot be trustworthy, period. The concept of
trust I am using here must be pondered because it relates to the
value attributed to the agent’s statement only, his obedience
and his loyalty stemming solely from his fear of the
punishment in reality. The latter comes to explains why his
recruiters indeed find this motive for him and teach it to him
astutely if ever he has none. In the facts, the contrivance
breeds an alibi, and not really a sincere and passionate belief
justifying all that suffering, though exceptions exist. The
motive often is the narrative of some formal aims, sometimes
even of the real aims, although, again, he should not know the
real aims of the mission he is assigned.
From the viewpoint of the DGSE, it is important to know
why the agent does what it expects from him, indeed, once the
alibi of “cooperation” has taken precedence over the threat of
the sanction. It is timely to say that all the aforesaid applies to
the source either, once a valuable threat brandished before this
other sub-category of sensors provides for his handling under
blackmail.
However, contrary to the source, the agent must assume the
role of a person he is not in reality, exactly as actors in films
do. Sometimes, not to say often, the agent seeks to hide behind
a pretense of unstable behavior or immaturity, in his hope to
escape the full responsibility of his wrongdoings. He may
appear to be immature, simply “disturbed,” or unfit to live in
the society of ordinary people, which character is acted and
does not reflects his true personality. This choice is not his
own, as in a role-play in which a game-master decides
everything for everyone. It should be said that the “unstable”
or “fanciful guy” the agent at times seems to be, the more
often is a character in a counter-espionage mission unfolding
in his country. Abroad, the agent of the DGSE acts either as a
less intelligent individual than he truly is or as the complete
opposite, which means, in the latter case, that he is constantly
seeking honors and titles of all sorts, and that he is much
interested in valuable and dependable acquaintances.
Therefore, he is hoarding university degrees and awards of all
sorts, be they completely fanciful or not. The DGSE wants this
in that case, and this agency may help him to do so, possibly
but not necessarily.
An apparent paradox makes that, once abroad, often the
highly intelligent flying agent is doing a blue-collar job while
the naïve and inexperienced graduate is given high and well-
paid position and responsibilities. For wasting the precious and
costly time of the counterespionage capacities of a target
country by resorting to countless decoys and lures and red
herrings of that sort is part of a tactic. Again, it is all about
deceit in the context of fuzzy logic, and not only because the
naive graduate might be sly enough at some point to see, in the
opportunity of an executive job in a foreign company abroad, a
way to escape the authority of his handler. Unless he has
enough ties in France to be deterred from venturing in the
latter direction, of course—as is the case, generally.
Additionally, the brained and highly educated agent who is
given a menial and manual job thus offers to the DGSE a good
mind entirely dedicated to the difficulties of his mission,
closer, herein, to the general policy in human resources I
explained in the chapter on recruiting and training.
As surprising as it may seem, the French agent sometimes is
an individual with an authentic psychological disorder because
of some reasons the reader is going to understand soon.
Beforehand, I tell, below, the case of an individual with true
mythomania that the DST (now DGSI) transformed in a useful
agent I am going to name “John”.
First, the DST set up a false recruitment for John to lure him
into believing he had become a counterintelligence officer of
the DGSE—this happened in Paris in the mid-1990s.
Concretely, the DST allowed this man in his early forties to
believe in his own perception of what his job was. He was
given true, small, and simple missions, and even genuine
sensitive information on some French personalities. At this
point, we must note that John was a former military in an elite
regiment who had been discharged for mental disorder. John
had a fondness for the subjects of espionage and military elite
units, and he had read all kinds of books on these subjects, in
addition to being a collector of French military paraphernalia,
insignias, pins, medals, and the like.
So, with his true military experience and all he had learned
from books on the subject of intelligence, John could very well
pass for an intelligence officer, according to the perception
French ordinary people have of it. In passing, yet importantly,
this exemplifies the customary French introduction of fuzzy
logic in intelligence, i.e. things that are neither entirely true
nor entirely false, but which hover constantly between these
two possibilities.
John had long dreamed to become a “secret agent,”
someday. That is why it was easy to convince him to
“cooperate”. Once at work—en piste (“on track”), say
colloquially French counterintelligence officers—he displayed
a zeal that would be concerning if shown by a genuine agent
whose discretion is obviously expected. In sum, John was
made an agent provocateur. Therefore, he was sent to
approach a variety of people including some personalities,
once he was loaded with true information on them, such as
intimate and embarrassing facts collected through telephone
and Internet tapping in particular. They were all things that
John hastened to repeat to the interested parties, in the sole and
true goal to showing off with his own importance and power,
as all pathological liars do.
The DST did expect those “leaks” to happen, of course, for
the game was all about intimidation, bullying, and threatening;
provocation, in sum. The ensuing expectations could vary
from blackmail to recruitment attempts, mere provocations, or
eliciting anything of possible value, a pan’s stirrer job. As
expected, John was quick at hinting before numerous people
he was a “counterespionage officer with the DGSE” and not
the DST, as he was instructed to and since he really believed
he had been recruited by the former agency anyway.
This is how those people that the DST instructed him to
approach took him seriously first, and then wondered about,
“What the fuck is happening to me, and what does this guy
want?” to that effect. All targets were confronted quickly and
always with the same weird situation, especially with the
awful doubt to having to deal with a crackpot who, however,
held very personal information that only an intelligence
agency can possibly know. From the viewpoint of those
victims, it was an annoying but inextricable predicament, since
they all were smart enough to understand that no one would
take them seriously if ever they came to complain about such
intrusion in their privacies. As soon as one of them dismissed
John, he came back to the charge with new information, ever
more accurate and embarrassing. So much so that it turned to
stalking, at some point.
The enormous advantage with a pathological liar, from the
viewpoint of an intelligence agency, is that anything he may
know, say, and do, can be denied at any time, promptly and
easily. Isn’t he a mentally disturbed person, therefore “unfit
and unlikely to be recruited as intelligence officer, of course”?
It is noteworthy that the mission of the unhinged agent of this
anecdote ended on a sentence of a two years’ term of
imprisonment, along a psychiatric follow-up. How such a man
could not be an “expendable”?
Now, the reader understands where the interest of the
French intelligence community is with making the
unenlightened public believes that “spies are gentlemen-like
people of a rare and superior breed”.
REMUNERATION OF THE AGENT
The French intelligence community does not see the craft of
the agent as a professional vocation implying remuneration.
When in public, “former” intelligence executives say that
agent rather is “a vocational activity,” as priest and monk are,
because it is out of question to acknowledge that slave is the
closest synonym, actually.
Previously, the reader saw that those who serve as full time
employees are not paid in proportion to their education and
skills. It is worse with agents. The only reward they can hope
for their service is little more than the rare compliment of their
case officers, and small “gifts” that cannot be converted into
hard currency, such as holidays and trips, restaurants and food,
prostitutes, and other ephemeral pleasures. For a rule prohibits
to pay agents and sources in cash, on the disingenuous
pretense that “loyalty is not a commodity for sale”. Therefore,
the agent must draw his meager income from a cover activity
placed under the secret control of the DGSE, generally, which
he carries on in addition to his clandestine activities. If he is an
agent in domestic intelligence, then he often is on the dole in a
way and form, which status makes him available round the
clock at no cost to the agency. An agent who can move on his
own without restrain would be a freedom impeding the
authority of his handler. This power is ensured at the cost of
strong tensions only, contradictions and paradoxes that
together come to explain the structurally unstable nature of
this unusual interaction, completely absurd to the
understanding of anyone does not know its true causes.
 THE AGENT AS RECRUITER
Over time, the relationship between the case officer and his
agent must stabilize so that it can offer the possibility of a
hierarchical pyramid of actions and relations that must escape
the logic of the unenlightened public. A pile of knowledge and
responsibilities must take place. This compound must lead to
attitudes and actions, and to the opacity of a real network of
individuals, whose existence would be impossible to
demonstrate before a rational justice demanding material
evidences and confessions that nobody will bring forth. Once
he is familiar with the many constraints of his new life, the
agent can recruit under-agents and sources.
The explanatory schema on the next page shows the cascade
of intermediaries from up to bottom between the DGSE and
the unconscious sources, with under-agents when there are,
agents, contacts, case officer, and the controleur (supervisor)
of the latter who works from distance in the DGSE, in France.
This type of organization is applicable to the case of the
classic espionage network in a foreign country, but it often
applies as well in France in the contexts of domestic
intelligence, counterintelligence, and counterterrorism, with
some minor differences of form between the two cases, at
times, as principle and methods remain the same.
On this schema, relating specifically to foreign intelligence,
note first that a flying agent in French intelligence may be a
French national or even a native of another foreign country
(here called “third country”) who is not the holder of a French
passport, therefore. For the DGSE uses commonly natives of
other countries it recruits and trains as agents and field agents,
the same way it does with French nationals. The latter are
recruited on occasion for a few possible reasons, such as
deceiving the immigration services and the counterespionage
agency of the target country where they are sent, or deceiving
a target in the contexts of recruitment, counterintelligence, and
counterterrorism. Thus, certain field agents the DGSE sends to
the United States are natives of former Yugoslavia, Italia,
Ireland, Brazil, Morocco, Algeria, and many other African
countries, Lebanon, Luxembourg, and more. The latter
enumeration is not exhaustive. Then, owing to a close
partnership in intelligence between the DGSE and the Russian
intelligence services, the SVR RF in particular, it may be
difficult to determine which one of these two countries indeed
runs those foreigners. This is especially true with Romanians
and other natives of Serbia, and then with nationals of satellite
countries of the former Soviet Union in general, respectively.
Which means Romanians and Serbs may be fluent in French
and have a number of contacts in France but be truly handled
by the Russian intelligence service in fine, highly likely to
have been trained the Russian way, therefore.
Many are unconscious agents upon their arrival in a foreign
country, and they are made conscious, taught, and trained in
spycraft years later, upon their successful settlements only.
However, such agents are unlikely to be trained as real flying
agents. Instead, they will receive gradually a need-to-know-
training that will make them fit to do what is expected from
them, precisely, and nothing else. The less they know about
spycraft, the better it is. Preferably, they must even not “know”
they are agents serving an intelligence agency. The latter
particularity will be explained later.
As about under-agents and sources, they must be valuable
assets, of course; that is to say, nationals of the target country
or foreign naturalized at worst, although they can be French
immigrants, possibly, if they prove useful in some way. They
provide information of lesser or greater interest, and that is
about all. They are not necessarily influential people or
executives, and may be clerks in public services, military,
police, or they may be working in a private company, be
university assistant professors, professors, engineers, etc.
Below are two examples I remember, as I was personally
concerned in both, at some point.
In the early 1980s, Renaud de Montigny, one of my ex-
colleagues, who did his debut as porte-serviette at the French
embassy in Beirut in the late 1970s, recruited a source in this
city. The latter was a young Christian Lebanese and a member
of the Kataeb vigilante forces. Later in the early 1980s, this
Lebanese immigrated in the United States, a country where he
had a relative and several acquaintances who also were
Christian Lebanese immigrants. A few more years later, he
enlisted in the U.S. Army and started a career in this corps.
 During his time in Beirut, De Montigny also recruited Nabil Dagher—or Dager, I am not sure of
the exact spelling of his last name, today—another young Christian Lebanese who, in 1985, came in
France to learn … how to pilot helicopters. By the end of March 1986, as I met De Montigny in
quality of adviser about his project to purchase a gun store in the Northern suburb of Paris, with
sorrow he revealed to me that Dagher died abruptly a few days earlier. For “Dagher” was the man
who carried the suitcase containing the bomb of the attack of the Galerie Point Show, Avenue des
Champs Élysées in Paris, on March 20, 1986. The attack killed two, including Dagher and the
person to whom he had been instructed to give the suitcase, and wounded 29. Sincerely, De
Montigny did not know what happened with Dagher exactly. He could tell me that this young
source or agent he had recruited had been in close touch with his uncle who had come to live in
France. A few months earlier, the DST had framed the uncle as member of a terrorist cell from West
Beirut, a likely Muslim believer, therefore. The latter man, De Montigny went on, had been
previously detained and interrogated by officers of the latter agency for more than one month in the
La Santé prison. Then the rest of the story was unclear; the uncle would have asked his nephew
Dagher to deliver the suitcase to someone, anyway. Yet he did not tell him there was a bomb in it,
possibly because he knew that Dagher was in touch with the French intelligence community (the
DGSE, exactly), so, a snitch.
I had known well Dagher personally, and “Georges” the other Christian Lebanese who
immigrated to the United States alike because the latter made his first trip to France from Beirut
with me, in the early 1980s. Once in Paris, De Montigny provided Georges with a housing. As I
knew well Dagher too, I am able to describe him as a young talkative man on his 26 with an
extravert and joyful temperament. He was the son of a deceased officer of the Lebanese customs
from the Hotel-Dieu district in Beirut. For a number of reasons, I excluded definitively the
hypothesis saying that this young man could be a would-be-terrorist or even a true believer of the
same ilk, and De Montigny shared my opinion. The circumstances surrounding the tragic end of the
rather hedonist young man remain a mystery to me, to date. The more so since the French media
said nothing about this bomb plot beyond the usual dramatic comments on the casualties. End of the
two anecdotes.
An agent may be made agent of influence as journalist, writer, or in some cultural and arts
activities because he is a true activist for whatever cause, already. Of course, many under-agents and
sources are recruited under some “false flag,” preferably. I say “some,” because false flag does not
necessarily mean a foreign country; it can be, very possibly, an NGO, a political activist or religious
group, a sect, or even a criminal organization, be it fictitious or real regardless. “Sensors” (capteurs,
in French intelligence jargon) of this sort do not believe they are betraying their country; they
assume instead (often) they are “fighting the establishment” of their country that they usually see as
despotic or corrupt, some political party, the military, capitalism, global warming, or anything else.
They picture themselves as proud defenders of whatever abstract cause they deem “noble”.
I once heard a case officer say, “We must never attempt to change the beliefs of an agent or
source. We must run this individual by making profit of his beliefs, on the contrary. It is as in
Aikido, when one is using the opponent’s own force to drag him down to the floor”.
Most under-agents are completely unaware to act in the service of a foreign country, and still less
for which country, when they are so. As many agents, they often believe they are rebelling and
fighting against something or someone willfully, or they think they are doing some good for
something, someone, an idea, belief, or even simply out of love or friendship for or with someone.
Those are true believers;[119] they expect some change to happen, often in their own country or even
in the World, to the point that they often picture themselves as “true patriots” or heroes, ironically.
The true motive of many under-agents who are acting in the area of influence in particular in fact
is a craving for other’s love, the recognition of the noblesse of soul they lack, deeply buried in their
minds and sometimes unbeknownst to them. Very often, altruism and unselfishness are the formal
aims of the agent, under-agent, or source, to reach all-narcissistic real aims in truth; that is to say, a
need for unconditional love, for getting praiseful comments and “likes” on some social networks,
etc. Some others do it out of boredom, simply and exclusively; they were looking for a purpose for
their lives, whatever it is. To those recruits of the activist kind, it may be also what they perceive as
a short path to enter politics and to access, at last and again, the recognition they think they deserve
because who is going to dare dislike or to be suspicious of someone who claims he takes side for a
minority or whatever about similar?
 Trainings courses given to agents of this sort are not necessarily relevant to espionage, therefore,
but rather to whatever ordinary knowledge and skills are deemed suitable to what is expected from
them. They are trained on public speeches, taught on epistemological fallacies, on civil rights, labor
laws, a computer software or else, along with recommended readings and films, very often. So,
about all of them have a favored book, a film or a hero that inspires them and from which they draw
their high energy and relentlessness.
Years ago, out of intrigued personal curiosity, I read some press articles about Kamel Daoudi, a
French national of North-African origin the British police arrested on September 29, 2001, in
connection with the U.S. Paris Embassy plot. I was surprised when I stumbled on a phrase saying
that this man had contracted a fancy for fictional film hero “Indiana Jones,” who inspired him, he
said. Is this a clue pointing to the responsibility of a spy agency? Not necessarily, yet very possibly
when considering other facts and oddities I also found in his background. Anyway, Indiana Jones
was the character he fancied to become, and this was his true motive and narrative, which
exemplifies how irrational they can be for real effects to occurs, and that is what would matter to the
DGSE.
Sources and under-agents in particular are not always unaware of their wrongdoings; they are just
honest nationals of the target country or naturalized immigrants who ignore they are manipulated
into doing something wrong occasionally or continuously. They can hardly believe that foreign
spies are eliciting useful information or services from them, even when a bundle of concordant facts
makes for an overwhelming evidence. Typically, and ironically, they see spies and espionage as
“people and things that exist only on television,” as most ordinary people do. They think they are
“too insignificant persons” to interest spies. More especially, they are unable to see how what they
do could possibly connect to spies, since they think that the trade of spies limit to to spying on, and
that is all. Then, to a few of them, they “guess” and indulge to willful blindness, at last. I think, the
cryptic film Slaughterhouse 5 depicts rather well this breed of half-conscious agents.
As about contacts, a large majority of them is French national, but they may be foreigners
naturalized French, and even nationals of a third party country who act for the same motives, but
quietly because they feel better at ease with the notions of conspiracy and underground movements,
are sincerely committed, and are not looking for praise. In all cases, they settled in the target country
for good or for a long time. They are neither agents, nor under-agents, nor sources formally
speaking, yet they act consciously in the service of French interests or even to that of the French
intelligence community, more clearly, as earlier explained. The DGSE sees contacts as very
important assets because those won the trust of the local population after years of efforts to adapt,
usually.
In the late 1990s, while going to a training in Eastern France, the DGSE instructed me to lodge in
a hotel restaurant in particular. Visibly, the owner of the place expected my arrival, and he knew I
was not an ordinary patron. He hosted me friendly and, on the following evening, he offered me a
drink and talked about his experience as Chief in a prestigious French restaurant in the United
States. Then he shown me a photo featuring himself with U.S. President Bill Clinton smiling and
holding him by the shoulder. He was openly proud to have thus fooled the President of the United
States himself on his real quality; kind of nose thumb in his view, a typical pattern in French foreign
intelligence, which I will explain in a next chapter as the gesture is a notion that has an importance.
The DGSE does not even run the risk to provide its contacts abroad with any spy training courses
because this could arouse suspicion on them owing to a possible subsequent change in their
demeanors: the likelihood of a slip of the tongue in a conversation or interview by a local
government agency, or else just boasting about spycraft after a couple of drinks. What is most
expected from them, essentially, is to integrate in their host country and to remain so. The DGSE
counts on them at any time in the eventuality of an emergency, for example. Moreover, they may be
unfit to adapt to the craft of intelligence in the field. Some are experienced in intelligence, but in
offices in most such instances, as it has been explained in the previous chapter.
The more often, the thoroughbred flying agent made his debuts in an elite unit of the French
Army, which gave him a very demanding physical training allowing best to appraise his stamina,
loyalty, and physical courage. He was given trainings on self-defense including how to kill silently,
camouflaging, target shooting and sniping, explosives handling and making, sabotaging, stealing
and housebreaking, stealthily swimming, diving, canoeing, intercepting telecommunications, etc.
Later only, if considered smart enough, he learned intelligence and counterintelligence methods and
techniques, this time in order to train him as field agent or intelligence officer evolving in a civilian
middle. He has been deeply indoctrinated, of course, to ascertain he will not yield to the offer of the
enemy. The profile of this agent only can be considered, somehow, as comparable to James Bond’s
and Jack Ryan’s in fictions.
THE “SUPER-AGENT”
The rare agents who appear with covers activities of senior business executives, wealthy
businessmen, and investors are entrusted possessions they do not own in reality. They will have to
relinquish them someday, to pass them on to someone else. This is a fact the public opinion is not
supposed to know, obviously. They do not become rich by working hard and thanks to their
exceptional acumen in business; they are made rich on purpose. For affluence is a cover activity,
too, whose justification is an all-logical need to penetrate the inner circles of the financial power and
to influence foreign VIPs in some way. Being rich and known is a magic key that opens almost all
doors and to collect high-value intelligence through gossips, confidences, and else from people who
are important, influential, and who know much. Wealthy and famous people often indulge in
believing they belong to an exclusive brotherhood of some sort, in which they can share secrets with
reciprocal confidence.
French super-agent André Guelfi worked above all for the Russian KGB, and then for the SVR,
and he truly was a committed far-leftist. That is why he said bitterly, in substance because from
recollection, “When I come to pay visit to somebody in a private jet, he welcomes me well and he
takes seriously anything I may say. If ever I came to see him in a 2 Chevaux,[120] then he would not
even deign say ʻHelloʼ to me. It’s too bad, people are so stupid, but that’s why no one can do
business with a 2 Chevaux”. French self-made man and businessman born in Morocco from a lower-
class family, Guelfi was particularly active with both French and Soviet intelligence under SDECE
and DGSE authority, notably in arms trade and secret diplomacy in Africa. Much alike another
upstart of the late 1970s such as Bernard Tapie he acquainted with, Guelfi had various past activities
ranging from car racing driver to real estate mogul, thanks to his marriage with the niece of late
French President George Pompidou. Overall, Guelfi has been following in Jean-Baptiste Doumeng’s
footsteps, another super-agent who worked for both the SDECE and the KGB.
In the late 1970s, in partnership with German businessman Horst Dassler, said to be “the father of
sport sponsorship” and who by then was owner of Adidas France sportswear,[121] Guelfi helped
discreetly the Soviet Union in her hope to become host country of the 1980 Olympic Games. This
end was reached by bribing South-American members of the Olympic Games Committee with
Adidas funds. Guelfi was also a member of the GOdF, and as for Jean-Baptiste Doumeng, Dassault
aeronautics provided him regularly with a private jet Mystère-Falcon type.
Since Guelfi’s advices are of value, I add he also used to say, “Don’t pay visit to an influential
person with whom you want to do business without an expensive gift to offer to him, ever;
especially in third-world countries. Only clumsy businessmen offer cheap gifts”.
Super-agents—whom DGSE insiders, in passing, happen to call colloquially “super
moustaches”—of course are not made rich just for doing business and making profits. They must
carry out varied missions, mainly of influence and of diplomatic nature, and more especially to
collect intelligence and confidences in the social middle in which they evolve. Thus, they are able to
exert influence on the unfolding of important events, or even to cause their happenings, and to
influence large masses of people, subsequently.
Bernard Kouchner, an avid poker player who had to become French Minister of Foreign and
European Affairs (2007-2010), has been a flying agent of the SDECE first, sent on mission in
Afghanistan during the Soviet–Afghan War (1979-1989). By then, Kouchner was under the direct
supervision of Director of the SDECE Alexandre de Marenches with a cover activity of
humanitarian doctor. Bernard Kouchner’s second wife, journalist Christine Okrent, was agent under
the direct supervision of De Marenches, too. These two particular super-agents, or rather operatives,
were good picks for sly De Marenches, since both committed to far-leftist ideology and as every
piece of intelligence they could collect ended in the ears of the KGB, consequently. As an aside,
Kouchner’s first wife Évelyne Pisier had had an affair with Cuban leader Fidel Castro that lasted for
several years.
The aforesaid explains why the super-agent is also an agent of influence, and why the DGSE does
everything to make him visible and popular, and to appear as a dynamic and successful individual.
For famous and rich people influence the masses easily and naturally, just by posing as examples to
follow to those who hope to succeed in life, to begin with; that is to say, the exact opposite of what
this agency does for all its other agents. The super-agent is the real “top spy,” a “knight with a
shining armor riding a white horse and enjoying the service of underlings,” while this agency
considers all its other agents as rank-and-file “infantrymen”. The reader should note that a recurring
pattern in the biography of the typical super-agent of the DGSE is, he does not come from the upper
class and he experienced hardship in his youth.
Another peculiar and oft-encountered feature of the French super-agent is his demeanor, which
must stand out at least at some point in his relationships with other people of the capitalist model yet
he draws himself. In this sense, he must be seen and understood popularly as “a simple and
straightforward individual,” and as an alternative version of the classic successful entrepreneur or
mogul. He seldom inherited his wealth because he had nothing to inherit when he was shortlisted to
become an agent. That is why he remains an outcast of a sort in his own exclusive middle, who does
not mingle sincerely with his likes of the financial elite, except for provoking and attacking the
capitalist values to which he seems to stick deceptively, and to ridicule its exponents more implicitly
than explicitly. Since he has been enthroned “rich and successful entrepreneur” artificially, he must
appear as a self-made man who sticks to his social cradle, often by affecting conspicuously the
simple manners and speech-style of the blue collar. The latter demeanor serves another purpose,
which is to spot influential persons who conceal their sympathy for leftist values by provoking
them. Below, is an example of the reverse, which an agent of influence very often practiced when he
met other businessmen “as him”.
Toward the end of meals washed down with alcohols, when the minds of the guests relax their
vigilance, he came out with jokes on popular leftist figures, and he was the first to laugh about it
because laughing is infectious. However, while he was doing this, he looked attentively and
discreetly at everyone’s reaction, to spot who did not seem to appreciate the depreciatory humor.
They were those he reported to his handlers as “worthy to be approached for recruitment” or just
“possibly friendly”.
The DGSE runs also super-agents who behave entirely “bourgeois,” “socialite,” the “capitalist
way”. Those are of an entirely different school; they hoard diplomas from prestigious schools and
universities, contrary to the former, and they dress very formally and talk with the affected manner
of their exclusive middle. Unlike the former who is a committed and trusted agent, the socialite
super-agent has been deceived when he was recruited and trained unbeknownst to him—in most
instances, as far as I know. Someday, he will have to go back to reality, when someone will come
over him to make him understand that he did not rise to prominence coincidentally or naturally, but
“thanks to those he must stand by in return, now”. At some point, he will find himself trapped-like
in a maze of informal yet odd and thought-provoking conversations that will come as invitations to
reconsider the purpose of his past existence and the “true purpose of life and success,” according to
the French existentialist model of thought. He will be invited “by happenstance” to watch films in
the vein of Dead Poets Society (1989), Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), or even The Jetty (1962) if
ever “things are not yet clear enough to him”. He will be subtly warned of his sanction to come if
ever he refuses to “understand” and to “go back to earth”.
France ran and continues to run many super-agents, and about all of them serve Russian interests
simultaneously, due to the French-Russian special relationship I shall explain in the chapter 23. The
earliest ancestor of those French businessmen who served the Russian interests, perhaps is an
entrepreneur named Joseph Fritsch. In 1937, Fritsch was appointed Chairman of the Board of
Directors of France-Navigation, a shipping marine business that truly was a Soviet front company.
Fritsch was a Soviet agent born in Paris, or rather a front man.[122] As an aside, for long, it is a
recurrent mark of the Russian intelligence community, and of the French Communist Party–PCF, to
add “France” in the names of the front companies they created in in this country, to make those
businesses appear deceptively committed to France’s values in an over-zealous fashion. The trick
was used in other countries either, such as in the United States where some French companies
conspicuously added the initials “U.S.” to their names. There was one in Worcester, MA in the early
2000s, which still exists today, possibly.
Note in passing, in Balzac’s Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans aka A Harlot High and Low,
the fictional Lucien de Rubempré is an early and accurate description of the recruiting, training, and
handling of French super-agents. In this novel, De Rubempré and his partner the beautiful Esther
Van Gobseck, ex-prostitute turned swallow (woman flying agent), together infiltrate successfully the
high society and the middle of the high finance.[123]
Some of those French puppet businessmen have also in common to have been selected and
protected in France by the DST, now called DGSI, rather than by the DGSE. Of course, to be a
super-agent is an extraordinary privilege the French intelligence community accords to recruits who
demonstrated exceptional qualities only, and after an unusually long probationary period
comparable to a path strewn with pitfalls. The duration of the course cannot be less than five years,
and it takes ten or more of hardship and various forms of humiliation, usually. The ordeal, we
notice, is analogous to an extraordinarily long initiation rite organized by some sorority that would
have no official existence and no clear purpose.
Exceptions, since there are, concern generally heirs of prominent French families who have been
secretly or even openly active in leftist politics in their youths. However, the latter condition does
not guarantee at any rate that the inherited reward will make one’s son or daughter a great French
entrepreneur. The shortlisting process is about the same in Russia, today, which explains how people
relatively young become multi-millionaires or even billionaires overnight in this other country.
The DGSE also transforms conscious and unconscious agents of the ordinary sort, apparently,
into super-agents upon their settling in the country where this agency sent them. This happens
through arranged circumstances and opportunities, the whole of it being wrapped in a media hype.
When the “personal wealth” of super-agents has been arranged in France, the latter won it through
arrangements and staged opportunities either. The French intelligence community neither is in need
of heirless great bourgeois homes readily available, nor of prestigious vehicles, boats, movable
property, and valuable jewelry seized by the revenue service, the customs, and other justice courts,
nor of airplanes and helicopters that can be borrowed easily, and nor of costly garments. An array of
private banks can guarantee liquidities on demand, and the DGSE has witnesses by the dozens to
testify to the exceptional qualities and achievements of the most despicable “chosen ones”.
Launching a startup and stumbling by chance on a large contract may be good enough to make
someone rich within a single year. Thenceforth, it is easy to make for the elected super-agent a
reputation of “skilled and successful entrepreneur” contributing to the making of a légende, about
acceptable to the ignorant public but certainly not to the insightful counterintelligence officer. For
this case concerns super-agents who will not act physically abroad to spy on foreign businessmen
and to influence them; their role is to serve the defense of the French economic heritage on the
French soil and abroad, unambiguously to foreign counterintelligence agencies, therefore; about as
known spies acting under diplomatic covers do. Those lead businesses and groups such as Ubisoft,
Kering, LVMH, Richemont, Canal+ Group and its subsidiary StudioCanal, Orange, and many more.
It is not so uncommon for a French university, even a prestigious one, to issue a diploma to an
agent who truly attended its courses for a very short time, enough to talk about his studies in the
event of a routine verification.
The mission of a super-agent and his cover activity may know an abrupt end, however, either
because it is estimated that he will not go farther than where he was helped to go, for the sole reason
of his natural limits because his cover has been “blown” and is likely to be publicly exposed
anytime soon, or because too many people know or understand that he actually is acting in the
service of the French State. Or else, because the counterespionage service of the country where he
has been sent tricked him at some point because his company has been led to be no longer profitable
or too costly to run any longer, or simply because power and money corrupted him and drove him to
yield to reckless spending, excesses, and unwarranted pride, all things that made him edge away
from his commitment and mission.
In whatever case above, the super-agent is asked to relinquish his possessions and position or to
surrender them to someone else, under threat of sanctions he often believes impossible against the
so famous and so respectable person he is become. Those threats are real, their effects are
devastating, and few journalists if ever will seriously investigate the causes of the unexpected and
bizarre demises. If he proves obedient and resigns at once, as requested, then he will be called to
come back to France where he will be given a senior public position or to disappear from public
view in some small country, the more often. He may be hired full time in the DGSE with a senior
position, or outside of it to reconvert as field agent with a specialty in influence if his name is
known enough for this.
In the mid-1990s, on a casual conversation with some of my ex-colleagues, I was told about a
freshly repatriated such woman super-agent from Japan. The anecdote did not specify what she did
over there exactly, except she had been risen high enough to have a limo with a chauffeur. Upon her
arrival in France, she had been hired to work at the DGSE headquarter, but not with a senior
position, apparently, and with a cheap salary in any case, with the immediate consequence of her fall
into deep depression. The higher we climb, the harder we fall.
 The French and Russian intelligence communities are looking constantly for foreigners having all
qualities and capacities to serve their interests as super-agents. For those recruits offer the
advantage to being harder to unmask, since they are not nationals of the country they serve. In this
endeavor, either they spot and recruit a young talent, or they seduce someone rich and famous
already, convert him, and corrupt him.
DISCIPLINE
At home, the French intelligence community bases its authority over its agents upon the long arm
of the governmental apparatus against which no individual can fight. Abroad as within the French
borders, the interpersonal relationship between a case officer and his agent remains asymmetrical.
The former always introduces himself as a rich and powerful individual, even when he is not in
reality, and he constantly reminds this to his agent to better assert his superiority and power. The
promise of the deliverance upon the completion of the mission is always implicit, but the date of the
dearly expected event is made unclear or ever postponed, and the agent could not possibly know
that there will be other missions. In other words, the case officer is moving the goalposts constantly
because he has a stake in keeping his sources and agents at his service as long as possible, since he
builds his career on them and is rewarded and promoted for their performances.
The thoroughbred flying agent and the more ordinary field agent both are made loners and
vulnerable people in reality. Those who run them are ensuring a permanent social void around them.
In French territory or in countries having close ties with France, case officers can count on the
support of a complicit bureaucracy, and on a large network of more or less influential individuals,
which the GOdF often provides them with in the frame of domestic intelligence or
counterintelligence when on the French soil. Abroad, agents are watched in their dailies thanks to a
clandestine network of contacts and other agents of minor importance, and they are threatened to
sanction when they indulge in unproductive relationships. Agents who are in the field often are
exposed to various dangers. Case officers are behind a desk or feel comfortable at home, paid for
what they do and according to the quality and quantity of services they render to the Centrale; the
flying agent, the agent, and the source are not.
It would not be wrong to assume the flying agent and the field agent thus are assimilated to a
special social category still inferior to that of the blue collar. The American reader can compare the
situation to the system of indentured contract of the nineteenth century. Even the lowest rank in the
military does for a better life. The simple soldier goes on furlough and enjoys his free time with his
buddies or his girlfriend; there are no such compensations to the flying agent and the field agent, for
years and years and then decades on a row. Within the French intelligence community, this
inequality is institutionalized. The importance of a total control upon flying agents and field agents
is paramount to their case officers. This is done by means that will coerce them into doing what the
intelligence agency wants, inescapably, sometimes at the cost of their freedom or lives, which
hindrance happens to be intentional, at times, it should also be said.
Now, as the reader understands, from the need of a total subjection of the agent comes the
requirement of knowing him better than his own parents do. There is an internal rule saying that an
agent “must be tightly held on a leash”. A more accurate aphorism proposes he must be “held with
an iron fist in a velvet glove”. Others say, “The ability to manipulate human beings in a detached
way is the cardinal virtue in a recruiter, and no one should be indignant of it”. There is no room for
ethics and moral in all this because the issue between the case officer and his agent indeed is the
triumph of the will of the strongest upon any resistance, regardless of the nature of the relationship
as illegality is the first instrument of the DGSE, we have seen, and as we shall see again all along
this book.
With individuals the case officer designates to his agent as targets, the agent is left with the sole
resource to sow clues that will prove later he is an irresponsible or the sole responsible. As the
DGSE indeed happened to convert subtly North-African immigrants into terrorists, this rule is of
utmost importance, therefore. This does not fool all foreign counterespionage agencies, although
they never have any conclusive evidences of it to present to the media or are instructed not to make
public a case incompatible with the pursuit of diplomatic relations and economic exchanges, not to
say useful police and antiterrorist international cooperation, ironically, sometimes.
In the late 1990’s, I have known of an unofficial warning that the U.S. intelligence community
sent to its French counterpart—one among many—asking to stop using terrorists against the United
States and its allied countries. Such exchanges are not publicly released, of course. In point of fact,
intelligence officers and analysts of the French intelligence community have a background
knowledge that makes them able to spot clues and patterns in the stories of arrested and interviewed
terrorists, suggesting or not and to varied degrees whether an intelligence agency could have
manipulated them in reality. Terrorists, as the arms they use, do not grow on trees, especially in
regions where they are no trees.
As example, as a preventive measure against possible accusations of manipulation or blackmail,
and of course in the aim to cover the transmission of real orders under deceptive pretenses, the
DGSE and the DGSI sometimes request to their agents to receive their instructions from couriers
acting under covers of astrologer, medium, fortune-teller, and the like.[124] Thus, agents can shroud
their secret meetings in arranged circumstances that must appear to anyone as ordinary consultations
of naïve individuals; thenceforth, they can hardly fall under the accusation to be spies. Reciprocally,
would hardly be taken seriously if ever they wanted to confess their activities, and by which secret
trick they are instructed.
In passing, in the DGSE, it is taken as no more than a running joke, told tongue in cheek, to
remind that many French politicians go to see astrologists, and that even former French presidents
Valery Giscard-d’Estaing had regular secret meetings with an African witchdoctor, and François
Mitterrand with a woman astrologist suitably attractive.[125] In French intelligence cryptic talk,
when a senior public servant or else has been framed as having a foreign handler, one says while
giving a stare, “Be wary of him; he tells everything to his wife”.
The substance of communications between the agent abroad and the DGSE is personalized, made
of metaphors and other subtle second-degree allusions matching present or past circumstances,
which can be and must be known and understood to two persons only. They may be allusions or
code words to some particular places, people or else; tricks analogous in their principle to the
random numbers of a cipher code drown in a gibberish. Such code words and phrases are as obvious
to those two parties as others that petty drug dealers use in their cell phone conversations. The
difference in the latter analogy is that agents never use code words universal to their trade, though
exceptions exist because a specific code word cannot be attributed to everything and memorized by
a single individual. Thus, it is up to the agent to separate the palaver of the astrologist, or someone
else, from words and sentences that can hardly be coincidental or that “remind of something” and
other dejà vus. This does not imply that the courier does know the meanings of the thus coded
words and phrases because he has been instructed to repeat them to the agent, only. The instruction
can be an alternative, whose two options may result in the same outcome, unbeknownst to the agent
himself when such instance arises.
For example, the agent can understand easily what is further expected from him if he is told, at
some point in a phrase, the rather rare word “dwarf” because, previously, his case officer or
someone else told him a tale in which one of the characters is a dwarf—it can also be about a movie,
again. Therefore, he and no one else knows what the dwarf did in the fiction or what happened to
him if the message is an emergency warning. If ever the dwarf, at some point of the fiction, was
forced to go back home as conclusion to the tale, then it means the agent has to consider his mission
is aborted for some unknown reason or is accomplished. Thenceforth, someone he knows or he does
not yet know soon is going to propose to him “a new opportunity in France” or in another country,
which he must accept forthwith and without even asking for specifics.
For long, and still today possibly, the DGSE requests its flying agents and many of its employees
alike to learn a little about ancient Greek and Roman mythology, and to buy at their own expenses a
particular and complete book on the subject[126] and none other. As it is a French dictionary of
Greek and Roman divinities, there is one story by name at least, and other names in each may be
numerous. The choice falls within a common culture whose true purpose is paganism, as opposed to
Christian religion and to the King George Bible, the latter being seen too closely associated with the
United States and its allies. No room must be left for ever-possible confusion and mistake! Thus, the
all-ordinary book is used as a secret codebook. This does not mean that French agents and their case
officers rely exclusively on ancient Greek and Roman references, since this would be indeed
imprudent. These elaborate channels of communication and means of cryptology must take on the
appearances of what they are supposed to be, so that even a counterespionage officer cannot use
reasonably their discrete recordings as evidences in a justice court, even if he knows indeed they
connect to foreign and hostile intelligence activities.
However, the trick above remains unsuitable to communicate precise instructions including
names, numbers, addresses, and similar. That is why there are other means of secret and safe
communication that will presented in the chapter 15, to which the subject is more relevant.
 This is how distance settles between the agent and his case officer, as it is out of question to
arrange regular meetings in a foreign country where any foreigner is likely to be under discreet and
routine surveillance from the local counterespionage service. Flying agents and field agents abroad
may be run directly from the DGSE, i.e. without a case officer acting as intermediary, on a case-by-
case basis. When he is settling in a target country where counterespionage is very active and
effective, a field agent is even unlikely to meet his case officer physically, someday. The concern
extends to visits to embassies and consulates, which must limit to justifiable obligations of
administrative and legal orders and nothing more.
THE CASE OFFICER AND HIS
RELATIONSHIPS WITH HIS AGENTS
If the field agent may be a weak individual with respect to strength of will, self-esteem, and to
moral, of course, this does not make the case officer an irreproachable character, and by far. Unlike
the agent, the case officer may be recruited through a bureaucratic process not very different of that
of a public administration, even though he is called to live outside the permanent physical
surveillance of the DGSE and as clandestinely as agents do. Psychiatric evaluations, behavioral
assessments, and social environment criteria differentiate the recruitment of a case officer from
those of an insider expected to carry on a desk job or to be a highly specialized employee. Case
officer is assimilated to an executive category. Then the status of “master” controlling the lives of
other individuals, according to the operational process summarily described at this point, implies a
lack of empathy, necessarily. A mentally balanced individual cannot inflict suffering on his fellows
without justifiable motives and over periods that may span a lifetime. It would take long to explain
exhaustively the typical mind of the case officer, but also useless as the French intelligence
community recruits them according to the two or three simple criteria that follow.
A good case officer must be streetwise and an educated person, preferably, even though many
French case officers did not graduate. Most of all, his personality must fit the description of the
narcissistic personality disorder as described in the International Statistical Classification of
Diseases and Related Health Problems–ICD, Diagnosis Code F60.81,[127] to that effect.
Psychiatrists of the DGSE who supervise recruitments do not base their appraisals on the other
reference book, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders–DSM because they consider
it biased. In addition, most of them have studied psychoanalysis and they all reason according to
Freud’s theories. For example, they talk about névroses (neuroses) and seldom or even never use the
word désordre (disorder).
Then the reader who, very possibly, finds bizarre that an intelligence agency entrusts
responsibilities to mentally unbalanced people, must know that French public services do not
recognize narcissistic personality disorder as a mental trouble, and that they even dismiss the term
“narcissistic personality disorder”. This is especially remarkable in French justice courts, in which
forensic psychiatrists never make mention of narcissistic personality disorder. Indeed, the generic
category “antisocial disorder” is not accepted as a pertinent specific in France’s justice system.
Instead, forensic psychiatrists deliver assessments such as, “difficulty with interacting with other
people,” “cold people,” “difficulty with understanding other’s suffering,” “ill at ease with
interpersonal relations,” “egocentric personality,” “violent people”. In some instances, they may use
the noun and adjective “psychopath” and “narcissistic,” but only informally to specify character’s
traits. Actually, there is a consensus in French justice about the denial that all such criteria, when
reunited in a single individual, indicate “a mental disorder,” sensu stricto; possibly because they
recur in a striking manner and notoriously in prominent personalities in this country—the well-
known cases of politicians Jérome Cahuzac and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, among many others,
exemplify this point.
Actually, a large majority of French case officers has been spotted as “fit to another particular
job,” while in the military or in the police. Remarkably, all those I met or heard of were ex-military
in French elite units and members of the GOdF simultaneously. They all are dangerous people
indeed, or “toxic personalities,” as some call people with similar behavioral patterns, nowadays.
They belong to this category of people for which the French intelligence community has
occupations more salutary to the society than if they were left free to live their own ways. For most
of them have character traits that, in addition to their intelligence above the average, would give a
hard time to police services, otherwise. The latter remark is not personal; I hold it from the mouth of
a middle-ranking executive of a financial intelligence unit of the police, the Brigade financière
(Financial Brigade), to be precise.
 On one hand, the theory about narcissistic personality disorder says it is incompatible with the
running of an agent. On the other hand, the stake a case officer has in keeping his agent(s)
productive as long as possible dismisses this incompatibility. A case officer is warned that if ever he
loses a valuable agent he was entrusted, so an asset that is property of the DGSE above all because
he was too careless in his handling, then he will be sanctioned; demoted, possibly. For a case officer
does not recruit and train agents; this lengthy and costly part of the trade is taken in charge by other
specialist in this intelligence agency. The would-be-source or agent may actually be a bait, called
“goat” (chévre) in French intelligence jargon, to begin with, which possibility a case officer cannot
probe alone. Then case officers do not “own” their agents as masters own slaves, although
appearances may suggest relations of this nature, especially from the viewpoint of agents who, often
if not always, believe their lives depend on the will and whims of their handlers. Therefore, the
freedom and life of an agent indeed depends on this threat hanging over the head of his case officer.
Otherwise, many agents would not serve for long.
For obvious reasons, the field agent is not informed of the psychological peculiarity of his case
officer. After several years and sometimes very early, some of them realize the plain and sad truth
about the true motives of the one they considered as “their partner” hitherto, at last. That is why an
agent who assassinates his case officer out of revenge is not that an unexpected event as this indeed
happens then and now, and why all French case officers own a gun. Very possibly, they may have to
defend themselves against the physical aggression of their own agent, and not to that of a foreign
foe, actually, as espionage movies tell the ignorant public. Case officers are well informed of the
latter risk, which they run constantly, indeed. In the early 2000s, in France, an agent in domestic
intelligence stabbed to death the wife of his case officer and then burned her body. The case officer
held the official status of officer of the Gendarmerie, but this did not impress upon his agent in any
fashion, apparently. The agent was taken almost at once, and then tried in closed session on charge
of wanton and villainous crime, since his true motives were dismissed and not communicated to the
media as they could not.
Still in the 2000s, in France, an agent outsmarted and compromised successfully his case officer
before he disappeared abroad, to the point that the incident extended to grave risks to the DGSE,
and even to the French Government, collectively. Things did not turn out as the case officer
expected, for he and not his agent fell into disgrace; he died from a rare type of cancer, two years
later.
Therefore, the case officer has the problem to having to justify constantly his methods of
management as from the latter depends the authority he is exerting upon his agent(s); whereof, his
hope for his own well-being and career. Actually, this expectation is rather ill-founded because the
case officer remain a “pawn” too, who must corrupt himself by practicing blackmail among other
forms of offenses he is guilty of, inescapably, punishable by the law of the normal society. Just as
justice cannot condemn someone to prison without a good reason, the case officer understands he
cannot strip an individual of his freedom and treat him as a slave without an acceptable motive. In
his defense, he argues of his patriotism and of the collective interest of the reason of State; thus, he
justifies the absence of empathy that characterizes his psychological profile and what he is actually
doing every day. He supports further the narrative with ever more political-ideological and
metaphysical arguments, such as arguing the logic of “the sacrifice of an individual to save several”.
The argumentation becomes increasingly elaborate over time and forms an aggregate that
crystallizes ultimately into a belief that is nothing but self-delusion.
Owing to his peculiar personality, a case officer may be awarded some medal if his agent(s) did
an outstanding job. Of course, a reward of this nature is justified by reasons entirely different of the
real ones or suitably as vague as “outstanding service in the interest of France”. As case officers are
more receptive to flattery than most of us are, by virtue of their profile, they are even encouraged in
their work with promises of medals. Indeed, I once heard accidentally a conversation between a case
officer and an executive of the DGSE, his controller, possibly, on which the later was promising to
him the medal of the Ordre National du Mérite (National Order of Merit), provided he would be
handling back an agent on the loose.
However, in French intelligence, the denial of self-fulfillment and the psychological and physical
suffering inflicted upon agents, and to their closest relatives, consequently, too often save special
privileges and personal interests having no real connection to intelligence activities or the national
interest, in actuality. I witnessed a number of cases of this order, which at one point or another led to
one or several of the following wrongdoings I enumerate, below.
 Fraud, unambiguous slavery, sexual abuses, blackmails and bullying for personal profit, non-
professionally justified or groundless blacklisting, thefts and open thefts in full view by recourse to
threats, abusive use of police force and attempts of evidence’s forgery, misappropriation of social
assets, and diversion of inheritances.
In several of the latter cases, the victims were helpless, the more so since in two instances they
were threatened in presence of a police officer and of gendarmes, respectively. Law and justice no
longer existed for agents, exactly as if they were trapped in some banana republic. In 2010, former
senior executive of the DGSE and whistleblower Maurice Dufresse aka Pierre Siramy reported
similar abuses, and he published some others in his autobiography that became a bestseller in
France—made out of print shortly after, however.
However, this program of subjection of an individual to another cannot be based exclusively on
psychological violence. Even if violence is never far and never absent in all cases, close to a
commando training’s that would prolong indefinitely, from a psychological standpoint, it needs
effective relays to mask it in the eyes of the normal world, while ensuring its durability. Threats
implicitly formulated about the close relatives are common leverages; properties, indemnities, and
inheritances are hijacked commonly and easily or even simply stolen through some plot
contrivances, as they depend on regulations and decisions of a state bureaucracy. Then the liberal
Freemasonry is called in support to mingle with suitable discretion in matters of that administrative
order, and not the Ministry of Defense, as I witnessed it repeatedly. All the latter measures are
suavely presented to the agent as displays of firmness mixed with benevolence. The DGSE (and the
DGSI) is never magnanimous because this agency does not want to leave hope to any of its agents
for an honorable exit before it decides so. As a result, on one hand, there is a high rate of suicides
and sudden unexplainable disappearances with agents, understandably. On the other hand, the
DGSE is reluctant to elaborate about its agents in general, on the ground that “the activities of the
DGSE are covered constitutionally by secrecy”[128] and by additional decrees of the Ministry of
Defense.
My previous use of the adverb “suavely” does not owe to pure literary form because the case
officer must follow a precise model of behavior laying largely on cynicism when interacting with
his agent, which may indeed extends to childish swaggering and taunting, as he was recommended
to on his training. In order to prevent the emergence of affective or compassionate bonds between
the case officer and his agent, largely relevant to the Stockholm syndrome, and to stimulate the
aggressiveness at work of the latter, the former must indeed present to him the most unpleasant facts
and constraints by showing a smile and by introducing inappropriate humor in his talk, at some
point and at a minimum. This trivialization is incongruous to the circumstance to the point of
unsettling absurdity, obviously.[129] The case officer even instructs the couriers (or the “screens,”
écran) he sends to his agent to mimic the latter attitude,[130] though this occasional go-between
never is enlightened on the reason of it as he is nothing but an ignorant rank-and-file or an ordinary
person, in the facts.
Humiliation and cynicism are said-to-be key ingredients in the running of agents, always used in
a form implicit enough to be deniable because they are the way the case officer renews his threats to
his agent. Additionally, all French intelligences agencies, the police, the Gendarmerie, and the
customs alike consider that an agent, and a snitch the more so, must never be given any opportunity
to regain their self-esteem and their free will, lest the latter feelings could lead to demands for
compensation, rebellion, or to getaway attempts. As a general principle, cynicism, when introduced
into authority, is meant to stifle all hopes for mercy and tolerance in the mind of the agent who, as
everybody, hardly accepts despotic authority without corresponding compensation. Most criminal
organizations, we notice, do the same, exactly.
Thus, the case officer too, at last plays the role of a character he is not in reality or, on the
contrary, for once he can freely indulges in behaving with his agent the way he sincerely likes it. On
the long run, a relationship of this nature breeds additional psychological troubles in both the case
officer and the agent, inescapably. Despite their personality, some case officers happen to feel guilt
or doubt that, adding to the fear of failure, may lead to drinking, as example. Some others become
overwhelmed with a belief in their extraordinary power, and thus indulge in reckless behavior.
Reciprocally, many agents catch the Stockholm syndrome, which leads to a vicious circle in the
relationship with their handlers. Some other yield to psychological fatigue, in the military sense of
this term, known in this middle as combat fatigue aka combat stress reaction, and to disorders such
as nervous breakdown, PTSD, passive-aggressive behavior, alcoholism, and other forms of
dependence and loopholes, such as frauds and treachery. Some compensate through occasional
violence or shoplifting.
Nonetheless, the case officer has been taught to be ever wary of his agent and even to despise him
for having submitted as basely as he does to a so despotic authority, although nothing of these
mistrust and contempt should be shown to the latter. For the case officer must still make his agent
believe he has confidence in him. “Mistrust,” says the internal regulation of the DGSE and DGSI,
“which regulates the conduct of the case officer must never appear in the relationships he has with
his agent”.[131] The case officer must lure his agent in believing he “appreciates” him beyond the
cynicism and suave manners he shows regularly in their relationship, so that an affective and
assimilative bond can take hold and thus comes to regulate the psychological pain of the agent. The
intensity of the interaction, the risk sometimes shared or supposed, the rule that requires the
establishing of a personal relationship anyway, and even bad conscience, are all elements partaking
in a phenomenon of personal attachment that is quite irrational not to say insane, from the viewpoint
of the normal society. This is the deliberate establishing of a process of emotional dependence, in all
respects similar in form and substance to the Stockholm syndrome again, but which in this
particular case is manufactured and then controlled over a very long time, until the agent dies or a
new case officer takes the hand.
To sum things up from another angle, the ever-conflictual nature of the relationship between the
agent and his case officer is a chicken game. The agent wants his freedom back by all means, and
this need overwhelms his mind permanently. Meanwhile, the case officer, pressed by his hierarchy
to produce firsthand intelligence, is anxious to keep his agent under his permanent authority and
control and to keep him under constant poverty to ascertain never he can afford financially the
means of his escape. The rules of the game between the two parties are thus set.
The case officer has been given the extraordinary power to exert a full control over the income of
his agent, which he uses as a permanent threat to rein him in tightly. Therefore, the agent does
everything his case officer asks him to do, lest he finds himself penniless, and then homeless. Yet
the agent often says to his case officer that “enough is enough,” and that he is “going to put an end
to their relationship for good”. This is bluff, in most instances, but the case officer knows this
because he has been trained thoroughly on handling agents, often through experience with dogs, as
surprising as the reader may find it. Actually, it is no coincidence that most case officers are familiar
with dogs; they own or owned one in a large majority of cases, which makes a pattern typical in
them. It is no exaggeration to say that the latter particularity is part indeed of their apprenticeship as
future case officers because it connects directly to the application of Pavlov’s experiments, and not
at all to some fancy or symbolical tradition. The still incredulous reader will understand why in the
chapter 9 on manipulating and handling.
That is why the case officer knows that his agent may mean what he says, very possibly. For the
agent is likely to believe, at some point, his case officer has no real interest, nor motive, nor time to
waste with chasing him if ever he manages to escape and to disappear. That is why the case officer
has been taught that the best tactic he has in hand to forestall this risk is to pass in the eyes of his
agent for “a nasty, crazy, and unpredictable guy,” from the inception of their relationship. This is
bluff, but not that much in the absolute because the DGSE warned the case officer in advance that
he, and the agency he serves, therefore, together would lose all credibility when attempting to run
other agents, thereafter. The case officer and his agency have indeed an additional stake in
punishing harshly the agent who refuses to obey any longer. More than that, if ever the sanction
proves difficult to enforce because the agent indeed ran away and managed to disappear, then the
agency will go as far as to issue a warrant supported by technical and legal means against the
deserter, exactly as if he were a dangerous criminal on the loose. This display of relentlessness of
the DGSE (or of the DGSI alike) is meant to make an example that the case officer and his agency
will brandish before other agents who show defiance.
Another rule says that a case officer or a courier of the French intelligence community must
never give an explicit order to an agent. Instead, he must do his best to suggest—the exact term the
DGSE uses—his order to the agent. In return, the agent must understand that the suggestion is an
order, indeed, because it is accompanied by the promise equally implicit of a sanction in case of
denial. For the more subtle, indirect, or implicit the suggestion is, the less his author exposes
himself to an always-possible legal complaint for blackmail, in case an agent would have the bad
idea to record the exchange or to keep for himself anything could evidence the relation with the
DGSE and its true nature. The latter impediment may happen, very possibly, in case the agent
decides to cooperate with a foreign counterespionage service, as example.
 The public assumes deceptively that the DGSE gives explicit orders to its agents, and always
enlightens them on the real aims of their missions. Isn’t that how things unfold, in the TV series and
films Mission Impossible or, more realistically, in the police? That is why an individual who claims
he carried out an intelligence mission because “someone at some point” just suggested him to do so
is promptly dismissed with sheer disbelief, obviously.
To sum up everything has just been explained, the relationship between a case officer and his
agent is similar to that of the procurer and his prostitute; whereof, the colloquial use in the DGSE of
the slang words “mac” (procurer) for “case officer,” and “gagneuse” (prostitute) for “agent” or
“snitch,” although not all case officers indulge in the triviality even when in private. Actually,
calling an agent a gagneuse is motivated by the same reason as calling “target” an unknown
individual. It is not just about using a professional jargon or coding one’s talk; everyone knows what
“target” means in this context today. The real aim of it, untold even to its practitioners, is to
dehumanize the agent to prevent the possible occurrence of an affective bond and shame for treating
him so unfairly. The reader who read on the Milgram experiment still better understands this.
Actually, there are other ways among French case officers to make discreet and colloquial
allusions to a flying agent. Some name him, tongue in cheek, “un gars de l’aviation” (“a guy of the
Air Force”), or about flying agents in general when they are several, “le personnel navigant” (“the
flight crew”). This is gentle mockery tainted with little cynicism because, strictly speaking and
importantly, the exact definition the DGSE gives to flying agent is “butterfly”; not “bird,” as the
reader assumed, probably. The metaphor says, “A bird is free,” whereas, this agency sees its agents
as “butterflies pinned down as a collection under the window of an insect display case,” another
French cultural particularism in intelligence. That is why the DGSE integrates in its narrative,
during the trainings and indoctrinations of its agents, the concept of “butterfly effect” as a way to
convince them that even when they are left acting alone in the field with little money, what they do
“may be followed by tremendous consequences”. This is meant to encourage them in their menial
and underpaid jobs, while they are left unaware of a touch of irony that they must never understand.
To conclude on the variety of clandestine agents, I remind the existence of the penetration agent
aka infiltration agent. This other agent is often handled as goat, first, in the aim to deceive a foreign
intelligence agency, a private company, an NGO or a criminal or terrorist organization into
“snagging” him. However, why telling more about the latter category of agents and tricks, since
John Le Carré best described what they are and how the plot contrivance works in his best novel,
The Spy who came in from the Cold. The reader who did not read this book—how come! —watched
at least films such as Donnie Brasco (1997), Serpico (1973), or The Departed (2006). The mortality
rate among goats is the most elevated in the trade of intelligence because of the following important
detail.
A goat is sometimes a defector who, instead of being welcomed and protected, is forced to
become an agent acting against his former colleagues and country, under the vague pretext that he is
a double agent. More often than not, the ex-colleagues and country happen to seize the attempt as an
opportunity to sanction the defector for being a traitor, simply by killing him, either on the spot or
following his abduction and hard interrogation.
Agents in domestic intelligence (mostly) must have a banking account as any ordinary French
citizen does, of course, but in France, this allows the easier control of their income and
expenditures. Specifically, they are instructed or coerced in some way to open a banking account in
La Banque postale (The Post Bank), a subsidiary of the French national postal service La Poste. In
France, La Poste is the bank of the poor who cannot afford any longer to open a banking account
and have a credit card in all other banks, it should be said. Additionally, many if not all are
instructed to use La Poste again as email address host provider. Thus, it is all the easier to monitor
their email exchanges and, at the same time, to warrant the safety of their correspondences.
Upon the return of a field agent to France from a several years long mission abroad, the DGSE
offers to him six months of rest and 10,000 Euros (about $12,000), customarily. The money is given
partly under the form of varied pleasures, and partly in small amounts of cash until each has been
spent entirely. Thus, the agent cannot save a part of this money to finance his escape, deemed likely.
Then he is given a new mission.
Sometimes, the DGSE rewards an agent who can no longer be sent on mission for one reason or
another. In this case, he receives an official letter or a telephone call from the Caisse des Dépôts et
Consignations (Deposits and Consignments Fund), which public body informs him that he is the
recipient of a certain sum. The sum varies according to the efforts, obedience, and loyalty he did
demonstrate, and to his performance, of course. The Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations is not part
of the French intelligence community. It is an old French public sector financial institution under the
control of the Parliament. Often described as the “investment arm” of the French State, this body is
defined in the French Monetary and Financial Code as a “public group serving the public interest,”
and a “long-term investor”. The Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations defines officially its mission as
follows—my verbatim translation from French.
“As set out within the French Monetary and Financial Code, the Caisse des Dépôts et
Consignations carries out missions of public interest, in support to the public policies implemented
by the State and local governmental bodies. It contributes to the development of businesses in line
with its own proprietorial interests, and may also exercise competitive activities.”
Technically, the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations is nothing but an intermediary financial
institution between givers and recipients, which means the funds it manages come from
“elsewhere”. Since the 19th century, some of the funds provisioned for the intelligence community
often have been given by the Fonds spéciaux of the Prime Minister.[132] However, if the thus
rewarded agents all obtain their money from the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, directly, this
does not mean it always comes from the Fonds spéciaux. For in many instances, the money has
been entrusted, willingly or through unclear administrative decisions, to the Caisse des Dépôts et
Consignations by one among a number of odd sources, such as heirless people in particular. Very
often, in the latter case, the deceased givers are relatives to the agent, a fact coming to explain how
and why inheritances of DGSE agents and staffers are locked out for undetermined periods and
under pretexts of the dubious sort. A deceased relative may also be used to camouflage a funds
transfer truly given by the Fonds spéciaux, the DGSE or one of its front-organizations and
companies, or by one its numerous “fund collectors and providers”—my stepbrother has been one
such treasurer, for some years.
The best agents who served well may be hired as full-time employees in the DGSE because of
their intimate knowledge of a country and of their consummate experience in the field, of obvious
interest.
In spite of what appearances may suggest, the DGSE considers its agents as “investments” or
“assets” it must avoid to losing, as long as they demonstrate their usefulness and loyalty. It is
difficult to estimate the cost of recruiting and training a field agent, that of the teachings and
trainings he may have received and, especially, the cost of his monitoring that by far is the heaviest
on the long run. The same remark applies to agents who are nationals of a target country. For a
significant part of these costs is not taken in cash in the funds of the DGSE, as the recruitment and
training of a field agent imply necessarily the involvement of contacts and of other agents who are
not paid for either. The latter work time could have been invested in other important missions,
which notion is taken into account.
Internally in the DGSE, there is the time spent in background-checking, and in knowing in the
detail the character of a would-be recruit, before his effective recruitment and training can begin;
that is to say, about five months in the DGSE and DGSI. This first stage always implies numerous
hours of work, in addition to expenses in travels, routine physical surveillance, shadowing, and
telephone and Internet tapping. When the recruiting process begins, we find the heavy monitoring of
spy microphones in the home of the recruit, staffs specialized in shadowing and physical
surveillance, and the numerous tests in real situation that take the forms of arranged circumstances
and setups. Then there are more behavioral tests and the psychiatric evaluation by a highly skilled
and specialized psychiatrist, unbeknownst to the recruit or not. All these unavoidable expenditures
can be optimized when done by an intelligence agency, of course. They would be absurdly long and
expensive to a private detective agency, which would find itself unable to reproduce certain tests,
background checking, and investigations, nonetheless.
The latter explanations help the reader understand why the getaway, disappearance, or death of an
agent indeed represents the sudden loss of an investment that may be relatively heavy to very heavy.
However, as a military culture dominates this agency, it has the particularity to assimilate an agent
to “a weapon”; not a weapon such as a rifle or a machine gun, but rather a bomb, rocket, or airplane
missile, wholesome. All the latter analogies, we notice, aim to suggest a “consumable weapon,”
whose possible destruction has been envisaged and “accounted for” already, from a certain
viewpoint. That is why “a bomb must not cost the same as an airplane,” to continue with the
metaphor. Recruitment managers of the DGSE monitor carefully the process, time, and costs of
recruiting and training staffers and agents, and they threaten recruiters with sanctions when a recruit
“needs too much persuasion”.
At this point of what this book explains, does the reader still wonder at the great importance
given, seemingly, to the life of the agent who has been captured and held hostage, when the
mainstream media report the incident? When the DGSE is struggling to save the life of this hostage,
often by using considerable means, it is looking for nothing but not to let anyone presuming of the
much lesser care it truly shows with the lives of those who serve it. I remember vividly the angry
protest of a French general of the DGSE about the heavy means and expense this agency, and the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, together invested in the vain freeing of an agent who had been taken in
hostage by some rebels in Africa. He was shouting, in substance because from recollection,
“Enough is enough! This affair did cost us more than ten million euros, already”. Had the affair not
reached public knowledge accidentally, then there is no doubt the agent would have been abandoned
to his sad fate well before one million euros would have been spent for his rescue.
Anecdotally again, in the late 1980s, I happened to know for a while an agent who indeed was
once taken in hostage in Africa. I can give his name, Tallieu, but I cannot remember his first name
because I did not know him for long, for the following reason.
Upon his return home, Tallieu had been made CEO of a small advertising agency in Paris, with
some good contracts and customers as a starter because of his influential family and not his
dangerous mission in Africa, it should be said. However, soon after that, he died in a car accident
caused by … reckless driving. I have no doubt there was no foul play; witnesses estimated the speed
of his small VW Golf GTI on the highway in the surroundings of 130 Mph. Besides, there were
three passengers in the car who all died either. This is sad, but how ironical, I find.
Doubtless, I will not be the first to remind that the DGSE refuses to consider its agents as more
than “expendable weapons” as long as their existences are publicly unknown, and as “heroes who
put their lives at stake for their country, deliberately and selflessly,” as soon as the media are
informed of their predicaments and report about them.
 8. The Lawyer & the Psychiatrist,
Pillars of the DGSE.
The Lawyer

At this point, the reader understands why the main

concern of the DGSE and of all other French intelligence
agencies is never to leave any evidence pointing them out as
the authors of any of their missions. As a matter of fact, they
never do anything they could not deny eventually, and happen
to renounce to actions that yet could serve greatly their
priorities and goals, just because they do not have the absolute
certainty that nothing indeed could possibly betray their
responsibility. That is why they hire lawyers to advise them in
the planning of a large majority of their missions.
A recent official motto of the DGSE is Wherever necessity
makes law,[133] even though, I am sure, nobody in this agency
cares about it, since it has been coined for the public.
However, what this sentence means deserves a little attention.
If anything one wants or needs is taken as a necessity that
would have the same value as a law, then the sense given
ordinarily to the latter word is no longer valid, and its presence
in the motto is pointless. Or else, the sentence has been
thought by someone whose despair makes him ready to do
anything, at the image of the homeless and desperate mother
living in the street, who considers she is right with stealing
milk for her hungry child. This is not false, but not for the
reason that my deduction might suggests because, in this
agency, all employees must attach a vital-like importance to
rules, order, and one’s duty. Their trainings focus on
conditioning their minds accordingly through repeated tests
and drills, until rushing just to bring someone a cup of tea or to
answer a phone call is become an automatism. Executives
expect to have their orders obeyed forthwith as a priority
overriding everything else: nothing less and nothing more. Not
everyone in this agency behaves thusly, however, because not
everyone must do so in all circumstances.
 Internally, there is another motto, much older and unofficial,
yet repeated countless times and taken seriously by everyone
from senior executives down to the servant of the most inferior
ilk, which says, Everything is permitted, but it is forbidden to
get caught.[134] It is out of question to stamp the latter in gold
on any official seal, of course, even not to frame it above one’s
desk in a highly secured facility.
As example in untold rules and discipline, I once attempted
to make my glass-cube office livelier with a couple of funny
pages I cut in the French version of the bygone humorous
British newspaper News of the World. The pages lasted there
for months, until a chief of service paid to our cell an
impromptu routine visit. I remember I saw this stern man on
his forties staring blankly for a few seconds at one of the pages
whose large title said, “Bat Child Found in Cave,” and then
silently resuming his inspection, as if this was unimportant,
after all. However, on the next morning, when I entered my
office, the two pages had mysteriously vanished and no one
would give me any explanation about this, although I held
there the position of Deputy Director. Thus, I was sent an
implicit warning saying, “Don’t do that again,” typical of the
mores in the DGSE as there is no official rule in this agency
about office decoration.
Indeed, one of the trademarks of the French intelligence
community is to work as a hit-and-run, always, but this would
not be always possible without the lawyers. All missions and
covert operations must withstand the subsequent scrutiny of
skilled investigative journalists and specialized historians,
since the latter know well the habits of this agency and how it
uses to cover its tracks. The countless underlings the DGSE
hires full-time, and those it recruits occasionally, are all yes-
men expected to carry on their tasks on implicit threats. This
model of management is antithetical to other public services,
and it does nothing but throw sand in the gears, sometimes, it
should be said.
There was a time when it was relatively easy to the French
intelligence community to prevent the public exposure of its
missions, and of State affairs and shadow diplomacy, as all this
is part of the general mission of the protection of secrecy and
of the national interest. For the proceedings of French politics
imply the common and unpopular practices of cronyism,
corruption, bribery, misappropriation of public funds, and
money embezzlement, as the media report regularly. The
DGSE has often a hand in the latter practices, for varied
reasons beginning with a concern for feeding the dossier
secrets of the elite.
The latter fact should not be taken as a striking revelation in
this book; it has been explained and commented countless
times by journalists, ex-spies, and ex-police officers who spill
the beans, then and now. To the point that the name of every
French presidents since 1958, exactly, are customarily
associated with more or less many politico-financial scandals,
their lots of suspicious deaths, and other shocking affairs
exposing members of the French establishment. The reader
who is in capacity to read French can find dozens of books and
tens of thousands of press articles each telling one or several
such cases, but very few expose their real causes that are
always the same: getting rid of embarrassing people of minor
importance and fabricating evidences incriminating the others
durably.
Although decades of such affairs and scandals shaped
definitively the political system of political governance in
France, today notorious beyond her borders, this does not
mean the efforts to prevent the revelation to the public of the
next scandal are pointless. However, this is become
increasingly difficult, since the coming of the Internet and the
invention of the smartphone connected 24 / 7 to worldwide
social networks. Blogs and online news media grant any
ordinary citizen not only the possibility to report about
anything he may witness or hear, but also to prove his saying
with copies of documents, photos, and sound and video
recordings of a much better quality than the average video
surveillance camera.
In other words, and from the viewpoint of intelligence
agencies, the ignorant public put its hand on the smartphone, a
super-spy multipurpose tool that would have dumbfounded
James Bond, only thirty years ago. Let alone a number of other
devices such as FLIR cameras, drones, spy microphones and
cameras, trackers, telephone tapping Trojan software, and the
like, about all connectable to this already omnipotent
smartphone, all legally and easily available for cheap, to cap it
all. On one hand, the DGSE is happy with smartphones that
allows it to peer into the most intimate privacy of any French
citizen at any time, nowadays, without even having to move
from one’s office. On the other hand, the miracle device grants
the entire population permanent access to professional
intelligence and counterintelligence technical capacities,
which it can use against its own government at any time,
reciprocally. Therefore, how to keep a secret in the era of the
Internet and of the smartphone, and for how long?
Of course, intelligence agencies reacted against this threat to
their power by attempting to gain control over the Internet and
smartphones. Since the early 2000s, the DGSE is in capacity
to spot and to geolocate a whistleblower who is leaking
sensitive information on the French Internet, in a couple of
days, in the worst case scenario; unless the latter has some
skills in hacking, of course. So, electronic mass surveillance is
not quite enough, and the DGSE felt left with only one option
on the two it enjoyed erstwhile: plausible denial.
In all missions and operations the DGSE conducts, plausible
denial must be planned and provisioned, since the risk of their
public exposure not only exists, but is also a hypothesis that
the new technologies in information make much more likely
than it was before. As a result, the best specialists and advisors
in plausible denial are particular strategists ordinarily called
“lawyers”. The DGSE is not supposed to resort to the services
of lawyers to defend its case before a court of justice; this
never happened to date, for much I know. As the daily
violation of the laws is the corollary of a majority of its
missions, this agency needs the advices of those specialists in
anticipation to breaking the law, therefore, and never after it
did it. That is why the employees and executives of the DGSE
working on the planning of its missions and operations very
often work in collaboration with lawyers, and with other legal
specialists such as accountants, forensic experts, and other
relevant specialties. Then, among the general category of
lawyers, we find those who have a specialty in foreign laws, in
criminal or civil affairs, real estate, air, space, and naval
affairs, foreign affairs, economic and financial exchanges
between countries, mergers and acquisitions, and even
environmental and similarly exotic topics.
At this point, it should be reminded, it is integral to the
general mission of the DGSE, and of several other French
intelligence agencies to counsel and to assist public and
private companies in their business against their foreign
competitors, and in their ventures abroad. In passing, the
reciprocity in the latter relation is to those public and private
bodies to providing permanent cover activities to spies,
knowingly or not, as their willful blindness is expected in this
respect.
When working in the service of the DGSE, all those
specialists are expected to have both the required knowledge
and the suitable mindset to plan backdoors and plan B’s, and
to build stainless-steel-alibis in advance. In other words, their
job essentially is not to assist and to defend criminals, but to
counsel on how to commit the perfect crime; an offense whose
prime suspect can be pointed out, at worst, but never be
overwhelmed by evidences. Once those lawyers have been
suitably re-trained to serve such peculiar interests, indeed they
are better qualified than the average intelligence officer is to
spot gaps and flaws in projects of missions and operations,
even beyond the strict realm of legal matters. They even are
called regularly as technical advisors in covert operations of
very varied sorts, as I often witnessed it.
Lawyer is not just a profession one learns methodically and
masters along a precise duration of studies, and taking the
defense of a suspect does not lays solely on a perfect
knowledge of all laws and cases of jurisprudence gathered in a
set of books. As for salesman, painter or musician, the trade of
the lawyer requires a natural disposition; a mindset that leads
him towards a career in politics, sometimes, not coincidentally.
Additionally, to be a lawyer, one must feel capable to take side
for the most repulsive criminal, for the Devil himself if ever;
but not all lawyers are ready to do this. In the DGSE, some
people see no objection with being called “the Devil”. As a
matter of fact, I happened to hear some ones in this agency
addressing friendly warnings in the form of the old and
popular proverb, “He who sups with the Devil should have a
long spoon”.
As seen from a technical angle, lawyers can foresee
impediments in a planned mission that even a skilled specialist
in intelligence may fail completely to imagine, or even
understand! They can artfully craft particular provisions to
circumvent flaws in a way that make them inconsequential,
and the best among them can even find in a situation an
unforeseen particularity that will demonstrate “naturally” the
“innocence of the agency”. When helping an intelligence
agency devising a mission, lawyers must also be able to plan
double-barreled strategies that will leave to a target none other
alternative than the one this agency wants him to venture into.
In its principle, the latter plot contrivance is similar to what
John Le Carré calls a “drive-to” in his novels. Along the
reading of this book, the reader will learn the many ways the
DGSE resorts commonly to strike psychologically against
individuals, bodies of individuals, governments, and nations
alike, always without leaving much chance to those targets to
incriminate this agency.
However, sometimes, what the public knows or figures
about the DGSE happens to be an additional handicap for it
that a lawyer is not always able to overcome, regardless of
how clever and skilled he may be. For any intelligence agency
is the usual suspect in many affairs in this world, even when
the suspicious incident truly is an act of God or the work of an
isolated crackpot who came unexpectedly on stage. Herein I
mean it is enough to die as a prominent personality and before
the age for the public opinion to believe “it is the dirty job of a
spy agency, doubtless,” even when the authenticity of the
accident is unquestionable. The well-known case of the
accidental death of British Princess Lady Diana in Paris in
1997 epitomizes the hasty generalization. Reciprocally, not all
precautionary measures taken around the discreet physical
elimination (assassination) of a prominent personality, such as
a minister or a general, will dispel doubts in the minds of
many. In both of the latter cases, the cause is the logical
deduction pointing a motive, since there is always one that
seems possible. In this eventuality, the DGSE finds itself in the
same situation as the infamous criminal whose guilt for all
wrongdoings happening around him is established on his sole
reputation. This is not yet acceptable from the viewpoint of
this agency, and here again a lawyer will be in charge to
preparing arguments of form that only aim to tame a little the
assumptions and the conspiracy theories of the multitudes. Not
so seldom, the latter provision implies fabricating a fake
culprit for the special circumstance; the second-rate-guy who
found himself entangled in a plot whose intricacies escape
completely his understanding. The case must cool on a doubt
and not on a burning unpunished culpability, which distinction
makes an enormous difference in the eyes of the DGSE.
For the past five decades, in France, prominent politicians
and senior public servants died through dubious circumstances
and in a number unparalleled in any other Western country.
Assuming they all were assassinated by the SDECE and its
successor the DGSE, yet the latter happened to be content,
sometimes, with only the doubt of the public about their
responsibility. Nonetheless, in this country, even if a
conclusive evidence would make a big difference yet not
followed by the sentencing of someone in a court of justice, no
real popular indignation and unrest would ensue; contrary to
what happens in the United States, for example. In the latter
country, the suspicious death of a prominent person always
gives rise to special investigation commissions, dozens of
reports and books, publishing of thousands of press articles,
and decades-long controversies. Although France and the
United States both are Western countries sharing a number of
legal specifics, yet the two countries remain culturally
different as Japan and Yemen can be.
When the DGSE spots a lawyer or whatever jurist in view to
hiring him full-time, be him freshly graduated or not, then this
agency expects from him the unusual service I previously
described. The recruit must have a still more particular
mindset than the average lawyer has, therefore, or else, he is
indeed an honest individual ready to admit that the reason of
State takes precedence over the ethical and moral
considerations that the public opinion invariably expects.
 Knowing that the French intelligence community has
developed considerably its workforce and its technical and
legal capacities since the end of the Cold War, and that
domestic intelligence is its first mission, it is normal and
logical that it currently hires full-time a large number of
lawyers and jurists, and establishes occasional cooperation
with others in view to make them contacts in France and
abroad. As an aside, I know firsthand that liberal masonic
networks serve well and commonly the latter need.
Not all lawyers who are helping and serving the French
intelligence community are full time employees in one of its
agencies, and by far. Otherwise, to help the reader figure the
importance of the role of lawyers currently working in the
DGSE, I hazard a rough estimate of 200 to 300 full-time
employees, and many more who are contractors and contacts.
In 2001, about one hundred graduate lawyers were working
full-time in the Directorate of Economic and Financial
Intelligence of the DGSE alone. Still in the latter year, the
Directorate of Financial and Economic Intelligence of the
DGSE, that is to say, where the managerial staff responsible
for planning and administering tasks in this service was
working, occupied two floors of the building where is also
located the Paris bureau of the World Bank, 66 Avenue d’Iéna.
The cover activity of this Directorate was a law firm, whose
head was Charles-Henri de Pardieu—his name will arise again
in other chapters as I knew him for ten years. The particular
provision allowed not to bothering about the possible scrutiny
of the lay public for the heavy security measures, officially
and normally justified by the presence of the World Bank in
the same building. In point of fact, if ever this law firm really
had to welcome normal and authentic customers at this
address, then the latter would have found weird, doubtless, to
have to submit to the same security proceedings as when
crossing the customs checkpoint in an international airport just
to have a meeting with a lawyer. For security measures in this
building actually were those of the DGSE headquarters, let
alone the permanent presence of police wearing bulletproof
jackets and armed with Beretta PM-12s submachine guns
guarding the entrance hall.
 For a few years, the Ministry for the Economy and Finance
has its own and official intelligence agency, named TracFin,
whose headquarters are located in Montreuil, Eastern suburb
of Paris. This body was created in 1990, at the same time as
the OCRGDF, its partner intelligence agency acting under the
responsibility of the Ministry of the Interior (police). To which
one must add numerous other lawyers working elsewhere for
the DGSE. Overall, one should estimate that the staff with
specialties in legal and financial affairs of the latter agency
knew a considerable increase since the early 2000s, let alone
the creation of several new financial intelligence agencies and
units since 2001, summarily presented in the Lexicon of this
book. It is also noteworthy that a relatively large number of
these legal staffs specialize in international law in the context
of current missions and operations of all kinds abroad; mergers
and acquisitions rank first. The latter category subsumes
lawyers attached to certain departments or sectors with more
specific activities: lawyers with a specialty in business law
within the framework of the specific mission of economic
intelligence, in particular. Then one should add all employees,
case officers, and agents who have a mandatory need to be
familiar with criminal law and general legal and fiscal
questions, commercial law, civil law, and even labor law, by
virtue of their specialties and usual roles and missions. Case
officers are especially concerned with this because they act
daily on the fringe of legality and “in the field,” often per
proxy and through screens, and because often they do not
enjoy the immediate availability of lawyers and specialized
jurists in the framework of their usual missions.
Nonetheless, all employees of the DGSI and many in the
DGSE must have an above-the-average knowledge of the law
by comparison with ordinary people. On the contrary,
however, a majority of agents does not have this knowledge.
They are taught this matter on a case-by-case basis, in
accordance with their specialties, or else they receive informal
and very specific legal advices when their actions and
missions request it. The latter comes as an additional reason
justifying their instructing never to take any initiative by their
own.
 In the light of all I explained since the beginning of this
chapter, the reader understands that the ordinary individual
who is a target of the DGSE has to face a redoubtable
adversary, which always has the advantages of cunning long-
term and double-barreled strategies made of alternatives
already explored, with planned counterstrikes for each,
already. Having the DGSE as one’s opponent is analogous to
playing a chess game against a good computer, though never
the best however. Too often, people self-delude by confusing
the words “justice” and “moral”.
The Psychiatrist
Since the human factor is always decisive in the
proceedings of all missions of the DGSE, even at a time when
technology seems to have taken over the role to Man, this
agency also hires full and part-time a large number of
psychiatrists, with an additional specialty in psychoanalysts
preferably, and other specialists in behavioral sciences.
Psychologists, trained anthropologists, and ethnologists, also
in numbers in this agency, are not included in my estimates
because a larger number of tenured employees, contractors,
and agents who graduated in these fields only make a profit of
these knowledge in their ordinary activities in human
intelligence. They are not hired and called as experts in these
fields, therefore.
Emphasis is put on the human factor in the French
intelligence community, as in those of all countries, because
Man is both its main weapon and its weakest link. The
psychiatrist of the DGSE is called for advice during
recruitments, systematically, in view to determining first
whether the candidate is fit to be a full-time employee with a
desk job, agent in the field, or his case officer. A would-be-
recruit may have a psychological trouble or trauma that
recruiters are not qualified enough to identify formally, even if
the latter are taught basics on psychiatry and on identifying a
number of common disorders.
Then a psychiatrist is consulted in the framework of the
ordinary follow-up of employees and agents, in relation with
human resources managers and some executives who have a
regular need for his expertise, and with the Security Service,
of course. If it is easy to dissuade a collaborator from making
public revelations, simply by resorting to threats of heavy
sanctions or measures that are even more persuasive, these
common means cease to be effective with individuals whose
mental state became unstable and unpredictable. Then there
are those who do no longer dread anything nor anyone because
they became suicidal. Then, in the same category, we find the
not so rare cases, not to say frequent actually, of those who
just learned they have a grave and incurable health trouble
whose inescapable and fatal outcome is to come soon. They
consider they have nothing to lose any more, either.
The often-tedious dailies of DGSE employees and agents, as
we have seen in the previous chapters, may easily arouse the
emergence of mental disorders that were only latent before
their contact with the work environment of this agency. First,
we find severe forms of depression that may easily evolve to
graver and hard-to-heal troubles when not cured in time.
Those troubles may require long therapeutic treatments,
obviously incompatible with a regular, very demanding, and
satisfactory work in intelligence. The DGSE dreads the latter
impediments because it has little patience and no compassion
at all for people who experience them. In addition, treatments
often are delayed because employees and agents who attempt
to simulate mood disorders, in their vain hope to be sent back
to the “normal society,” are common. Many among the latter
ask, typically and verbatim, “I want to go back to a normal
life”. This is in no way abnormal, and even easily
understandable, yet out of question.
Beyond the simple transient depression and insomnia, also
common in intelligence work and that can be quickly healed
the “hard way,” if I may put it that way, we find among the
most common disorders the various expressions of anxiety,
and the paranoid form of schizophrenia and paranoia. Still
among the most frequent, there are other transient disorders
that may cause serious occupational faults and hazards, but
that remain minor from a medical standpoint because they can
be cured easily. I am alluding in particular to cognitive
dissonance, burnout syndrome, and passive-aggressive
behavior. Sanctioned staffers easily experience post-traumatic
stress disorder–PTSD, also very common in field agents
returning from their missions abroad, along with depression.
To prevent or detect more easily the appearance of
depression and other mental disorders, the psychiatrists of the
DGSE found a simple trick, which consists in the
recommendation to the personnel to be attentive to changes in
their co-workers’ character, and to report at once any warning
signs or unusual behaviors to their hierarchy. Then those
troubles are reported to the Security Service and to the HR
service. The Security Service is much interested in mental
health troubles and their psychosomatic consequences noticed
in staffers, for certain mood disorders in particular may be
consequential to abnormal degrees of stress, possibly caused
by guilt, therefore; that is to say, by a particular reason that has
to be investigated and cleared forthwith. For example, betrayal
in intelligence is often associated with the appearance of heavy
drinking and stomach ulcer.
The intervention of the psychiatrist in the DGSE may be
informal and even be done unbeknownst to an employee or
agent. This particular provision derives from a concern for the
attendee who simulates on purpose the expected behavior of a
sane person, or who may behave differently than his usual
abnormal behavior, thus biasing the diagnosis. The stealthy
consultation from distance may be easy to carry out, and it is
even frequent in this agency because many employees and
intelligence officers have a good knowledge in behavioral
sciences already. That is why psychiatrists may first get
around the interested by interviewing his co-workers or a close
relative instead. I have firsthand knowledge of one case of the
latter type, in which a psychiatrist interviewed the spouse of a
case officer following a report of bouts of paranoia and
concerning psychological and physical violence. The man in
his fifties had begun to behave with his children and wife the
same as with agents. I have heard of a regional intelligence
officer who was reported to training his fourteen-year old son
in the use of explosives, parachuting, and espionage
techniques. In this other case, the school of the boy reported to
his mother his concerning behavior with other teenagers: his
attempts, in particular, to manipulate and to corrupt them for
various or unclear reasons. The school expelled the kid, for all
I know.
As about recruitments, if a full-time employee of the DGSE
must be a psychologically balanced individual, the recruitment
of particular agents and of case officers is often freed from this
imperative. It will depend, more exactly, on the nature of the
identified psychological disorder because an “external
collaborator” may present an interest due to his particular
personality disorder, as we have seen previously. The
psychiatrist brings a valuable contribution in these other areas
because he alone knows how to manage and to manipulate
such individuals, and for which kind of missions they can be
employed usefully. I exemplify the latter point, below.
The DGSE needs henchmen in the context of small
harassment missions, since they are the regular lot of
counterespionage, domestic intelligence, and their services. A
narcissistic pervert or a psychopath can be accommodated as a
neighbor next-door of a foreign agent, or else he may be the
perfect recruit to carry on the harassment of a target, to partake
in a mission of social elimination, or he can be a good agent
provocateur. A complicit staff placement agency may be
demanded to recommend this type of mercenary to a company
considered as undesirable. A pretty woman with a borderline
personality disorder can be sent into the arms of a married man
the agency wants to separate from his family, in order to
isolate him in the frame of his recruitment or else. Thanks to
the Internet and its easy monitoring, the DGSE setups “toxic
encounters” online between a target and such disturbed
persons or with persons with alcohol or drug problems, and
troubled true believers in whatever cause, in order to discredit
the former by association.
Finally, the psychiatrist of the intelligence agency selects
individuals to be assigned to other tasks and missions a
balanced person would be unable to execute. That is to say,
long-term manipulations of agents, supervisions of missions of
harassment, social and physical eliminations, as well as
various types of activities abroad relating to espionage,
terrorism, activism, agitprop, and, last but not the least,
infiltrating particular groups of people. It is not uncommon not
to say frequent, for example, to arrange a media hype for a
crackpot in order to discredit or dismiss an unwelcome
political ideology to which he claims standing for. I will
present one such case at least in this book.
The variety of opportunities and needs is infinite because it
depends on multiple factors specific to each individual, and on
a case-by-case basis in respect to the type of missions and
profiles of targets. Key events in an individual’s childhood, his
character, tastes, endeavors, intelligence, background,
traumatic events, and his education, of course, are all matters
of interest deserving to be investigated with suitable scrutiny.
As example illustrating the latter point, women who have been
traumatized following their rape often prove to be great
achievers when expected to harass male targets. In this not so
rare case, they may be lured to believe that the target is a rapist
himself because such women often seek to take revenge on
men in general as substitute to their real aggressor. This is
something a balanced woman would be unable to do with
similar tenacity, of course. The latter effectiveness will be
about the same with another woman whose husband left her as
single with a child and in dire social and economic difficulties,
when she will be introduced to a target described as having
doing the same, and, why not, with additional details such as
acts of violence against women.
Among the psychological profiles of troubled individuals,
we find those that psychiatrists categorize under the generic
name of sociopaths. As sociopathy or antisocial disorder is a
generic form of mental disorder encompassing varied
symptoms and behavioral subtleties, each with varying
degrees of intensity ranging from mild to severe, individuals
who suffer from it have as other interesting traits to be
perfectly capable to lead an apparently normal life and to
normally (or thereabout) interact with others. People who
learned to identify sociopaths can spot them more or less
quickly, but too late for the unexperienced target who will
learn it at his own expense. As the sociopath—narcissistic
personality disorder in particular—learns along his life to
adapt to the society of balanced people, then his intelligence, if
ever it is above the average, can make him a good case officer
against whom an individual already put in a situation of
vulnerability can hardly fight.
Another characteristic, frequently encountered with certain
categories of sociopaths that also interests the DGSE is an
outstanding ability to lie and to deceive the most talented
experts in micro-expressions and body language analysis, as
well as the best lies detection equipment (polygraph and voice
stress analyzers), by virtue of the simple fact that they feel no
guilt when they lie.
As an aside with respect to the latter example, a serious
psychological assessment of an individual shortlisted to be
sent to work in a diplomatic representation, in certain
countries in particular, is very important. For, once there, the
latter is likely to experience varied forms of petty harassment
in a context of bad diplomatic relations between France and
the host country. In such cases, perfect mental balance, calm,
and resilience under psychological pressure are determining
prerequisites. For example, in the 1990s, I seem to recollect, a
French official sent to Japan as diplomat broke under the
pressure of this common ordeal that the local
counterespionage service ordinarily inflicts to diplomatic
personnel strongly suspected of intelligence activities. There,
while driving his car he rolled over a traffic police officer who
was gesturing him to stop. Thereupon, he was diagnosed
psychological exhaustion. As another aside, still relevant, the
French counterespionage often harasses U.S. consular
employees with petty tricks, such as deflating the tires of their
vehicles repeatedly, an impediment that may unhinge most
balanced people on the long term.
As a rule, psychiatrists specialized in intelligence are always
consulted before the sending aboard of a flying agent or
intelligence official under diplomatic cover, considering the
frequent recruitment’s attempts of important foreign nationals
as double agents. Gilles Perrault, a French novelist and
historian on the subject of espionage, wrote a particularly
realistic fiction titled Dossier 51 (1969). The film adaption of
the latter novel, with the same title (1978), as excellent as
uncommon in its style, describes meticulously all stages of the
hostile recruitment of a diplomat by an unnamed intelligence
agency that would be foreign but whose methods point out the
SDECE, In Dossier 51, a psychiatrist in intelligence has a
leading and determining role, played with great realism. This
film is a must-watch for the reader who is further interested in
French intelligence beyond what this book explains. If Dossier
51, at times, shows outdated technical means of espionage and
gadgetry, yet the proceedings and methods in human
intelligence it shows did not change since the 1970s.
I conclude this chapter with a personal anecdote about my
regular psychiatric assessments, mandatory in the DGSE for
certain employees.
During those visits to psychiatrists and their interviews, I
was exceptionally allowed to “say everything” about my job,
regardless of the sensitivity of certain matters that may easily
be brought upon. I found this very upsetting and difficult to do
not to say stressful as it clashed with years of stringent
precautionary measures in handling sensitive matters. My
hierarchical superior called me in his office where he shown
me an ordinary computer-printed list of names and addresses,
all located in Paris and sorted by arrondissements, i.e. Paris
districts. It was up to me to pick up my psychiatrist according
to the geographic location I saw fit. The DGSE trusted all
those psychiatrists, therefore. Since many of them were its
full-time employees, then this list of about 15 pages with about
20 names on each itself was sensitive, of course. Yet there was
neither header nor any stamp on it saying the document was
classified. It was a blank, therefore, so that if ever this
document were lost, then the person who would find it could
not possibly know its origin, and its particular interest,
consequently, beyond a simple list of names associated with
telephone numbers, but with no indication whatsoever
specifying they were psychiatrists. Only my superior and I
knew the latter detail. Anyway, the anecdote gives to the
reader a rough estimate of the important number of
psychiatrist the DGSE is currently employing or trust as
contractors and contacts, in Paris only.
 9. Manipulating & Handling.
A lthough this chapter often alludes to domestic intelligence, the principles, techniques, and
methods of manipulation it explains apply to foreign intelligence as well. The difference between
common domestic intelligence carried on a daily basis and missions abroad is essentially imputable
to the ever available cooperation in France of a large network of scattered informants, sources,
agents and contacts in public services, public and private companies, partly state-owned business
groups, political parties, religious networks, alumni associations, corporative and workers unions,
and several thousands of associations and organizations of varied sizes, fully or partly subsidized by
the State.
So far, the reader had only a glimpse of who and how numerous are those external human
resources that the DGSE and several other intelligence agencies use to call “capteurs” (sensors) as
taken collectively, indifferently, we notice, of electronic and optical spy devices and equipment.
Moreover, he still has a misty and inchoate idea of the large variety of services the latter render
commonly and daily because those cooperation and helps are quite eclectic in their nature, and
relate often to odd needs that would seem remotely connected to intelligence activities in many
other countries. On one hand, in a large majority of cases, sensors are occasional informants, whose
roles actually are more active than just reporting. On the other hand, saying that together they
constitute a “secret militia” would be excessive, save for the liberal masonic grand lodges among
which the leading grand lodge GOdF plays a role that indeed qualifies it as domestic intelligence
agency, as we shall see in a next chapter.
Networks of informants and benevolent aides in domestic intelligence exist commonly in all
countries, of course. In France, the police, the Gendarmerie, the customs, other public bodies and
servants, and the more than twenty agencies of the intelligence community, together are quick at
spotting and knowing the smallest social groups down to the size of a tiny cell, and then at garnering
informants in their midst. The goal of this extraordinary provision is not really to spy on all those
people individually, but to survey the activities and evolution of their networks and to stay abreast
of their aims, ambitions, and concerns, whenever they have some. It is all about foreseeing ever-
possible disturbances and nipping them in the bud before they erupt, thus qualifying as a mission of
mass surveillance subsuming preventive counter-interference and preventive counter-insurgency.
If the reader finds the latter concern excessive, I remind him that the French ruling elite and its
domestic intelligence apparatus always had a permanent fear of the hypothetic small group that
voices its discontent before the police or one of its agencies could identify it. The origin of this
anxiety is cultural and old as it locates in the Third Empire period, when Napoléon III tasked
architect Baron Haussmann to transform the small streets of Paris into large avenues unsuitable to
the building of barricades, following the experience of the Revolution of 1848. The fear of dissent
and popular unrest further strengthened in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1870, when the
progressive republicans took the power, and again when the scandal known as the Affair of the
Cards of Denunciation in 1904 caused a general and persistent disorder intense enough to justify the
creation of the Renseignement Généraux–RG three years later, in 1907. In all cases, it should be
said, the real cause has always been an adamant monarchic and centralized perception of political
power that hardly tolerates the democratic expectations of the masses. In France, everything is
thought, decided, planned, and ordered in the capital, Paris, by a ruling elite that uses to inherit its
power for centuries, regardless of the political regime, and that sees “free electrons” are “hazardous
to the tradition,” therefore.
This permanent concern probably is at the origin of the slang word espionite (spy mania) in
France. “Free electrons” are hardly tolerated in this country. In the chapter 13 on domestic
intelligence, we will see in detail how old and well devised the techniques of homeland security in
France were a century ago already, and how potent, far-reaching, organized and structured they are,
today. Thereof, a French consummate experience in the manipulation of networks and minorities,
and even the complete creation of the latter in a large majority of instances. The methods were set
still earlier than in the mid-19th century, already, in the aftermaths of the Jacobin Revolutionary
period of 1789-1803, and they perfected steadily and quietly since then. In its most advanced stage,
today, they can be used advantageously to interfere in the ambitions of any would-be autonomous
group, be it political, religious, or even cultural, as we shall see in detail in other chapters.
This first and summary explanation of the French capacities in domestic spying means to help the
reader understand how the DGSE can put any individual it wants to recruit or coerce in a virtual
“corridor” in which all doors but the one it chooses for him are closed. Some people in this agency
call the contrivance “technique de l’entonnoir” aka “nasse,” expression and jargon word both
translating as “funneling”.
All recruits and targets ignorant of the aforesaid, and of other important details also explained in
this book, may self-delude easily by assuming they are “surrounded and followed by agents of the
DGSE” in all their moves. In reality, a few only of the would-be-conspirators or “ghosts” belong to
an intelligence agency, which just make a profit of permanently available ways and occasional
collaborators it thus shares with others public bodies, all readily available to help in a large variety
of other tasks and occasional missions.
For long and until the late 19th century, French intelligence agencies did not teach how to
manipulate and to handle people from the theoretical standpoint of behavioral sciences, simply
because they did not yet enjoy the common availability of serious reference books on these subjects;
that is to say, at a period of our history that saw the simultaneous booms of modern anthropology,
psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry. As I said earlier, the coming of theoretical teachings in
human intelligence in France, in classrooms in specialized schools and universities, dates back in
time to the 1990s and not earlier. That is why a large number of employees and agents concerned
with human intelligence learned their trade through empirical methods taught in the field, and many
still do it this way, today.
As a result, the French spy seldom knows what words of Anglo-Saxon origin such as
“groupthink,” “cognitive dissonance,” and “peer pressure” mean, indeed. Even, still in our 21st
century, these words and notions have even no exact equivalents in French language, for most
because they are associated with discoveries and experiments made by American scientists,
apprehended in France with with caution if not defiance. The irrationality the reader my find in the
latter perception owes to a strongly politicized apprenticeship in French intelligence, but despite
these ideological hurdles, French spies know well how to handle and to manipulate, indeed.
If few French intelligence officers heard or read the few English words I cited above, and know to
a more or less extent who Ivan Pavlov was and what he did exactly, yet they all never heard of
Stanley Milgram and still less of Eric Hoffer and B. F. Skinner. Even not of French scientists Henri
Laborit, Gustave Le Bon, George Sorel, Jean Rivolier, Gabriel Tarde, and Frédéric Le Play,
although their works and discoveries largely influenced the psychiatrists and certain specialists of
the DGSE. Still less they heard of other foreigners Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto in the field
of sociology, although the latter are European. Neither would they be able to reason, analyze
situations, and devise manipulation tactics from the standpoint of game theory, this branch of
mathematics otherwise largely used in strategy and intelligence in the United States since the
beginning of the Cold War. A tiny minority in the DGSE knows what game theory is, while, I guess,
this branch of logics is largely known in the U.S. CIA since the 1960s, at least.
I continue pinpoint differences in culture between the two opposing agencies; my knowledge of
them, it is pertinent to clarify, owes largely to a strictly personal interest that brought me to read a
number of American books on the disciplines of behavioral and social sciences, and on U.S.
intelligence of course, much more documented and serious in this country than in France.
People in the DGSE who hold an aggrandized and theoretical knowledge in behavioral sciences
do not hold managerial positions in a large majority of cases because an overwhelmingly military
leadership tends to associate soft sciences with civilians, whom they perceive as unsuitably
disciplined colleagues. The military in this agency, when they are commissioned officers and hold
some seniority, accord greater consideration to hard sciences bringing exact and invariable results,
overall. History is an exception that yet hardly extends to sociology in the DGSE, however; the line
locates about there.
Most French case officers learned their trade through one-to-one courses, in which one teaches
the other by telling past examples and anecdotes, and by giving recommendations, sometimes in
masonic lodges (of the leading GOdF in particular). Teachings and notions are presented as an
eclectic mix of pseudo-science tricks, such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming–NLP and sophrology
in particular, or by experienced police officers on one-to-one informal meetings, again.
The justification for resorting to pseudo sciences is to forestall the risk to provide someone with
correct premises because they could lead the average intelligence employee toward true scientific
principles he may eventually learn by his own, unbeknownst to his hierarchy, assimilated to a
knowledge or awareness degree he has no need-to-know. Additionally, the pretense of courses on
pseudo-science comes as a denial of spycraft and of its specific terminology that agents in particular
often are not supposed to know. In sum, the compartmentalization of knowledge in French
intelligence is largely accountable for this surprising ignorance. The DGSE holds firm on a principle
saying, “knowledge is power,” and on a need to conceal the real size of its human resources as much
as possible by favoring the recruitment of unconscious and half-conscious agents having no official
existence. Another French perception of spycraft says, “to be a spy, one does not need to know it”.
As a matter of fact, in spite of recent improvements in the transmission of knowledge, not all
DGSE recruits go to learn theoretical notions in human intelligence in classrooms; still in the early
2000s, even a majority of them were trained in the field with practical examples exclusively, “the
old-school way” (la vieille école), presented as “the most reliable”. There is indeed a need in the
intelligence community of this country to exert ever-greater control over employees, contractors,
and agents. This may even include people whose specialty precisely is to manipulating and handling
agents and sources because they, too, must be handled, at some point, based on a rule saying that
they must not know enough to enjoy an unwarranted extent to their autonomy, and to question their
own indoctrination, subsequently.
Inside the DGSE, the compartmentalization of knowledge and responsibilities comes to solve the
problem of the latter concern and policy, though not always. To put things simply, it is out of
question that a freshly trained employee or even a middle-ranking executive could access the same
awareness degree as that of his hierarchical superior, and that a field agent could know enough to
identify and forestall all tricks his case officer resorts to. However, since the 1960s, the DGSE edits
internally a thin classified Guide de l’Officier Traitant (Case Officer Handbook), first published
when this agency was still named SDECE. Remarkably, the principles of the earliest editions of this
guide actually are those of the U.S. way in intelligence, as many other teachings of the bygone
period of the full and cooperative membership of France in the NATO.
The considerations above that prevail, today, and will do for long, doubtless, come to set a limit
to this new policy of theoretical teaching in intelligence in specialized universities and schools in
France, even outside the realm of intelligence. Indeed, today’s reference books and latest
discoveries in social sciences taught in French classrooms remain strewn with important lacunas,
still justified by political considerations. To best exemplify the latter remark, a reference book on
negotiating behavior as important as The Strategy of Conflict, first published in 1960 but that earned
its author Thomas C. Schelling the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, not only has
not been translated in French before 1986, but also was put out-of-print shortly after and is still
unavailable, as I am typing this phrase in 2019.
Now, this chapter is going to explain how are carried out manipulations of contractors, agents,
sources and people this agency recruits and targets. Techniques in group and mass manipulation will
be presented separately in several chapters of the Part II and III, even though they are
complementary and even closely associate together. It should be noted, however, that not all the
methods of manipulation commonly used by French spies can be presented and described in a single
chapter, and that satisfying this ambition alone would require the publication of another book.
In the earlier chapters, I only yet exhaustively, I guess, described the nature of the relationship
between the agent and his case officer; that is to say, enough when added to the followings to
explain more than what teaches the Case Officer Handbook of the DGSE, since its authorized and
cleared readers are not taught the scientific bases supporting this knowledge. Only the psychiatrists
of the DGSE and some other specialists—and soon the reader—have the privilege to hold this
knowledge. More exactly, this new chapter presents the fundamentals supporting French methods in
manipulation, and not just the methods. These principles, largely scientific in essence, about all
belong to a French behavioral science named “behavioral biology”.
At first glance, behavioral biology seems similar to the systematic approach to the understanding
of human and animal behavior commonly known as “behaviorism,” and perceived as such in the
United States. However, the reader who possibly is familiar with behaviorism applied to human
intelligence will discover that the fundamentals of behavioral biology much differ from it. He will
have the required background knowledge, therefore, to recognize in those fundamentals the concept
of the herd instinct as initially described by British pioneer in neurosurgery Wilfred Trotter, among
a few others—Trotter is never cited and is largely not to say totally unknown in the DGSE. Then the
reader might recognize the brain evolutionary model of American neuroscientist Paul D. McLean
known as triune brain, and then in some respects he will find analogies with the works of lesser
known French surgeon and researcher in human biology Jean Rivolier. For the record, Rivolier was
a pioneer in the study of human adaptation in hostile environments and in operational military
situations and related, with a strong focus on stress.
 Eventually, when I will bring the reader to the practical matters of influence and
counterinfluence, and of the manipulation of groups and masses, he will notice that the psychiatrists
and specialists in manipulation, influence, agitprop, and disinformation of the DGSE rely on the
fundamentals of behavioral biology again, closely associated with the theories of Sigmund Freud in
psychoanalysis. This agency is largely Freudian in its approach to the understanding of human
behavior; which detail may surprise, but the effectiveness in the results found “in the field” in real
situation testifies in favor of the validity of the tenets. In this respect, remember my remark about
the approach of psychiatry in the DGSE, i.e. neuroses vs. disorders, in the previous chapter.
Furthermore, I remind that American pioneer in the fields of public relations and propaganda
Edward Bernays relied largely on the theories of Freud—his uncle, actually—mixed with the works
of Trotter that put the emphasis on the herd instinct and its origins.
Although the aforesaid may possibly seems unimportant or superfluous to the other reader who is
not familiar with behavioral sciences, yet I insist saying that it remains a very important knowledge
when one wants to know the bases on which the DGSE handles individuals, and when its designs
influence, disinformation, and propaganda for the masses alike, as we shall see. In any case, my way
to explain these notions is much less empirical and more technical than what the average French
case officer is used to. For they are also the bases of all other techniques and tricks in French human
intelligence that are not always relevant to the handling of agents, as we have seen when I presented
the other subject of management in the DGSE. Here ends the necessary introduction to the subject
of this chapter, which is going to start with some generalities and will end on some varied methods.
Manipulating others is one of the very first teachings given to recruits selected to work in the
field, at their own expense mostly, since the DGSE largely favors a heuristic approach and classical
conditioning. Herein I mean “rewards and punishments,” but still as seen from the viewpoint of
behavioral biology. It also applies to staffers, though not exclusively in this other instance. In other
words, I am taking about informal teaching given in the field through practical demonstrations in
real situations, never supported by any theoretical complement of scientific nature.
As first example I chose among the simplest, on a trip in a subway train, the fresh recruit is
shown that yawning causes many other passengers to yawn, too, “in response”. The rookie laughs
and marvels at what he has just been presented as an intriguing joke, and then he craves his
chaperon, coach, or leader teaches him more, of course. Actually, he too is being manipulated at that
moment, but he will not be explained this because, again, the DGSE always takes care to keep a
good head start on its agents and employees. No way to tell all tricks to the apprentice the way it is
done in espionage films, along intensive training courses spanning months. For the recruit must
acquire first the required mindset and demonstrate his loyalty to deserve the teaching of this
knowledge, which will be gradually and increasingly presented as the only reward for his zeal and
works.
That is why learning spycraft in this agency actually claims years of patience mixed with ordeals;
the goal being to build in the mind of the spy a knowledge piling up gradually, layers upon layers,
along his indispensable indoctrination and successive guarantees of loyalty and obedience. In the
DGSE, no teaching is given to anyone is not indoctrinated simultaneously and suitably. However,
this approach is a coin with a flip; if the American reader is familiar with the Biblical verse, “And
ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” the exact opposite applies in the DGSE.
Indeed, in this agency, the more one knows, the less freedom one enjoys, for all the reasons I
explained in detail in the chapter 4.
The recruit must understand that the knowledge he is thus entrusted can be easily harmful; it is a
weapon indeed, and that is also why he must keep it for himself, secret. Manipulation and deception
entail consequences, unintended sometimes, which vary tremendously from one individual to
another. That is why a psychiatrist has to vouch and even to design certain manipulations before
they are executed, and his approval depends on a wide variety of considerations and aims on the
long run, which often are too complex to grasp to the young recruit, and even to the experienced
field agent because rarely is he a scholar, anyway.
The concerns range from the social background of the target to his education, experiences, and
traumas, all things he would reluctantly confide, but which must be guessed and assessed, one way
or another. The DGSE has no difficulty with finding out most of this information on a French
citizen, whereas it may claim much time, observation, and deductive reasoning with a foreigner
unknown to all public services. Nevertheless, the care given to an investigation on a targeted
individual greatly depends on the value he is given and on what can be expected from him,
ultimately. Attempting to manipulate someone may easily result in a failure or even in a disaster, for
wants of the latter care. Of two individuals deceived and manipulated the same way, one will laugh
of it in self-derision; the other may go as far as to put an end to his life. Yet the field agent is not
taught this, and that is why an experienced specialist must first approve all actions he may undertake
to manipulate a target of great potential value. Of course, the process introduces certain delay
between each steps of the manipulation, which in the end commonly takes months and may spans
several years, sometimes, whereas the same with another individual the DGSE knows well already
—a politician, for example—can be done in a few weeks.
Each time the DGSE or the DGSI is the author of a manipulation, it is the more often a deception
purely “intellectual,” even if the consequences for the target can be costly not to say dramatic. A
simple and short manipulation may break the life of someone forever. In other words, if a French
spy has been thoroughly trained to behave and to manipulate as a talented con artist, his aims
remain different. When he succeeds to fool his target, this is just because the target failed to see
what the aims of his manipulator were, exactly. The target was wrongly thinking about money and
ordinary crookery all along, for example. For the manipulation of an ordinary people by a spy, aims
only to alter the perception the former may have of someone or something, a particular event, a
situation, a word or sentence, in nearly all cases and in the absolute. Often the DGSE plays with the
different possible meanings and implications of a single word, symbol, notion, or situation, which
the targets may see or, more exactly, may “want to see”.
This is why the mastery of sophisms and the learning of fundamentals in epistemology is a
prerequisite for certain employees and intelligence officers in the DGSE, since they are the bases of
the formulation of all formal aims. These other fundamentals are taught in counterintelligence and
in counterinfluence to identify formal aims in foreign actions of influence, interference, and
propaganda. Therefore, epistemology is not taught to everyone in the DGSE, and by far. An
overwhelming majority of agents of this agency does not even know what the word “epistemology”
means, simply because how could they read and understand the works of Kant and Wittgenstein, to
begin with.
Now, as the word “manipulation” may not have the same meaning to everyone, and as its
possibilities and limits often are misunderstood, especially to people who are not professionals in
intelligence, the following reminder will be helpful. We have seen that it is a rule in the DGSE never
to tell things and to give orders explicitly to anyone is not an insider. An outsider must never be left
with the resource to say something such as, “An intelligence officer of the DGSE asked to me to do
this”. Instead, this individual must appear to have acted entirely by his own; wherefrom, the
importance of manipulation in intelligence.
The purpose of manipulation in French intelligence is to induce its target to act according to the
hidden agenda of his manipulator, without the former being aware of its own moves and of their
consequences on the long run, at no moment while the process is unfolding; or when it is too late, at
best. Manipulation is to lure someone into doing something by resorting to implicit and untold
suggestions and ways that can be as varied as the aims are. Herein manipulation is much different of
persuasion, and the two should not be confused because if persuasion may also aim to deceive, yet
the method consists in telling or showing something in an explicit way with the intent to convince.
In point of fact, the reader will see in this chapter and again in others that, formally, manipulation is
tampering with unconscious parts of the brain, whereas influence is addressing the conscious parts
of the brain.
In the broadest meaning of the word, manipulation is to spycraft what persuasion is to advertising
and propaganda. Persuasion is explicitly visible and audible, and then those who are submitted to it
are left free to believe it or not. Manipulation, all on the contrary, must remain stealthy and insidious
to reach exactly the same goal as persuasion, but against all wills in those it aims. Yet persuasion
often is part of a manipulation at some point; that is to say subsumed in a plot contrivance that is a
manipulation. The reason coming to justify this principle is that someone who has been manipulated
successfully, not only must be unable to realize he was, but also he must be unable to tell with an
absolute certainty who his manipulator is, if ever he comes to realize he must have been fooled at
some point, eventually. It will be all the better if this target is made unable to known why he has
been manipulated, exactly. In French intelligence, doubt in the mind of the target is seen as a bonus
in his manipulation because, therefrom, he cannot know what he must do exactly to get out of the
tricky situation he let himself be caught in.
The main advantage of manipulation over mere persuasion is that his practitioner can remain
close to his target safely, even after the plot contrivance has been carried out successfully. On the
contrary, the practitioner of persuasion must run away, and thus he loses the benefit to remain in
touch with his target upon his understanding that he has been fooled and to know who the culprit is.
Persuasion is a one-time method of the petty crook, whereas manipulation offers the additional
opportunity to resume safely the handling of the target, source, or agent, for a very long time,
possibly.
History is full of cases of people who were duped for decades by close acquaintances they
persisted to trust and to confide in. The DGSE is looking after this kind of manipulation, and it is
ready to go to great lengths, to make sacrifices, and to show much patience to succeed, each time it
deems the stake worthy of it.
Then manipulating claims a particular mindset, and its practitioners see it as an art beyond a mere
technique; the comparison ends at this point, however. The con artist who knows how to manipulate
often acts alone and entirely by his own, whereas the spy does not or very rarely, for regardless how
skilled the spy is, never is he left carrying out a manipulation single-handedly, as he remains entitled
to make mistakes and to be outsmarted. That is why all the moves of the spy are monitored and
supervised, or as much as possible while he is provided varied forms of assistance, expertise, and
intelligence that the con artist can hardly enjoy. Even when the spy acting in the field is aided by
colleagues to execute a manipulation, the latter are no more skilled than he is, and they act upon
precise instructions either. Thus, the spies who are acting in the field, and the specialists who are
designing and supervising the manipulation from some offices, together attack their isolated and
vulnerable target as the pack of wolves does with its prey.
The DGSE teaches its field agents that all individuals are vulnerable to manipulation, including
the smartest and even the most experienced in manipulation. Skilled manipulators indeed are
surprisingly easy to manipulate, sometimes, but for reasons that may be very different from one
individual to another. One among the greatest vulnerabilities of the skilled manipulator is his
inclination to trust no one, precisely, and to believe what he sees only. Therefrom, it is as simple as
logical to manipulate him simply by counting on his flawless distrust toward everybody and
everything. For example, the experienced manipulator tends to see manipulations or treacheries
attempts in acts and behaviors that truly are innocent and purely accidental or involuntary: he is
easy to deceive because of this weakness, therefore. This is a flaw indeed; a type of cognitive bias
and a systematic error of inductive reasoning called “confirmation bias,” very frequent in police
officers and counterintelligence officers.
I remember vividly a case officer who bought for a plump sum a fancy green seal to stick on the
windshield of his car, which a scammer presented to him as a secret sign of recognition that would
avoid all tickets for prohibited parking. The scammer, apparently well informed of the uses in
conversations between French spies and on the little known association between the French
Ministry of Defense and the color green, simply hinted he represented an “exclusive and sensitive
cell of the French Ministry of Defense”. The case officer trusted no one, except anyone introduced
himself in the latter manner, which each time he understood as “the DGSE”. Indeed, the case officer
bought again the “magic sticker” for three consecutive years, until a colleague at last told to him he
was fooled by smarter than him!
Famous British statesman Benjamin Disraeli held that “Frank and explicit—that is the right line
to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and confuse the minds of others”. On one hand, I
cannot but confirm firsthand the latter attitude works best with the most distrustful spies. On the
other hand, it transforms into a serious problem when one wants to tell them the truth. Police
investigators notoriously are such people who learned to be excessively distrustful. The cause of it
is that police have to deal daily and mainly with an unusually elevated number of dishonest
individuals, and with countless lies and frauds of all sorts. The spy, all on the contrary, must deal
with a large majority of honest people because he is the dishonest individual. Yet, as an amusing
aside, it is surprising that professional poker-players rank higher than police officers do when tested
on catching people in the act of lying. French counterespionage officers learn all sorts of tips and
tricks to spot lies, and each has his favored method. However, it seems that none equals experience
and mere intuition, or one of those unexplainable revelations that many people have when they just
wake up in the morning. For our brain keep on working when we are sleeping, especially on the
problem that haunted us when we went to bed.
Many skilled and experienced professional in intelligence regularly fall in the trap of a
psychological phenomenon nowadays called “confirmation bias”. Then, in the same category, come
“wishful thinking,” “belief perseverance,” and “illusory correlation”. Some true anecdotes the
reader will read in this book owe entirely to these types of misperceptions and biases. When I was in
the DGSE, if I had said to a colleague, “I am a submarine of the CIA,” he would have taken this
statement as worthy to be reported and further investigated, doubtless. Thereupon, if I had explained
to him it was just a prank, it would have taken years before I would have been exonerated
completely, very possibly. Therefore, this is manipulation and not persuasion, as the intent is not to
persuade. As other example, if you say to anyone “I am an honest person,” this individual will
remain more wary of you than if you had said nothing of that sort. If you say the opposite, then this
same person will believe you instantly; a few other only will say you are joking. If you keep
insisting on saying, “I swear I am an honest person,” this will probably lure your interlocutor into
running away from you! In passing, this may be a clever method to eliciting certain attitudes and
behaviors in certain circumstances, such as getting rid politely and astutely of someone you do not
want to see anymore.
The first and most elementary aims to manipulation in intelligence are

1. to make the other believe we are who we are not in reality or the reverse, and

2. to make the other do what he would not do if we had not deceived him by
tampering with his perception of a given situation.

All employees, contractors, agents, and case officers spend a great deal of their lives, hour after
hour and day after day, making others believe they have no business with intelligence and spies.
They do this by crafting appearances meant to challenge anything could suggest the contrary; that is
to say, without ever being put in the uncomfortable situation to have to deny working in
intelligence, explicitly.
Of course, manipulation is connoted even more negatively than theft, since it serves wrongdoings
of the most villainous sort, generally. It is seen as a perversion, hardly justifiable from the
standpoints of moral and ethics. Our parents taught us for years to reject and to hate this—not all
parents though, I know. That is why the DGSE is very insisting during the trainings of its employees
and field agents with the instructions, soyez culottés! (“Be cheeky and daring!” or “Get a good
nerve!”), “Resort to boldness to catch your interlocutor by surprise, and feel no shame with acting
offhandedly or even very impolitely, each time you feel it is quickest way to reach your goal,”
“Shame is a bourgeois weakness you must never feel”. More than that, the teaching of these guiding
principles indeed aims to changing the values and beliefs of the recruits, and is efficiently supported
by the repeated forms of humiliation—intending, first, to break their self-esteem—they are
submitted to during their recruitment, training and indoctrination. In this agency, the assumed lie is
a means of discipline, to the point that discipline in the DGSE could be otherwise explained as
tersely as “enforced self-delusion”. The latter particular comes to explain why the average French
field agent tends to behave brazenly, not to say typically. In a number of instances, I noted, the
behavioral pattern also applies to case officers, intelligence officers, up to senior levels.
Additionally, future French intelligence officers and case officers learn in explicit terms that they
must act selfishly in all circumstances, and that never they must have any concern for others. I can
quote the followings sentences from recollection. “Care about yourself and only about yourself.”
“Don’t give a shit about others, no matter what”. “Don’t be fooled by their titles of engineers; they
have been trained to solve technical problems, but they are incapable to innovate by their own”.
Future executives are trained, and even instructed, to some extent, not to hesitate to be arrogant
and to scorn employees of C and B categories, as an additional way to assert the authority conferred
on them. As their intellectual capacities at times do not match their education or the reverse, the
provision does little to dispel a strong feeling that the DGSE indeed is a feudal society with its serfs,
squires, knights, and lords. This particular creed is confirmed with those who are sent abroad:
“When you are sent on a mission in a third-world country, never ever indulge in pity for the misery
and suffering of people you will see there, and never be indignant on the despotic practices and
cruelty of its rulers, since those can be made our allies. Do not try to change people and things; find
the ways to make a profit of their beliefs, instead. If you cannot do this, then never you’ll be an
effective and trustworthy intelligence officer”.
Now, we are going to enter behavioral biology in a scientific way to review the fundamentals on
which the psychiatrists of the DGSE rely on when they are called to advise spies on carrying on a
manipulation.
 The first vulnerability in Man is action, the theory says, and that is why the word “action” is
frequently heard in the DGSE. So, see what “action” means in the context of behavioral biology
applied to intelligence, exactly.
The sole purpose of any being is to being, and there is no other “why” since this is an innate drive
and not a thoughtful assumption. Then we must separate the need to being individually from the
need to preserve the species because the purpose of any species is to being either, i.e. an additional
way to preserve one’s self, all things being considered. All other claims about the purpose of life are
naïve beliefs and mistakes, as individuals in all species other than Man are not equipped with a
brain capable to processing abstract notions and concepts at a similar degree of complexity; or else
those claims are nothing but attempts to fool others in some way for the sake of some secret agenda,
selfish again. In point of fact, selfishness is the most obvious and straightforward expression of the
need to being at an individual degree.
Plants are entirely equipped for the sole purpose to being individually and to being collectively as
species either; designed to collect water, nutriments, and sunlight, without having any need to move
for this, and the same remark apply to reproduction. Insects, animals, and Man alike, need to move
to feed themselves, and they need to move for preserving their species, too; that is to say, for
copulating. They all have a brain that, at least, is capable to processing basic orders given to their
bodies, which we call actions.
When the brain of the individuals of those species processes the urge to copulate, it also instructs
to choose the healthiest, strongest, and most beautiful partner, without their being conscious of it.
Herein I mean without being able to understand why the healthiest, strongest, and most beautiful,
since copulating with individuals of inferior qualities would be good enough to satisfy the urge
faster. For picking up the best partner is how a species best reproduces itself and last. Otherwise, it
would develop naturally ever-greater vulnerabilities along generations, unsuitable to resist against
hazards such as extreme cold and heat, diseases, and against other species, predators, including
individuals of their own species. In Man, as in many other species, this unconscious instruction to
reproduce persists even when the goal, or likely outcome, is not reproduction. However, in reality,
the conscious part of Man’s brain does nothing but strives to process in more or less intelligible
terms a permanent need for preserving his species that originates in a part of his brain where
consciousness does not exist.
Therefore, the reader notice, the all-French science of behavioral biology fully endorses the
notion of survival of the fittest of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, even though it also supports
the fundamentals in American free capitalism that France antagonizes!
As a species thus survives and evolves along generations, steadily but imperceptibly, it develops
naturally better sensory organs to select and drink the purest water, to feed itself with the best food,
while developing an immune system against everything is not good for its body, and to reproduce
with the best partners. These choices, innate again, are all improvements necessary to repeat this
sole need of the species for surviving against all odds. The reader must note that, once more, the
latter processes are not thoughtful instructions, even to experts in behavioral sciences who know
well how they work and where in the brain they originate. This reality is not glamorous, certainly,
yet it is the reality, regardless whether it clashes with our values of the moment.
Moving for feeding oneself, moving for fighting or fleeing a danger, and moving for preserving
one’s species by copulating are drives that the reader must understand as actions in the present
context of manipulation, and all along this book in my next explanations, henceforth. For Man has
no roots and no leaves to feed himself to preserve his species without moving. That is why Man, as
animals and even insects, is equipped instead with a central nervous system that is a whole
including the brain and the spinal cord. The main and overwhelming concern of this central nervous
system is to make the rest of the body acting, in order to being individually and collectively, i.e.
lasting; let alone the fact that this body itself is thermodynamic in its design, which implies that its
innards must move to keep it alive either. So, neither the central nervous system nor the body can
stop moving, ever, or both would die.
As the evolution of Man thus proceeded from primate to Homo sapiens for the past million years,
all along to ever improve his capacity to being and for this sole sake, his central nervous system also
developed itself to become very complex; the most complex among all other species, today. Still to
fulfill this need to being, Man’s central nervous system commands to him to act for defending
himself against very varied dangers, including fighting individuals of his own species because his
need to preserve his self seems to be naturally stronger than preserving his own species.
Nonetheless, this overwhelming concern for preserving one’s self remains a way to preserve one’s
species, ultimately, for the latter would not last for long either otherwise. As a matter of fact, truly
we are preserving our species when we struggle against disease, the idea to let ourselves be killed
by some threat, and the idea to suicide. So, this need to being individually is not selfish at all,
actually, but we cannot understand and analyze this drive we all have in ourselves and that makes us
acting and moving permanently because we do not have any control over it. We cannot tame it, just
as we cannot order our heart, lungs, stomach and intestines to stop for a while, because the fact that
our movements are controlled by our brain does not mean that we have total control over it. Certain
areas of our brain work completely independently of our will, hopelessly; no matter how hard we
struggle to change this.
In many other species, individuals also fight each other, often in these other cases to win the
privilege to reproduce themselves. Thus, females select the fittest males—in point of fact, Man
happens to do the same, sometimes, still at the present high stage of his evolution. Infightings in
Mankind serve the survival of the individual first, and of the species ultimately, through a process of
natural selection of the fittest and strongest.
Men fighting each other, that is to say, war, is a natural thing, consequent to the aforesaid;
regardless whether their consciousness tells them that is a disturbing reality. Herein we ought to face
war as it is, since the unconscious part of our brain is its deepest, truest, and sorry cause, and since,
being unable to think, it is impervious to all political doctrines, philosophical teachings, religions,
ethics, and moral. Herein we could say that the conscious part of Man’s brain is very concerned with
what is happening at the present moment, while its unconscious part is concerned permanently and
solely by what might happen tomorrow to it, and solely to it. Politics, philosophy, and religion are
not going to challenge genetics anytime soon.
So, basic actions in Man are not consequent to conscious and logical thoughts, but to unconscious
drives dictated by the same need to being. Then, what Man persists to see as thoughtful actions are
nothing but elaborate alibis in reality, designed to justify these irrepressible drives according to
ethics and moral that are an acquired knowledge because his superior intelligence and his capacities
to process abstract notions spur him to find explanations for what his unconscious, his id, urges him
to do. He cannot help asking to himself, “Why am I is hungry, actually”? “Why do I need to
copulate, now, all of a sudden, and not one hour earlier? What happened to me, when I could not
help myself lose my composure, so stupidly? Why in Hell did I venture in this absurd and
devastating war?” The latter point should be kept in mind because the vast majority of us have a
poor command over these drives—that means there are exceptions; I will come back to it later.
Most manipulations, not to say all, the DGSE carries out with individuals in fact rely exclusively
on the premises I just summed up; and not only with individuals because the specialists and
contractors of this agency with an expertise in influence, counterinfluence, and information warfare
in general, establish their reflections, tactics, and strategies on the basis of these discoveries in
behavioral biology either. When trying to influence people in their tastes, opinions, and choices
collectively, it is more effective to focus on the fundamental and unconscious need to being and
subsequent drives triggering their actions than on the intermediary stage of the conscious alibis, i.e.
thoughtful processes. Actually, those conscious processes limit to transforming the necessary need
to being and subsequent and inevitable actions into elaborate, immediate, or delayed initiatives and
postures. For the record, this intermediary stage of the filtering of drives itself exploits a gathering
of recollections we commonly call “experience” or “knowledge”. Therefore, it is an acquired
function, contrary to the innate need and drives—I will come back to this gathering of recollections
acting as a filter when it will be timely.
Our reaction to an action of influence, i.e. serving a manipulation, directed against us will always
limit to a same and invariable alternative made of three possible options only, which all are drives.
The reader must remember these drives in the same order because, thenceforth, I will refer to them
in about all the next chapters. They are
1. fleeing,
2. fighting, and
3. inhibition aka inhibition behavior.
The order in the enumeration above is logically understandable, even though the unconscious part
of the brain that orders them does not process logics because fighting is hazardous to the integrity
on one’s body. The three very simple instructions and their sequence are physically “implemented”
from birth in our brain. Indeed, when in the face of any impediment, threat, or aggression, first, we
flee; second, we fight if we cannot flee; and third, we yield to inhibition when neither fleeing nor
fighting are possible. Then the thoughtful process of conversion of these drives into actions is
largely conditioned by logic in Man. Knowing this allows to predict accurately the response of
someone to his manipulation, regardless of his intellectual capacities, indeed. It is even possible to
improve further this accuracy, or even to transform it into an inescapable outcome, by arranging
circumstances that will deny to this individual his option to fleeing or to fighting, or both in order to
leave him with one option only: inhibition behavior. We could say, he can also suicide, as Man is a
species that does this, unlike most other species; but, actually, Man seldom knows that suicide is but
another way to fight, against himself. The latter particularity will be explained soon. Note that the
basic instructions in Man’s brain are five, actually; I just skipped nutrition behavior and
reproduction behavior, equally fundamental to the need to being, as we have seen.
Then, when all three options remain possible to the targeted individual, certain—but rare—DGSE
experts in manipulation may turn to an additional scientific discipline called systems theory, and
more exactly to a subset of it called complex systems, i.e. the properties and behaviors of systems.
As complex systems have non-linear behaviors, generally, then the expert in human intelligence
may also turn toward abstract notions such as fuzzy logic, fractals, and cellular automata. Counter-
intelligence specialist General Jean Guyaux (DGSI and DGSE) was a pioneer in applying the latter
scientific disciplines to counterintelligence from the late 1990s, which at some point he taught in
secret learning sessions, and more openly from the early 2000s in courses on intelligence and
counterintelligence in schools.[135] Specialist and scientist Professor Bernard Caillaud focused his
researches on cellular automata.[136] At this point, however, we are entering a realm of highly
technical notions and considerations that would make me wandering much away from the generalist
purport of this chapter, and even of this book. I guess I ventured much enough in theoretical
descriptions, already, simply to relieve my concern for the possible misunderstanding of the reader
on what behavioral biology applied to human intelligence is, and in which way this field differs
from behaviorism.
In passing, to the attention of the reader who, perhaps, holds some notions in behavioral science
yet never heard of behavioral biology before, very possibly, he will be interested to know that this
French discipline relies also on the discoveries of American physician and neuroscientist Paul D.
MacLean, known as the inventor of the evolutionary triune brain theory in the 1960s. MacLean’s
theory of the triune brain has been alternatively questioned and revived since the 1980s. Since
French military scientist Henri Laborit relied on MacLean’s works to develop behavioral biology in
France, the discipline provided the DGSE with accurate forecasts in Man’s responses to stressful
situations,[137] further investigated by Jean Rivolier in real situations because stress is consequent to
angst, itself consequent to a state of prolonged inhibition. Allegedly, today, a number of civilian and
ordinary psychiatrists appreciate the triune brain theory, while many others fiercely dismiss it as
invalid, thus fueling an ongoing controversy. This does not matter to us because behavioral biology
applied to manipulation and influence prove effective in a large majority of instances.
Below, I present one among the simplest examples demonstrating the practical interest of
behavioral biology in HUMINT, which will help the reader understand the principle of a method of
recruitment I described in the chapter 4 on recruiting and training: that of the young, poor, and
desperate individual who was manipulated by a wealthy and influential person.
As it is vital to the desperate man of my new example to feed himself, he must act to fulfill this
need, and his action will be the more vivacious and impulsive if his organism is physiologically in
need of this food because he has no control over the latter phenomenon. Herein what is of interest to
us is that his need for survival i.e. need to being overwhelms his thinking skills to the point of
altering them. As seen from another angle that is not that of behavioral biology sensu stricto, but
rather that of epistemology,[138] we can say that passion in his mind takes precedence over reason.
He is no longer able to postpone his vital action as a stage of an elaborate strategy he would be
capable of in normal circumstances. Indeed, he is ready to do anything to eat, i.e. to respond to his
overwhelming nutrition behavior, and all his thoughts focus on this basic need to be fulfilled as
soon as possible.[139] The strength of the latter urge, spurred by physiological effects impossible to
tame, actually is about the same as that, well known, of the drug addict who is entering a stage of
dire need, but there is more to it to be taken in consideration, as shows the complementary
explanation, below.
Man is vested with a capacity to foresee accurately the long-term consequences of facts that most
other species are unable to figure. His sophisticated brain makes him capable to project himself in a
near or even remote future, and even to estimate the time and possible causes of his forthcoming
death or harm he may have to suffer. This is an enormous advantage he has over all other species,
double-edged however because when one of his likes is posing as his opponent, then this aggressor
can rely on this capacity, precisely, to bend his will by promising a danger that is only threatened.
The psychiatrists of the DGSE noticed that the smartest and the more educated an individual is,
the more able he is to foresee the likely consequences of facts and events; that is not so much a
truism when in respect to the following consequences. An individual of superior intelligence and
education will backtrack “with reason” when in the face of certain facts and events he will correctly
identify as bad omens, whereas another individual of lesser intellectual capacities will fail to see
them altogether and will proceed unconcerned, “with passion,” toward a real danger because he is
unable to assess it. I mean if the brain of Man has innate instructions that make him react in the face
of dangers to fulfill his need to being, he still needs to acquire the knowledge of the innumerable
things, events, and successions of events that are dangers. Indeed, most of those dangers are more or
less difficult to identify as such, since Man creates them himself thanks to his superior intelligence,
e.g. electricity, stoves, cars, trains, machines, poisons, blades, guns, explosives, and so on, and on.
What I just specified explains why physical courage decreases along the scale of intellectual
capacities, on average, of course, since exceptions are not so rare for a variety of reasons including
one of physiological nature in particular.[140] Thus, ironically, the fool and the crazy the more so
have greater chances than the smart individual to win a chicken game, and by extension they can
foil elaborate manipulation and persuasion attempts relying on threat, as we shall see later in this
book with true examples. Nonetheless, higher intelligence means a longer life on average, since this
quality again makes one able to foresee the likely consequences of a greater number of threats and
to devise elaborate strategies to shield oneself against them, starting with an access to more
intellectual and less hazardous professional activities. In passing, and back to the fundamentals in
behavioral biology, the growth of intelligence along the evolution of Man has been caused by the
need to being either.
Therefore, manipulating someone effectively depends essentially on the tactic chosen, on a case-
by-case basis, wherefrom, the need to assessing accurately the profile of a target before designing
and planning his manipulation. Then other considerations must be taken into account, as we soon
shall see in this chapter and again in others, and that is why the theory of behavioral biology will not
be explained entirely but its fundamentals only in the present one.
Back to our poor and desperate angry man, he may not be smart enough to foresee accurately the
possible consequences of an intermediate step that his manipulator introduces on purpose in his
action to obtain the food he direly needs. The most obvious among many other such steps may be
the offer of a small sum of money to buy the food, in exchange for carrying out a simple task that is
a trap. Of course, the landlord in the example of a previous chapter enjoyed complicities and means
to put the young man in a dire predicament, by making for him a very bad reputation between other
provisions, only in order to make him highly receptive to an offer he could not be persuaded to
accept and would deny in normal circumstances. Say, in this new example, the simple task consists
in delivering a parcel whose content is of an illegal nature. The parcel is sealed so that the hungry
man cannot know its content, as he cannot figure that someone would set up an elaborate stratagem
to trap him because he has been led to believes he is too poor to be a person of interest to anyone,
following a series of plot contrivances and setups against him he could not see either.
If he agrees on doing the latter task, and he will do it because his manipulator knows he craves
food, he is manipulated a first time. Possibly, he even begged for delivering the parcel against a
small sum, upon his hearing two people talking loudly about a problem with this so simple task,
who obviously are two accomplices of the manipulator. As a matter of fact, the DGSE would add
the latter provision in its setup, doubtless, to ascertain the hungry man could not say eventually,
“Someone asked to me to deliver the compromising parcel”. Therefore, he would be forced to
admit, “I asked for delivering the compromising parcel,” thus proving formally that “he is an
accomplice who acted entirely from his own will in a mischief”. Consequently, once the parcel is
delivered, the manipulator secured a threat against the hungry man, in order to ask to him to deliver
more parcels for a much smaller salary, as example between many other possible. The dilemma that
thus place is: (1) the poor man will be denounced and will go to prison if he refuses any longer, but
(2) he will compromise himself further for a very long time if he yields to the threat. More than 90%
of people choose the option (2) when facing similar dilemmas.
 The difference with persuasion in the simple example above is that no one explicitly or even
implicitly asked to the target to deliver a parcel containing something illegal for the setup to take
place. Instead, the target was submitted to a small problem, hunger, therefore being, through
arranged circumstances he could not possibly identify nor even guess. He solved his problem thanks
to the best and first solution he was presented with, which he took as an unexpected opportunity.
This setup may seem a bit simple or farfetched, at first glance, but I only exemplified a principle
as simply as I could. Then the reader must know that the basic need to being expresses in much
more subtle or sophisticated ways that suit other circumstances in which the target does not seem to
be in need of anything, at first glance. Coincidentally or not, the seven sins of the Bible each are
expressions of the need to being. Pride, to take another example that seems at first glance remote
from basic needs, actually may express in certain people in a way as potent as hunger. For pride
indeed is one such elaborate expression of the need to being, as the reader will understand it, soon in
this chapter. The same applies with wrath because it actually is a reaction to fear for one’s safety, or
just to one’s well-being that itself is a projection in the future of the same fear for one’s safety.
Thereof, the reader may easily understand that lust is an expression of the need to being of the
species, which in Man may express in much more sophisticated ways than in all other species, and
with a force similar to hunger, indeed.
I just established a parallel with the Bible not to promote Christian religion in a way that could be
seen as partisan, but to draw the attention of the reader on the fact, all rational and apparently
unquestionable, that the threat associated with the seven sins actually is a safety provision urging
people to tame their need to being in a thoughtful way. Similarly in the Quran, we notice, forbidding
the consumption of pork much suggests a different precautionary measure, thought at a time and in
a region of the World when and where the inexistence of effective means of food storage and
regulations made this variety of meat highly hazardous to populations.
Anyway, the reader must remember that the setup of my previous example bases on the
fundamentals in behavioral biology found in about all others that the DGSE designs, when the aims
are to recruit, trains, handles or manipulate an individual, and to manipulate bodies of individuals
alike. Relevant cases have been presented in the earlier chapters, and many others will be shown all
along the rest of this book in varied, more or less subtle, and sophisticated versions. So, the need to
being in Man thus expresses in many ways that each can be taken as a leverage serving his
manipulation. Therefrom, the goal of the manipulator either is to favor the one that seems to express
with the greatest potency in his target, or to exacerbate suitably one that seems to be the most
obvious. That is why the manipulator of the DGSE calls those leverages “vulnerabilities” or “cracks
in the cuirass” when at a stage he has not yet set his manipulation.
Before presenting such contrivances, including all the most frequently used, I must elaborate a
little on the three drives, fleeing, fighting, and inhibition stemming from the need to being, since
they are the most important in behavioral biology applied to intelligence.
Wholesome, the need to being individually and as a species, that is to say, to survive, gives an
instruction to the body via its central nervous system to react physically to anything is perceived as
a threat or aggression, being understood that hunger and even sexual frustration are threats to being,
alike. All three drives originate in the reptilian brain, and the two first are always immediate and
fast, independently of the intellectual performances of the two other parts of the brain that treat and
regulate them, called mammalian brain aka limbic system, and neocortex. They will be processed
anyway, even though the mammalian brain and more especially the neocortex can delay
thoughtfully the transformation of the drive into action, and in a way that depends entirely on
whether the subject is young and inexperienced, adult and grown up, idiot or gifted, educated or not,
and sober and not drugged, of course.
In the individual to be manipulated, “threat” must be understood in the largest sense of the term
that therefore includes, but not necessarily depending of varied considerations, everything he does
not yet know because he never experienced it before, and which he may considers by default as
“possibly painful, harmful, hazardous, or deadly” or just “unpleasant, upsetting, or annoying”. In all
instances, his awareness of a threat arouses in his mind a feeling whose intensity may range from
minor annoyance (reaction to an aggressive fly, for example) to angst (bigger insect, or animal), fear
(large dog, snake, or a threatening people), and panic (tiger, fire, sudden flood, great height, or a
lightning bolt). The greater the intensity is, the less filtered i.e. thoughtful the action i.e. response is.
Therefore, the odds that this action be stupid, unproductive, or even counter-productive grow
accordingly; wherefrom the interest to a manipulator to favor the emergence of panic or fear in the
mind of his target, and in way, additionally, designed to lure the target into seeking the protection of
his manipulator himself or of his accomplice. The latter explanation actually sums up what a
manipulation is.
There is nothing particular to add about threat and aggression, since the meanings of these words
are obvious, except that our modern society of this 21st century is producing a new and growing
type of abstract and virtual aggressions, verbal and written in their form, innocuous and futile at first
glance, but whose effects, very real, range from social exclusion, to fines, and even to prison. These
modern and abstract forms of threats and aggressions extend as far as to political correctness, self-
censorship, and censorship, produced by a variety of random and therefore unpredictable causes as
taken independently, ranging from social and natural evolutions of our societies[141] to hostile
foreign influence, agitprop, propaganda, and disinformation, to be explained in detail in their
modalities in the Part II and III of this book.
Consequently, the three possible drives must be understood in the largest sense of their
applications and range of actions, meaning fighting extends to actions as subtle as answering
politely “No” to a demand of minor importance or to act noncommittally in presence of a person we
dislike. Similarly, fleeing can be dodging an embarrassing question, just looking away, or not
answering an overdue invoice letter.
As about the third drive, inhibition aka inhibition behavior, it is the one that must interest the
reader the most, particularly in the context of this book. First, inhibition is very rarely a response to
threat and aggression as fast as fleeing and fighting are. When so, it generally occurs under two
particular conditions that are (1) exposure to a great danger resulting in what some call popularly “a
state of paralysis,” and (2) a previous long series of lesser dangers against which fleeing and fighting
each time proved fruitless or impossible, thus arousing a mood of irrational hopelessness. Second, to
explain best what inhibition is and what consequences it may entail, I must stress about fleeing and
fighting that action characterizes both of them, indispensable to any being equipped with a central
nervous system, whatever the action may be in its nature, and even when no action is necessary,
indeed. In all species equipped with a central nervous system, action preserves the integrity of the
whole body, as researchers in behavioral sciences have demonstrated it repeatedly with various
experiments resulting in the same psychological and physiological effects, invariably.[142]
Therefore, since Man is not equipped with a natural passive defense system, as the hedgehog and
the skunk are, then he must defends himself by action against threats and aggressions, even when
the action is unlikely to pay off, as we soon shall see.
Inhibition or inhibition behavior in behavioral biology is inaction, exteriorized by passiveness,
apathy, and resignation. In any case, it is the impossibility, real or supposed, to react to a threat or
aggression by action. The DGSE is looking for the latter and third drive inhibition as outcome of
nearly all its manipulations, internally and externally with its staffs, agents, sources, in the fields of
domestic intelligence, influence, foreign intelligence, influence, and disinformation, indifferently.
We have seen the letter expectation in the chapter 3 on “Recruiting and Training” with the step 3.,
4. and 5. of my explanations on the diagram, and eventually with the debasing of the Pyramid of
Maslow. In point of fact, the reader noticed while reading this chapter that the same pattern of
expected inhibition invariably reproduces in all types of recruitments it describes. Similarly, we will
see that the pattern arises again in about all intelligence actions I present in this book, even when
applied to the manipulation of masses of individuals and at the scale of an entire country.
Since action is a vital necessity in all beings equipped with a central nervous system, and is
automatically ordered by it from below the level of consciousness, then a too prolonged inhibition
results inescapably in the brain instructing the body to “fight against itself,” including in a
physiological way, indeed. In other words, when no action the central nervous system commands
can be done, that is to say, an action that can have an effect on anything that is not part of itself, then
it begins to act not only against itself, thus producing mental disorders, but also against all other
constituents of the body, in various ways. Then those unconscious aggressions may have gravities
ranging from minor to fatal, since they are, pell-mell, mood disorders, muscular pains, cardio-
vascular diseases, stomach ulcer, type 2 diabetes, various addictions, skin conditions, and even
cancers because they proceeds from a weakening of the immune system. That is exactly how
psychosomatic diseases occur, and why they generally are consequent to stress, itself engendered by
the impossibly to act with effectiveness against a prolonged threat or aggression.
Military scientist Pr. Henri Laborit definitively established the cause-to-effect relationship above
with repeated experiments with rats, focusing on stimulating the drives of fleeing, fighting, and
inhibition behavior. When reproduced with Man, through less extreme conditions than these of
Laborit I am going to present, the experiments produced the same effects as with rats, exactly and
invariably, and regardless of the intelligence, education, and social middle of the subjects.
Anecdotally, in 1970, American scientist John B. Calhoun did an analogous experiment with rats
either, but which focused in the effects of an explosive growth of population, and it produced the
same effects again, among interesting and subtler others consequent to more complex settings and
longer durations.
Laborit electrified a cage A. with dimensions of about 20” x 12,” and 12” of height, and he
connected this cage to a cage B. that was not electrified via a short tunnel equipped with a vertically
sliding door. An electric current of less than 50 Volts could get through the whole cage A. on
demand, activated by a button accessible to the scientist only. Four seconds before the current was
sent, a buzzer was activated. In each of three different experiments, one or two rats were put in the
cage A.
In the experiment 1 with one rat only, the buzzer rang and the electric current was sent through
the cage A. four seconds later, until the rat found the tunnel leading to the cage B. where it went to
escape the aggression. Thus, the animal flew the aggression successfully because the latter option
was available to it. The same experiment was repeated about ten minutes a day for seven days on a
row, until the rat each of those times flew when it heard the buzzer; that is to say, before it received
the electric shock. Thus, the rat learned to foresee the aggression and to forestall it, alerted by the
sound of the buzzer that was the threat.
At the end of this seven-day experiment, the animal had coped well with its thus arranged
situation, since at some point it had learned what to do, not to experience the aggression. The latter
fact was evidenced by a general medical examination of the health of the rat focusing on arterial
hypertension and other signs of stress; it maintained its biological balance.
In the experiment 2, the sliding door between the cages A. and B. was closed, and two rats that
had been trained as in the experiment 1 were put together in the cage A. When they heard the
buzzer, the two rats ran instantly to the tunnel to escape the electric shock. However, when they
realized that the sliding door was closed and that they could not flee the cage A. anymore, and thus
dodge their punishment, they panicked, first. After a short while, and as the current was still going
through the cage and electrocuted them, they fought against each other. The modified conditions
caused an infighting, we notice. In other words, they fulfilled their need for action against the
aggression by fighting, simply because they were denied the first option of fleeing. This reaction
was completely unproductive, of course, yet the two rats persisted doggedly with it as long as the
current was on, their minds being seethe with panic and pain. After a series of the same experiment,
the result was the same, invariably, even with no electric shock, simply upon their sole hearing the
sound of the buzzer. Indeed, the rats could not tame the primal drive to fight and “teach” it that
fighting each other could not solve their problem, simply because it is innate in them as it is in us,
humans, and strong enough to overwhelm their deductive reasoning or capacity to learn and to adapt
to changing situations.
However, to the surprise of Laborit, the two animals remained in good general health following
repetitions of the same experiment, with no difference in their physical and physiological
conditions, as in the experiment 1.
In the experiment 3, one only of the two rats was left alone in the cage A., still with the sliding
door closed, thus allowing no escape, again. After repeated buzzer sounds and ensuing electric
shocks, each of a duration of few seconds and spaced several minutes apart as in the experiments 1.
and 2., the aggressive behavior of the rat changed entirely for that of resigned passiveness. The
reaction of the animal limited to incontrollable muscular spasms caused by the electric shocks and
that was all; that is to say, he yielded to the third and only one remaining option of inhibition
behavior, for he learned that all action was useless, as it could not escape nor fight. So, the animal
stopped trying.
This time, contrary to what was observed in the experiments 1. and 2., the general health of the
rat deteriorated rapidly and visibly, starting with arterial hypertension and a fur that was no longer
sleek. On the long run, all rats submitted to the experiment 3. also developed mood disorders and
arterial hypertension, which persisted for days between the ordeals. Prolonged series of the
experiment 3. resulted in the gradual worsening of their health conditions, and in their premature
deaths ultimately, caused by the situation, only. If a microbe is present in the organism of the rat,
whereas normally it could fight it off, now it could not and thus contract an infection; a cancerous
cell that normally it would destroy, now would develop into cancer.
 The three experiments allowed Laborit to understand and to prove formally that the cause of the
persisting good health of the rats in the experiments 1 and 2 simply was they were given the options
to fleeing and to fighting, although they indeed received the electric shocks in the experiment 2. The
deterioration of their health and then their death in the experiment 3 were not consequential to the
electric shocks, therefore, but to their impossibility to acting. They remained in good health in the
experiment 2 because fighting against each other allowed them to compensate cerebrally, that is to
say, psychologically only, thus preventing their brains from instructing the body to fight against
itself physiologically, following a first stage of angst that eventually evolved to stress. Prolonged
stress is the factor triggering mood disorders and psychosomatic diseases.
Indeed, the results of the experiments of Laborit reproduce identically in Man, when he is
submitted durably to abstracts forms of threats and aggressions, since they nonetheless are caused
by stress, itself resulting from prolonged exposures to angst. Threat of electric shocks or whatever
other aggression resulting in pain, be it physical or moral, the determining cause triggering reaction
is angst. In point of facts, we notice, Man becomes aggressive and may easily fights against his
likes, verbally at least, when he experiences prolonged angst. If angst is prolonged indefinitely, a
state of stress takes place and the health of Man deteriorates the same way as with the rats; that is to
say, when he is denied the options to fleeing and to fighting. Then prolonged inhibition leads Man to
his premature death, consequential to one or several of the psychosomatic illnesses I named earlier.
The series of experiments of Laborit explains several other psychological phenomena. For
example, inmates whose health conditions remain good, simply because they are not isolated and
can still socially interact with each other to “share their ordeal together,” and also to fight each
other, verbally at least and / or by establishing hierarchic structures of dominances allowing
violence and aggressions that are only abstract in their forms. The case of U.S. soldiers of the
Vietnam War who compensated for their ordeals by inflicting violence to their fellows still better
exemplifies in Man the experiment 2 with the rats.[143]
Laborit’s experiment also provides a convincing explanation for the increasingly frequent cases,
nowadays, of sudden, irrational, and unexplainable otherwise, burst of anger and violence in
individuals previously described as quiet and even kind persons. Then, from a general viewpoint,
the observations explain convincingly a similarly rising trend in some societies and countries, of
quick, irrational, and disproportionate verbal aggressiveness, passive-aggressive behavior, and of a
concerning rise of depressions and other mental disorders. Aggression in balanced people is never
fortuitous; it always results of the impossibility to act with effectiveness against a threat or a pain,
moral the more often.
In passing, and concerning the latter remark, our modern, occidental, or / and advanced societies,
especially when characterized by high levels of abstraction and complexity in social interactions,
are fostering a spectrum of new and similarly rising behavioral patterns that actually are elaborate
forms of escape rather than inhibition. However, in some instances, it must be acknowledged, the
patterns, old and common, are but unusually stimulated only. On one extremity of this spectrum, we
find practices such as addictions to substances that may either provide a relief to psychological
suffering and frustration or satisfy a hidden or half-conscious will of self-harm, and piercing and
tattooing, since these practices indisputably are (milder?) form of self-harm. At the other extremity
of this spectrum, we find practices for long identified as mild forms of escape, though on a case-by-
case basis, such as writing, painting, sculpting, related artistic activities, and many hobbies; that is
to say, when the latter practices are obviously stimulated by a need to fleeing social or financial
contingencies, intellectually, at least.
Overall, and as Freud notoriously underlined it in his Civilization and its Discontents, and
Skinner in his Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Man is getting stuck in societies where a compound of
a growing number of rules and regulations, and of new abstract and complex social conventions
generally accompanied with stark intolerance, is further widening an already large gap separating
his desire for individuality and freedom—which actually are other visible marks his need to being
individually—from the expectations of the society that is the need to being of his species. However,
these individuality and freedom are increasingly difficult to fulfill normally and naturally, thus
leaving to Man the third and last option only, inhibition and its consequences on the long term. Note
for later in this book that boredom, consequent to inaction or to the impossibility to act in a
rewarding way, also results in either fleeing, fighting, or inhibition if the two first options are
unproductive or impossible. For, even in the absence of threat or pain, Man’s brain perceives
inaction as a form of hazard to its need to being.
 Laborit says, “There is no proprietary instinct. Nor is there any instinct to dominate. The nervous
system of any individual has learned the necessity of keeping for his own use an object or person
that is also desired, coveted, by someone else. And he has also learned that in the competition to
keep that object or that person for himself, he must dominate”.
We are all unaware to flee, flight, and yield to inhibition every day, within half an hour in a
conversation, for example. For these reactions indeed are but mild manifestations of the need to
being, and that is why we can hardly identify these drives in ordinary and unimportant
circumstances of the latter sort. The drives repeat again and again along a single day and every day
on innumerable issues of varied importances, such as negotiating a deal, delaying a payment, getting
more responsibilities at work, etc. They even express in our writing, still unconsciously, which
grants certain specialized spies an opportunity to assess accurately the psychological profile, social
and economic situation, and concerns of a target through parsing aka syntax analysis. For the
frequency with which one of these three primal drives overrides the two others defines an important
characteristic in each of us; yet those varied nuances in the ways the drives thus express do not help
us to identify it. That is not yet all because the fundamental need to being and its three drives open
onto behavioral traits shaped by numerous exogenous variables that are, mainly, the way we have
been raised during our infancy, our geographic, social, and cultural middle of origin, our past
traumas and phobias, experiences, complexes of inferiority, superiority, or of another origin. To put
it simply and in words in common use in the field of intelligence: what is of interest in the character
of a recruit or target is whether he is rather a “fighter” or a “runner,” and where he locates between
these two extremes on a graduated scale that is “inhibited”. Wherefrom the other interest in the
DGSE in automated computer parsing since the late 1990s, and in more performing artificial
intelligence in this area, eventually.
All innate need to being and corresponding drives, and then acquired behavioral traits, together
adapt along one’s infancy to serve one general goal that is, improving interactions and relations with
one’s likes in order to avoid social rejection. In other words, to fulfill another need called need for
belonging / belongingness, which is a safety provision of the need to being that originated in the
brain of Man’s remotest ancestors in a time when loneliness was hazardous. That is why we also
call the latter, herd instinct. This need for belonging, by the way, is one of the most important
leverage, if not the most important, in mass manipulation and public opinion making, as we shall
see in the next chapters.
All societies, that is to say, countries and civilizations, foster social conventions of their own
along their evolutions, and each time those evolutions unfolds quickly along a few generations.
Social conventions, however, remain all codified about the same way because they all invariably
respond to a same fundamental need in Man to interact with his likes peacefully, which actually
serves his need to being individually and the need to being of his species either. However, the latter
process has a recurring corollary that is the establishing of hierarchic structures of dominance, with
a leader and possibly one or several advisors, then deputy leaders, and so on down to inhibited
drudges, servants, or slaves.
Therefore, the common goal of these social conventions and hierarchic structures of dominance,
unconscious in the minds of all individuals, in fact is to perpetuate the erstwhile flock we today call
clan, gang, band, circle, club, group, sorority, organization, crowd, mass, society, nation, and
civilization. However, this is not the easy, obvious, and peaceful, enterprise the most ingenuous of
us figure. In reason of a natural competition for survival, deeply and durably ingrained in the mind
of Man, and regardless his claim of solidarity with the mass of his likes, be it ethnical, racial,
cultural, or else, then futile disputes, feuds, and bloody wars inescapably arise. The causes or real
aims actually are one that is the need to being individually, also responsible for the struggle for
dominance, since ruling and being respected as the ruler better serve survival than being ruled,
generally. Wherefrom, the births and rises of religions, each with its lot of rules, regulations, laws,
and rites, and then of political doctrines and systems supported by various justifications we call
myths and narratives. This lot of rules, regulations, laws, and rites, all and always converge toward
the same goal of regulating the hazardous excesses of the competition between individuals, to thus
help fulfill the need to being of the species, in an ever natural way. We notice that the latter actually
is a regulating mechanism coming to prevent the excesses of Man, simply caused by his superior
intelligence and unique capacity among all other species to produce abstractions and to busy his
mind all day long with those abstractions.
Now, I tell my own opinion on behavioral biology from my experience and no longer from the
viewpoint of the DGSE, as this agency does not have any beyond this point. Studies on history of
civilizations—such as Toynbee’s to cite the most complete, objective, and enlightening, overall—
show that sincere beliefs in supernatural or metaphysical notions, completely irrelevant to the actual
conditions in the actual world of space, time, and history, and their evolutions toward accomplished
religions, finally make sense when seen from a sociological standpoint.[144] For they indeed gave
birth to secular political systems of laws, regulations, and governances, and not the reverse. The
later remark remains true, even if some retort that the new secular systems are supported by rational
principles inspired by ancient philosophers, and even though I will provide the reader with other
fundamentals in manipulation that also challenge it. Then come to add to the latter remark, my
previous summary reminder of the myth of Sorel and of the narrative, and my description of the
method of the formal aims to reach the real aims that, two millennia ago, applied in religious system
of governance, already.[145]
It is timely to precise that behavioral biology, contrary to “conventional behaviorism,” is
politically inspired by the French progressive thought not to say Marxist-Leninist in certain
respects, even though the bias no more invalidates its premises than the findings and theories of
many notoriously leftist, anarchist, and far-rightist thinkers and scientists. They all draw their own
conclusions that are complementary and thus constitute together a correct and highly detailed
analysis of the society of men, in the end. In fact, this political dimension of behavioral biology
arises only when this discipline is seeking to demonstrate the irrationality and absurdity of religion
because indeed it does it so. That is why the psychiatrists and other experts in manipulation,
influence, agitprop, and disinformation of the DGSE closely associate behavioral biology with the
theories of Freud.[146] For Freud, I quote in substance because I am summing up his conclusion,
further validates this claim when he says, in his Civilization and its Discontent in particular, that
religion is an underlying expression of neuroses and distress, a childish need for a powerful father
figure expected to tame Man’s natural propensity to being aggressive, since there is no solution to
this problem anyway.
Thus, the good practitioner in behavioral biology is implicitly expected be a secular. However,
the theories of this discipline are not forthcoming or very clear on the struggle between the need to
being of the individual and that of his species. Still from a personal viewpoint, the theories cannot
but be inchoate as they still depend on relevant discoveries on the evolution of the human brain to
come, if ever—why would it stop? Proponents of the leftist thought, and French politicians and
propagandists of the DGSE alike, seem to self-contradict regularly on this question. Sometimes,
they contend that one should show no compunction in sacrificing the well-being of the individual to
preserve the stability of the collective. Sometimes, they do the exact opposite by siding with
minorities—through their agents of influence and other proxies—claiming new and exotic rights
clashing with the established social customs of the majority. At this point, of course, we are back
again to the method of the formal aims serving the real aims: confuse and rule, and divide and
conquer, take precedence over concerns for scientific accuracy. After all, even if Marx and Engels
wanted to replace religion with science, thus walking in the footsteps of their French inspirer Saint-
Simon, yet they did not believe in science for science’s sake, but only as an argument in Marx’s own
doctrine fiercely holding that religion is a hindrance to reason, which remain his personal reason
and not a scientific discovery, nonetheless.[147]
Behavioral biology is very convincing on the innate need to being individually and its three
fundamental drives. However, it stops short of providing similarly complete explanations on the
other areas of the brain responsible for acquired knowledge and experience, which indeed serve also
the need to being of the species by regulating the innate drives. To put it otherwise, behavioral
biology neither explains why nor how these two other areas of the brain produces invariably the
same regulating mechanism throughout history, regardless of the place, race, and culture. For, past
the French political correctness, the latter mechanism indeed produces the intelligible form of a
belief in a religion supporting a set of rules, which not only relieves the complex burden of the need
for the survival of the species, but is also accountable for its recent, sudden, and spectacular shift in
its evolution, we call, “birth of civilization”.[148] My point, herein, is that the all-French rejection of
the theories of Jung, to dig a bit deeper in this point of contention, perhaps is a mistake.[149]
Especially since it appears to be justified by a concern—itself of a metaphysical order—for
enforcing a progressive political doctrine and a dogmatic belief, for that matter, in fierce laic claims
decided by the ruling elite in France. Perhaps, the problem with this simply is that psychological
referents to traditional religious terms are not yet satisfying and convincing enough to French
specialists in behavioral sciences and to others elsewhere.
 Nonetheless, political science does not question the validity of the method of resorting to
irrelevant and utopian arguments to establish and to propose formal aims to the masses for making
the real aims come true. Since then, religious beliefs alike do not have to be true to the same masses
to believe them, and then to make them abide their rules, no nonsensical, since they obviously serve
the survival of their species in fine.
That is not yet all because the same religious beliefs, we notice again, serve also the development
of the full potentialities of each individual in those masses, and his quest for wholeness that the
innate need and drives originating in his reptilian brain cannot process. Honestly acknowledging
these simple facts would reconcile religion and politics to the benefit of all organized societies, a
laudable step Russia recently made, regardless what the final objective of this sudden and striking
change could be. The reality of the change of course is that Putin, and those who brought him to
power, espoused Christian faith for the masses in order to maintain their power over them; formal
aims for real aims, still and always. End of aside about the Russian would-be-reconciliation between
secular politics and religion.
Émile Durkheim, French sociologist and founding father of modern social science, for the record,
was the first, apparently, to say and to acknowledge objectively, basing on serious anthropological
studies, that religion is an expression of social cohesion. Not only it is not imaginary at all, since it
is very real as an expression of the society itself, he specified, but also there is no such a thing as a
society sans religion. More interestingly with regard to what I just explained in this chapter,
somehow as Jung did, Durkheim further said that religion is an expression of something he
describes as a “collective consciousness” in Mankind, which would be the fusion of the
consciousness of all its individuals, each creating a reality of his own.
The latter theory, indeed could make an elegant and fascinating alternative description of both the
scientifically established herd instinct and the need to being of the species, but which would limit to
the human species, thus invalidating itself from the viewpoint of a would-be-unifying behavioral
biology. Simultaneously, this would give reason to Jung, since his theory says that Man’s belief in a
supreme and supernatural being is innate, which statement establishes implicitly a connection in
thought between all individuals of Mankind, somehow akin to this herd instinct, precisely. At this
point, I do not feel enlightened enough to elaborate further in my attempt to explain behavioral
biology, and I am already wandering a little too far from what the reader ought to know about it.
Nonetheless, we know that the set of rules associated with religion I just alluded to—such as the
Ten Commandments of the Bible—is accountable for fostering social conventions necessary to
accessing the stage of civilization. That is to say, respect towards each other aka the Golden Rule
that one can find in about all religions and philosophies in the World, not to say all of them.
However, it comes as an additional vulnerability to manipulation from the viewpoint of the DGSE
because with the knowledge I explained heretofore, the thoroughbred intelligence officer who
learned it—even if empirically as I specified, and not at all the way I am teaching the reader—is
offered still more possibilities when manipulating or recruiting somebody. End of my personal
remark on behavioral biology.
Below, is one good and simple example of manipulation relying on those acquired social
conventions that Man may find difficult to tame, which the DGSE teaches to all its future field
agents and intelligence officers. The reader must note that it greatly differs from the previous
example of the yawning, an innate urge, which makes other people yawn because this other
manipulation relies on acquired conditioning.
Applauding someone’s performance is a social convention, and not a drive, of course, aiming to
encourage the performer to persevere in his quest for self-improvement, and so for the aforesaid
development of his full potentialities. In the brain of this performer, this action stimulates a network
of neuronal connections called reward system, which is also an important vulnerability to
manipulation, to be explained soon.
If he wishes, the reader can manipulate the audience in a theater without prior experience, simply
by starting to applaud when he thinks fit. At first, the applause of few people will follow at once.
Then the entire audience will applause if he persists and strikes vigorously enough, or he can make
the applauses resume by keeping going on when they decrease. The more energetically he will clap
his hands, the more people will follow him in his enthusiasm. The trick works every time;
guaranteed. In the chapter 26, we will see that an elaborate derivative of it can make an unknown
artist famous overnight or, more precisely and appropriately, an agent of influence provided with a
cover activity of artist. Pending this moment, I present a few other examples showing how easily it
is possible to manipulate people by exploiting their social conditioning, yet unbeknownst to them,
again.
Before leaving the toilets in a restaurant, leave the tap of one of the sinks wide open. The next
person who will enter the toilet will certainly take the trouble to shut it down, even if he uses
another sink; the experiment will work again in many other ways, with closet’s doors left open or an
empty wallet left on a sidewalk intentionally. What if all these things have been poisoned to trigger
a handicapping disease or an illness possibly fatal? The “trick of the lost wallet” may be used as a
way to send anonymously a message or a threat slipped inside to someone who must pick it up, if it
is foreseen that he will take a precise path and none other. Thus, the target will be hardly in position
to claim the message “was addressed to him personally” because anyone would think he is paranoid,
if ever he does this.
Finally, Man’s mind has one or several of these flaws we call addiction, neurosis, disorder,
perversion, and mania, inescapably and to a varying degree. Against the possible expectation of the
reader, they all are likely to serve manipulations. Psychological disorders must be understood as
corollaries of the complexity of the human brain, for the record, which, in point of fact, gradually
disappear as we go down a range of intellectual capacities by species. We may hear of wild and rare
races of cats but seldom of cats with borderline personality disorder, and dogs, cows, and birds with
schizophrenic paranoia remain very rare disturbances. On a learning course, a psychiatrist of the
DGSE explained to me that we, humans, all have neuroses—a word of Freudian origin, again, the
reader may notice—, no matter how balanced we are. Often, we fail to notice those neuroses
because they did not grow enough for people who did not learn psychiatry to spot them; about as
not everyone can spot exterior signs of alcohol and drug addiction. Most of those neuroses may
easily grow and overwhelm us when we enter a stage of prolonged stress, and thus they become
obvious. The DGSE is looking for neuroses that only exist in a latent form when it is recruiting its
future employees and agents, thus justifying the years-long duration of its recruiting processes and
the oddity of many of their tests. The stimulating effect of stress on neuroses has been well rendered
in the film Cube (1997), directed by Vincenzo Natali, and for the first time and most famously in
The Caine Mutiny (1967), directed by Edward Dmytryk. It has been more realistically brought to the
knowledge of the public thanks to the Stanford Prison Experiment, made in 1971 by the Stanford
University under the supervision of psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo, which was the theme of
one interesting film adaptation, at least.
Once thus spotted, a psychological trouble may be of a type either incompatible with working in
an intelligence agency as full-time employee or, on the contrary, taken as a suitable opportunity in
an individual to manipulate him to execute a mission of a particular sort, as we have seen earlier.
The US intelligence community subsumes all leverages for manipulating an individual in four
broad generic categories, which case officers of the U.S. CIA for long learn in mnemonic form from
the acronym MICE, meaning, for the record,
• Money (as bait),
• Ideology (true believer),
• Constraint (blackmail/threat), and
• Ego (pride/vanity).
As remarkable exception, all employees of the DGSE know this acronym and they are making
good use of it, even, probably because it is a U.S. import backing in time before 1966, when France
was still a faithful member of the NATO. However, the presence of the money argument must bring
the reader to understand that the DGSE and the DGSI are not content with paying for the
intelligence they obtain from a source. Money is only used as bait, actually, and this reality differs
from what the would-be-source always figures. We have seen that the DGSE does its best not to pay
its agents in proportion to the services they render, just as the French police that pay its snitches in
cash is a tale that comes to hide the reality of a threat serving a blackmail. Case officers strive to
make this deception last as long as possible with their agents and sources, when they threaten them
and promise to them a reward “upon the completion of their missions,” simultaneously. The case of
the DGSE that rewards a defector is very rare, contrary to what many assume; the few lucky
rewarded exist, but only for the sake of seducing other potential candidates who will never be
compensated in any way.[150]
When the DGSE promises a gain of some sort, it never does it clearly and explicitly. Instead, this
agency arranges for the agent and the source to believe, entirely by their own, that their rewards
“will go without saying,” thus relying on the otherwise normal and common assumption that
companies pay their employees at the end of the month. However, the DGSE and the DGSI, as most
intelligence agencies in the World, neither pay nor reward their sources for their services as they did
not explicitly promised anything of these sorts, and only hinted at this possibility instead—actually,
they never give anything even they formally promised a reward. Rewards are given only and truly
when this serves another aim of which the recipient knows nothing or will know eventually,
generally.
Manipulating by resorting to ideological motives extends over a very long period, generally; the
whole life of the agent or source, commonly—that is what “handling” is about. When ideology is
the motive, the tactic consists in ever challenging the loyalty and sincerity of the agent, under-agent,
or source. Thus, the asset must be brought to do his best to prove his sincere and indefectible
commitment “to the cause,” and the reward he however expects for his loyalty will be nothing but
the ever-elusive trust of his handler who ever moves the goalposts. Of course, the agent or source of
this other breed will never be rewarded either, especially if he has been recruited under a false flag.
As the case officers of the DGSE are rewarded financially in proportion to the results they obtain
from their agents and sources, since the former are hired to exploit others due to their pathological
lack of empathy, this is the best incentive this agency found to make the running of the latter last as
long as possible.
Manipulating a source on ideological pretenses requires his prior thorough psychological
assessment, which task is often difficult to carry out, due to the great diversity of the true and hidden
motives on which the alibi of ideological claims must take place. This is the way the expert
psychiatrists of the DGSE define ideological motives and all other types of commitments, which
include psychological attachment,[151] for the ideological commitment always hides a more personal
motive that often is not fully conscious or is suppressed because it stems from a frustration or
followed some trauma. It can be a disappointment the person refuses to admit because it can hardly
be perceived as noble or legitimate, a need for revenge following a deep vexation, a painful
deception or discontent, or a past tragic event loosely associated with politics or the like, accidental
or not. Very often, the commitment followed a series of failures that aroused a psychological
downfall initially, which led the person to relinquish gradually his self-esteem and then to believe in
an abstract ideal deemed noble, enhancing, and bringing and binding other people together, i.e. a
collective substitute for his ego.[152]
Typical to the latter case are people who say they “found a new family” upon their joining some
group. Then we find the particular yet frequent case of the opportunist with a strong ego, who found
in his commitment to a cause that others perceive as unselfish and noble an easy way to be loved
unconditionally. Typically, the ideologue of the latter sort remains insensitive to criticisms addressed
to him personally. He is very sensitive, on the contrary, to the slightest criticism against the ideology
he committed to, and to its supporters he often perceives irrationally, again, as his “second
family”[153] either, but few of them prove able to enough self-control and wit to fake the posture.
It is worth mentioning the so-called “forty-year-old syndrome” that, for the record, is the
disappointment that an individual, always around this age, may feel for not having had the
promotion he thinks he deserved, while his colleagues had it although they are younger and less
competent than he is, truly or in his opinion regardless. Such recruits are particularly vulnerable to
corruption because they no longer see any virtue in their commitment, hard work, and loyalty. The
DGSE knows well this and considers it when it is interested in recruiting as source a senior
executive, engineer, or scientist, between other examples.
Resorting to the lever of ideology is easier when the commitment of the target locates in whatever
far end of the political spectrum or in religious extremism.[154] On the contrary, it can be difficult if
not impossible to make the indifferent commit to such abstract concepts. Yet the flip of this coin is
that the indifferent who does not feels concerned about any abstraction, and who generally opposes
passivity to social events and political and religious issues, is easy to buy and to corrupt.
In all cases, the opposite notions selfish vs. unselfish are among the most important to identify in
a target to be manipulated or recruited, along with the other, fighter vs. runner. This is not
necessarily as quick and easy as it seems, even though an intelligence agency such as the DGSE is
always ready to go to great lengths not to give or surrender anything to the one it wants to
manipulate, recruit, or from whom it expects a service whatever it may be. This particularity with
this agency is the more striking each time it invests considerable technical means, highly
sophisticated tricks, efforts, time, and even amounts of money to reach this goal. For it comes as a
contradiction when it is blatantly obvious that, often, it could instantly succeed at a bargain simply
by offering first a compensation of some sort in exchange for the expected outcome to materialize,
with the allegiance of the target as a bonus.[155] The main and sometimes only causes of this
contradiction are, obtaining something by bargaining is not an option, and the DGSE must never
give up nor ever relinquish a single inch of ground, regardless of the cost in the end. This
intransigence is the more stringent once the thus solicited party or target understands the will of this
agency to obtain something unconditionally. When the target holds firm to his position, the ensuing
battle of wills draws invariably this agency into a poker game-like dilemma in which its reputation
of inflexibility must remain unquestionable, especially in the eyes of its employees and agents who
witness its unfolding. Backtracking or even yielding a single inch of ground to the target, considered
at this point as a “stubborn and insolent opponent” for the sole reason of his balking and resistance
to coercion, would constitute “a bad example that some could be tempted to follow”.
Recruiting someone as a source by resorting to a threat, i.e. constraint, is one of the most
frequently encountered schemes, largely explained in the previous chapters, already.
Otherwise, the DGSE has a special fondness for manipulating by tackling ego. Indeed, pride is
the first weakness this agency is looking for when ideology is not self-evident in a potentially
interesting target. In its principle, manipulation by the ego works the same way as in the first
example of the hungry man who compromises himself by delivering a “Pandora box.” For hunger
for pride and honors both produce a same strong need to be fulfilled forthwith, even though the
stimulated area of the human brain in this other case is not the reptilian brain, but a neural network
called reward system, which I only named earlier. Behavioral biology applied to human intelligence
is also insisting on the importance of the reward system aka reward pathway aka mesolimbic
pathway[156] because this particular area of the brain is responsible for motivation, wanting, desire,
and crave for rewards of very varied sorts. Additionally, it induces appetitive behavior and
consumption behavior and is responsible for stimulating the need to being of the species by
associating the action of sex with an intense and rewarding sensation of pleasure. Without this
feeling that the reward system remembers from the first experience, it would probably consider sex
as an inexplicable craving, which it must nevertheless satisfy, much like the need to urinate.
The reward system produces innate drives, but it has the particular quality to be capable to
acquire and to process additional needs through experience all along the life of the brain. For
example, early in Man’s infancy, the reward system reacts positively to the caress and song of the
mother who thus appeases him, and eventually to compliments as rewards for good conduct, and to
the offering of candies and toys on occasions presented as special and exceptional. Note the
association between abstract notions and pleasurable sensations, which thus not only trains the
reward system, but also teaches it to “cooperate” closely with the neocortex responsible for
memory.
Once the young child becomes mature enough to go to school, his reward system is trained the
same way with good grades for good works and results, which intermediary stage of his growth
prepares him to crave honors that are still more rewarding. From a general standpoint, in Man as in
all mammals, the reward system is a fundamental brain circuit that reinforces certain behaviors by
providing the motivation necessary for achievements to materialize. That is how the reward system
of the civilized individual uses to be regularly stimulated; thereof, teaching to the neocortex what is
good and what is not by experiencing corresponding rewards and punishments—considering that no
reward is also a punishment by frustrating the reward system, additionally. Thus, he is made able to
behave in a way profitable to him as it is also profitable to the society as a whole, and that is why
about everyone is trained in one’s infancy according to the very behaviorist system of reward and
punishment—or to the tit-for-tat tactic of game theory, one could also say.
Except, as an aside, in those cases of children of the elite, whose parents train early in age to be
future rulers and to be obeyed and respected unconditionally by those who do not belong to their
exclusive social middle. Indeed, in the French elite, there is even a method, precise and highly
codified, to thus train children. It includes riding horses early in age, which in this country aims to
train kids to be assisted and served by obviously adult and lower class palfreys, and to be used to
physically and socially look down at other people who cannot afford to pay and to enjoy free time
for horse-riding, let alone particular relations with adult servants at home. Then they are taught
precise ways to dress and to behave in society, how to hold a fork and a knife, a pen, and other
stereotyped attitudes, codes of conduct, and precise words to be reproduced and repeated in
corresponding situations. That is to say, all things meant to become conditioned automatisms, which
later allow individuals of the French upper class to recognize each other quickly and easily, and to
spot who truly does not come from the same cradle. For anyone pretends to be a member of this
higher society, soon or late makes a mistake and thus betrays his real social middle of origin, simply
because he strives to reproduce consciously habits and social uses that are conditioned attitudes and
responses in all people raised by parents of the elite.
As those children are reaching their teenage years, their parents organize for them expensive
socialite parties they call “rallies” (in French). Although a rally is introduced to children of the
upper class as a joyful event, similar to an expensive birthday party sans gifts, the true and sole
purpose of it is to use them to know and to befriend each other, and to prepare unions between boys
and girls of the same exclusive society, early in age, as a safety net against the risk, highly likely
otherwise, that one’s child dates and marries a partner of lower economic and social extraction.
People who attempt to infiltrate the elite in the aim to prosper in life through a shorter and easier
path, but who never experience a rally in their infancies, have little chance to succeed this way.
All such practices have been set and perfected by the French monarchic noblesse initially, but
they survived all revolutions and social upheavals, and even imposed themselves in the progressive
circles of the French elite until today. This should not be surprising, however, as identical or highly
similar social provisions also exist in nearly all countries of the World to ensure the survival of their
elite, and more especially in European countries where the circulation of elite[157] opens
exceptionally only to individuals of the lower and middle classes.[158]
As questionable as it may seem, at first glance, this self-protection of the elite I just described,
which is even not the political and ruling elite, has the crucial usefulness to preserving the highest
standards of civility, mores, and tastes that, reunited as a core, is the model without which any
nation loses the landmarks that makes it a civilized society. Reference manuals on good manners are
written after the mores and customs of those exclusive societies that remains largely and generally
religious abiding, and about indifferent to contemporary political doctrines in truth. In point of fact,
its members do not even admit in their midst the political leaders and successful businessmen who
express their desire to join it; in France, the former reject the latter with polite contempt and
describe them pejoratively as roturiers, or “commoners”.
As a matter of fact, in about all countries we find commonly trainings that are similar in their
aims yet not so highly codified and sophisticated, in families that are not necessarily of the upper
class but in which politics or religion or both hold a place of extraordinary importance, which thus
condition the minds of their children respectively. However, in those other instances, the success of
the methods is not guaranteed and even often result in unintended or opposite behaviors when
submission, obedience, and good results are poorly or not at all rewarded correspondingly. Indeed,
there is an entirely opposite way to condition the mind of children, and of adult alike, by feeding
their minds to a degree excessive enough to produce an aversion strong enough to trigger
physiological effects; wherefrom the Latin adverb ad nauseam. Coincidence makes that an
espionage film, The Assignment (1997), I cited earlier in another context, features the method that is
a particular form of manipulation not so remote in its principle to reverse psychology.
On the long run, all these simple stimulations that are flattery, honors, gifts, awards, prizes, and
medals, and whose effectiveness relies essentially to mere repetition, prepare the reward system to
react to ulterior and new inspirations increasingly sophisticated and abstract, together help fulfill the
need to being. The stimulations train each individual to behave in accordance with the tastes and
fashions of the moment of and of the society, ultimate form of the flock of his remotest ancestors, to
fulfill more or less consciously the herd instinct today called “belongingness” aka “need for
belonging,” itself spurred by a need for safety that the need to being commands.
That is how and why Man evolving in today’s world, now filled with new, numerous, and highly
codified abstract notions, social concepts, and rules of conduct must adapt to their complex
exigencies to satisfy his needs for food, water, safety, shelter, and sex. Each of those exigencies
coming to condition the fulfillment of the need to being and its herd instinct compels him, as
examples, to look for elaborate clothing, accessories, jewelry, sophisticated design and power in
motorbikes and cars, and many other things of the same abstract order.
Finally, the grown-up individual can even train his reward system by his own, by developing
interests in ever more abstract, sophisticated, and personal things and notions ranging from fine
wines, painters, sculptors, particular animals, rare books, flowers, fishing, hunting, guns, and all
those said-to-be collectibles things and “limited / exclusive series”. We notice that the reward
system can be trained to react positively and to produce pleasurable feelings in response to
absolutely anything, including inflicting violence, killing, and other activities and manias that most
other people reject, condemn, or just find weird.
In passing, but importantly, the neuronal network of the reward system, and others areas of the
brain “storing” the “gathering of recollections” that make up for experience and knowledge, closely
connect together and are largely accountable for what the character of any grown-up individual is.
They even physically develop, indeed, through creations or neurons and the establishing of
connections between these fundamental brain’s components from the first day of birth to childhood
and until the end of the teenage years, between the ages of 17 of 21 on average. That is to say, all
along the stage of physical growth in Man that is also that of his brain. That is why the way our
parents raise us, along the stage of physical growth of our brain, shapes the character we have once
we reach adulthood and even earlier, definitively. Thus, if our parents were smart, well educated,
honest, and kind and forbearing with us during our childhood, we are likely to be similarly good and
pleasant adults. If our parents were the exact opposite, then we would probably be stupid and mean
as adults; sociopaths, most likely. If ever our parents were smart, well educated, and honest people
yet they could not be attentive enough with us, there is a good chance we be not well balanced as
adults. If they were rich but spoiled us because they felt guilt for their too frequent professional and
social absences, then we are lucky not to be cold and narcissistic, unattached people.
I present the following extreme and imaginary example that should help the reader understand
definitively the importance of this stage in Man’s life. A child who would simply be fed until the
end of his teenage years without contact with anyone, if such a thing were possible, would thus
become nothing but a wild animal with human physical features upon entering adulthood,
irreversibly. He would seem neither happy nor unhappy, and he would act on impulse, thoughtlessly,
only. He would satisfy his most elementary needs and deal with threats without any recognizable
form of civility and kindness; that is to say, without delay and whenever possible. He would not
have these consciousness and personality we first consider when we want to define what a human
being is. Possibly, he would even be a potentially dangerous being to be dealt with suitable caution.
My descriptions above are four options only, plus an extreme and impossible one, chosen in a
much richer alternative to which countless other social and environmental variables and accidental
experiences come to add. That is why we all are very different in character and in many other
subtleties, and why perfectly manipulating someone claims the prior assessment of what kind of
person he is, exactly.
Remember that those traits of our personalities are not just products of an immaterial gathering of
data stored in a memory that would be “erasable” and “rewritable” at will, as a computer program or
artificial intelligence can be. What we call “our mind,” to differentiate it with our physical brain that
contains it, indeed has been built piece by piece, physically, as many neural creations and
connections along the years of our physical growth that ends with our teenage years. The latter
explanation implies that the part of our memory—in the largest sense of this word—that is built
between the first day of our life and the end of adolescence cannot be “deprogramed,” contrary to
what some sci-fi and espionage films and some gurus of pseudo sciences suggest and pretend.
Except, of course, in cases of physical destructions or alteration of certain areas of our brain such as
lethal accidents, Alzheimer’s disease, and brain tumors. Things are different with the information
our brain acquires and records past this stage of physical growth, since neuronal creations and
connections no longer accompany the process.[159]
When the DGSE recruits, trains, and indoctrinates somebody with the expectation to make him a
field agent, a psychiatrist instructs the recruiting staff to proceed in a way that truly aims to
tampering with his reward system, and to altering the subsequent meanings of the gathering of
recollections that are his experience / knowledge. Now, the reader can fully understand why the
DGSE treats its recruits with complete disregard for what they may think or say about the odd
ordeals they are put through. He also understands why this agency does not want to tell to its
recruits the real reasons underlying this so particular and upsetting process, in the facts carried out
in a very scientific and detached way, exactly as with a guinea pig, even when one of them clearly
understands it all, as it happens sometimes, though rarely.
The same scientific principles applies in the ways this agency sets up and carries out a
manipulation and a recruitment alike, much close this time to the theories and principles of
behaviorism, since it relies on challenging and tampering with information / data that the
mammalian brain and the neocortex process. In other words, it consists in substituting pleasurable
sensation with others, essentially by making artificially and abnormally unpleasant or hazardous
certain practices, social customs, and other things and notions that are not in normal situations. The
goal is to change the way somebody reacts when facing certain situations in particular, and / or
when presented certain notions and things, to that effect.
Medals and honors of varied sorts, down to “likes” on Facebook, “views” on YouTube, and other
positive comments are thought and designed for stimulating suitably the reward system and, above
all, they are advantageously inexpensive from the viewpoint of the DGSE. Notoriously, many famed
writers, journalists, painters, singers, actors, and film directors crave public recognition, and
develop excessive pride and arrogance, simultaneously. The reward system is accountable, again,
for developing the latter behavioral traits when it is excessively stimulated with other’s praise,
exactly the same way as abnormal abundance and richness in food may easily breeds gluttony.
Flattery may thus become addictive in the full sense of the adjective.
As the abstract information / data this part of the brain processes is felt as a hardly controllable
urge, then the addicted just does not want to know that “Mephistopheles is the Devil’s
representative,” if I may put things that way, exactly as it happens to the hungry man who delivers a
parcel in his expectation to have the food he badly needs. Others perceive the behavior as willful
blindness, regardless whether what causes it is consequent to staged circumstances or not.
When those who thus behave enjoy fame, already, and became used to have it, then they are
looking compulsively for a still more powerful stimulant they have not yet been able to access, such
as virtue. Alternatively, their reward system reached a point of over-stimulation at which it was
“dulled,” for it is quick at becoming addicted and fed off, ultimately, with anything stimulates it
with abnormal frequency and intensity; that is to say, about the same way as drug addiction does,
since the reward system actually is accountable for this other phenomenon either.[160]
Along the process summarily described above, most people become easily addicted to success,
fame, unconditional love, and power, of course, to a degree that makes them much more vulnerable
than they assumed before their accessing to these stimulants in unlimited quantities. It is in no way
exaggeration to say that these rewards thus become in their minds as vital as food is to the hungry of
my earlier example. Then they are overwhelmed with the advantages of choice and attractive
opportunities in nearly everything, which explains in passing why they become unable to lead the
same emotional life as balanced people do. They hardly remain attached to a same partner in life;
that is to say, long enough to found a stable and balanced family. Typically, instead, many of them
seem to have lost themselves in a ceaseless quest for an ideal partner they never find, since an
insatiable and uncontrollable need for ever-greater pleasure and pride that their reward system
demands, irrational at some point in this evolution as drug consumption is, has overridden the
thoughtful process of their reason.
Cases of famous and / or rich and / or highly influential people whose reward system
demonstrates an unusual resilience to those high and constant stimulations remain scarce, enough to
draw the particular attention of a minority of those who adulate them, and of journalists,
biographers, and historians. Even rarer are such people who do not express interest in committing to
some cause either; they are among the most difficult to manipulate or to recruit. They are highly
intelligent in addition, generally and logically, because they previously acquired enough experience
/ knowledge to tame their basic urges with effectiveness. In the DGSE, it is said colloquially and
metaphorically that all such qualities once reunited endow somebody with a “cuirasse” (“cuirass”).
In short, I am talking about people whose weakness is ego, and who want to be loved for who
they are and no longer only for what they are, still unconditionally. They are not recruited for spying
on, therefore, but for doing influence and propaganda, spurred by the sole and selfish expectation to
be ever more admired and loved, or else loved again when they are experiencing a downfall. That is
how they end up committing to causes completely unrelated to their ordinary activities, usually
relevant to a large French or / and progressive agenda.
As an aside, the DGSE seldom uses for long famous foreigners it thus corrupts; this agency tends
to abandon or disregard them after a few years of their services, to focus instead on new similar
targets. The main cause of it is that a large majority of those VIPs and people the DGSE corrupts
successfully seldom commit sincerely to French values and agenda in reality, and are rather
motivated by mere opportunism in the depth of themselves. At some point in their lives, they have
been lured or bought by flattery and false promises of greater fame and honors. The second cause is
they mistakenly believed that by committing to certain political issues, thus they would have
acquired “a nobility of soul”. As the reality of their financial needs they were used to catches them
back at some point, they realize, too late, that they were wandering away from what truly and only
made them successful and loved.
I happened to hear about some American celebrities the DGSE wanted to corrupt in the aim to
make them political activists, that is to say, agents of influence, as this agency commonly does.
However, each of those times, the DGSE collectively and truly considered those people (in both
senses given to this word, today) with contempt because of what and who they were above all; that
is to say, regardless whether they claimed sympathy for France and progressive values or not. Those
circumstances I witnessed allow me to give two examples among those Americans people the
DGSE targeted circa 1999: film director Irvin Kershner and actor Robert De Niro. An intelligence
officer of the DGSE I knew well approached Kershner to “test” him on an edition of the Deauville
American Film Festival. At about the same time, this agency had a particular interest in the most
intimate aspects of De Niro’s privacy and character, to the point that even what the actor was saying
and doing during some of his trips in private jets was spied on and dutifully recorded, i.e. he was
psychologically assessed as target.
Sometimes, the DGSE lured successfully and / or definitively corrupted several such famous
American actors and filmmakers just for the sake of convincing the public that France and the ideas
this country defends are better than the United States and its, and not much more; that is to say, an
action of cultural / political influence. Russia does the same for the same reasons, exactly, and she
succeeded with a handful of popular American actors either. Even North Korea made for itself a
notoriety with the practice, with much fewer such famous people.
Spying on is an activity that would not suit at all the particular profile and needs of those people,
anyway. They truly are not interested in committing to any cause that would logically lead them to
spy on something or someone, since they would have to be highly frustrated materially and socially
for this, first, as the field agent is. Many of them happen to be frustrated, at last, when for one
reason or another their popularity knows a downturn. Therefrom, as their reward system uses to be
ever satisfied, they perceive unconsciously any prolonged shortage of consideration and love as a
threat or even as a form of aggression because they interpret it as “disrespect”. They think it may be
a “temporary situation,” sort of “desert crossing,” but maybe not; how could they know?
Thenceforth, angst settles in their minds because they are smart enough to evaluate the long-term
consequences of their new situation of second-rate people; their need to being is threatened and
stress may ensue.
In their particular case, first, they attempt to fight against the unexpected turn of fate, in vain the
more often, simply because some new challengers whose popularities are rising are stealing their.
Thus, they are about to yield to fleeing, since fighting does not pay off; that is to say, fleeing the
formalization of their new ranking as “second rate famous people”. At this point, their vulnerability
is at its highest, and some skilled spies somewhere in some offices are lurking about this. The wolf
pack attacks the disoriented target. The rest of the story generally is an unexpected promising
“opportunity to be seized quickly; of the kind one would be stupid to miss,” but whose
consequences will be definitive, it is not specified. This is the pact with the Devil, made possible
through willful blindness, the way I alluded to earlier.
However, the DGSE—and the DGSI alike—do not consider ego as a reliable and long-lasting
vulnerability to manipulation because an opponent can outbid on it easily, and take over the thus
motivated individual to make him working for his benefit. This is why a second manipulation
follows, based on a surer leverage, this time, i.e. about the same as what was in the parcel that the
hungry man of my earlier example delivered.
According to the DGSE, the four levers of manipulation of the U.S. intelligence community do
not cover all possibilities because others proved effective, as we will see in other chapters.
Additionally, the reader may note, sex is absent from the list, whereas the DGSE, the DGSI, and
other intelligence agencies resort frequently to this leverage. This is because most intelligence
agencies consider that one can hardly manipulate or corrupt a thoroughbred foreign spy with a
honey trap. So far, it is true, but all persons of interest to an intelligence service are not necessarily
skilled spies.
The DGSE tries to dissuade all its rookies in their recruitments and trainings from yielding to
advances of sexual nature and even to purely sentimental opportunities by resorting to very
Pavlovian methods, this time. In the facts, this agency instructs attractive male and female agents to
approach and to entice the future agent or employee, and this is not about one-time tests because the
DGSE asks those “agent provocateurs” to be insisting to be insisting along periods that may span
months. If ever the recruit responds favorably to one such solicitation, he is “punished” in various
possible ways, and in the first place by an unexpected and brutal change of behavior in the would-be
partner, or else by the sudden onset of another accomplice instructed to play the role of the angry
spouse or boyfriend who makes a scandal. The pattern repeats again along different scenarios as
long as the recruit falls in the trap, and punishments become increasingly unpleasant, until the
presence of an attractive person or an opportunity to have sex inhibits him. No justification,
explanation, or preliminaries accompany the tests, in accordance with the rule of the implicit
demand because his refusal to give in to an opportunity of a sexual nature must be a conditioned
response, and not a conscious compliance with a rule.
The DGSE and the DGSI never give up trying to approach the agent of a rival foreign agency by
resorting to the bait of sex because they know that an agent suffers often from his loneliness, his
prolonged abstinence because his relationship with his legal spouse deteriorated, or simply out of
prolonged frustration, i.e. looking for a way to compensate psychologically. These agencies are
right because, when an agent comes to believe he is safe from the monitoring of his agency, he may
possibly yield to a sexual or and romance opportunity or even simply to friendship.
However, it is true that a long-lasting manipulation by resorting to sex or feeling of love
exclusively remains rare. Usually when sex, love, or friendship is involved to bait a foreign agent or
a targeted ordinary individual, the mistress, the lover, or the friend that the DGSE hired and
instructed introduces eventually the target to one or several accomplices who will catch him
definitively and firmly with a surer leverage. The mistress will have a “brother who is a dangerous
drug dealer,” the lover a “narcissistic perverse wife who has influential friends,” the good friend
other “friends who will turn out to be police officers,” or any other tricks of the same vein. Often,
the mistress will pretend to be pregnant, or she will be pregnant for real in the case of a highly
valued target. Then blackmail about the undesired child will take place, accompanied by a request
for alimony that means other than money can pay, of course. On the short run, ordinary sex can pay
off when used with an uninitiated individual such as a politician or a CEO, whereas sex that is more
exotic may easily do for long years. It is at the end of a trade of this kind that the DGSE may
content itself with what it obtained, or else may resume the handling by resorting to stronger means
of persuasion.
Manipulation, recruitment, and coercion through friendship is also frequent on the short run, but
it remains rare on the long run. Actually, friendship is the first step of a tactic aiming to drive the
target to a trap, in a large majority of instances. John le Carré, in his essay The Unbearable Peace
(1991) presents the true story of Brigadier Jean-Louis Jeanmaire, a Swiss Army officer who spied
for the Soviet Union from 1962 to 1975 simply out of mere friendship with a spy who posed as a
diplomat.
The DGSE and the DGSI commonly resort to staged accidental encounters as a way to approach
a target. The DGSE calls this technique ouvrir un contact (opening a contact) or tamponner
[quelqu’un] (bumping into [someone]) when it limits (generally) to a proposition to cooperate. I
explain explain how opening a contact unfolds, below.
In the first place, the target is put under discreet surveillance and all his moves are monitored
daily and its habits recorded meticulously, while a psychiatrist assesses his character from distance
in some office. Second, as an option of an alternative made of two or three, an agent is sent to hang
around in the spots where the target uses to go. The agent is instructed to glance repeatedly at the
target, thus acting as if they knew each other in a forgotten past. However, the agent learned during
his training that he must never make the first step; this is an invariable rule in French intelligence.
The manoeuver is repeated about once or twice a week until, at last and as expected, the target takes
the initiative to come over the agent and to say something as, “Do I know you?” Thus, “he bites the
bait”.
All thoroughbred agents know the method above and even ordinary desk-job employees of the
DGSE are explained it so, but not ordinary individuals who often happen to be targets to this
agency. In passing, the trick is reproduced realistically in Norman (2016), a good and interesting
film that presents a few other true techniques and patterns in HUMINT. Additionally, about
Norman, although Joseph Cedar its director made clear that the eponymous main character Norman
Oppenheimer is not a spy, strikingly enough, however, he indeed has the realistic demeanor and
typical good nerve of a very common type of field agent. Norman is another must-watch for all
these reasons at least because it tells other sub-plots that are indeed true spy tricks and methods.
 If ever the target has a dog and walks it every day, then the trick will be an attractive woman
agent who also walks a dog in the same area. Great then will be the chances for that the two dogs
cause the expected accidental encounter to happen.
Now, I present some other ways to open a contact the French intelligence community commonly
resorts to, which are all manipulations.
When two ordinary people meet together for the first time, they normally introduce themselves as
the most elementary courtesy commands. In passing, that is one among many other reasons for the
DGSE to train its agents to be impervious to courtesy, to act non-committal, or to lie when they are
put in this situation accidentally. Commonly, an introduction of this sort may naturally expand to
various aspects of each other’s privacy. A good recruiter or agent, however, always refrains from
asking too many questions to his target not to arouse his suspicion. He speaks spontaneously about
“himself,” on the contrary; that is to say, the character and légende he invented for himself for the
circumstance because it is more productive to wait for someone to talk spontaneously about himself,
he learned. Some French agents—woman in particular for I do not know which reason—do the
exact contrary by boldly bombing their targets with numerous questions thrown one after the other
on a row.
Back to my example, the agent will say to his target, “I have a lot of problems with my wife,
now”. Then the target will feel more at ease to say, unaware he is answering a very personal
question, “It’s okay for me, I’m lucky; I get along well with mine and it looks like it’s going to last”.
In the contrary case, more interesting to the agent and his agency: “Well, you’re not the only one, if
that can comfort you. Mine is a real pain in the ass”. The reader guesses easily what the DGSE is
going to do upon the latter confidence.
The same trick works well with family photos, bogus, obviously. The agent will say, “Hold on, I
have a photo of her in my wallet. Look, this one was taken shortly after our wedding”. Thereupon,
the target must answer, if ever the agent is lucky, “I have one of mine too. Look. That was with our
two children, last year. We were in our second house in Spain”.
Another tip, very similar in its principle, works as follows.
In a cafe where he is waiting for his target, the agent took care to bring a novel or an essay
dealing with a subject selected on purpose. Then it is a safe bet to assume the target will say, while
seeing the book, just to keep on the conversation going, “What are you reading?” The agent will
answer something as, “Stephen King. Latest novel. You like him?” The target may answer, “Not my
cup of tea. Too creepy for me. I’d rather in Stendhal, Proust, Hemingway … You see? But my
favorites are about fishing. Fishing is my thing”. This time, without being aware of it, the target
delivered in no time a number of very personal information that the DGSE can transform into as
many opportunities of some ulterior setups. For the agent or rather the specialists who run him can
proceed to deductions and associations of ideas, thanks to the writers’ names the target thus
delivered.
For example, still relevant to the imaginary case above, the target is possibly a liberal, given his
literary tastes and preferred authors, and he may be gay, since he likes Proust and goes fishing, a
solitary leisure activity that is consistent with the hypothesis of suppressed homosexuality. This is
worthy to be cleared with further investigations on the target on the Internet and social networks,
and then with subtle provocation attempts, if ever the latter information channel yields inconclusive
results; and so on, and on. That is how things go on.
Perhaps, the reader was taught that appearances and physical features are deceptive, and that one
should abstain from assuming anything from such things. Then he should know that any good
French spy will be attentive to those details, on the contrary, and that he will make many first
deductions and inferences on this first and sole basis. For someone’s tastes in color, dress code,
means of transportation, and several other things of this most elementary sort are all clues that can
shorten considerably the length of an enquiry or background checking. These appearances can even
confuse, often moreover, those who lie about themselves. That is precisely why recruiters of the
DGSE always do their best to deceive people they approach, by dressing and behaving in ways
completely inconsistent with what the average person would expect in a spy, of course. When on a
mission, the field agent of this agency wears clothes he dislikes in reality, and he does about the
same with his claimed tastes and preferences. The DGSE teaches its agents that they must be and do
“as a chameleon,” to cite the exact and recurring comparison it favors. They must camouflage
themselves, blend into the crowd, and adopt the style of the social middle they are instructed to fit
in. They must do their best not to betray their true character.[161] The French agent on a mission and
when in his privacy often are two very different persons. However, another recommendation says an
agent will be well advised to claim tastes, occupational, and leisure activities he knows enough to
talk about at length, if necessary. A légende actually must borrow to truths as much as possible, to
make things easier to the agent and not to be confused by an impromptu question.
Back to the example of a meeting in a café, the trick may come in many other ways, but always
by keeping in mind that a recruiter or agent must never appear to be too curious. Basing on
everything the agent may thus learn on his target, the DGSE or the DGSI will set up accidental
circumstances eventually, which are as many baits and traps the target must bite or fall in. For
example, on a train trip, these agencies will send one of their women agents, a “swallow,” in
intelligence jargon, to sit next to the target where she will take a Hemingway novel out her purse,
and will begin to read it nonchalantly. During the trip, there is a good chance the target engages the
conversation with this woman, if only to kill his boredom, on the pretext that she is reading a book
by an author he much appreciates, “coincidentally”. Here again, the reader notices, the target must
make the first step. Otherwise, the agent will remain silent and will abort the mission without
uttering a word nor even glance at her target. The same pattern may reproduce with two men agents
who will have a conversation aloud about fishing next to the target, as he is passionate with this
subject.
If the target never bite to any of these hooks, some specialist in the DGSE or the psychiatrist who
assists in the mission will draw inferences such as, “the target is an introvert or a shy people
possibly, unless he is an experienced spy,” or else “he may have a stake in remaining so discreet and
aloof; all hypotheses that must be cleared, therefore”.
The presentation of the latter techniques and tricks in manipulation must bring the reader to
consider a rule applying to all individuals: Man never fails to notice what follows him and to worry
about, but he never pays attention to what precedes him, and he worries the less so about it. The
DGSE and the DGSI act accordingly, therefore, and that is why the two agencies always manage to
know the habits of the individual with whom they wish to establish a contact, and to know as soon
as possible where he will go in order to place their agents on his way, front of him and not behind.
In passing, his smartphone, if he has one and keeps it powered, may be very useful to know where
he is heading, since his telecommunications and Internet activities will be spied on in such case.
Again, opening a contact with a target this way owes to the following concern. The skilled agent
must do his best to induce his target to do the first step, so that if ever the latter comes to suspect
something eventually, in an afterthought he will be forced to conclude that it is a wrong assumption
because “he, from his own will, engaged the conversation with this unknown person”. This
important detail in the establishing of a relationship aims to put the agent “above suspicion” in the
eyes of his target, and it shelters the former from an ever-possible accusation, eventually.
As about fermer un contact, or “closing a contact,” this is much simpler. Basically, the method for
the agent consists in behaving friendly with the target, as if nothing changed in their relationship,
but, at the same time, he must introduce in his talk and attitude all things likely to bore the target
and to wear down his patience and forbearance. To reach this goal, the agent does silly things
repeatedly, and suggests ideas of leisure activities that will logically displease and bore the target,
still based on his known tastes and realms of interest. The agent may also come in very late at
scheduled meetings and multiply other similar “blunders,” so much so that the target, out of
weariness, is brought to take some distance with the agent in the expectation that the relationship
will break, to his relief. The target must do the first step again, backward, this time. The flaw in the
method, however, is that if ever the target knows it because he is a trained spy himself, he will
understand instantly that his “good friend” actually is a trained spy too, since very few ordinary
people thus behave.
Now, I present another characteristic in Man’s behavior allowing another form of manipulation
that case officers frequently resort to with their agents. The trick, explained below as a fictitious
anecdote, derives from a form of interaction that experts in game theory call non-cooperative game,
[162] and it is difficult not to be fooled with.

Two people, I will call “Peter” and “Paul,” physically distant from each other by several miles are
having a conversation together on their cellphones. They decide to meet and to agree on a place that
should be located halfway between them, logically. However, at this precise moment, Peter decides
to manipulate Paul by telling him that the reception signal of his cellphone is scrambled, and that he
does not hear him anymore. This is a lie, but Paul cannot know this, and so he says to Peter that he
hears him clearly, on the contrary. Nonetheless, Peter continues pretending not to have understood
what Paul just said. Then, given the impossibility to communicate normally anymore, Peter
proposes the only remaining logical solution allowing them to meet together. He tells Paul that, “if
ever he can hear him,” he proposes they meet together at the location where he is presently, or else
at any other place of his choice, regardless. Peter adds “he will wait for him over there,” as he
cannot hear a counter-proposition. Thus, Peter tricks Paul into forcing him to make the trip alone,
and to go to a specific spot of his choice. This example teaches a principle that can take countless
forms and serve varied aims and plot contrivances.
Very often, the DGSE resorts to non-cooperative game in its relationships with its agents, only in
order to assert its implicit authority over them through its case officers, in the first days of the
relationship with the latter, usually, in order to prepare the ground for the subjection to come. The
trick is mixed with other implicit demands, all having the appearances of eccentricities and whims
disguising orders in actuality. For a case officer does not want his agent arguing with him about an
order, thus leaving the latter with one option only: to comply. Additionally, disguising orders under
pretenses of whims fulfills the need of the DGSE never to give explicit orders to an outsider such as
an agent, an under-agent, or a source, in the aim to camouflage the true nature of their relation.
Non-cooperative game may also help trick a target into going to a particular spot where he must
be entrapped in some way. Resorting to it is not necessarily about physical moves however. The
more often, its principle serves to lure the target into taking a decision that will prove disastrous,
eventually. In other words, it is part of a common tactic that could be called “unforeseen
consequences”.
Still as a rule, the trained French agent never goes straight to the point in his expectation from his
target to thus elicit what he wants rather that demanding it explicitly and clearly. Therefore, he is
simultaneously inching and turning around his target to reach his objective, in a way that must stop
short of begging for the favor. Herein the attitude is not far from a sort of love parade because the
agent woos his target as the willful child who sows clues that must make his parents understand by
themselves “he would be so happy to have a PlayStation,” without ever mentioning the name of the
toy. Once more, the goal to the agent is not to make the first step of the proposal he has in mind,
since it will prove to be an entrapment in the end. He wants his target to make it and to formulate it
explicitly, alone, first, and out of kindness, enthusiasm, or anything else, regardless. The recurrent
logic in this, the reader understands, is a concern of the DGSE and its people with never assuming
any responsibility in their actions. However, when an agent is thus proceeding, so typically and
completely unlike a normal and grown up person, at the same time he reveals implicitly who he
truly is, if ever his target is a trained agent, too. Yet the former must be ready to retreat promptly and
at any time in his demand, to deny with indignation the ever-possible accusation, and to swear
before all gods that “it is absurd and grotesque because outwardly groundless”. The agent learned to
act thusly, and he is anxious to please his case officer. Sometimes, the agent had this mindset before
he was recruited; he used to be exploitative with others and was sincerely unable to grasp the
meaning, purpose, and interest of dignity, decency, and self-esteem. He never heard the latter words
at home when he was a child, and, as adult, he holds them as those risible forms of sophistication
socialite and ingenuous people fancy.
Below are some other examples about manipulating a target in accordance with the same pattern
never to make the first step.
Relevant to a trick earlier presented, and following it logically, if the DGSE learned that the target
likes fishing, then it will send an agent to put a flyer in his mailbox announcing an attractive
promotional sale of fishing equipment that someone organizes at his home or shop, on a particular
day and time. In a setup of this kind, the seller very possibly is not an agent but a screen, contact, or
social vigilante if the mission is executed in France; an accomplice acting on instruction of an agent,
anyway. As the seller instructed to organize the sale “missed” to write his phone number on the
flyer, the target is left with the only option to go there at the day and time printed on it—this
contrivance, we notice, derives from the principle of non-cooperative game. All the target can do is
to “try his luck in his hope to stumble on a good deal,” and he must ignore that he, in particular,
must go to the sale. If the target is suspected to be a trained agent, the DGSE (or the DGSI) takes
care to put the same flyer in the other mailboxes of the near neighborhood because he would check
for this, doubtless. The same precautionary measure will apply with a flyer under the car’s wiper of
the target; all other cars in the street will have the same flyer under their wipers, the same day. Some
teenager may be hired to do this small job as an additional way to blur the tracks a little more.
The DGSE resorts commonly to variants of the trick above on the Internet either, as first stage of
an infinite number of plot contrivances and tactics that must begin on an accidental encounter
between an agent and his target, or else the setup may aim to lure the target into going away from
his house for a while, far and long enough for a team to make a clandestine search in this place, to
hide in it a spy microphone or the compromising evidence of some fraud.[163]
This agency also happens to use a particular trick that aims targets who appear to be people with
good moral and of the “heroic kind”; “too good” moral in this case. A couple of agents, man and
woman, stage together a heated dispute in view of the target, in a deserted street, suitably, and so at
night, preferably. At some point, the would-be boyfriend of the woman becomes very rude and
seems bound to slap her. The target must intervene out of benevolence, obviously. Then, the two
agents who stage the dispute have been instructed to act in a way among several possible. For
example, the man agent runs away, and the woman agent befriends her “courageous savior, out of
gratitude for his gesture,” or else the male agent strike back violently and thus involves the target in
a fight. In the latter case, two police officers who partake in the plot and who were hiding nearby
intervene forthwith and bring the agents and the target to the police station where the
responsibilities in the misdemeanor are established. There, the female agent will testify in favor of
her colleague, arguing that the target actually aggressed them. As there was no witness around to
bring a contrary testimony, the target is indicted on charge of battery. A third police officer who
interviews the target “believes what he says,” but he “can hardly do anything against the two
concordant testimonies of the couple”. That is why he offers to the target to “try to intervene in his
favor with his hierarchy, in exchange for some small service”. The deal must lead the target to a
blackmail, and the small service in question will prove even more compromising than a charge of
battery, of course.
Another rule in the DGSE says, “Never ever involve yourself in a situation in which one or two
people are in distress; run away, instead”. Alike, “Never pose as witness in a case you witnessed,
and say you saw nothing, instead; no matter how grave it seems to be”.
I add to the latter recommendation, from firsthand experience as target of three gendarmes who
actually were security officers of the DGSE, “Never ever accept to partake in a tapissage”.
Tapissage is a French police jargon word that denotes a situation in which, in a police or
Gendarmerie station,a few innocent people pose as look-alike of a suspect before one or several
witnesses who must identify the latter among them. In a setup of this kind, everybody including the
suspect actually are agents pretending to act in the context of a fake or true criminal investigation,
and the goal is to incriminate the target.
Based on the attitude of benevolence and bravery spotted in a target, many other similar options
may be staged, ranging from an agent posing as a woman with a flat tire by a deserted road, to
another who is an old lady or a handsome woman who closed her door with the key left inside, and
so on, and on.
I invite the reader to watch again the excellent and interesting film The Game (1997) starring
actor Michael Douglas, but to take its plot the opposite way. As seen from this other angle, it is a
realistic training on varied forms of manipulation. Consider instead that the main character,
investment banker Nicholas Van Orton begins his training as a nice and normal person brought to
learn all opportunities to do good, by experiencing accidental situations that actually are setups he
must not let himself be dragged in. In the end and consequently to the series of plots and
entrapments, Van Orton must become the cold, stern, and distrustful businessman he was at the
beginning of the actual plot; that is to say, exactly as a thoroughbred spy must be. This opposite
understanding of The Game makes it a realistic film on the training of an intelligence officer, and
exemplifies how conditioned responses to situations in most ordinary people must be changed for
the opposite through setups of the Pavlovian sort.
Flying agents acting in a foreign and hostile country must be ready to cope with very varied
manipulations, setups, and entrapment attempts of the cunning sort, and games between two rival
intelligence agencies may easily turn tricky and challenging intellectually. Some American
counterspies notoriously compared this endless war of relentless and reciprocal deceptions and
maddening treacheries to a “wilderness of mirrors,” in which each of two opponents are unable at
some point to make the difference between real plots, deceptions, false moves aiming to hide true
ones, and offensives and reactions that in the facts only exist in their minds. French counterspies of
the DGSE do not have a similar metaphor about all this. Instead, they propose a positive perception
of it saying, “Voir le réel dans l’irréel; trouver la part d’irréel dans le réel,” or “Seeing what is real
in the unreal; finding the share of unreality in the reality”. All this is awfully time-consuming, and
claims amounts of patience, self-restraint, and intellectual capacities few people have.
 In reality, however, agents and intelligence officers often cannot help themselves be carried away
by bursts of anger; especially case officers because their common characters make them vulnerable
to frustration. A rule in the DGSE is humorously formulated thusly, “A good agent must appear in
the eyes of all as impassive as the graceful swan that calmly moves on the waters. But in reality,
underwater it is pedaling like mad”. This flip of the coin in spycraft is a permanent ordeal to agents,
case officers, intelligence officers, and counterspies, and errors in judgments and mistakes often are
sanctioned disproportionately to their gravity. All this further justifies the length and hardness of
tests in their recruitments and trainings.
All methods, tricks, and tips that conclude this chapter are common knowledge in French
intelligence. Anecdotally, some years ago, I read with intrigued interest several issues of the popular
American comic book series Spy vs. Spy. In my view, the situations and plots this series presents
succinctly often exemplify true principles in spycraft; herein Spy vs. Spy is more serious than what
their readers may assume. I would not be surprised at all to learn some day that this series has
certain success in the U.S. intelligence community, as some similarly popular readings happen to
entertain French spies. In France, Astérix et la Zizanie, in the so-Gallic Astérix et Obélix comic book
series, describes realistically elementary principles in agitprop and subversion; it is more serious
than it seems at first glance either—it has been translated in English, by the way. In all cases, neither
theoretical nor scientific teachings whatsoever are given to the readers of those comic books,
although the much empirical way they teach manipulation remains valid from an educational
standpoint. After all, the seriousness to be found in the acronym MICE and its summary
explanations, barely more elaborate if ever, lays only on its intended purport to provide the
“multitudes” of the main and biggest intelligence agencies of the World with a minimum education
in spycraft.
At the higher level in decision-making, tactic, and strategy, spies must know more than agents do,
of course, and they redouble with ingenuity in contexts of challenging rivalries, consequently; not in
the expectation to invent new tricks, since the number of drives and conditioned responses in Man
on which a manipulator can rely is all the same finished, but to make them harder to forestall to the
opponent. Therefore, strategies in manipulation and deception remain cunning in their forms as in
their substance, and the higher the stakes the longer the duration of their unfolding, rarely less than a
year and not so seldom a decade or more, even when the final objective is to compromise a single
individual, sometimes. In cases of similar importance, it is not so rare that a strategist, a lawyer, or a
psychiatrist design a manipulation attempt whose sole objective is to hide another one, in the
expectation that the target heads on in the latter while believing he dodges the former successfully.
This is in circumstances of this sort that intuition and conditioned behavior happen to be lifesaving.
Logics and scientific rationality have the weakness of their universal predictability; here lies the
interest of unreality and irrationality in the trade of intelligence.
From personal experience, and as a target for a number of years, I had confirmation that the
DGSE and the DGSI tend to rely heavily on mindless repetitions of same manipulation techniques,
and just introduce slight variants into them, actually. At first glance, this seems to be a stupid
mistake made by some young and inexperienced spies, exactly as when one is playing a chess game
—or rather, a Go game, in my personal view—against an opponent who is too inexperienced to plan
more than one or two moves ahead. In most such instances, however, the goal actually is no more
than playing on the nerves of the opponent or target, until he surrenders or makes a wrong and fatal
move, out of an overwhelming need for action.
Generally, the latter method is integral to a war of economic and social attrition to better wear
down the target until a stage of psychological exhaustion is reached. When so, the target must yield
to an unacceptable demand that obviously entails dire and irreversible consequences. The provision
also applies when attempting to recruit someone against his will or to force him to “cooperate”. As
seen from the viewpoint of the target, the method in its unfolding indeed evokes the incessant
begging demands of the spoiled brat used to get what he wants by simply repeating loudly, “Please
… please … please …” Except that the scheme with adult spies may last for days, weeks, months,
and years, if necessary. Note, however, that the DGSE resorts to the latter method when all others
proved fruitless and thus drove the exchanges between this agency and its target to a stalemate.
Manipulation knows limits beyond which French spies do not hesitate to resort to open threats,
obvious psychological violence, and to damages done against property, exactly as mafias do.
Back to the angle of behavioral biology, thus pressuring somebody psychologically leaves him
with the three possible options I largely presented at this point, only. No one can do anything against
that once the options to fleeing and fighting proved fruitless or are unavailable. What happened to
the rats in the experiment 3 of Laborit will happen inescapably to the target caught in a war of
attrition of this kind. Additionally, the unenlightened target ignores this alternative of three options,
and even more the basics in behavioral biology. In the contrary case, the target knows that the best
of the three options, when opposing a hostile superior force, is flying at once because it might not be
possible anymore eventually. In the absolute, and more precisely, the best tactic against a “siege” of
this kind is to get away as soon as the threat is identified or foreseen, in order to fight from a secure
position eventually.
This presentation of the fundamentals in behavioral biology helps the reader understand the cause
of the pronounced tendency of the DGSE to favor brutal and relentless psychological action in
human intelligence as in its management policy. Now, I present some varied schemes and facts for
which I failed to find a suitable context in this chapter or in any other, but whose interest remains
relevant to manipulation or to defense against it.
As a general principle, the well-trained French—and Russian—field agent learns never to end a
meeting with an ordinary person on the answer he was looking for, but on an irrelevant subject. The
provision aims to divert this person’s attention and not to let him asking to himself, in an
afterthought, “Why did this unknown guy ask this question?” for the last things we heard in a
conversation are those we remember the best. That is why French agents happen to provoke the
opposite effect, when they want to construct a plausible denial to their intent to say something in
particular. In this other case, they begin the conversation with small talk presented as the motive,
and they may even make it last for long. Then they end the palavers on a single and striking phrase
yet presented as unimportant or innocuous, containing what they truly wanted to say from the
inception. The goal in this alternate method is to relax the attention of the interlocutor in the aim to
catch him off guard for obtaining a spontaneous and sincere answer. It may also serve to strike the
mind of the interlocutor on purpose, with a message introduced disingenuously as a passing
reference because its seriousness must be easy to deny, since it is a threat, generally. Finally, French
spies, diplomats, politicians, and even businessmen use the latter scheme in negotiation, around a
lunch washed with alcohol to relax the defense of their interlocutor in the expectation to strike a
better deal. Additionally, the process of digestion after a copious meal weakens naturally one’s
defenses.
Many French field agents and all flying agents are trained to cope with the throes of police
interrogation; this is done in real situation with gendarmes rather than police officers. Those
interrogation techniques aim to trick the apprentice by resorting to varied fallacies and provocations
stimulating innate drives, taunting, intimidating, and threats come first. The drill generally lasts for
24 hours on a row, at minimum. Remember the part of my previous explanations about trainings on
stealing and burglarizing. In the first years of my career, I had to submit several times to long
Gendarmerie interrogations, plus one with the police during which I spent one full day in a cell. Of
course, at some point, the gendarmes and police kicked me out without further explanations,
unexpectedly and without further notice. In some instances, I met with them again eventually, this
time to enjoy a drink or a meal together.
Many French spies learn, often at their own expense as a rule, that one of the most effective and
straightforward ways to evade a manipulation attempt is never to listen to the recommendations and
suggestions of strangers, although this is not always easy to do, it is true. That is why the best way I
found with it is to always say “Yes” first, to please the manipulator, and then do the opposite
without any qualm. This method indeed has been a lifesaver to me, sometimes.
Many small manipulations that become big eventually proceed by the use of telephone, first—or
with agents posing as pollsters, officials, neighbors next door, and the like, who ring at the door.
That is why agents and intelligence employees never answer the phone when its screen does not
display any number, or “Unknown number”. They learned to consider, rightly, that the person who
seeks to reach them would leave a message on the voice recorder, if his call were friendly or honest.
As a principle, never ever call back an insisting unknown phone number that does not leave any
message on the answering machine. Alike, thoroughbred French spies do not open anonymous mails
and emails, even not those sent by identified people they do not know, or else not until they declined
their names, occupational activities, and mores on the Internet, at least—although the latter option is
not necessarily safe. Unknown people who prove impossible to find out neither on the online phone
book, nor on any social network, nor on the Internet must be held as very suspicious.
When acting on the national soil in the frame of domestic intelligence and more especially in
counter-interference, the French intelligence community uses largely social networks and online
forums as baits and tools for manipulation, and its tactic bases on “non-cooperative relationship” in
its principle. However, the French intelligence community sees the Internet as a means of passive
domestic spying and monitoring when dealing with individuals it targets, and more enthusiastically,
if I may say so, as an efficient and multi-purpose tool for influencing the masses and for counter-
interference. This cautious use of the Internet to manipulating individuals simply owes to a concern
for the recordable tracks it leaves, as all can be used as material evidences. The latter caution
extends to smartphones because anyone can easily enjoy the services of effective countermeasures,
such as applications that record and save all calls automatically, monitor Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and
other relevant radio electric activities.
 10. Elimination Methods: a. Social Elimination.
Social elimination is the social isolation of an individual by discrediting him and reducing
his economic capacities down to bare necessities; the goal being that anyone is normally
integrated in the society will not wish to develop or resume a relationship with this person. Very
few among people normally integrated in the society are ready to maintain a relationship with a
needy, even if he managed to demonstrate his honorability and sociability. The networking of the
social fabric in Western countries rests on the stake anyone finds in connecting with each other.
All altruism and claimed kinships are but alibis I previously called social conventions, in reality.
Explanations on the mind in the previous chapter are accountable for the latter attitude to occur;
Man naturally tends to stay away from his likes when they appear to differ too much from a
majority he holds as the norm. Thus, he responds to the potent call of his innate herd instinct he
inherited from remote and animal ancestors, millions years ago, while being unable to justify it
with rational premises because it is not a thoughtful process. All explanations he can provide for
actually are irrelevant; they are but alibis for an overwhelming yet elusive drive he may find as
shameful as an inopportune sexual urge, at times.[164] He feels it, but he does not understand it,
especially in an advanced society in which empathy and courtesy are highly valued.
Keeping away from the poor and the needy is an expression of both the need to being and the
need to preserve one’s species. The mere sight of such people strikes the mind in the deep
unconscious—the id, according to Freud’s structural model—as a foreboding akin to superstition:
“poverty is a contagious disease”. Well, we may easily take it as a superstition, but it is not at all
from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology in which it is very rational and all practical, for this
drive reproduces in numerous other species, to the point, in those other instances, of ostracizing
the weakest individuals and even of killing and eating them, sometimes. This is the rule of the
survival of the fittest that preserves all species and guarantees their evolutions. In passing, this
drive is also accountable, directly and solely, for the feelings of racism and xenophobia because
they are but two among many other feelings identical in their expression, unrelated to race and
anatomic features in reality. The sole reason of the latter antagonisms, in essence, is that anything
is perceived as different from one’s norm to which most individuals not to say all want to belong
to feel safer is held as possibly hazardous, still unconsciously.
Many European people who express racism against black people do much less so when tripping
to the United States, simply because American black people, as descendants of slaves who settled
in this country many generations ago, share today the same social customs, habits, and tastes in
everything as American white people do. In European countries, most black people are
immigrants of first, second, or no more than third generation in a large majority of instances, who,
therefore, still hold on their African tastes and way to behave with others, and thus differ from the
norm of the country where they now live. The following anecdote epitomizes this fact.
For decades, in France, racism against Asian people was about inexistent because a large
majority of Asian immigrants was political refugees, formerly members of the bourgeoisie and of
the ruling elite of Vietnam and Laos, erstwhile called together Indochina. Upon their arrival in
France, already, they behaved already in perfect accordance with the occidental rules and customs
French colonialism had fostered in their countries for a number of generations. However, the
apparent French kindness towards the Asian race faded from the late 1980s, when natives of the
Popular Republic of China began to immigrate in France, for most of those Chinese immigrants
have the opposite social and cultural characteristics of the Asians of Vietnam and Laos and. For
worse, the former hardly mix with Caucasians who mirrored the attitude, instantly. More to the
point, both French Vietnamese and Laotian immigrants dislike and distrust those Chinese
immigrants either, and reciprocally; thus, they feel strangers to each other as Black Africans and
White Europeans can be.
Man feels urged either to flee or to fight his likes who do not seem that so. With regard to the
subject here I am bringing upon, Man tends also to be afraid of people who, on the contrary, are
much richer than he is. This other variant in the natural reaction is accountable in some measure
for the class struggle that Marx justified with other arguments supporting his doctrine.
I have in mind a good example of this “fear of the rich” to tell, which I experienced firsthand
with surprise. In 1995, a labor strike of exceptional scale crippled all public means of
transportation in Paris, and countless commuters resigned to hitchhike to return home on
evenings. A spontaneous social phenomenon of mutual aid that no one expected in the French
capital yet settled between those who had an automobile and those who had not. I followed the
trend as car owner and commuter myself. I had a high-end German car at that time, and as
consequence for this, each of those occasional hitchhikers to whom I offered a ride showed the
same embarrassment in return. Many hesitated with visible angst, and several even refused my
help and preferred to wait for a Good Samaritan with a smaller and less comfortable car. It could
not possibly be racism or xenophobia, but the attitude was the same exactly.
Psychiatrists of the DGSE who design the process of a social elimination know well all this,
but not all the others who actively partake in it, up to their team leaders. The latter only knows
that the three social classes do not mix and even tend to resent each other, and that is all.
A social elimination should not always be seen as a cruel sort of punishment, cruelest than
prison indeed, as we shall see. In many instances, it actually is nothing but an all-practical
measure aiming to make someone socially removed for wants of imprisoning him because his
fault, recognized as such by the State but not by the Nation, is not punishable by law, therefore. In
other words, a culprit of this extraordinary sort must be discredited for one of the reasons to be
soon presented, and thus made unable to have friendly relations with peaceful and law-abiding
people of the ordinary society. More precisely, social elimination means “to ban somebody from
the society by depriving him of any contact with others and of their consideration, attention,
confidence, and even empathy”. This explains why a mission of social elimination is an extreme
and relentless form of smear campaign, while its target is harassed in an infinite variety of forms
with the same consistency, until a point of psychological exhaustion and of extreme downfall is
reached and guarantees that he will never regain the social and economic rank, and, most of all,
respectability and consideration he enjoyed before. In other words, a mission of social elimination
consists in arranging the “social death” of somebody, definitive or for a very long time, even
though it is not necessarily a sanction, since it is above all a durable measure of safety with
respect to state secrecy and / or public order.
My earlier specifics “peaceful and law-abiding people of the ordinary society” implies a
credibility necessary to relay and to spread effectively in the social fabric any kind of information
and rumor, therefore. Every day we all spread rumors, true and false regardless as the intent is not
malicious; that is to say, platitudes for most, such as “Weather forecasts say it will be rainy
tomorrow,” “Sure, Boris Johnson is going to be elected next PM of the U.K.,” or “The U.S. Air
Force keeps secretly the body of a dead extra-terrestrial frozen in a cold room in the hangar C of
the Area 51”. These information, rumors, and absurdities of no consequences together shape the
public opinion of the country as the French Government and its specialists and agents in domestic
influence and counterinfluence see it fit. As rumors spread fast and far as wildfire, especially
when they say things that strike the mind, it is out of question, therefore, to leave alone even a
single individual endowed with sufficient credibility telling embarrassing state secrets prejudicial
to these ambient peacefulness and harmlessness we use to call “public order”. That is why the
individuals who know state secrets must remain in the tightly monitored middle where they
learned them, and why the normal society where they happen to escape, then and now, must
distrust and ostracize them in every respects.
Then not only the target of a social elimination is allowed to have relations with all other
people whose credibility is weak, but he is even encouraged by all possible means to join them as
a new and then permanent member of their social middle. From the collective viewpoint of the
DGSE, “people with weak credibility” are even not integrated in the lower class, the reader
understands. They are seen as outcasts of the lower class itself, not numerous and honorable
enough to be likened together to a would-be-fourth social class, since the matter is not about
social and economic statuses, but credibility only. While the American reader is probably thinking
I am trying to define the word “underdogs,” I cut him off in his reasoning to say instead the rarer
German word lumpenproletariat, more accurate in the present context.[165]
This other particularity gives to social elimination the alternative perception of an elaborate and
softer equivalent of the better-know labor camps of totalitarian countries, where the same
undesirable individuals of all social classes are sent to their disappearances, even from the
memory of all people who knew them before. In France, this special provision exists indeed,
unofficially and even secretly, as we are going to see, though at a much lower scale than in the
totalitarian countries I just alluded to. It has been thought and gradually perfected to remain
unknown to the French population and to those of all other countries until today, in order to fit
claims of democracy, freedom of speech, and justice. This should surprise, as state assassinations
i.e. physical eliminations in this country became public knowledge since around the 1970s,
although the French Government ever denied the practice either. So, social elimination, alone,
remains a taboo to date, but the general ignorance of it simply owes to the fact that it is not as
spectacular as the violent or suspicious deaths of senior officials, politicians, military, and spies
are.
Due to its unofficial and sensitive nature, and to its causes that generally relate to matters of
national security and secrecy, social elimination is a mission of the French intelligence
community, therefore. The DRSD orders those missions in all instances and ultimately—i.e. the
Security Service of the DGSE when this other agency is directly concerned—because this agency
is responsible of the protection of secrecy not only in the military, the intelligence agencies of the
Ministry of Defense, and the military industrial complex, but also in the entire French
Government, largely unbeknownst to the civilian public, as explained in detail in an earlier
chapter. However, the enforcement of social eliminations neither is executed nor even supervised
by the DRSD. Other intelligence agencies supervise and execute social eliminations with the
active support of the employment and welfare agency Pole Emploi, the police, the Gendarmerie,
and the grand lodges of the French liberal Freemasonry under the lead of the GOdF. In point of
fact, Pole Emploi and the GOdF cooperate in general and regularly with the domestic intelligence
apparatus for reasons the reader shall discover in other chapters.
Then there is a mild version of social elimination that is even lesser known, which limits to
preventing someone from finding employment in the country, thus obliging him to fall under the
permanent monitoring of Pole Emploi that, therefrom, executes an unofficial mission of domestic
surveillance with a focus on filtering accesses to the French job market and to social positions. At
this time in 2019, the unofficial specifics is publicly known under the form of a rumor only; idem
about the role of the liberal Freemasonry in this country and since this fact was publicly revealed
for once in 1907, on the occasion of the scandal of the Affair of the Cards of Denunciation.
Since the target of a mission of social elimination must behave at some point in a way
detrimental to his own credibility, it is also necessary to unsettle him continuously, and to arouse
negative feelings in his mind to unhinge him ultimately; that is to say, until he takes an initiative
that all people normally included in the society condemn. Thus, he must free the state of the
unproductive and costly obligation of his social elimination, which in some instances may
mobilize more than ten agents full time and involve advanced technical means normally attributed
to the priority missions of counterespionage and counterterrorism.
That is why a social elimination consists in varied and discreet forms of harassment, cunning
because they all aim to unnerve its target, while he must be unable to expose publicly their
organizers. The latter difficulty makes this kind of mission as delicate and costly to carry out as
the permanent surveillance and manipulation attempts of a foreign spy can be, and varies
according to the intelligence and / or possible skills in spycraft of the target. As examples, an ex-
politician or senior public servant can be tricked and discredited successfully within a month,
whereas the same enterprise may claim years, possibly, with a perceptive ex-intelligence
executive or a specialist in behavioral science, or worse with someone who knows well how a
mission of social elimination is organized. From a technical standpoint, this very particular
mission pertaining to the more general missions of protection of secrecy, domestic intelligence,
and counterintelligence, aims essentially to tampering with the mind of the target, by relying
largely on the fundamentals in behavioral biology. Therefrom, its success depends largely on two
main characteristics of the psychological profile of the target, which are
1. his capacity to understand and to rein in his innate need to being and its three drives, i.e.
the strength and richness of his acquired knowledge and experience, and
2. his tolerance threshold, i.e. his capacity to assess his psychological fatigue
(metacognition), and to devise prophylactic measures to fight the inescapable consequences
of his ordeal that is an acquired knowledge either.
An above-the-average intelligence alone is no miracle remedy against the powerful poison a
social elimination is. Other considerations are at stake: mindset, mental balance, and experiences
count also for much. In a few words, an individual with a decent education and intelligence only,
but with the mindset of a Gandhi, is much likely to give a hard time to the whole crew tasked to
eliminate him socially.
 In a large majority of cases, the DGSE—and the DGSI alike—socially eliminates an individual
when he is deemed likely to make himself a troublemaker by exposing publicly highly sensitive
State’s secrets, and / or when he does not any longer abide the unofficial authority of the State
with regard to the protection of secrecy. Or else when he is a highly valued target who refused for
too long to “cooperate” in intelligence activities. More precisely, people to be socially eliminated
the more often may be
• a foreign spy or a terrorist who has been identified as such but who refuses to “cooperate,”
e.g. to become a double agent or simply a spotted talent who denies his recruitment,
especially when it was underway, already,
• a thoroughbred agent or an enlightened employee in intelligence who stops obeying or who
is suspected to leaking highly sensitive information to the public by himself or via a
journalist, to a foreign power, or to a terrorist organization,
• an ordinary individual or a VIP with a knowledge of sensitive information that will be
detrimental to the national interest / public order or to important personalities in case of their
public disclosure, and who is both credible and thought likely to disclose this information
because he could not be manipulated / handled, and proved vulnerable to no leverage, nor
pressure, or no longer is,
• a charismatic would-be-political or religious activist gifted with a capacity to convincing
and to rallying others people to his cause, but who could not be manipulated / handled,
persists denying all offers to join an officially recognized or tolerated political group or
party, and is vulnerable to no leverage nor pressure,
• an agent or employee in intelligence who is punished and expelled for serious misconduct /
grave fault, and who, therefore, must be discredited definitively in order to prevent him from
convincing ordinary people of the actuality of anything he may tell (this is my case, by the
way).
Generally, a mission of social elimination may be launched against spies and ex-spies,
politicians, officials and employees of all ranks, and to Freemasons of the GOdF who attempt or
attempted to make unwarranted public revelations or, in any case, people who are guilty of
serious misconduct that cannot be sanctioned officially and legally. At last, all French are equal
before this unofficial law, regardless of their social statuses, indeed.
Social eliminations are always identical and typical in their general processes because they all
follow a same guideline, itself essentially based on the precise and invariable way the human
brain works as defined by behavioral biology. Slight differences of form in their complexity and
attributed resources depend, for example, on whether the target is a VIP or acquainted to this
social category, or is an individual unknown to the public who never had any important
responsibilities. Note that this mission happens to be the first stage of a physical elimination, as
we shall see in the next chapter. However, a confusion in the latter respect is possible because in
many instances the unexpected death of the target, as a direct consequence of the multiple
psychological aggressions he is exposed to during his social elimination, is not perceived as
harmful to any other interest and is inconsequential therefore.
Now, I explain how a social elimination unfolds.
As an abstract, first: it comes as a plot contrivance consisting in the discreet and elaborate
staging of numerous and repeated incidents of various kinds, each intending to cause a minor
disturbance to the target and to his closest relatives when needed, but whose origins must appear
in the eyes of any possible witness as natural and common in everyday life, or logically
explainable in each of their occurrences. Then what is neither natural nor common, of course, are
the frequency and persistence with which the disturbances recur in the life of a single individual,
even though their distribution seems to be random either. Sometimes and for a while, a third party
and even the target himself may easily believe his ordeal is nothing but “a period of misfortune”
that “may happen to anybody”. Some among the less enlightened and the most receptive to
passion and irrationality go as far as to believe they are cursed, which perception greatly
facilitates the task of those who are executing the mission, and is expected, therefore.
However, as days, weeks, and then months pass, and while seeing that the frequency of the
disturbances does not change and that their repetitions together now are affecting his life in an
alarming way, at some point, the target is obliged to admit the “streak of bad luck” is too long to
be only accidental. Surely, he is thus brought to infer, “a very powerful and devious person,
group, or organization having influential connections bears a serious grudge against him”. Yet this
or those unknown persons never come over him to express their grievances or expectations, to the
least, unless the target has been previously warned and threatened or he understands that all this
actually is a devilish and highly sophisticated form of sanction for a past fault he is perfectly
aware of, and remembers, now.
The target does not yet know that those who are “making his life a Hell” will never come to see
him in person, nor will ever address him in an explicit manner. Alike, he would not possibly know
how long the “attack” against him is going to last, since he would not know that the goals of his
mysterious tormenters are to exhaust him psychologically and to make him a homeless, and / or
that he takes a thoughtless initiative on an impulse that will discredit him forever. The latter
expectation implies that the target gives leeway to his fight drive and behaves as the rat in the
experiment 2 of Laborit. On one or both of these conditions, only, the team of stalkers will
disappear and leave him alone, in all meanings the latter adjective can possibly convey. This
brings us to see which effects a social elimination have on the mind of its target, to the point of
pushing him to act in a way he would find stupid in ordinary circumstances, obviously.
On the long run and as expected, the endless repetition of minor nuisances generates
inescapably two major troubles to the target. The first is a steady and apparently inescapable
economic downfall that itself or so is accountable for a social downfall. In the understanding of
the target, “the whole World seems to be collapsing from under his feet”. By the same occasion,
his extraordinary and impossible fall questions the validity of all his bearings, his experience, he
painstakingly acquired along his life; everything he previously held as normal and logical no
longer is. All countermeasures he may attempt fail unexplainably or even haste the coming of his
definitive demise. The second is a growing angst that finally engenders permanent stress, which
impairs and twists his moral judgment and rationality. He may go as far as to question the
tangibility of the society in which he always lived normally hitherto, with all its certainties and
predictabilities that, now, seem to have been turned upside down. Trust in many things and in
people including close friends and acquaintances evolves gradually toward distrust. Confidence
weakens at the same pace to yield ground to diffidence; all new feelings and beliefs that, in turn,
cause an ever-growing mood of irritability. The more often, the most influential factors
responsible for the latter psychological alterations surge and unfold along the following typical
and logical progression.
First, the target loses his job for one reason or another. He is either fired or submitted to a new
social environment at work, unfriendly or even unambiguously hostile, which will drive him to
resign at some point, inescapably. Actually, the latter incident is consequent to a discreet smear
campaign based on true or imaginary facts, exposed by accomplices of the stalker team who
introduce themselves as police officers, gendarmes, or some other officials, generally. All
attempts of the target to find another job fail. The latter provision is enforced easily thanks to
connections between the intelligence community, Pôle Emploi, and the liberal Freemasonry.
The moves of all blacklisted people are monitored by Pôle Emploi, as they are put in the logical
obligation to register to this public service, and by the EMOPT unofficially (formerly by the RG).
In France, without network of acquaintances, friends, and connections, there is no other way than
to register to Pôle Emploi to both survive financially and to find a job. As an historical aside, in
1629, Théophraste Renaudot created for Cardinal Richelieu the forerunner of Pôle Emploi, called
Bureau d’Adresses at that time. It is the oldest French dual-purpose public service serving the
public and domestic intelligence simultaneously, each time the latter particular need arises.
Renaudot was a close acquaintance of Richelieu, and his own eminence grise; together they
invented and perfected various means and methods of clever domestic intelligence, of which most
are still in use in France in a barely improved form. End of historical aside.
Then as months go by and the monthly payments of his welfare benefits steadily decrease, the
target experiences growing financial difficulties. If ever he has a partner who also had a job, then
she lost it, too, though for a different reason because the DGSE is wary not to leave a too obvious
pattern about this. Nonetheless, at this point, the latter agency knows that the probability for the
couple to break up is elevated and is rising steadily. That is why the team of stalkers and agent
provocateurs sets up opportunities for the target and for his partner to engage in an affair or
romance to precipitate this event. The latter provision aims to isolate and further weaken the
stamina of each of the partners; the more so since an incident of this nature further damages the
reputation of one or both of them, and hastes the shattering of their network of acquaintances,
friends, and relatives. Importantly about the latter points, it is much easier to harass a single than
someone who still lives with his partner because, the psychiatrists of the DGSE say, “Two people
who witness the same events cannot be accused to have the same delusions at the same time,”
whereas it is easy to deny the responsibility of any wrong one can do against a loner and thus, to
make him pass for a delusional person.
As an aside, note that the psychiatrists of the DGSE know and greatly expect that certain
particular circumstances and events, completely irrelevant at first glance, arouse desire for sex in
those they want to manipulate, to recruit as source, or to socially eliminate. Such events are:
witnessing the death of a fellow human being; and prolonged frustration. As surprising and
paradoxical as it may seem, deceases and burials are events that greatly arouse desire for sex. This
fact seldom misses to surprise those who experience it and arouse in them mixed feelings of
shame and guilt—except people who work in hospitals and who experience it repeatedly because
they all learn the cause of the phenomenon. Each time Man witnesses the death of one of his likes
—one or several at the same time regardless—, this stimulates his reptilian brain in a way that
triggers, first, fear for the survival of the species and, second and consequently, an urge to
reproduce himself as a prophylactic measure to compensate for the loss of one of his kind. This is
a very old drive that originates in a time when Man’s remote ancestor was a much simpler
multicellular organism and that otherwise still exists today as an instruction in the DNA of certain
species, such as the salamander, to regrow an amputated leg or tail by recreating new
corresponding cells. Wherefrom, the impossibility in most of us to understand this urge because
we obviously see it as an inappropriate and absurd response to a so tragic event. In point of fact,
the same urge may possibly reproduce in reaction to witnessing someone’s impending death or
enduring great and life-threatening physical pain.
The need for sex when consequential to prolonged inhibition / frustration is a much different
thing, as it is a need for the pleasurable sensation sex procures as compensation to the feeling of
moral distress and affective loneliness, yet it is not conscious either, though it may be “half-
conscious”. It would seem logical to consider the hypothesis saying that the latter reaction
originates in an unconscious fear of one’s own impending death, but this is a conjecture of mine.
In any case, it may be useful to add, these unconscious responses to angst and frustration must not
be confused with the other case of sex associated with death and / or great physical violence
reported by criminologists and forensic psychiatrists, which generally owes to particular traumas,
deviant parental behaviors, or affective shortage experienced during infancy. The target who is
not an enlightened spy or a worker in behavioral science is generally ignorant of all the latter
specifics, and may be tricked with it, therefore. End of aside.
Before or after the stage of the ordeal earlier described, the beleaguered target either is forced
to move to another home in order to reduce his ordinary expenditures, or to sell it if he has not
been evicted, already. At this point, a number of his acquaintances, friends, and even relatives
take some distance with him, due to their thus aroused need to being, I explained earlier. His
social network and the frequency of his social interactions reduce significantly, anyway, which
evolution further arouses bitter feelings in him, still as expected.
While experiencing this situation that causes a hardly bearable moral suffering, the target
ignores that his new economic and social environment have been set up entirely for the sole sake
to produce the same effect on his mind as the electrified cage did on the rat in the experiment 3 of
the series described in the previous chapter. For, as a human being, the target is intelligent enough
to envisage the scary perspective of his homelessness he perceives as an impending “social
death”—it already happened at this stage, in actuality. However, as the rat, he has a reptilian brain
—i.e. his id—calling for action and more particularly for fleeing or for fighting if escape seems
impossible, still in order to fulfill the fundamental need to being.
Thenceforth, if ever the acquired knowledge and experience of the target are not consistent and
strong enough to filter the latter urge that gradually overwhelms his entire mind and engenders
irrational alibis, he is ready to commit the irreparable at any time, logically from the standpoint of
behavioral biology, but unexplainably from that of an unenlightened third party that will be
“everybody around” in the facts. As the rat in the cage, he, too, considered all possibilities of
escape, including abstract forms of it, as his brain is much more advanced. However, the
psychiatrist of the DGSE who instructs the surveillance and stalker team holds the scientific
knowledge allowing to foresee the series of thoughts, normal, logical, and inevitable, in anyone is
frustrated and threatened to that extent and simultaneously. For the they “built” an abstract and
invisible “doorless corridor” ahead of the target’s psychological progression, made essentially of
arranged economic and social impediments, laws, regulations, and logical options and decisions
the latter impose, exactly, in the principle, as a child builds a physical corridor ahead of a
scrambling insect or mouse to drive it right to a box. With these precise descriptions, the reader
can see a first good example of what may be a “drive to,” I only alluded to in an earlier chapter.
As scenarists of the target’s journey, and as a powerful and omnipotent public body with
influential connections at all levels of the society, the DGSE and its team thus contrive to close in
advance all “emergency exits” they do not want the target to use, in order to leave to him one,
only. Close relationships with relatives and friends are those emergency exits, such as one of them
giving to the target some temporary helps, money, shelter, or else. Wherefrom, the need of the
team to undermine those friendly and family connections, first. The target could not possibly
foresee the latter tactic because it took too long to him to understand the real meaning of the
succession of misfortunes he went through, and because he ignores what a social elimination is,
how it works, unfolds, and what its aims are, ultimately.[166]
In the absolute, there are other “exits” than that the only one the team wants the target to use,
but they consist to the latter in precipitating his homelessness deliberately, if he no longer has a
family. Then he may also attempt to flee to another country and thus, to disappear from the view
of his aggressors. We will see eventually that these escapes, which claim as much courage as
fighting do, cannot but be illusory or temporary in our advanced society in which computer
technology and performing means of telecommunication shortened speed and time into that of
light.
Finally, if ever the experience / knowledge the target gathered in his brain is consistent enough,
then he may be able to tame the powerful urge to fight violently that his reptilian brain commands
to the other parts of his brain. The experiment 2 of Laborit has shown that fighting is a
thoughtless drive that greatly alleviates fear, stress, and psychological suffering, for wants of
solving all problems. For the record, the practical usefulness of fighting, since there is one, as the
reader saw, is to allow to the mind to compensate by inflicting violence to a third party, in
response to prolonged or intense angst, which action indeed prevents the brain from yielding to
stress and to triggering physiological self-aggression leading to psychosomatic illnesses via the
central nervous system; let alone mental disorders, starting with depression or else, depending on
one’s latent neuroses that stress always raises.
Man’s intellectual superiority allows also to him to compensate per proxy. The popular and
recurrent example of the righteous action movies hero who can strike back with suitable
effectiveness simply by punching his opponent in the face, or by shooting him with a gun, owes
entirely to the relief per proxy if offers to the multitudes frustrated in various ways and to varying
degrees. But it is much unlikely to pay off in the actual world of space, time, and history where
people are prompt to ask for justice for very little, and where police and justice are much more
active, fast, and effective than in movies. This is one true cause, by the way, of the success of
action movies, of which the public is largely ignorant. Then writers, scenarists, film-directors, and
video-game makers, themselves know only that action and violence are “efficient and easy ways
to improve the sales” of their works. Wherefrom, an additional reason for the DGSE to encourage
its staffers to practice one physically demanding sporting activity at least, be it said in passing.
In short, the target is left with the last of the three possible drives / solutions the DGSE wants,
especially if his partner proved loyal and resilient enough not to quit him and to run away, and if
he did not lose the custody of his children in the meantime; that is to say, inhibition behavior,
identified as decompensation from the other viewpoint of psychologists and ordinary
psychiatrists, when it materializes as depression.
In the peculiar context of a social elimination that last for months, at least, and in the position
of the target, inhibition consists in resigning to accept a new social situation he can easily
misperceive as “his fate” or “a curse”. The physical conditions of this position typically are a very
modest housing located in a popular area, disreputable and possibly hazardous, or else a place
isolated in an economically deserted region, remote to large cities. Additionally, the target has
been brought to accept a new network of acquaintances entirely different of the one he had before,
which, now, comprises poorly educated people, dropouts, illiterate immigrants, crackpots, ex-
convicts, drunkards, drug addicts, extremist activists for absurd causes, and other individuals of
that ilk. Of course, one or more of the latter people is a regular informant of the police or of the
Gendarmerie, who will report on anything the target may and can do in his logical hope to return
to the life he had before. His economic resources will limit to a small monthly amount given by
the local office of the social welfare Pôle Emploi. The latter provision will oblige him
conditionally to report monthly about his activities and privacy, therefrom to submit, logically, to
a permanent assessment of his mental balance done by a social assistant, again at the demand of
Pôle Emploi. When this final stage of a social elimination is reached, the chances that the target
be rehabilitated socially, someday, are nil, indeed. Most people socially eliminated who do not
find a way to escape their vegetative existence, which in the facts is a virtual and unofficial
solitary confinement lasting indefinitely, have a lower-than-the-average life expectancy because
the prolonged suppression of their innate need for action causes the health problems of
psychosomatic origin, I named in the previous chapter.
I pause an instant to draw the attention of the reader on the arranged substitution of an
acquaintances’ network by a new one, I just described summarily. Actually, the DGSE accords an
importance to the latter provision in somebody’s social elimination that is greater than to limiting
his economic capacities, free will, and freedom of movements. This is visible, for example, when
the target previously held responsibilities high enough to entail certain public recognition and
fame, such as making appearances on the mainstream media, and being an opinion leader,
therefore. For it is impossible to relegate an individual of this social category to complete oblivion
or to discredit him in the eyes of everybody. Regardless of how great the evil he truly or allegedly
did is, he will always enjoy this particular credit a minority accords unconditionally to despots
and criminals who demonstrated exceptional skills or ruthlessness in their crafts. Examples of the
latter fact abound in the history of politics and in that of crime; see also the Bonnie and Clyde
Syndrome.
On one hand, it is out of question to the DGSE to give to any socially eliminated individual a
chance to reconstitute an acquaintances network he sees fit to his interests and needs, regardless
of his past social status. On the other hand, VIPs and highly talented people abhor mingling with
people they do not see as up to their own level in one way or another, i.e. who differ too much
from their own norm. The latter attitude, normal and common in about everyone, is also largely
accountable for the spontaneous and natural separation between social classes, first, and then for
the natural emergence of social clusters within these classes—I previously pictured on a schema
at the beginning of this book—and social and economic neighborhoods, clubs, and the like,
present in all societies. That is why this agency is ready, first, to invest means commensurate to
the social elimination of people of this exceptional category; second, to resume the surveillance of
their activities by finding or building for them a specific acquaintances’ network fitting their
expectations or thereabout. Thenceforth, it goes without saying that one individual at least in this
network must be either a police or Gendarmerie informant, or an informant of the intelligence
community, which is the same in fine.
Yet, it is not so rare that this agency puts in the balance, on one side, the running cost of this
permanent monitoring, and, on the other side, the profit it might make of the already acquired
notoriety of the disgraced. When this particular circumstance arises, the DGSE may “reconsider
exceptionally the terms of the sanction,” and give to the socially eliminated VIP a chance to
“redeem himself” as agent for an undetermined time—quite long or forever, actually.[167] In an
instance of this kind, the reader may rightly remark, a social elimination much resembles a hostile
recruitment. In fact, both processes are based on the same behavioral biology foundation, and the
differences between the two are limited to the following.
A hostile recruitment as the recruiting process of a field agent is thought as an ordeal or, some
might say, as a rite of passage; whereas a social elimination is a hostile recruitment that lasts
indefinitely in the facts, and whose “recruit” would not be motivated by any goal or hope. Seen
under this other angle, the process may be described as a methodic destruction of the four last
layers of the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, from up to bottom, presented in the chapter 3 on
“Recruiting and training,” except that the definitive destruction of the psyche of the target is the
final objective, since he is not a recruit. A social elimination changes and alters the mind of its
target inescapably in addition to his new social and economic statuses, as hostile recruitment aims
to either, though in a lesser measure. End of pause.
From the standpoint of the target, yielding to inhibition is no panacea, nonetheless, because it
will not stop the surveillance and stalker team in its mission. Moreover, in case the target is not
yet discredited and his physical health and mental balance both remain apparently good, his
extraordinary performance at this stage cannot but spur the aggressiveness of the team.
Assessing the physical health of the target is made possible and justified officially thanks to a
regulation of the French Social Security, which is to call the target to submit to a mandatory
medical examination carried out by a public service named Médecine du Travail (Bureau of
Occupational Medicine). Refusal to submit to this examination is sanctioned by the cancelling of
one’s State financed healthcare, which is the main vocation of the Social Security in France. The
expected degradation of the physical health of the target may take years if he has an unusually
elevated tolerance threshold to frustration and finds the psychological resources to oppose
passiveness to his torments; stoic, some will say. The characteristics of the latter elevated
tolerance threshold essentially are outstanding resilience to stress, social environment when there
still is one, and whether the target is a trained agent or a specialist who knows what the goal of his
elusive opponents is, exactly.[168] Notwithstanding, the surveillance and stalking team leader
knows he will be sanctioned himself if he fails to terminate his mission past a certain period
beyond which its cost is considered excessive. A mission of social elimination is unproductive
and is a running cost, already.
Note in passing, the reversal of the popular perception of what a “tough person” is; for, in such
a struggle, he who is bold and fearless and of the impulsive type is a sure loser, whereas he who
remains imperturbable and of the thoughtful type is harder than the average to beat. As other
example, in the DGSE, when defining the expected qualities of the would-be flying agent during
his recruitment and training, the tale of The Oak and the Reed by French poet Jean de La Fontaine
—truly created by Æsop under the same title—is cited as a reference and as the best symbolical
description of the latter qualities. From this definition of the best recruit, the reader may be
tempted to make the other obvious analogies of the “lion” and the “fox” of Machiavelli and of the
opposing residues of “class II” and “class I” of Pareto, respectively. However, the deductions the
reader will make of it will tally the descriptions of the mindset of the good field agent I made
elsewhere in this book, only. The real interesting conclusion to be drawn of all this is that, in
politics as in the trade of intelligence, the French ruling elite considers that the fox (reed) always
outlives the lion (oak); or rather outsmarts it, to be precise. Ironically, to the DGSE, religious
persons or those who simply have strong faith in a religion often prove more resistant to violence
and harassment than others are. They do not easily yield to the unproductive violence that may be
expected from them. They ponder their decisions instead; inasmuch as they do not have a latent
corresponding neurosis, of course.
Anyway, from the latter stage on, the surveillance and stalker team is given greater leeway in
aggressiveness, on condition however that the target ended up alone at this point, and that no third
party can witness the more patent wrong about to be inflicted on him. If the latter condition if not
filled, the DGSE or the other agency in charge of the mission takes extraordinary measures and
ask for the assistance of more skilled specialists to expedite it. When things are reaching this
extremity, rarely encountered, the mission gains an importance that elevates it internally to the
degree of an ongoing “affair” known at a senior executive level. At such point, one of the main
reasons justifying the latter concern is that the harassment of the target lasted for more than one
year, certainly. Therefore, the target is thought to have gathered enough incriminating clues of his
ordeal to transform them together into a strong evidence pointing out the responsibility of the
state. For the irony in a mission of social elimination is to be a state secret yet implicitly revealed
to the target, on the long run and as far as the latter is thought intelligent enough to analyze and to
understand its unfolding. Formally speaking, the corollary constitutes an implicit encroachment to
the rule of the need-to-know; thereof, the possibility that a mission of social elimination evolves
to physical elimination, due the latter reason, precisely!
As I said, the forms the harassments of a social elimination take may greatly vary because they
are defined according to the personality, culture, and intelligence, of the target, and to his present
and past occupational activities. In many instances, the DGSE, and the DGSI alike, send warnings
and threats to the individual they are about to thus sanction. This happens when the wrongdoing
of the target is not yet done irremediably or / and when he is an employee, experienced agent of
one of these agencies, or a senior official in another public service, and as such is able to fully
assess the gravity of his own misdeed.
In their simplest and less harmful forms, very often, the threats are anonymous messages that,
at first glance, seem to be the works of an uncouth and barely literate drudge, a crackpot, or a
vicious kid. Sometimes, all on the contrary, the threats come as suave and cryptic, whose turgid
proses aim to further serve the claim of “misunderstanding of his author’s intent,” in case the
recipient “takes it the wrong way”. Below, I present my English translation of a true specimen of
the latter possibility, sent to me as an email while I was the target of a social elimination myself.
“As about Chloe, girlfriend of Colin in Froth on the Daydream, she is anything but a proponent
of Sartre … rather that of Camus… my reference in philosophy.
Good evening, my dear.”
The second mail thus insisted:
“Yours truly, Chloe, wishing you another fate than she of Boris Vian …
Samy.”
Actually, no one but me could see in which way the two messages above were threatening,
unless one knew their context and precise period, I am obliged to explain, therefore, to which I
will add the pretext given to their sending because it is not devoid of interest in the context of my
explanations either.
In France, in early January 2010, I was attempting to write an espionage novel in French
language on my computer. It was an uchronia whose several plots unfold against a backdrop of
dystopia in an imaginary occidental country, to say in passing. At that time, I was aware to be
under the heavy surveillance that goes along with all social eliminations. The latter included the
24 / 7 monitoring of all my Internet activities and the monitoring of all my activities on my
computer alike, thanks to a Trojan horse someone (the DGSE?) had sent under the guise of an
Adobe Flash software update—thus, no antivirus software could identify the small computer
program as a virus or threat.
As the plot of my novel could hardly please the DGSE and the less so the GOdF, although I
gave another name to the latter organization and slightly changed its rites, I received a first death
threat under the cryptic form of a small Superman toy figurine, whose head had been loosely cut
and its remaining body partially covered with dirt and would-be-blood red paint. I and no one else
could take seriously the mutilated toy as a dreadful warning.
A few days earlier, I had put a used pair of Church’s shoes for sale on EBay. Someone
immediately bought the shoes and there was nothing suspicious about this other event so far, even
though the first buyer who outbid all others failed to send his payment and vanished without a
word of apology. That is how I had a deal with the second bidder with whom I was in touch,
therefore. The latter detail, insignificant at first glance, actually is important because it
underscores the fact that “I felt obliged to solicit this person,” and not the reverse. This man, first,
sent to me an email to say he was happy with the deal, right upon his receipt of my shipment. This
was also all normal so far. What was no longer normal at all was his eventual sending of the
couple of completely irrelevant emails, I translated verbatim on the previous page, whose elliptic
and shrewd references indicated he seemed to know much about my privacy beyond my shoes’
size and taste, unambiguously. I explain why, below.
The name “Chloe,” this man insists on in his mails, is my wife’s first name, indeed, which I
used as pseudonym for our common EBay account. Yet my buyer made a direct allusion to the
other “Chloe” of Boris Vian’s novel titled Froth on the Daydream. At first, I could not understand
what he meant exactly by “Chloe’s fate,” as I never read that book. That is why, obviously stung
by curiosity, I looked belatedly on the Wikipedia page on this novel, at least to know what to
answer to the buyer. Thus, I learned that his two odd messages were not friendly at all, and that
they aimed unambiguously to be ominous to the sole person who could understand the allusions
in it, myself. For in the plot of Froth on the Daydream, the Wikipedia’s synopsis explains
“Chloe falls ill with a mysterious disease that consists primarily of coughing and chest pain.
She is eventually diagnosed with a water lily in the lung, a painful and rare condition that can
only be treated by surrounding her with flowers.”
The Wikipedia page goes on explaining,
“[…] the expense of the treatment is large and Colin [Chloe’s husband] soon exhausts his
funds, compelling him to undertake low-paying jobs in an effort to accumulate more money for
Chloe’s remedy. But as Chloe’s disease worsens, the apartment of Colin […] begins to decay.
Ultimately, Colin struggles to provide flowers to Chloe, to no avail, and his grief at her death is so
strong that his pet mouse commits suicide to escape the gloom.”
In the meantime, in the story, the Wikipedia page further explains, there is an important subplot
involving a relative of Chloe and her husband who is asked to “stop publishing books”.
Following the sophisticated warning, quite clear to me, at last, I obviously investigated a little
on who was the purchaser of my used shoes, exactly. With no great difficulty, I discovered he is a
biochemist by the name of Felix Baklouti—and not “Samy”—with a MSc. degree, working in
Lyon with the CNRS, and formerly for the French customs at Lyon’s airport. For the record, the
CNRS is a well-known French public scientific research institute that, for decades, is sheltering
analysts, specialists, and technicians of the DGSE to provide them with cover activities and
official incomes. Consequently, “Samy” is a man who professionally is at the right place indeed to
know the exact cause of Chloe’s mysterious disease in the Boris’ Vian novel, not to speak of his
previous employer the French customs.
I am sorry for this man to publish his real name and in this incriminating chapter in addition,
but I think his occupational activity certainly allowed him to buy a brand-new pair of shoes, and
he would have been better advised not to send a cryptic death threat to someone he does not even
know. End of anecdote and example.
As many, I read and watch videos on the Internet, including their comments each time I am
curious to know what people think about such or such issue they present. My arcane knowledge
of the way the DGSE and the French intelligence community in general proceed and deal with
negative news on France allows me, then and now, to spot threatening messages of the kind I
previously described, addressed this time to the concerned people I cannot possibly know. At the
risk to edge a little away from the subject of this chapter because, I believe, the following might
also interest the reader, in certain of the latter instances it appears clearly that the DGSE—the
“trolls” of this agency who are in charge of information watch, more exactly—crafts those threats
in a way indicating they hold their recipients as familiar with methods and mores in spycraft,” i.e.
able to understand their true meanings. In some other instances, the boldness is waning, and so I
believe by intuition the DGSE only suspects the latter familiarity or is putting the targeted author
on test about it. In a third category of instances, the “message” actually does not aim to threat or
to warn anyone, but to “pollute” the targeted information with gibberish or nonsense in the aim to
annoy and to discourage the readers, and thus, to “kill” the interest of the news and its discussion
or to wrench the subject in the endeavor to discredit its author.[169] In all three instances, the
typical pattern of ranting nonsense, sometimes fully formulated and sometimes inchoate, its
uncouth author yet brazenly delivers, becomes easy to identify to anyone knows the practice and
its patterns.
Quite often and typically in the latter case, the uncanny matter the French troll brings upon to
formulate his criticism or to intervene in an ongoing online discussion, includes insisting
references to UFOs, and other World conspiracies theories in which the names “Bilderberg
Group,” “Council on Foreign Relations–CFR,” and “Trilateral Commission” invariably arise.
Commonly, we also find references to mysterious attacks with electromagnetic or other waves,
other and varied pseudo-sciences, supernatural powers, ancient myths, and so on. Note, trolls of
the Russian intelligence community for long use the same methods in censorship, references, and
style of gibberish, exactly.
In about all cases, the ominous messages of that sort the DGSE and the DGSI use to send to
those they want to silence or to socially eliminate, connect loosely to the real matter at hand. The
threats could hardly relate to any other subject their recipient could know of or be interested in;
whereof, the curiosity it inescapably arouses in their recipients, as their senders expect. In its
principle, this way of doing things, first, is a manipulation of the same type as the “trick of the
wallet,” I presented in the previous chapter; second, it is a persuasion attempt.
Of course, this peculiar way of communicating with foes and targets owes exclusively to the
concern never to betray activities the DGSE and other intelligence agencies claims they never
involves in. Thereof, a syntax intelligible or so for an irrelevant message, whose sole purpose in
actuality is to carry second-degree meanings, metaphors, and symbolic allusions; that is to say, all
notions any justice court would promptly dismiss. In other words, using my case I explained
earlier as example, of course the DGSE would never send to me, obviously, an email stating
something as, “We, the DGSE, your former employer, shall harshly retaliate against your wife by
poisoning her, if ever you persist in your attempt to publish a novel alluding to us and to the
GOdF in unflattering terms”.
Finally, the other and last interest to be found in those written threats is a pattern, implicit in its
form, of excessive and irrational violence, crafted to suggest to their recipients that their authors,
apparently “insane and brutish,” will remain deaf to any argument and are unlikely “to be brought
back to reason”; sort of chicken game. Once more, this can hardly point an intelligence agency,
according to the perception the public and the justice have of a public body, and fits the profile,
instead, of the resolute and crazy individual that anyone would dread as one’s opponent.
As a matter of fact, the pattern of would-be-insanity recurs as the acted demeanors of all team’s
agents when those are instructed to taunt the target physically, such as swaggering in front of him
when there is no witness around, typically. Those agents act on precise instructions, exactly as
extras in films making do. As it happens, sometimes, that the target of a mission of social
elimination meets accidentally an agent who, previously, acted with him in a bold or bombastic
and self-assertive manner, the former is obviously surprised to find the latter an “entirely different
person,” behaving and interacting normally with other people, this time.
On those occasions of open taunting, the agents may be instructed to reproduce in their talks
the other pattern of absurdity because the goal is to strike the mind of the target in two ways. The
first is to make clear for the target that several people indeed are causing all his troubles, but that
he could never use this show to evidence this reality, if not at the risk to be promptly accused of
delusion. The second is to send to the target a “message” saying that he is “surrounded” in his
dailies in a so elaborate and potent fashion that it leaves to him no chance to retaliate in any way.
People capable to resist morally against this peculiar form of aggression, when repeated numerous
times, are rather rare, although it is no more elaborate than a prank, in the facts.
The target may be sent anonymously by post or else a film on DVD or a novel, whose plot
appears eerily reminiscent to the extraordinary events of his actual harassment. Further
sophistication is introduced in the method, when the team selects a fictional story to “tell” the
target a plot that is going to reproduce identically as a set up to come. Indeed, the team, when
assisted by a psychiatrist, may even forecast accurately the next decisions and moves of the target
in a more or less remote future. For the ways the target is manipulated during his social
elimination, elaborate and overwhelming, and the fact that all his moves, artificially limited, are
monitored and recorded, together make about all his future decisions and more especially counter-
actions predictable. This variable in the method aims to striking the mind of the target and to
precipitating him to a psychological state of haplessness and powerlessness, and so of inhibition if
not madness. For his psychological defenses have been so weakened and his logical reasoning so
altered, at this point of his ordeal, already, that he may be lured easily into believing that his
elusive opponent “is even capable to predict the future,” including his own thoughts and moves.
In reality, the target is unable to understand that, given his reduced choice of options, predicting
his future actions in response to a set up to come is no more difficult than doing so with the rat in
the experiment 1 of Laborit; he will seek and find out the only exit that has been left open to him
to flee the unpleasant situation that will be arranged either. The difference with the experiment of
Laborit is that the exit will lead to another unpleasant experience. The DGSE does the same
exactly when it is recruiting and training an employee or agent, still in order to know in advance
how he will react and behave in the face of accidental events when in real missions or / and when
he will be left on his own in a foreign country. This underlines again the many similarities
between a hostile recruitment and a social elimination, owing to the basing of both upon the
teachings of behavioral biology.
Should my reader express his incredulity about the latter explanation, then he must be reminded
that during the process of a social elimination that happens commonly to span several months, the
team records dutifully all reactions and responses of the target, the evolution of his economic and
social situation, and how his mental balance deteriorates in reaction to his permanent harassment.
Whereof, it is possible to know intimately the target at some point, including the ways he reacts
and behaves usually in the face of an ever-increasing range of staged situations and incidents.
Actually, the DGSE does the same exactly when it is recruiting and training an employee or
agent, still in order to know in advance how he will react and behave in the face of accidental
events when in real missions or / and when he will be left on his own in a foreign country.
 The DGSE uses to send anonymous threats by other means, equally common, such as
anonymous phone calls with no one speaking on the line or with someone who is instructed to
imitate the hissing of an angry cat, or else weird and cryptic solicitations intending to arouse
concern or fear. Usually, DGSE employees of lower rank or rookies are tasked to make phone
calls of this kind, from phone booths distant from the place where the target lives, preferably.
Typically, when someone receives a threats of this other kind, he does not understand what is
happening to him, first. Then, in an afterthought, he is scared and enters a first stage of inhibition.
In case the person is reproached to “talk—or write, as me—too much,” he must become mute and
the rest of the mission will limit to the monitoring of his moves for some months. If the target
refuses to comply with the implicit demand to backtrack, the DGSE may possibly orders a
mission of social elimination against him … or worse, as some true stories show in the next
chapter.
Possibly, the reader may find paradoxical that a mission of physical elimination be ordered
against someone who did not yet “talk”. That is why enlightened spies all know well that an
effective measure against their likely assassination is to talk to as many people as possible,
precisely, and that what they say, associated with their real names, be reported by reliable and
popular media if possible and as soon as possible. Nearly all people the SDECE, and then the
DGSE, physically eliminated in the past fifty years were only “about to talk”. Thus, they did not
have the time to, still as we shall see with true stories and names in the next chapter. Russians
make an exception with this: they are prone to eliminate physically not only those who talked or
even published their secrets already, but they also happen to take revenge against their closest
relatives. France, on the contrary, still has an appearance of democracy she wants to preserve
from accusations or strong suspicions of this kind. This country, however, socially eliminates all
those who had the time to talk, at least.
It is sad to say things as the followings, but more than 99% of people who thus are threatened
backtrack. The percentage I deliver is an abstract number of my own, however, since I could not
possibly find any such statistics, nor ever personally involved in schemes of the sort I explain in
this chapter. Notwithstanding, I believe the latter figure is accurate enough because I establish it
from a comparison between rough estimates of the very large number of people the SDECE and
then the DGSE thus threatened since the end of the WWII, and the known tiny minority of them
who either exposed secrets successfully or were assassinated before they could do so. Actually,
the most accurate and easiest to find sources of information on people who oppose resistance to
threat are estimates of their numbers as opponents and free fighters in despotic regimes and
occupied countries. In a majority of cases, we notice, those other rough figures are as small as one
to two hundreds of thousands of people in populations numbering in tenths of millions. In France
during the German occupation, the total number of free fighters was inferior to 200,000 for a
population of about 40 million, and it did not rise above this threshold before the allied landing in
Normandy in June 1944, or less than 0.5%. Four months later in October 1944, as Paris had been
freed from the German forces, yet the number barely reached 400,000 or 1% only. The Umbrellas
Movement in Hong Kong in 2019 gathered no more than about 200,000 active people, and there
is even no known force of opposition or relevant acts in North Korea.
The latter specific brings me to make a new aside, below, this time on the more general topic of
courage. I associate it with the matter this chapter tackles on to make it a comment the reader will
find pertinent, I believe.
We all heard of people who resist(ed) to despotic authority with unflinching determination. The
best example of such persons everybody knows is Indian activist Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi found
the inspiration of his passive resistance against torments in Henri David Thoreau’s essay Civil
Disobedience, who, before him, made for himself the same reputation. Much earlier, we find John
Calvin, Martin Luther, and Étienne de La Boétie who many hold as one of the earliest advocates
of civil disobedience for his Discours de la servitude volontaire (Discourse on Voluntary
Servitude or the Anti-Dictator). Then we find Niccolo Machiavelli, and William of Ockham,
lesser known nowadays for his A Short Discourse on the Tyrannical Government, his On the
Power of Emperors and Popes, and his A Question on the Power of the Pope. I leave to the reader
the decision to add Dante Alighieri for his De Monarchia.
The existence of such rebels explains further why the DGSE does not rely on patriotism alone
when it hires someone, although, I am sure, this agency does not draw its inspiration from
Thucydides’ saying, “It is a general rule of human nature that people despise those who treat them
well, and look up to those who make no concessions,” for it would not like too many other things
the Greek historian wrote. As far as I can remember, I never heard anyone uttering the name
Thucydides in France, nor Zeno of Citium. Courage in this country when considered as a virtue
must be understood as blind obedience; I remember of one case only of rebellion, and it did last
for long, following a harsh sanction.
As any other intelligence agency in the World, the DGSE finds plenty of people ready to do
crazy things, such as walking on a cable stretched over a chasm, escalading a skyscraper with
bare hands without any safety measures, or else physically torturing and killing people in cold
blood including women and children. Surprisingly enough, however, it is something else to find
out people who are not afraid of tax controls, losing their home or even just their job, threats
against their wives and kids, or of a video exposing them in a degrading situation. Yes, I find the
episode of the Black Mirror TV show titled Shut Up and Dance (2016) quite realistic in its
behavioral renderings—the first episode of this series, on the same theme, is too grotesque. This
episode mirrors also the true motives and recurrent attitudes in a majority of people who work
with the DGSE, and of even more in many public servants, especially at senior levels. That is
what dossier secrets are filled for, by the way, exactly and almost exclusively since the early
1800s.
Those who continue to show stoicism when in face of threats of the entirely different range I
just enumerated indeed are very rare birds the DGSE itself dreads. Contrary to what many
believe, “exceptional courage” is not a quality the DGSE really expects in its recruits. The French
intelligence community in general is wary of recruits “who dread nothing,” simply because they
must necessarily be afraid of sanctions to be operational and dependable. Constantin Melnik,
former coordinator of the French intelligence agencies to Prime Minister Michel Debré from 1959
to 1962, used to say, “Courage is not a virtue, but a physiological characteristic medically
explainable”. Frederick II of Prussia explains in his Political Testament (1752) that by threatening
soldiers of harsh punishments it is possible to make them face greater dangers on the battlefield.
[170]

Therefore, there are two distinct types of courage: physical courage that is in no way
exceptional and commonly available in quantities in any military elite unit or street gang, and
moral courage that is extremely rare; in the range of the less than 1%, I just presented. Another
sorry though no less surprising remark about the latter point, made as a written testimony by
Colonel Walter Nicolaï, head of the German military intelligence service during the WWI, is that
recurring patterns of exceptional resistance to threat and to despotic authority may vary in their
percentages according to the considered cultures, ethnics, regions, and countries.[171]
By the way, today and since the First Empire, for much the history of France teaches us, the
French intelligence community gives priority to certain ethnic groups among immigrants to
handle its dirty jobs, today including social and physical eliminations, and hostile recruitments in
rarer instances. For long, this minority comprised immigrants from North African countries, until
the Yugoslav Wars of 1991-2001 and unrelated social upheavals in French suburbs disrupted the
centuries-old tradition. Since then, the DGSE entrusts its petty and dirty missions on the French
soil to a new minority made up of immigrants of former Yugoslavia, Serbs in particular. In second
position, we find the uneducated French youngsters and young North African immigrants living
in large and poor city’s suburbs, typically. Male immigrants of Serb origin in particular made for
themselves in the DGSE a reputation of hard violence, for it was found that an abnormally
elevated percentage of Serbs are prompt to obey any authority that comes before them and to
carry out on order the most immoral acts without any qualms. Indeed, those Serbs even have a
good head start on young criminals of French and North African origin because they can be more
ruthless than them without any need of justifications, narrative, and myth for this. Serbs who
immigrated to France during the last Yugoslav War and in the aftermath of the latter event are the
first called to partake in missions of social elimination, and in physical punishments, each time
the DGSE has a need to give a claque or a fessée to one of its employees and agents or to
intimidate them suitably. Typically, in this context, “intimidation” means overt and threatening
shadowing in streets.
The evolution and recent trend above must not be understood as marks of a French
contemporary society that would be in decay. For we can find clues and even detailed testimonies
not only of similar practices, but even of the very elaborate ways they were done as far in time as
in the 15th century in Italy, and in the early 17th century in France. It was especially true in
Prussia’s 18th century where state’s harassment and stalking were surprisingly similar to those the
DGSE and the DGSI order nowadays. The following anecdote about Voltaire, when he was a
super-agent Louis XV sent in Prussia to spy on King Frederick II, may be taken as an example,
similar in all respects indeed, of what a foreign agent under diplomatic status coming to France
today might face.[172]
When Frederick II understood the secret motives and true feelings of Voltaire toward him, he
was careful not to take revenge openly against a so respected writer and philosopher. On the
contrary, he had made available to the Frenchman a comfortable residence,first. However, an
intellectual as Voltaire could not fail to notice among other details that the interior walls of the
house in question had been painted yellow, color of shame and discredit in the European high
society at that time. Additionally, the tablecloth of the dining-room table had been embroidered
with foxes; a symbol of betrayal and deceit—the animal still is, today, in Western countries.
Additionally, Frederick II’s secret agents were instructed to shadowing Voltaire wherever he was
moving in Prussia, and just as openly as necessary for the philosopher to notice them though
without ever being able to prove this to anyone, otherwise at the risk to pass for a lunatic.
Meanwhile, Frederick II continued to tell Voltaire he was “his good friend” with reciprocal
hypocrisy, as nearly all heads of States do so today when introducing publicly their foes as
“allies” and “friends”.
The tactic in counterintelligence I just described, very underhanded, aims to breeding cognitive
dissonance in the mind of the adversary, incapacitating his critical judgment, getting on his
nerves, and to unhinging him if possible. The DGSE often resorts to the practice nowadays,
including against its own senior employees as a way to punish them or to send to them a warning
meant to be untold and unofficial yet quite real.
Remember when I said that the forms a mission of social elimination may take must be tailored
to the profile of its target, and see how old the sophistication is, actually. Voltaire could feel
harassed because he was sufficiently educated to know that yellow was the color of shame, and
the fox an allegorical representation of betrayal and deceit. On the contrary, an individual of
average intelligence and of mediocre culture would have found himself happy to have a
beautifully embroidered tablecloth and freshly painted walls, and he would have taken Voltaire
for a lunatic, had he seen him “lamenting about so insignificant cosmetics,” thus disputing
unwittingly all possible complaint for moral dishonesty or harassment and siding with the
tormenter.
The latter contrast in perception is a side effect of harassments the DGSE and the DGSI
commonly do today, since a specific in the practice is to make the target see things and events that
all others people around must not. Anecdotally, film director Taylor Hackford made the cunning
trick a recurrent pattern—devilish given this other and fictional context—in his film The Devil’s
Advocate (1997). Anyway, the reader sees that a mission of social elimination is infinitely more
sophisticated than harassments commonly done by ordinary criminal, gross by comparison, and
that can be reported to the police with substantial evidences in hand, such as death threats written
in clear talk and other bullets and little coffins sent in parcels. Today, when the DGSE, the DGSI,
and even many counterespionage services in the World wants to proceed the same way as
Frederick II to make a foreign spy aware he fools no one in concealing himself under pretenses of
good faith and honorability, they expose to his sight a secret symbol he alone and not the public.
The latter examples and their explanations help the reader figures the characteristic marks of a
harassment conducted by the French intelligence community against a foreign agent acting under
the cover of a respectable position, in particular. The French intelligence community has a stake
in making its methods of harassment difficult to expose with conclusive evidences. Few ordinary
French know more or less that the intelligence community of their country does such things, but
they know well either that it would be ill advised to talk openly about those matters that “do not
exist”.
Harassments and social eliminations the French intelligence community knew a sharp increase
from the late 1990s. The phenomenon did not go unnoticed to everyone because the practice and
several of its sophisticated techniques even propagated in a number of large French businesses,
often publicly owned or partly publicly owned, we notice. The sudden appearance of a concerning
number of mysterious suicides of executives in those companies was the main cause of this public
knowledge. I do not know formally the reasons for this increase and trivialization of sophisticated
psychological violence and cruelty in the French private sector, but I know of several facts I
present, below, which can explain them partly, at least.
In the first place, the trend surged in the wake or thereabout of the strong development of the
new policy of the privatization of the intelligence services. Second, there was at that time a rising
concern for hostile foreign industrial and economic activities in France that aroused, say, a certain
agitation in the French intelligence community and in the political elite. Third, the DGSE was at
the origin of the appearance and trivialization on the book market of the new subject of
“harassment” (harcellement, in French), presented innocuously at that time as a “new
phenomenon in the French society”.[173] The reason for the latter sudden and weird initiative is
easily explainable as a common and very old practice in French domestic intelligence, in the other
sub-fields of influence and counterinfluence, I name to cut the grass under someone’s foot. In
other words, better not leaving an unknown individual delivering his personal take on the causes
of the new wave of harassment in private companies, especially if ever he was an actual victim of
it himself, and thus could explain how it truly happened and why, exactly.
Internally and colloquially in the DGSE, a social elimination is called a “chantier,” meaning
metaphorically a “demolition site,” and it is referred to under the code number “53,” more
formally and cryptically.[174] At this point of my explanation, one may notice that there is no
French translation of the verb “blacklisting” or “to blacklist,” simply because “there is no such a
thing in France”. In this country, any police officer, lawyer, or judge would rightly say he cannot
find the French translation of the word “blacklisting” in the French Penal Code. Therefore, how to
complain about a mischief that does not exist, even if about 20,000 people in France are
blacklisted currently for justified, unclear, or unknown reasons.[175] The more so since the
practice of blacklisting that the French intelligence community does commonly often includes the
closest relatives of the target, regardless whether they did any wrongdoing. Let alone people who
were or still are in the uncomfortable situation to be political refugees and holders of state secrets
in their countries, simultaneously. The latter case applies in particular when the secrets in question
relate to rules and techniques in domestic intelligence, secret diplomacy, or hostile intelligence
activities between countries introducing publicly as allies. Internally, the French intelligence
community subsumes the preventive measures in a sub-category of counterintelligence called
contre-ingérence (counter-interference), and they can be relevant to another activity in the same
sub-category called contre-espionnage préventif (preventive counterintelligence) depending on
the specifics of the case. In addition to the deprivation somebody’s right to work and to his round-
the-clock shadowing, there is a large variety of methods and techniques of harassment serving a
social elimination, whose common goal is to breaking his stamina, again.
We have seen that Man has a brain advanced enough to postpone his defense against an
immediate threat or even aggression, and to plan instead long-termed tactics, strategies, and
double-barreled strategies. Notwithstanding, he is rarely strong enough nervously and
intellectually to postpone indefinitely a physical action of retaliation against a relentless
psychological aggression; I explain why, below.
In our childhood, many among us have experienced or witnessed taunting, bullying, and the
torments of repeated mockeries, each insignificant and stupid. Yet we all know that when this
repeats for too long, it will cause a single but loud burst of anger, a slap, a punch, or whatever
other physical action; that is to say, a defensive response whose intensity does not appear
proportional to the attack, apparently. This is a matter of perception that may largely differ from
one people to another, especially from the viewpoint of a third party that did not witness the entire
series of aggressions. Yet we all know well the phenomenon and we even understand it, since it
gave rise to the popular epigram, “The straw that broke the camel’s back”. The DGSE relies
largely to the psychological phenomenon when it executes a mission of social elimination or
wants to persuade someone to “cooperate”. This agency has an additional clever trick in its sleeve
to ascertain no witness can identify any culprit in the series of aggressions, which consists in
instructing several different persons to reproduce a same aggression identically, thus shielding
definitively all of them against a possible accusation of “repeated aggressions”. As long as no
physical harm has been done and no property has been damaged, the repeated little aggressions
are abstract notions only, whose gravity can be trivialized or dismissed easily, therefore.
Moreover, it is difficult to anyone to be taken seriously when attempting to complaint for
conspiracy against people he does not know, and when the harassment is not justified by any
motives, apparently, or by a motive that is highly likely to be dismissed as delusion. I invite the
reader to picture himself entering a police station to say something as “I come to complaint
because I am stalked everyday by unknown people who, apparently, want me to become a spy”.
The latter difficulty has been popularized longtime ago, already, by the film Witness to Murder
(1954), and more recently and cryptically by the other film A Beautiful Mind (2001) in which the
hero indeed has paranoid schizophrenia.
I exemplify the latter provisions in an abstract way, below, since they come together as a
principle in social elimination.
If I present as a challenge to the reader to remain stoic upon being insulted or mocked for 10
seconds each day for ten days on a row, he will be able to withstand the aggression until the tenth
and last day. He might not, however, if I do not introduce the latter notion of challenge before
doing the same, and he might even slap or punch me in the face on the first or second day, only.
Thereof, he is brought to realize that, after all, he would perfectly able to oppose no more than
quiet defiance to the series of verbal aggressions. However, he will wonder whether he would
withstand greater harm each of these ten days; possibly, again, he may feel strong enough
mentally to go very far with it, if the ordeal is explicitly presented as a challenge before it begins.
Then, what happens if I substitute the intensity of the harm done by the number of times I inflict
it? Even if I reduce the duration of each daily session of verbal insults or mockery to 5 seconds
only, it might prove harder to withstand the ordeal for one month. Then what about no more than
a quiet mocking or a quizzing smile of 1 second only a day for one year, done impromptu at any
moment of the day? Even if the notion of challenge is still attached to the ordeal, its duration
alone, or 1 second x 365 = 6 minutes, might prove much harder to withstand than “no more than”
a 6 minutes long mocking or quizzing smile. In the former hypothesis, doubt and exasperation
will arise in the mind of the reader; in the latter hypothesis, he will probably burst laughing after a
few seconds. Now, imagine again the first hypothesis with no challenge announced and the smile
done by 10 different and unknown people; the effect might well be devastating after a couple of
weeks, only.
French agents tasked to harass someone counts much on the psychological trick I just
explained, and the repeated little aggressions do not limit to insults and quizzing smiles. Many
more little and varied nuisances come to haste the unhinging of the target with much more
effectiveness than inflicting physical violence, on the long term. Moreover, assaulting him would
evidence the aggression, and the agents would be forced to renounce quickly. That is why
missions of social elimination never include physical aggression, except if the target makes the
mistake to strike first physically and violently against an agent or even against one of the
expendable mercenaries they happen to hire to blurry their tracks; immigrants and violent
youngsters, typically. In such case, the surveillance and stalking team will be glad to seize the
violent action of the target as a pretext, logical and easily explainable in the eyes of all possible
witnesses and in the police’s, to drag him into endless and stupid quarrels and feuds with local
dropouts and petty criminals. In point of fact, the DGSE and other French intelligence agencies
indeed makes a common and large use of those urban mercenaries each time this agency needs to
harass or to socially eliminate someone. Therefore, I must describe who they are and how their
cooperation in intelligence activities unfolds, exactly.
For a few decades, the French intelligence community and the police take advantage of those
innumerable gangs of chronically jobless youngsters, immigrants, and petty criminals with no
education nor future, losers by definition and themselves excluded from all classes of the society
already. It is easy for an intelligence agency to manipulate them, for they all are very vulnerable
one way or another. Those who are alien run the risk to be deported at any time, and they are
expecting from the French authorities that their families will join them on the French soil,
someday. Then, French nationals or alien regardless who were caught by the police or the
Gendarmerie for offenses of varied gravities, are left free however, in exchange for being regular
informants and snitches. Nearly all of them, not to say all, are hooked to the welfare, which in
France are paid in part directly to the housing companies that provide them with condominiums in
those typical larges buildings of the poor suburbs that law-abiding citizens call colloquially zone
de non-droit (“no law’s zone”). This situation of great economic and social precariousness is a
potent threat that constantly hangs over the heads of those young nobodies.
Every day, they hang around aimlessly and endlessly in their quarters or they gather in clusters
in building entrances leading downstairs, underground, to dark mazes of corridors and cellars
filled with garbage mixed with parts of stolen vehicles, all this making up for as many temporary
caches and dead drops for drugs and all sorts of weapons. Upstairs, we find dozens of unnamed
apartments where the young people live with their families, and where they are careful not to
store evidence of their petty crimes. Those caves of our modern age are the “territories,”
“strongholds,” “headquarters,” and “news agencies” of the tribes that occupy them.
Those French and immigrant youngsters get along rather well overall, simply because they all
belong to the Inferno of the French society, near the bottom, just one circle above these of the
convicts and homeless. Their common and first sin is particular in the sense that it is to be born
there, where they learn to do more as a common fashion to being and to fighting the eternal
dullness and frustration that are their punishment. The few who reject the local mores expose
themselves to the risk that the majority ostracizes them for their refusal to adapt to the local norm,
and their chances to escape to the Purgatory of the socially included citizens are next to nil. The
rest of the society does not really see them as citizens, to begin with.
Each of the urban tribes that divide their crowds has a hierarchic structure of dominance,
shaped and regulated by a mix of age, experience, physical force, ruse, boldness, time spent in
prison, and courageous deeds in crime. The tribes, innumerable in the country and constituting
together a minority of several tens of thousands of fighters, share very precise rules, customs,
dress code, cultural habits, and tastes. They even have their own language that in actuality is a
dialect mixed with signs and specific body attitudes making for an additional non-verbal
language, which the socially included barely understands or does not understand at all, except
certain specialized police officers and rare social assistants who have a stake in learning it. This
dialect, based on the French language, consists of about 500 words, compared to the 1,300 typical
words used daily by French people with a bachelor’s degree. Each time those young socially
excluded exit their territories to “go to the city” or to the nearest supermarket, they are reminded
of the comfort and pleasures they will never enjoy if not illegally. Thus, they each have to cope
with about the same feelings of frustration, stress, and moral suffering as the rat in the electrified
cage of the experiment 2 of Laborit. Therefore, they fight their likes violently either, since the
door leading to the cage B. of the Purgatory is closed. They will yield to inhibition, at last, when
they will grow older or they will become dreadful demons themselves.
Typically, they do not have the same education, and intelligence of the frustrated young people
Miles Copeland Jr. describes in the excerpt I presented in a previous chapter. So, they are poorly
receptive to abstract notions and discourses and unlikely, therefore, to attach themselves to any
holly cause, except a tiny minority, smarter than the average and of North African origin
generally, who committed at some point to Muslim extremism and became terrorists, exactly as
Copeland explains.
The nonsense the former talk could not be polished up so to makes a modicum of sense and its
values could never reach any high moral plane. They are ordinary people turned violent by the
circumstances. The concept of commitment of American sociologist Howard Becker sums up
rationally their arguments and the premises supporting their perception of the society in which
they are forced to live. Then and now, they join together around a cause to revolt in an apparent
common momentum. However, as they resort to a violence devoid of any narrative and myth, by
burning vehicles and looting shops, invariably, since they are unable to voice their claims in an
elaborate discourse the rest of the society expects, special police forces can stifle quickly those
bouts of insurgency with a reciprocal violence the media censor. The tribal wars they engage in
daily over futile territorial claims and power rivalries within common suburban areas divide and
weaken them already, exactly as it happened to their spiritual ancestors of the post Roman Empire
era.
Ordinary police services know well the proneness to wanton violence and acts of petty
criminality to which each of them indulges, and their whereabouts, complete pedigrees, and what
sort of illegal trade in which they display a particular skill are dutifully recorded.[176] Those who
refuse to cooperate or one of their close relatives will go to prison for a past misdemeanor or
felony, of which the police keeps under the hat all evidences in anticipation of this need.
Additionally, their parents might lose their social benefits and their housing with it. Additionally,
their parents might lose their social benefits and their housing with it. If they prove receptive to
the voice of reason, the police not only will put their cases back to the drawer, but also, they
might be entitled special favors, I will soon describe.
 Thanks to schemes of the latter sort and to relations between the police, the Gendarmerie, and
the intelligence community of a more or less official nature, they can be turned into useful
mercenaries, readily available for partaking in the many dirty tricks that missions of social
elimination claim. If the birth of street-gangs à la française sticking around a violent rap music
culture conveying their resentment is a relatively recent social phenomenon, this way to hiring
third rate agents of the expendable sort is old and well tried. The reader could spot its patterns in
the history of the French police of the 19th century and in the autobiography of Eugène François
Vidocq in particular. Clues suggest that the French police and spies have gotten the hang of things
with it even before the 18th century.
For much I could see by my own on one accidental circumstance, spies in charge to
establishing connections with those mercenaries and to handle them belong to the barbouze
category having the official title of police officers. Under-agents who have ongoing connections
in this underworld handle the relations on the long run and thus, act as “burnable fuses”; the
followings explain how.
Under the conditions I just explained, a police officer or an agent introducing himself simply as
“an influential people” sets a meeting with one of the young delinquents. In addition to impunity
for the wrongdoings the latter did, the former proposes to provide him and a dozen of his friends
with free pot, daily, in exchange for spending some hours of their time, every day, at a precise
spot. There they must behave in a particular but simple way, according to precise instructions. The
place in question is the main entrance of the building where the target of a social elimination lives
or that of his house, or else that of the business he still owns. The mercenary is promised the
police will not disturb him and his buddies anymore, provided they always follow the instructions
to the letter. The directives, quite simple and not demanding at all, are for the group to behave
exactly as they use to when they hang together for hours at their usual building entrance; that is to
say, chatting, joking, and laughing noisily, drinking and eating snacks, and throwing mindlessly
their junks and empty bottles around the place. They can even smoke joints, still without
bothering about passerby and the police, as long as they do not do it too openly.
The young mercenaries are not informed of the simultaneous presence nearby of a surveillance
team enjoying sophisticated technical means to carry on their mission of social elimination,
which, therefore, will monitor their behaviors and activities in addition to those of the target.
Thus, the stage two of the harassment of the target begins; the stage one having limited to
warnings and threats of the sort previously described. At this precise moment, the process of
social elimination is set to motion, really and irreversibly.
If the target did not ask for help to the police or to the Gendarmerie past a few weeks of this
ordeal, one at least of his neighbors certainly did, even though the handler of the team
recommended to the youngsters to behave peacefully and even courteously with all tenants who
live in the same building, including the target himself, for the moment. The police or their
military colleagues the gendarmes indeed intervened once, but only to order the eerie squad of
pranksters to disperse at once, as “they did nothing wrong and just gathered peacefully to chat
together”. That is why they came back to the charge the next day, as if nothing ever happened. At
one point, the police expresses its weariness at answering calls for nothing because a noise
complaint is admissible provided it is made after 10 p.m. As a matter of fact, the youngsters were
instructed to leave a few minutes before the latter time, always and precisely; a conspicuous detail
the target is expected to notice either.
In case the target calls the police, then the tactic commands to tip the youngsters about it, and
to grant them the right to take revenge for the “cowardly and uncooperative denunciation” by
bullying the target, at last, yet without ever resorting to physical violence. A physical aggression
would give the target the opportunity to obtain justice, and by the same occasion to prove the
existence of a conspiracy against him.
If the duration of the harassment lasted enough to be numbered in months, and if the target did
not yet yield to the strong call for action of his reptilian brain and still opposes passive resistance
to the siege, the youngsters are given additional instructions and corresponding incentives. The
mission of social elimination must enter a new stage marked by a slight increase of
aggressiveness in its diversity and intensity. In the first place, the leader of the youngsters is
instructed to “hire” more of his friends, still to convene every day at the same spot because, now,
their presence and the permanent noise they do together must be overwhelming.
 A gang of fifteen to twenty such uncouth, impulsive, and visibly aggressive teenagers who are
hanging, blustering, yelling, swaggering, breaking bottles, smoking joints, and staging fake
brawls to show their skills in street-fighting for hours, every day, in front of one’s home indeed is
a stressful experience to anyone. Decisions and actions as ordinary as going outside to buy
groceries or walking to take some fresh air become dilemmas, as this implies to make one’s way
twice through the impressive crowd of underlings whose proneness to wanton violence is
notorious: once to go out, and once to come back home. Very possibly, giving to them a polite
hello in conventional French language may instantly antagonize them, simply because they may
take it as the invidious custom of a society that rejects them reciprocally, and saying nothing may
be perceived as contempt and “disrespect”. Their possible provocation attempts, inescapable
actually, are challenging nervously, and the sudden silence sustaining the defiant and unflinching
look of a dozen of them is worse. Never looking to them eye to eye is a rule that the
unenlightened ordinary citizen must learn, as it is provocation for a fight, in their understanding.
Meanwhile, the surveillance and stalking team introduces refinements in its instructions to the
youngsters, such as asking to their leader to approach the target at a run to open for him the main
entrance’s door of the building, which must come as an obvious satire of the palace’s chasseur.
The expected result of this being to put the target in a quandary, so that he feels compelled to be
courteous to the nasty kid, reciprocally, even if he holds with reason that the whole gang will
mock him for this. A day earlier, possibly, the target found a phallus roughly sketched with a
marker or the tip of a knife’s blade on his mailbox. The latter provocations address targets who
held high positions and ranks before their sanction began, in particular.
Obviously, the other tenants in the building look in disbelief at those odd exchanges between
the odious youngsters and the much older and apparently civilized person the target is, as they all
come to understand quickly he is the cause of all oddities that newly happens in the area. But how
could they understand the reason of this, since they would not believe it if ever someone told it to
them, anyway. It would change nothing to the target, therefore, or it would even make things
worse than they already are.
More humiliations, some sophisticated, other overly childish, must come as a bitter seasoning
to more stressful troubles and unsettling staged situations. The intent with this is to instill in the
mind of the target the belief that a single powerful and sadistic individual with a marked fondness
for cynicism is attacking him in particular in the neighborhood, and to arouse his anger up to a
state of madness. That is why the number and diversity of the possible torments are as vast as the
imagination of Man can be; examples, below, provide the reader with a general idea of a reality
that is richer than he could possibly figure.
They are the wanton denials, refusals, and oddly recurrent pettiness of officials, but whose
consequences will prove dramatic. The unexplainable childish behavior of the bank clerk and his
“regrettable little mistakes” that transform into catastrophic issues. Their innumerable promises
and commitments each time revoked at the last minute with absurd but plausible excuses. The
many “unfortunate accidents” and other sad “turns of the fate” that, now, reproduce with an
impossible frequency. The bizarre or absurd telephone calls “that only rarely occurred before”.
The inexplicable electric breakdowns and failing heating system in winter and the same with the
Internet and the cable TV network that always stops working in the middle of favorite shows and
good movies. The disgusting flood in the house caused by a big piece of fabric that inexplicably
went through a sewage pipe where it was stuck, or else in the depressurization pipe in case of an
individual septic system. The attitudes of the neighbors and shopkeepers around; mocking,
hostile, or contemptuous. The neighbor downstairs who wide-opens his windows when he is
cooking good meals every end of the month, while there is only pasta to eat for the target. The
other neighbor next door who stacks, well in sight, empty boxes of pizzas in front of his door,
instead of putting them in the trash bin. And there may be the young military upstairs who
organizes frequently noisy parties with his friends.[177]
Of course, some among the latter forms of staged annoyances imply the complicity of other
tenants in a same building. This is easy to do when the new economic and social situation of the
target forced him at some point to leave his for a less expensive one, chosen according to strict
criteria defined by both the welfare service that pays a part of the housing rent, and a publicly
owned or half publicly real estate company that imposes the “only one such apartment available,
at this time”. To the intelligence agency tasked to execute the social elimination, the alternative
either is an apartment located in a quarter where young offenders live in numbers, already, or one
in a publicly owned building in which tenants are selected for their statuses of active military,
retired military, civilians working or who formerly worked with the military, and civilians
working for private security companies, typically. There are indeed such reserved dwellings in
France, generally located where there are important military presence and barracks, and all people
living in them have an obvious stake in cooperating, in addition to a sort of esprit de corps bred
by the analogy they find in their present or past professions. Obviously, the target who is thus
relocated is not informed in advance of the latter specific, while the rumor about his situation of
“outcast” and of the caution that must be observed with him, therefore, is spread forthwith in the
neighborhood. Even, he is further described as some particular mischievous character or would-
be-traitor to the country who has been lodged there to be suitably kept under surveillance,
precisely. Thenceforth, no wonder how receptive all such people will be to the most bizarre little
helps they may be demanded “in the aim to provoke and to catch the nasty guy red handed”. Their
expected zeal that will badly mix with their lack of experience in spycraft will obviously result in
their gross faked courtesy and blunders with the target, whose repetitions must also make the
latter aware of his social confinement, helplessness, and true hostility that surrounds him.
Now, I am going to explain how far the DGSE is ready to go to break psychologically the target
of a social elimination who shows exceptional resilience to stress and opposes determination and
courage to a violence that is no longer only threatened at some point of his ordeal.
Finally, his home will be burglarized and ransacked on one of his leaves. In order to sign this
attack with the same typical cynicism, the opportune absence of the target at home will be
arranged with a summons and precise date and time of appointment in some public service. The
official who will call for the appointment, very formal but of minor importance in the facts, will
be further instructed to make the meeting last long enough to give the burglars enough time to do
their job quietly, but he will never told the real aims of the request. Thus, the target will be
deceived in assuming a complicity between his looters and the official. However, since he has
shown enough shrewdness and stoicism to reach this extreme stage in his way to the cross, he
knows it would be folly to try to convince anyone that “an official in a public service arranges to
get people out of their homes as part of a conspiracy with burglars”.
If ever the target still owns a vehicle, it will be burned or sabotaged, just as one or two others
will be in the neighborhood the same night, with no concern to the stalking and surveillance team
in this respect, so that he will be left still unable to prove that he, alone, is targeted and tormented
by some mischievous people. Such dirty tricks exemplify the following advice the DGSE gives to
some of its intelligence officers and future specialists. “The more absurd the modalities and
reason of an attack seem, the harder it is for its victim to cry wolf”.
Arranging repeated circumstances forcing the target to be in contact with dropouts is another
way to discredit him against his will, by association. Indeed, we talk of “social elimination by
association” because this method is always used in the hostile recruitment of agents to further
isolate them, and, otherwise, to discredit politicians and VIPs who must be caught “incidentally”
in company of mobsters, prostitutes, spies, or similar.
When the target is a woman, then her age and her physical features will weigh heavily in the
choice of the aggressions launched against her. If she is rather handsome, odd and rude men will
overtly approach in her in crowded streets with off-handed manners, implying she is a prostitute.
Additionally, strange bedfellows will come to knock her door at night, with enough insistence for
the neighbors to hear and see it. If she is rather plain, she will be dealt with as a man would be.
From an overall standpoint, gender equality applies fully to social elimination.
The married target whose partner did not yet flee is lucky in his sad fate. For, alone, all sorts of
strange bedfellows would often tail him overtly in streets and in a threatening fashion, and he
would have no possibility to complain to anyone about it without running the risk, again, to be
taken as a delusional person and to be ridiculed publicly with redoubled cynicism.
Children of parents who must be socially eliminated will be taken as many additional
opportunities to inflict further moral pain. Their lives will be doomed from the inception,
regardless of their intellectual capacities, education, and moral. They will perform poorly at
school because they will be exposed to wanton, absurd, and repeated sanctions, frustrating
experiences, bullying, and fights, relentlessly until they reach the age of sixteen. For it is at the
latter age that they will have their first contact, with alcohol and drugs, arranged again. A
particular rule in the French intelligence community forbids to initiate children under the age of
sixteen with alcohol and drugs, and to recruit them.
As an aside about the latter point, I recollect, in the 1990s, soon after the U.S. CIA had created
its Internet website, this agency had added to it a “CIA for kids” page. For some years, the latter
initiative spanned indignant conversations and mocking and cynical jokes in the DGSE, at the
expense of both the CIA and the United States. It happens, however, that some employees in
French intelligence take on them to prepare their kids to enlist in this activity.
When children of socially eliminated persons enter their late teens, they must resign to accept
odd jobs in SMEs, and positions in large companies and groups are denied to them, as this is a
privilege, in France. Thenceforth, their professional lives are strewn with frequent layoffs.
Constantly penniless, they end up as police snitches because cynicism is one among the best
means to enforce psychological suffering upon their guilty parents.
All this is no exaggeration, for I have a vivid remembrance of Mathieu Chileri who, in the early
2000s, was a freshly recruited agent in counter-espionage in the DGSE upon a beginning in an
elite unit of the Army. The zeal of this man by then in his late twenties, common in all young
recruits it should be said, bordered on a stupidity that allowed to fool him anytime. I once heard
him say, “Making someone’s life a misery; that’s what I’m really good at”. Finally, the DGSE sent
Chileri to Reunion Island, to deal there against locals in domestic intelligence.
Possible witnesses to a mission of social elimination may be threatened either. At the simplest,
people who have been a first time in connection with the target of a social elimination are
approached forthwith by an agent who just says something as, “You are going to get into trouble,
if you talk to this person”. This is good enough in about all cases, since it gives rise to gossips that
quickly propagate in any neighborhood, inescapably. In our troubled time, the sole rumor saying
that someone would be under suspicion to have ties with terrorists is a potent social deterrent, and
no one ever do the effort to determine whether this would not be mere slander.
That is why the DGSE and the DGSI resort frequently to the latter method on the Internet in
particular, discreetly again, by sending emails to whomever the target attempts to be in touch with
by this other means. As I said, the online activities of any target are monitored zealously round
the clock, lest he could attempt to testify, complaint, or ask for help on social networks about his
stalking.[178] The latter warning mails may be very official, and the style given to their contents
made suitably dramatic. Additionally, they instruct their recipients to remain discreet “because a
police investigation about Islamic terrorism is in progress”. Then who would dare question their
authenticity, since they are authentic? Consequently, the target never receives any answer to all
emails he may sends, which seems as irrational and unexplainable as black magic is in his view,
obviously.
It is therefore easy for the DGSE to confine socially someone within the borders of the French
territory. Abroad, this is difficult or even impossible if the government of the other country denies
any cooperation in an enterprise of this kind; it all depends of the considered foreign country and
of the quality of its relation with France. Today, the boom of the social networks allows anyone to
testify openly about a wrongdoing done by the French intelligence community, with little
concerns for censorship or possible retaliation by the government of the foreign country from
which it is done if ever it feels unconcerned. It commonly happens, however, that certain foreign
countries help France to stifle the public revelation of one of her wrongdoings, by censoring their
own citizens about it, indeed. This foreign aid to France may be spontaneous or it may follow a
discreet demand, diplomatic or in the frame of a secret agreement between foreign intelligence
agencies and police services, for cooperation and “mutual understanding”. In case of denial,
France takes the refusal very seriously, typically, and does not hesitate to go as far as to retaliating
against this country by other means, about the same way China does in similar circumstances,
notoriously.
In a number of times during the last fifty years, for much I know, countries that have no true
good relations with France yet spontaneously helped her to censor revelations on her
wrongdoings. Several possible reasons may explain why a foreign country may thus help France
although their diplomatic relations are not that friendly. Chiefly, France and this country may
have reciprocal stakes in carefully limiting the “amount” of harm they can do to each other, on the
Internet in particular since it is the medium favored for bashing between countries. The stake may
be of an economic order, for example and at the simplest. Very often, the real reason for the
unenthusiastic cooperation may be that the two countries each have their shares of dirty little
secrets their respective intelligence agencies reciprocally know about, and they each dread the
other might retaliates by leaking an embarrassing on it, too. The reader just learned that the
doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction–MAD in nuclear warfare applies to information
warfare alike. Before considering the latter sort of intricacy, another concern to about all
intelligence agencies and police services in the World is to maintain a cooperation in the specific
fields of the fight against terrorism and transboundary organized crime, which come together as
an additional leverage.
A true example about the thorny situation above is that of the U.S. FBI that cooperates
regularly with certain French intelligence agencies in the field of counterterrorism, and even
happens to provide special trainings to French intelligence and security officers, and reciprocally.
All this while the FBI indeed is chasing French spies who are very active on the U.S. soil and is
leading for decades an ongoing and consistent investigation on French intelligence activities
hostile to the U.S. national interest—would the reader who is an agent of the FBI dispute my
saying? In general, and for the record about the latter question, I explained in a previous chapter
that those cases of enemy countries that officially claim to have friendly relations however are
frequent.
Otherwise, one of the best ways the French intelligence community found to reduce the cost
and the number of people involved in those missions of social elimination is to lure its targets to
fleeing in lost and isolated spots in the countryside. Those fail to foresee that upon their settling in
such would-be-refuges, their tormenters actually will be the more aggressive, as they have much
fewer witnesses to dread, when there are some.
As we are nearing the end of this chapter, I present, below, certain points in the perceptions the
opposing parties of a mission of social elimination have of each other, starting with the DGSE.
I explained much enough so that the reader could figure the ordeal the target of a social
elimination must face and endure. Indeed, no one on earth can sustain indefinitely a relentless
aggression of this kind, morally first, and then physiologically, as we have seen, for social
elimination is torture beyond mere manipulation, in actuality. In point of fact, this kind of
treatment leads to death past certain duration and intensity, via an intermediary stage of
psychological decompensation and psychosomatic disease(s) supported by inappropriate or
inexistent health care. I said enough so that the reader could also figure how certain intellectual
and moral capacities improve or reduce resistance to the ordeal on the long run.
Many political leaders in the World experienced exactly similar treatments when they were
only political dissidents. Those cases of exceptional resilience come to demonstrate that a mission
of social elimination may result in unintended consequences, completely opposite to those
expected, ironically. The French intelligence community is well aware of the latter risk, even
when one of its agencies harasses someone temporarily only. For the one who proves able to
present conclusive evidences of an aggression of this kind is, by the same occasion, granted
publicity and large popular sympathy that inversely transforms into widely reported discredit to
the guilty country. That is why its agents and officers entrusted with this delicate mission are
instructed accordingly, supervised, and monitored themselves, while they execute it. Psychiatrists
and lawyers of the DGSE not only are commonly concerned with it, but they also play a role
commensurate to the importance given to the target.
Then, the reader may possibly assume, the cynicism that all targets see in the hostile actions
thus directed against them does not necessarily correspond to a reality, in the facts. The latter
statement must be relativized for the following reasons. A clear distinction must be made between
the passionate feelings of hatred, rivalry, and revengefulness when they exists indeed, and a
display of cynicism that often is acted in reality because it is nothing but part of an all-rational
tactic aiming to strike the mind of the target. For example, the DGSE resorts commonly to
cynicism to put to the test the will and the loyalty of its full-time employee, agent, or recruit who
is going through the challenging stage of his training. Cynicism, we notice, appears in trainings of
soldiers of special units, generally and typically, not only in France, but also in about all military
units of the World and for exactly the same practical reason of indoctrination because their
common process claims the questioning of all values of the world of ordinary and civilian people.
Passionate and thoughtless feelings must soften suitably as one goes up in the hierarchy in
intelligence, as in the military. The mind of the good soldier in wartime has to be seethe with
contempt and hatred to the enemy, and the commanders and their officers must arouse further this
feeling in the minds of their troops; doubtless, the reader heard or read the corresponding odd
names “Krauts,” “Japs,” “Ruskofs,” “Rosbeefs,” “Frenchies,” and “Yankees” that complicit
media in wartime help popularize. Then beyond these provisions, no army and no intelligence
agency can possibly exert full control over the true opinions and feelings of all their people,
regardless of how vigilant they are on everyone’s commitment. Reciprocally, all military and
spies know they have a stake in displaying conspicuously this commitment, while their
intelligence, experience, and education may tell them to see things more thoughtfully and from a
wider angle; except when they have been hurt personally, of course. Then one can find among
executives in intelligence an array of intellectual capacities, education, characters, and
experiences in particular that together breed antagonisms and aggressiveness of varying strengths
towards adversaries and targets. Finally, one must take into account the gravity, actual or alleged,
of the faults attributed to the latter.
Whereof, it is true that willful cynicism exists in the minds of many subordinates in the DGSE,
especially when the missions they are commonly entrusted are of a hostile sort, for they have
statuses of agents, and as such, they must be convinced suitably in their beliefs that their targets
are foes guilty of the greatest evils. The younger, the more inexperienced, and the less intelligent
and educated they are, the easier they put their heart and soul into mindless adversity. I could not
but notice that many agents hired for a mission of social elimination are rather young, less than
thirty-year-old for most, and predominantly women when older because a great deal of passion is
expected.
As explained in the previous chapters, the amounts of hardship and frustration those
underlings are submitted to permanently make them prompt at seizing any opportunity they are
offered to psychologically compensate by inflicting violence against anyone, exactly as the rats
did in the experiment 2 of Laborit. Expressions of schadenfreude equally arise in agents whose
tasks are essentially passive, e.g. static monitoring, surveillance, and shadowing. In all cases,
many go as far as to show excitation and fun with it, mindlessly. Notwithstanding, they are
encouraged to behave so, in order to ward off any compunction in them, as the suffering and
despair of a foe, target, and even recruit, is always obvious and undeniable. For the record, in the
DGSE, any feeling of remorse or understanding toward an opponent is an unwarranted attitude to
be probed forthwith, to the point that it is even a cause for limiting permanently someone’s access
to higher responsibilities and sensitive matters. All French spies are violent people, by trade at
least, even if this violence is expressed morally only in a large majority of instances.
Then the reader possibly assumes it would be ill advised to transform one’s mission into a
personal feud at a managerial level, since passion is the enemy of reason. It is true, however, that
in a number of instances, I witnessed unambiguous expressions of hatred in middle-ranking
executives, and often heard and read about the same at senior levels. Even rivalries, internal
quarrel, and conspiracies of offices would exist in this agency. Maybe, I was too candid or too
busy to identify one worthy to be told in this book, or else I mistakenly consider that slight
differences of opinions on issues everyone sees from a same viewpoint are not worthy of interest.
What I witnessed repeatedly or know in the latter respect is a collective interest, on one hand, in
fostering good relationships and in encouraging reconciliations between certain individuals and
groups, and, on the other hand, in breeding internal antagonisms between certain others in the aim
to breed spirit of competition and subsequent effectiveness.
A mission of social elimination must be thought and organized exactly as a military siege,
which claims obviously to put some heart in an enterprise of this kind. Indeed, the will of the
beleaguered target can be metaphorically compared to the stonewall of a fortress that can collapse
under the repeated blows of a battering ram, in association to all kinds of weapons and tools one
could figure. All this while the occupant entrenches in a situation of social and moral starvation
behind walls that he built himself. Should this stonewall prove to resist, then the occupant will
have no other choice than to surrender at some point or to die from exhaustion. “Time is on our
side, it is one of our best allies,” the DGSE teaches its people tasked to carry on a siege of this
sort, and it also teaches this principle to counterespionage staffers concerned with psychologically
pressuring individuals under suspicion of hostile intelligence activities on the French soil. That is
the setup for the two opposing parties.
From the viewpoint of the target, now. When someone is facing a nuisance of this extraordinary
nature, then he can only question the reasons that may have induced all those youngsters of the
disreputable suburbs, minors mostly, to come to occupy about permanently the entrance hall of
the building or front of the house’s door where he resides, between many other types of arranged
nuisances. Nothing can rationally explain this in his view, since there are many other similar and
even better places in his neighborhood. He exclaims, “Why the police always fail to notice those
delinquents, yet everyone can see smoking pot in full view and breaking bottles of alcohol whose
pieces strew the lobby of the building?”
At some point, he has to fight a strong and permanent urge for action; that is to say, any
reciprocal form of aggression to “make it stop”. Inescapably, he will come to believe the
youngsters are here for him only, yet for a reason he cannot clearly understand or even not at all.
As he does not know any of them, obviously, he thinks they have no reason to gather everyday
where he lives for the unique reason to “make his life a hell”. Yet he still is mentally balanced
enough to understand that talking overtly to anyone about this situation would bring him nothing
in return, except displays of incredulity and suspicions of insanity. Thus, he is brought to face a
tricky dilemma also arranged to haunts him even in his sleep.
If the target is both morally exhausted and desperate, then he will be tempted to solve the
problem by himself, at last. The latter option would please the DGSE because it would not pay,
and disastrous consequences would ensue. Most of the young delinquents are minors from a legal
standpoint, and the law, widely supported by the public opinion, prohibits adults from physically
striking back at minors, even when they are obviously dangerous criminals. Moreover, police and
justice always are more lenient with guilty minors than with adult culprits. In France, the former
often leave the police station free before their victims are heard entirely. If ever the target
nonetheless is giving in to the urge to fight violently, which at some point is highly likely, then he
alone will have to deal with the police, and “for real,” if I may say so. If ever the violent response
results in injuries or in the death of one of the teenager mercenaries, then he will go to prison, of
course, a place where much greater torments will await him, and with no credible witness around.
Thus, not only the target is in the impossible situation to remain silent about the wrong that is
daily inflicted on him, but he has also to invent alibis and pretexts at the benefit of his aggressors,
in order to justify his impossibility to solve his problems. For when at last he understands his dire
predicament cannot possibly be accidental, then he understands the uselessness of his attempts to
find a job, between many other worries. In other words, he is driven to a situation in which he can
only yield to inhibition, since he has been denied the options to fleeing and fighting. In a large
majority of cases, the target ignores his ordeal has been artfully designed in the sole goal to drive
him to inhibition behavior. Had he known this, perhaps would he have fled when this option was
still available; at an advanced stage of the ordeal, the latter possibility is out of reach or hopeless.
He also ignores that his prolonged inhibition and stress are leading him toward elevated risks of
health troubles, grave and even fatal in the end. When he feels the first portents of illness, then he
discovers, too late again, that he must avoid at all costs to seeking healthcare in the country. The
more so since numerous physicians in France are members of the GOdF. I witnessed two cases of
sabotaged healthcare, made possible and easy because the physicians involved in it were members
of the latter masonic grand lodge, but I can only assume that those people ignored the real reasons
of their expected cooperation.
On exceptional circumstances of this sort, the ordinary citizen made target is brought to
acknowledge the truth about how far-reaching the power of the State in France is. Before that, he
would never have believed it, of course, as he still was a “sleepwalker”. On one hand, being the
target of a social elimination mission feels as being jailed in a “social bubble” from which all
friendly and trustworthy relationship is impossible. On the other hand, it is difficult, obviously, to
believe “everybody is a spy” or “an accomplice in a powerful conspiracy” organized against one
person only. In fact, this is a simple trick that the reader will understand when I will explain other
specifics and tell true examples in the next chapters.
In order to help the reader figure even better the amount of stress and the complexity the target
of a social elimination has to cope with, I recommend him to watch or watch again three films of
the fiction genre. Some French spies describe the two first as excellent symbolic versions of what
a social elimination is. The first is Panic Room (2002), directed by David Fincher, and the second
is Fallen (1998), directed by Gregory Hoblit. The first, of the thriller genre, describes well the
siege situation and its tricky dilemmas. Despite its fantastic genre, the interest to be found in the
second is to present realistically the cynicism surrounding the odd and unsettling staged
encounters that the target has with his tormenters, their mercenaries, temporary accomplices, and
his rising feelings of haplessness and distrust toward everybody. In both the hero is brought to
confront a desperate situation in which he can ask for help to no one, thus putting the emphasis on
the most important ingredient of a mission of social elimination to be remembered. The interest of
the third film Witness to Murder (1954) lays on the emphasis it puts all along the plot on the
struggle for winning other’s trust between a criminal, who draws a profit from the façade of
respectability he built for himself, to make passing for a delusional person a woman who attempts
to reveal who he is in reality and the murder he committed. For a reason I ignore and that may be
worth clearing, possibly, this old American film in black and white knows an unusual popularity
in Russia for a few years.
 11. Elimination Methods: b. physical Elimination.
T he DGSE and the SDECE its predecessor has a long record of “physical eliminations;” that is
to say, assassinations. The RG, domestic intelligence agency of France from 1907 to 2008, is known
for its important contribution to the unknown number. Together these agencies “eliminated” much
more French citizens than foreign spies and terrorists reunited, indeed. This fact challenges certainly
the perception my American reader holds of a secret service, and calls for questions, to say the least.
If ever you are in the CIA or the MI6 and your agency sends you in mission to France, someday,
then I can tell you that the greatest risk you will run in this country is to be harassed; ask to your
colleagues. Contrariwise, your sources and agents only, if ever you recruit some, might possibly die
suddenly and unexpectedly from some illness or accident. France does not much kill foreign spies,
lest the media of their countries might report it worldwide.
My rough estimate of the number of French citizens physically eliminated for the past fifty years
is far in excess of a hundred; several hundred would not surprise me. In point of fact, French spies
dread more their own side than those presented as their foes. The significant number of DGSE
employees, intelligence officers, and agents who die early in age following their disgraces
exemplifies this fact. The latest known French spy eliminated by the intelligence agency yet he
served for decades, the DGSE, was shot dead near the Swiss border in May 2019, thus epitomizing
the actuality of the practice. Nothing comes to suggest the massacre is going to stop; not by a long
shot, if I may say so.
In spite of this, France has no qualms with introducing herself as a staunch and proud opponent to
the death penalty, since she abolished it officially in 1981, in the wake of the election of François
Mitterrand as President. Overwhelming facts, such as the many I report in this book, say that France
needs less bombast and more substance in her speech on human rights, for it comes as a sorry
coincidence that there has never been as many assassinations of politicians and of French citizens of
humbler classes as under the presidential mandate of Mitterrand, precisely; since that of De Gaulle
between 1958 and 1968, I mean. The reader will have no difficulty with finding out information on
the Internet on all those odd disappearances and suspicious deaths, starting with the names of
prominent personalities Joseph Fontanet, Roger-Patrice Pelat, Charles Hernu, Pierre Beregovoy,
François de Grossouvre, Jean-Edern Hallier, Christian and Fernand Saincené, and René Lucet. I
name many more in this chapter.
Nonetheless, one could say there was something of it in the air, as the previous presidential
mandate of Valéry Giscard-d’Estaing had its fair share of suspicious deaths deemed State’s
assassinations by many, and by their relatives and journalists in the first instances. For, it should be
said, if the Socialist Party took the power in France in March 1981 officially, political purges and
intensive British and American spy hunting truly began in the mid-1970s. I noticed firsthand a
strong involvement of the GOdF in these undertakings, which liberal masonic grand lodge did it
either as a committed anti-West leading force or as mercenaries of the Ministry of Defense. I will
not much elaborate about the latter specific because I did not join the SDECE before the first
months of 1980. Yet, as my brother joined counterespionage earlier when he just reached the grade
of Master Mason in the GOdF, I can say, to the least, that there was in this earlier time an electric
atmosphere of witch-hunt aiming French entrepreneurs suspected to sympathy for the United States
and the values this country stands for, especially; I will tell about it in the chapter 23.
The reader must take this French contradiction on the death penalty as a pattern reproducing
about countless other issues; I will explain the cause of the generality in the chapter 12 on active
measures. Pending this moment, I can say there is a cult of the oxymoron in the DGSE, formally
taught indeed, and summing up in a running byword containing the words “le beau ciel noir
d’azur” (“the beautiful black sky azure”); I do not remember the complete sentence, today, as it did
not much interested me. Everybody works in and for this agency is supposed to take the doubletalk
humorously, and violence and death are trivialized customarily, up to the point of a suitable
opportunity to joking that no one would dare question. A dozen of people died through the most
gruesome circumstances? Well, there certainly is something funny to say about it. That is the way it
is.
The shortest path to understanding French intelligence and politics is to see what Belgian
surrealist painter René Magritte purported to say, and then to figure it as a culture intending to
invalidate any definitive statement. “Nothing is granted; everything is questionable,” learn French
liberal freemasons as they reach higher degrees.
 If Russia does not bother much with making obvious its political assassinations and other deadly
settlements with firearms and poisons, France rather favors fake suicides, lethal accidents, and
sudden fatal diseases, with a marked preference for sophisticated and clueless sorts of poisonings, to
be explained in this chapter. French police and justice seldom investigate on those suspicious deaths
with the same stubbornness they demonstrate with ordinary crimes of passion committed against
citizens who knew no state secrets. The former become cold cases within a couple of years or three
at best, a few weeks at worst; whereas the murder of a child in this country seldom misses to
transform into a national affair that may drag on for decades. The latter cases are all about juicy
businesses for journalists and writers, and their universal popularity actually owes to the “syndrome
of the cute blonde dead girl with blue eyes”; a particular form of entertainment for the multitudes
who need to trust their police and justice, every once in a while.
Actually, state assassinations in France are no big secrets, and the masses in this country use to
read their announcements and obituaries between the lines and to take them as “customary”. Of late,
the DGSE even granted some of its intelligence officers the right to acknowledge publicly this so
particular part of its general mission. Yet the French Government still denies officially that it kills
French nationals commonly. Doublethink, doubletalk; he who wants to understand France should
bear these other notions in mind either; the reason of state must come to the rescue of a fallen
honorability, since it has no possible substitute. State assassination has even been promoted in 2015
with the release of a book that is an enduring best-seller since; zealously compliant journalist
Vincent Nouzille was awarded the authorship of the 352 pages long mass obituary, titled Les Tueurs
de la République (The Hit Men of the Republic), thus making it an acceptable oxymoron.
Among the most recent examples of those assassinations in relation to the DGSE, I present first
the latest case of Daniel Forestier. The reader may find some articles in the French press about it,
but as French journalists botched the job, on purpose apparently, and failed to report about what
actually was a spy ring and some other important facts, I find pertinent to explain what I could learn
on it without their help.
On March 21, 2019, Daniel Forestier, aged 58, was shot dead from four gunshots in the torso plus
one in the head at point blank on an isolated parking lot of Ballaison; a small French town located
between the cities of Thonon-Les-Bains, France, and Geneva, Switzerland. The French mainstream
media reported the event five days later, on March 26. Since then, journalists introduce Forestier
alternatively as a former agent of the DGSE and as a legit intelligence officer of the same agency.
The truth is Forestier’s past professional experience with the Service Action of the DGSE for 14
years, from 1990 to 2003. Upon his official retirement, “his missions had become more exciting to
him,” he is posthumously quoted as saying; but riskier, I add, because as such he could no longer
count on the assistance and benevolence of this agency. Forestier was indeed become an operative
of the barbouzes class, which certainly explains why he is also quoted as saying, “Not seen, not
caught; caught, hanged”—that is the first time I hear that one, be it said in passing.
At the time of his death, Forestier had a cover activity of bar owner and city councilor in the town
of Lucinges. Since 2011, he self-published an espionage novels series yet no one ever heard of
before he passed away, titled Les Barbouzes de la République (The Barbouzes of the Republic), with
a recurring hero named “Max de Saint-Marc”. “Max de Saint-Marc” is Daniel Forestier in plots
largely inspired by true stories, apparently. In his small town of 1647 souls located three miles from
the Swiss border, Forestier had made for himself the reputation of a colorful and boastful character
who did little secret of his past membership in the French special forces, i.e. the COS, to be
popularly understood as “the Service Action”.
However, the “former” spy was in trouble with the French justice since September 12, 2018, a
few months before he died tragically. For he and an accomplice named Bruno Susini, also a
“former” agent of the DGSE in the Service Action, have been both interrogated by the DGSI and
indicted on charges of “associate in a conspiracy” and “illegal possession of explosives”.[179] Le
Monde daily newspaper reported the latter facts on September 15, 2018.
In fact, there was a third man by the name of Alain Brunet, ex-member of the Service Action of
the DGSE either—more exactly a barbouze since his early retirement with a flimsy cover activity of
private detective. The judge of Lyon heard the latter spy as “witness assisted by a lawyer” in the
case, and that is all. There was even a fourth man, only known as “Laurent R.,” with a professional
activity of “chauffeur for VIPs in Switzerland”. The French justice proved unable to find out and to
hear this fourth spy, allegedly.
 The complete and exact motive of the official investigation on Forestier and his ring was a
“project of political assassination on the person of Congolese General Ferdinand Mbaou,” dissident
of this country and political refugee in France. General Mbaou, on his sixties in 2019, had been
close advisor to former President of Congo-Brazaville Pascal Lissouba, and head of the presidential
guard until October 1997, when Denis Sassou-Nguesso overthrew Lissouba and took the power in
this country. Since then, General Mbaou would convene with other Congolese in exile who expect
to return to Congo to take back the power. Mbaou said to the media, he was very surprised to learn
in Le Monde daily newspaper that “his modest person was the target of an assassination plot”.
The latter statement was ironical because previously in 2015, a bullet had seriously wounded
Mbaou in a first murder attempt against him. The event happened at the moment Mbaou was just
leaving his house in Bessancourt, a town of the Northern suburbs of Paris, to go to the railway
station. Mbaou had the time to see his murderer pointing a pistol at him and shooting a second time.
The man was hiding partially his face under a keffiyeh when he fired his gun and hit the former
general in the torso, near the heart. However, not only Mbaou did not collapse, but he was even
able, he said eventually, to look at his murderer eye to eye and to say, verbatim, “Why do you want
to kill me? Why did you shoot me in the back?” More than that, not only Mbaou could identify the
shooter as a male white Caucasian in spite of his Arabic style keffiyeh, but he even found the
strength to run after the man, while he was running away. At some point, Mbaou went on, he saw
his aggressor getting in a car with two other men inside, whom he describes as another Caucasian
and a Black who thus all flew at a fast speed. There was more to come, to the bemused surprise of
the survivor.
When Mbaou obviously asked for justice, the police investigation was botched in an oddly
conspicuous fashion. Some people around the crime scene had seen the assassination attempt and
the car getting away with three men onboard including the shooter, but the police did not find
opportune to interview any of them. The justice court of Pontoise lingered unambiguously and even
went as far as dismissing all demands from Mbaou to interview the witnesses. Even, no
investigative judge was appointed, as it should have normally happened in a case of this gravity. In
sum, it was as if nothing of particular ever happened. There is more to it, still more surprising.
In 2017, two years after the shooting, the French Government and French Prime Minister Manuel
Valls in particular[180] ordered the freezing of all the financial assets of Mbaou, upon request of two
unknown Chadian nationals, allegedly, but for no clearly explainable reason, in the facts. Since then,
the freezing of all banking accounts of Mbaou is renewed regularly, every semester exactly.
Additionally, Mbaou was stalked and offered odd propositions of French military assistance that
quickly turned to be provocations. A smear campaign was launched against him, saying he was
preparing secretly a coup d’état in Congo. Actually, all people who contacted Mbaou turned out to
be well-known agents of the DGSE with a specialty in African affairs. Finally, in March 2018, the
justice court of Pontoise dismissed the case of the murder attempt against Mbaou as nonsuit.
The small caliber of the bullet that hit Mbaou is unspecified because surgeons found too delicate
and unnecessary to remove it from his body, as it is located very close to the heart. As Mbaou
identified categorically a pistol and not a revolver, we can only infer the bullet is either a .22, .25
ACP or a .32 ACP at best because a more powerful caliber would have gone through the torso, and
a much bigger but similarly weak .45 ACP would have resulted in a physiological shock, and
incapacitated Mbaou. The murderer, it is noticeable, showed enough self-control not to miss his
target, and even to succeed in hitting a vital area of the torso; all this in broad daylight and on a
street where there were passers-by. Furthermore, the murderer had two accomplices waiting for him
in a car, which other fact excludes the hypothesis of a disturbed individual who acted on his own.
As Caucasian men, the murderer and one of his accomplice were not Congolese, and so they are
unlikely to have a personal motive to mingle into the political affairs of Congo, to the point of
attempting to assassinate one of its prominent citizens.
Back to Forestier, from August 31 to September 1, 2018, two agents of the DGSI came in to
interrogate him about his own project to assassinate Mbaou once and for all, with explosives, this
time. The interrogation took place in the commissariat (police station) of Annemasse, near the town
of Ballaison where Forestier lives. Forestier would have acknowledged “to study the feasibility of a
bomb plot to kill General Mbaou” upon a demand of Bruno Susini his accomplice. Then why
Forestier, a tough ex-member of the Service Action, did confide to two agents of the DGSI so easily
and spontaneously? Did he feel he could talk to them freely and safely? Did he do it because, at this
point, the mission was aborted? Or else had he been instructed to deliver a version of the facts
aiming to exonerate someone else, the responsibility of the DGSE more especially?
 The latter hypothesis makes sense the most because Forestier expected certainly the DGSE would
take him out of his troubles with the justice and the DGSI, in return. Later in this book, the reader
will learn through other similar anecdotes that trusting the DGSE in a context of this kind would be
inconsiderate, to put it mildly. Yet Forestier trusted the DGSE beyond reason, apparently, since he
was shot dead a few months after the DGSI interviewed him. Forestier’s confidence in his employer
went very far, indeed, because it is known that he did not believe the DGSI would leak his
confidences to the mainstream media, at least because this is not customary at all in this intelligence
agency. However, the latter oddity compelled him to retract his confession when the judge
interviewed him anew, although no record of any interview by the DGSI was found in his justice
file, strangely again.
Anyway, all pieces in possession of the justice court were leaked anonymously to the mainstream
media, therefore illegally. Thenceforth, the conspiracy of the DGSE to making Forestier the sole
responsible in an assassination plot against General Mbaou became obvious. Doubtless, Forrestier
felt his employer abandoned him to his fate, yet he attempted foolishly to retaliate by suing the
French justice for violating the confidentiality of a preliminary investigation.
In the last months of 2018, and in the wake of the latter series of ominous events, Forestier
reconverted professionally as … magnetizer and hypnotherapist. The reader may find this
outlandish, but it should not come as so surprising in the DGSE. I recollect I have known three
agents and heard of others who indeed had activities of the same sort for particular reasons that were
in no way no nonsensical. For the unserious professions of astrologist, palmist, and sophrologist,
and even psychotherapist, happen regularly to cover activities of courier or are used to serve
manipulations, or else simply to launder unofficial incomes paid for entirely different kinds of
activities. Agents instructed to do this often are of the con artist type, appropriately. That is why I
assume Forestier thus reconverted upon discreet instruction, as he was still expecting a redemption
of a sort from his unflinching loyalty and obedience. In reality and clearly, the DGSE was luring
Forestier in the expectation to discrediting him.
Anyway, given the eerie series of portentous happenings surrounding the dailies of Forestier, at
this point, if I had been in his shoes, I would have ran away as far as I could, overnight, without
notice, and with as few luggage as possible. What happened to him eventually shows that I would
have been right and, in point of fact, the chapter 27 will provide me with an opportunity to describe
a similar type of plot of which I believe I was the target. If I had reacted as Forestier did at that time,
then I assume with confidence I would have experienced a prison term, a sojourn in a psychiatric
hospital, or why not the same fate as his.
When the bullets-riddled body of Forestier was found next to his car, the first forensic
examination established he was given a coup de grace at point blank, near the eye. The latter
anatomical detail suggests the killer was given serious theoretical courses on assassination, for it is a
trademark common to several intelligence services, of which I once was told a little about.
As about Bruno Susini, the accomplice of Forestier, a police search in his home resulted in the
discovery of a mail with the header of the Presidential palace of Congo. It is noteworthy that Joseph
Kabila, President of Congo from 2001 to January 2019, that is to say, at the same period of the
aforesaid events, was known to be in relation with Bernard Squarcini, Director of the DGSI from
2008 to 2012. I will have an opportunity to tell other surprising things about Squarcini, in a next
chapter. Actually, it is said that Susini and Squarcini together were assisting Congolese President
Kaliba to foil an impending coup d’état in this country. The latter facts connect plausibly to General
Mbaou, therefore, and would have provided police investigators with a valuable motive to
assassinate him, if there had been any such inquiry. Anyway, following the discovery of the
Congolese presidential document, Squarcini however denied he had any business with Susini.
Susini was held into custody at some point, but he claimed he did not understand why and had no
knowledge of any project to assassinate Mbaou.
Susini is known otherwise as a “specialist of the Congo and Gabon regions,” a French citizen
whose parents are from Corsica. Born in Chad in 1968, he moved eventually with them in New
Caledonia, until he came back to continental France in 1983, then aged 15. Susini’s father was
engineer in building and public works, a cover activity of the “typical sort” in intelligence affairs in
third world countries, I notice, along with similar activities such as engineer in the oil industry,
minerals, and agronomics. In 1992, Susini, then aged 25, was briefly suspected to have partaken in a
spectacular bombing from a helicopter in Cavallo Island, between France and Sardinia, while acting
in the service of the Corsican separatist group Resistenza. Thereupon, Susini enlisted in the French
Army, in which the DGSE recruited him. He did his first mission in Algeria as member of the
Service Action, with Forestier as partner: that is how and when the two met each other for the first
time. Susini, aged 51 in 2019, introduces himself as “Corsican singer and music composer”. At the
Eurovision Song Contest of 2008 in Sweden, one of his songs, titled Hosanna in Excelsis, was
awarded in the “Eurovision of Minority Languages” category.
Remarkably, no French journalists expressed much interest in Susini and still less in Alain Brunet
and Laurent R., the more mysterious accomplices in Forestier’s bomb plot. A justice representative
stated on condition of anonymity that the death of Forestier reduces to nil any chance to know the
truth about this project to assassinate General Mbaou, someday. Given the professional signature of
the murder of Forestier, there is little chance to know who did it, the representative specified. To
which statements I add mine saying from experience in French intelligence that there is little chance
that the media publish anything else about this affair before long, if ever. At best, Forestier’s story
will help some “ex-agent” fill a next book on the DGSE someday, without any certainty since, I
notice also, no one added Forrestier’s name on the list of active and ex-agents of this agency on its
French Wikipedia page, still in April 2019. The latter fact strongly suggests Forestier fell in disgrace
before his decease because, for the record, the French Wikipedia page of the DGSE has been
created, updated, and is monitored permanently by agents in the service of this agency. Indeed, the
French version of the Wikipedia page on the DGSE is “exclusive property of this agency,” which
writes and censors on it as it sees fit.
Among other recent examples of physical eliminations that come up in my mind, one of the most
striking I could cite is that of Thierry Imbot, intelligence officer in the DGSE and, most of all, son
of General René Imbot, former director of this agency.[181] Officially, on October 10, 2000, Thierry
Imbot, then aged 48, died accidentally of a fall from the fourth floor of his Paris’ apartment. At that
time, Imbot was making frequent trips to Taiwan in the frame of the important sale of six French
warships (frigates) of the La Fayette class[182] to this country. As peculiarities in the deal upset
Imbot Jr., the media reported eventually, he had made an appointment with a journalist to make
striking revelations on the morning following the night he fell to his death. The media added, the
revelations in question were the personal enrichment through briberies of certain people involved in
the deal, for an extraordinary amount of 500 million dollars. The fraud included kickbacks paid by
the client to one or several French officials; as this kind of scheme invariably happens in French
arms sales, be it said in passing.
So, Imbot did not have the time to elaborate about the fraud, although it was known, already, and
even caused a huge scandal today referred in France as the “Affaire des Frégates de Taïwan,” and
abroad as the “Taiwan’s La Fayette Frigate Affair”. Police investigations quickly concluded
“accidental death,” while Imbot “was closing his shutters by a windy evening”. The hit men who
did the job in emergency made a little mistake however, for the lights in Imbot’s apartment were
supposed to be on because it was dark when he fell. On the contrary, all lights were off when the
police arrived in the place. With unflinching loyalty to the DGSE, General René Imbot limited his
comments to saying he did not believe his son fell accidentally because the corpse was found too far
from the spot where it would logically have fallen; 15 feet to be precise. The latter detail suggests
Thierry Imbot was thrown with sheer force indeed from his already open window. Should the latter
hypothesis be correct, Imbot Jr. either was knocked out or sedated before he was killed, due to the
great difficulty with throwing a conscious and healthy man from a window.
Thierry Imbot actually was a super-agent who graduated at the Sorbonne University, and was
awarded a master’s degree in Chinese studies at the School of Oriental Languages, Paris.
Eventually, he obtained a Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Montpellier.
Thereupon, he enlisted in the DGSE under the much favorable auspices the position of his father
blessed him with. Thenceforward, he served as field intelligence officer undercover in several
countries, and then with the cover of commercial attaché in several posts, including the French
embassy in Beijing, that of Shanghai, and that of Taipei. He served as First Secretary at the French
Embassy in Washington from 1989 to 1991, and from 1996 he had a cover activity of “international
consultant” in Washington D.C.[183] with a specialty in arms trade with African countries; all this
while enjoying official status at the UNO, simultaneously and oddly.
As an aside that will serve the understanding of another espionage anecdote, later in this book,
Thierry Imbot and his father played an important role in the French takeover and subsequent
downfall of U.S. Repeating Arms Co., in New Haven, Connecticut, the company that manufactured
famously known Winchester carbines and rifles since 1866.
 The Taiwan’s La Fayette Frigate Affair, which spanned nineteen years since 1993, caused the
physical eliminations of seven more people at least, even though the French media reduce the
number to four, generally. A number of other people received prison sentences for the same true
reason of bribery. The first to die tragically among the other departed was Captain Yin Ching-fen,
Head of the Taiwanese procurement directorate; his body was found at sea in 1993. Yin’s nephew
eventually died of an unusual death, as did a Taiwanese bank official who was responsible of the
Taiwan’s naval dockyards. Taiwan-based Thomson employee Jacques Morrison also fell to his death
from a high window. He lived in the second floor, but he would have borrowed the service staircase
to go up to the fifth to jump; the investigation concluded suicide, however. Jean-Claude Albessard,
former executive of Thomson and responsible for the frigates market, died of a “sudden cancer.” “A
few days before, he was at his office and no one knew he was sick,” testified one of his colleagues.
Yves de Galzin, former representative of Matra missiles in Taiwan, died of a fatal “therapeutic
accident”. Prominent French businessman Jean-Luc Lagardère, no less than CEO of Matra, died of a
nosocomial disease; a whistleblower revealed it was criminal poisoning with a rare substance
manufactured as chemical weapon in Russia. Again, “a few days earlier, Lagardère was at his desk
and no one knew he was sick,” testified another person. The necrology is not exhaustive.
The massacre happened lest of revelations about the aforesaid bribes, and not at all of highly
sensitive diplomatic or military affairs. Nonetheless, “in the course of the investigation led by
prosecutors in France and Taiwan, both sides found reasons for alarm. Taiwanese complaints
focused on the inadequacy of the vessels, and on the inflation of their cost consecutive to a similar
package offered to Singapore. In France, the deal became entangled in a larger scandal over retro-
commissions, kickbacks paid by arms sales clients used for funding political activities in France”.
[184] The price of the deal was inflated from 10 to 15 billion French francs (about 2 billion dollars),
thus making it the largest French arm sale contract ever. “Taiwanese President Lee was exonerated,
and the responsibility for masterminding the deal was assigned to Premier Hau, who was not
impeached, however. French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas was convicted in May 2002 for
embezzlement from the public treasury, but acquitted on appeal in 2003 after prosecutors failed to
establish that bribes had been paid back to into the French political system.”[185] In the chapter 23,
the reader will learn a little more about this affair, thanks to a testimony of former Chief of Service
of the DGSE and whistleblower Maurice Dufresse aka Pierre Siramy.
Now, I present the case of Lieutenant-Colonel Bernard Nut. On February 15, 1983, this regional
head of the DGSE for the region Provence Alpes Côte-d’Azur, Southern part of France, was found
shot dead from a single bullet in the head, lying in frozen snow, face down, next to his car parked in
the middle of nowhere by the National Road 202, not far from the small town of Rigaud. Nut was
aged 47. The forensic investigation, conducted by the Security Service of the DGSE and the
Gendarmerie, concluded Lieutenant-Colonel Nut was shot with his own service weapon, a caliber
.357 Smith & Wesson revolver, found about 6 feet away from his body. However, it was determined
that the gun fired three rounds, of which two bullets were never found. The latter discoveries added
some mystery to the case, yet the likelihood of a suicide was alluded to, for a little while.
Whether Lieutenant-Colonel Nut had a legal right to carry a gun was not specified. I can say
about this particular that DGSE’s officers under ordinary military or civilian status are not allowed a
carry license. This is an extraordinary privilege in France and even in the DGSE, unless, of course,
an intelligence officer works under the status and cover activity of police or gendarme. Often, they
own one or two guns legally, and one or several illegally, this in order to go to any shooting range
freely and undisturbed, I can specify. In the 1990s, a colleague under status of police officer who
was the secretary of a civilian shooting range where DGSE recruits were given rudimentary training
once confided in me, in substance, “Running this shooting range is a burden to me; I delivered
2,800 approvals to purchase licenses and I never saw again three quarters of those people”.
Nut was known to seldom carrying a gun, which other fact matches the habits of his colleagues
who have a need to own a gun because they handle agents. The media specified he owned a second
handgun of the emergency kind; a small Derringer that is a particular type of guns of the easiest
concealable sort, frequently owned by certain DGSE intelligence officers, case officers typically,
and barbouzes, still bought illegally. I can specify, in the 1990s, those Derringers were smuggled in
France in quantities from Switzerland, hidden in semitrailer trucks with other guns of all types and
brands and ammunitions of Italian origin (Fiocchi). Those I saw were modern Derringer revolvers
caliber .22LR, stainless steel made, and not the two-shots over-under of the old-fashioned type. A
test I ran with one such revolver demonstrated they can be used at very short range only; hitting a
cow in a corridor from a distance of 15 feet would be an uncertain endeavor, if I may put it that way,
simply because they cannot be correctly handled due to their too small size.
A careful examination of several tiny bullet’s fragments found in the skull of Nut determined,
their metallic composition did not match that of the three remaining ones in the cylinder of his
revolver. Therefore, he was not shot with his own firearm, and was assassinated indeed, since no
other gun was found on the crime scene. The forensic examination further established that the bullet
entered the back and lower part of his head, slightly on the left, and went out from the upper front
slightly on the right, thus indicating that Nut did not face his murderer. Moreover, he was shot
nearly at point blank from a short distance of about 8 inches, an examination of the residues of
burned powder attested. As he was not tall, he was necessarily bending his head forward when the
shot was fired, the investigators also concluded. The likely caliber of the bullet that killed him is not
specified, but at least we know it was powerful enough to get through his head from side to side,
leaving only a few tiny fragments of a metal whose nature neither is stated. Only lead, copper or
both would have provided us with some clues at least. Nonetheless, the latter specifics are consistent
with the hypothesis of a caliber .357 Magnum or a similarly powerful ammunition. Nut was killed
outside and near his car, whose contact was found on and radio still playing classic music.
One or two investigative journalists, more curious than the others apparently, discovered
eventually that, far from to be suicidal anyhow, Nut was known to be thrilled by an investigation of
his own at the time of his death, of which nothing was ever said. Adding to the mystery, it was also
found that two or three days earlier, on the occasion of a private meeting with a said-to-be close
acquaintance of him, Nut had given a word about the case he would have described as an
“incredible affair”. The acquaintance in question turned out to be the Secretary—or President—of
the Association des Amis de la Cathédrale Orthodoxe Russe Saint Nicolas in Nice–ACOR
(Association of the Friends of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Nicholas in Nice, France).
Close connections between the latter association and Russia are notorious, described by some as a
Russian spy nest in Southern France, I can add. Nonetheless, the media did not find opportune to
elaborate about this interesting lead.
Later on, the DGSE leaked an information alleging that Lieutenant-Colonel Nut was under
suspicion of betrayal because he had had an affair with an ex-Miss Lebanon while he was earlier
posted in this country. Other contradictory allegations and theories followed. Some said he was
falling into disgrace and was even harassed, already, because of his poor performance and of money
expenses when with his Lebanese mistress, incommensurate with his income. Most of all, his affair
with this foreigner of a sulfurous sort would have worried the DGSE.
Was Nut an intelligence officer incompetent or weak enough to fall into a honey trap? Some
people think this woman provided him with interesting intelligence on certain figures of the
Lebanese Maronite Christian community. Nut indeed had an affair with this ex-Miss Lebanon, his
widower publicly acknowledged herself upon her claim for compensation to the Ministry of
Defense on the ground that her husband was killed while on duty. It is noteworthy that Mrs. Nut was
given a survivor’s pension corresponding to the inferior rank of Commandant, and not to that of
Lieutenant Colonel, and that her husband was not posthumously awarded any medal, contrary to
what the usage commands in a circumstance of this kind. We know nothing else because the latter
ministry classified the case, thus making it a cold one. The assassination of Lieutenant-Colonel Nut
is a State secret and will remain a mystery forever, most certainly.
I make a short mention only of the other following case, from recollection because I was unable
to find anything about it on the Internet. In the late 1960s, the plane of a DGSE (SDECE at that
time) executive named Allione was sabotaged and crashed in a field in the Bourgogne region of
France. Allione was suspected to serve the West, i.e. U.S. and U.K. and to steal highly sensitive
computer magnetic tapes data storage. I know firsthand that most of those who were in charge of his
surveillance were members of the GOdF lodge of Auxerre. The affair was never made public; local
newspapers reported the plane crash as an accident only, without further detail.
Shortly before 9 pm on July 19, 1990, in Paris, two police officers came to see a man named
Joseph Doucé at his house and summoned him to come with them for a police interrogation. Doucé
was openly gay, I precise because twenty-four hours later, Guy Bondar his partner, worried not to
see him again, complained to the police station. Four more days later, as Doucé did not reappear,
Bondar filed a complaint for arbitrary kidnapping and forcible confinement. On October 17, three
months after the police took Doucé, his body was found in the forest of Rambouillet. The autopsy
determined he died either from strangulation or suffocation shortly after his disappearance.
 “Joseph Doucé was born to a rural family in Sint-Truiden, Belgium. He was a psychologist and a
defrocked Baptist pastor in Paris, and one of the founders of the International Lesbian and Gay
Association. Previously, Doucé served as volunteer soldier in the NATO base of Limoges, France,
where he learned French. After one year of pastoral and humanistic studies at Stenonius College aka
Europaseminär, a Roman Catholic seminary in Maastricht, the Netherlands, today extinct, he began
his conversion to Protestantism around 1966.”[186] Doucé had been expelled from an unspecified
masonic lodge, as additional detail. For several weeks at the time of his disappearance, he and his
partner Bondar were the targets of an ongoing social elimination mission carried on by the RG.
Possibly, the reason for this was Doucé was known to be in regular touch with some French right-
leaning political figures. For he was a regular informant and consultant specialist with the Vice
Squad of Paris police, and he enjoyed good and close relations with this particular police unit that is
specialized in illegal sex.
Anyway, the successful physical elimination of Doucé was a failure to the RG. The ordinary
police questioned Jean-Marc Dufourg, a police officer of this intelligence agency in charge of
Doucé’s surveillance and harassment in quality of GER group leader because he was quickly
suspected to be the murderer. Thenceforth, police officer Dufourg was recommended to pick up no
less than Jacques Vergès as his lawyer, to everyone’s befuddlement.[187] Thanks to this well-known
attorney of sulfurous reputation, Dufourg’s culpability could not be established convincingly, and
his case was dismissed in 1991.
However, seven years later in 1998, Dufourg however was sentenced for forgery of official
documents because of his false and antedated reports about pastor Doucé’s surveillance. He
received eight months of suspended prison plus a fine of 20,000 francs, and 20,000 additional francs
in damages for Bondar. Finally, in 2007, the investigation was closed at the judicial level when a
judge ordered a nonsuit for the murder case.
By a morning of October 13, 1996, a Sunday, two men were found dead by the door of a military
shooting range in Penfeld, near Brest, in the French region of Brittany. Both men were shot twice in
the chest and once in the back of the neck, as a coup de grace. The crime scene strongly suggested
executions, well prepared, quick, and clean. The incident came as a surprise in this rather rural
region of France where the rate of criminality is very low. Of the two victims, one was Pol Creton,
aged 32, a civilian technician and an ordinary law-abiding citizen with no criminal record. The other
was Colonel Francois Picard, aged 52, chief pharmacist and responsible for the radiological
monitoring of Brest harbor. The investigation quickly established that Creton actually was a
collateral victim; just a witness who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The targeted man
clearly was Colonel Picard, responsible for measuring the radioactivity of French nuclear
submarines leaving and returning from long missions from the military port of Brest. As such,
Picard held highly sensitive position, responsibilities, and information.
Witnesses present in the surroundings at the time of the murders said they saw the two killers,
both dressed in plain black clothes, and added, they flew at once after they shot Colonel Picard and
Pol Creton. The killers took away the briefcases that their two victims carried, known to contain
handguns. However, while on the way to their flight they opened the briefcases and left them with
the guns inside. The latter detail, surprising, proved they did not kill to steal the guns but something
else they found out and took with them or not, the witnesses could not say.
Since the shooting range where the men were assassinated was military, the Gendarmerie was
tasked legally and exclusively to lead the investigation on the two crimes. It appeared eventually
that the latter task was botched and gave no other clue that could tell more about the hit men. It was
only known that the latter waited for hours near the crime scene, hidden in a wood nearby, until the
arrival of Colonel Picard.
The truth in this affair is that Colonel Picard, passionate about his work but worried by the
presence of high levels of radioactivity around the place of the submarines and even in the whole
harbor of Brest, intended to make this information public. His superiors in the Navy knew this, and
they had warned him to keep mum about it under threat of “serious troubles”. More concerning, the
Navy suspected Colonel Picard was providing the results of its radiological samples to a civil
engineer who worked in the field of underwater flora and fauna preservation.
Since the happening of this double assassination, several attempts of unclear origin have been
made to mislead police investigators who took over the case at last, by suggesting it would rather
have something to do with local and petty drug dealers. To no avail because the false evidences
incriminating some local criminals of the lowest breed were gross and quickly proved inconclusive.
In addition, some journalists denied the assassinations were done by skilled killers, on the pretense
they used a .22LR carbine. The use of a carbine at short range indeed appears to be clumsy and
inconsistent with the skills and modus operandi of the two killers. As for the argument of the caliber
.22LR, it is invalid for several good reasons, I present below because of their relevancy to this
chapter.
In the first instance, the diameter of a .22LR bullet is the same as that of M4 and AR-15 assault
rifles, for the record. Small calibers may have big effects, and the size of a .22LR cartridge is
deceptively small. For the full lead bullet of a .22LR High Velocity cartridge has about the same
penetrating power as a full-metal jacket 9mm Para; I invite the incredulous reader to make the test
and to see it by himself.
Second, .22LR is largely appreciated not to say favored by many intelligence agencies in the
World for assassinations, which include the DGSE and the Israeli Mossad at least. To be definitive
in my claim, the DGSE favored—and it still does today, possibly—two .22LR semi-automatic
pistols at least. These are the Italian Berretta 70 equipped with a classic removable screw-in
suppressor, and a modified version of the American Ruger Standard MK II, whose barrel has an
integral suppressor, similar to a special version of this gun specially designed for the U.S. Navy
SEAL. As an aside, the DGSE also has .22LR carbine I know of. One is a bolt action with an about
20 inches barrel with integral suppressor and a 10 rounds magazine. The other is a custom-made
bolt action with a classic removable screw-in suppressor, and a particular folding bipod identical to
that of the French sniper rifle MAS FR F1. A scope may be added to both of these carbines, of
course, but the practical range of a .22LR sniper carbine for doing a one-shot kill does not exceed a
hundred of yards, and 50 with low-power subsonic ammunitions. Beyond these distances, the
DGSE, i.e. COS / Service Action has big caliber suppressed sniper rifles to be described later in this
chapter.
Third, in France, .22LR carbines are among the easiest guns to buy without any special
authorization, and as such, they offer the interesting particularity to be hardly traceable firearms; the
same remark applies the more so to .22LR cartridges.
Fourth, .22LR indeed is a good pick for a killer who wants to mislead investigators, journalists,
and the public because the two latter tend to assume “serious killers use big calibers, only”.
Fifth, and last but not the least, French journalists, including those specialized in criminal affairs,
are notoriously ignorant in firearms, and mistakes about this in the news they publish on criminal
affairs are frequent.[188] Maybe, the killers had a particular reason for using a carbine or they even
did not use that kind of gun in actuality.
It is worth mentioning the affair Dupont de Ligonnès, today held in France as one of the most
mysterious cold cases ever. In my eyes that are not these of most French journalists, this case bears
several strong marks of a collective physical elimination in connection with espionage, for one other
case about similar, at least, already happened in the recent history of barbouzeries. Here I am
alluding to the other affair of the “Tuerie d’Auriol” that happened by a night between July 18 and
19, 1981 in Auriol, near Marseilles. The reader will find easily on the Web accounts of this terrible
massacre of a whole family of six, including a child aged 7, committed by barbouzes, which
shocked the whole country at that time. Then other facts to follow will support my claim of the
likelihood of an espionage affair.
The reader who might express further interest in the extraordinary case of Dupont de Ligonnès
will find plenty of information on it in French language on the Internet, and a few more on the
Wikipedia page titled, “Dupont de Ligonnès murders and disappearance”—though I warn of several
mistakes I spotted in the latter article. I know nothing more than what the public could about this
affair. However, my knowledge of analogous but less bloody past cases greatly helped me find
particular patterns in it, which together accredit a hypothesis saying that Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès
is likely to have been involved in intelligence activities in France and in the United States.
That Dupont de Ligonnès killed his wife and his four children, although he clearly was an
educated, smart and socially fit individual, is not completely unlikely however, for he may possibly
have lost his mind at some point due to the effects of an unusually trying ordeal. People submitted
to highly and prolonged stressful events may have bouts of extreme violence, including with close
relatives yet they truly love. Overwhelmed by psychological pressure, they are unable to think and
to reason rationally any longer, and to see any possible exit to their dire situation. However, most of
those who reach the extreme feeling tend to commit suicide rather than doing harm against their
beloved.
 Before posing my hypothesis, what is surprising with this affair is that the police and the
Gendarmerie both claim they were unable to find any track of Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès, after he
allegedly killed his wife and his four children on a same day and place. In France, it is very difficult
to evade the curiosity of ordinary citizens and multiple highly effective informant’s networks, to be
presented and described in the Part II of this book. Moreover, it is about impossible to walk
anywhere in the countryside and in woods without being spotted within a day; there is no large
deserted area as in the United States where one can be lost for weeks. Skilled and experienced
criminals who furthermore enjoy helps and complicities while on the run on the French territory,
rarely succeed evading their hunts for more than a couple of months, for the aforesaid reasons to the
least.
Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès was heir of an old French aristocratic family of Versailles, aged 50 at
the time of his supposed escape. Although described as a smart and balanced man, he was also
known to have no skills in hiding and surviving in the wild, nor exterior help, nor any known or
possible complicity, apparently at least. Repeated and long searches for him by both the police, the
Gendarmerie, and even the military, involved considerable human and technical means generally
devoted to finding out the most wanted criminals and terrorists. In vain however, for eight years
exactly as I am writing his story. Dupont de Ligonnès is still wanted officially and actively since
April 2011, as main witness and prime suspect in the murder of his family.
To be precise, between the 3 and 4 of April, Dupont de Ligonnès is thought to have executed
coldly and quietly his wife, then aged 49, his three sons then aged 20, 18, and 13, his daughter then
aged 16, and even his two dogs; all of them with a .22LR carbine equipped with a suppressor. This
happened in a house located in a populated and bourgeois quarter of the city of Nantes.
Along with many police investigators and journalists, I cannot believe this man has not died for a
long time. Then how, however, since a man who commits suicide or die in the wild in France can
hardly hide his own body at the same time? One thing that must be kept in mind with respect to the
subject of this chapter in general is that the disappearance of this man, sole alleged survivor of the
massacre of his family, makes him the sole culprit in the eyes of everybody, implicitly.
The wife of Dupont de Ligonnès, Agnès, was known as a devout Christian Catholic, and her
professional activity in Nantes was teaching catechism in a private Catholic school. According to
the media, Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès, his wife and their four children together presented as a
normal and balanced family of the French upper-middle class, with no record of bizarre activities
whatsoever. The couple is said to have had a global monthly income amounting to 4,500 euros or so
(about $5,000) at the time of the tragic event, which in France locates well above the average and
describes someone as a member of the upper end of the middle class. French journalists and
investigators however said that Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès had a long-lasting affair with a German
woman, and that he was in financial trouble. They further specified, he would have borrowed the
sizeable amount of 50,000 euros (about $56,500) to this mistress, shortly before his disappearance.
Additional information suggests that Dupont de Ligonnès might have borrowed some money to his
mother earlier. Yet the Dupont de Ligonnès family did not seem at all to have difficulties with
making the ends meet. The children studied either in private school or in university, they all went to
restaurants and travelled, and they had leisure activities of the kind that not all ordinary French can
commonly afford.
Dupont de Ligonnès had regular incomes throughout his life as manager of several successive
small businesses. However, his professional specialty and the exact activities of his businesses
remain obscure and largely unknown or unreported to date. He is also known to have lived in the
United States for some years, as in 2003 he created a company in Miami, Florida, whose activity is
not clearly specified either. While in Florida, at some point he associated with Gérard Corona, a
French national essentially known there as a con artist who has been in trouble with the U.S. justice.
Was Dupont de Ligonnès a con artist, too, or rather a victim of Corona remains unclear, but in
either case this does not exclude the likelihood of intelligence-related activities, this hypothesis of
mine being supported by the following specifics. First, because field spies are con artists by trade,
precisely, and second, and most importantly, because Dupont de Ligonnès is said to have revealed to
some of his relatives living in France that he worked as “secret agent for the U.S. Government”.
Indeed, upon his disappearance in the early days of April 2011, Dupont de Ligonnès sent to one of
his relatives a surprising letter he wrote on a computer, which the French police retrieved and
released to the media. Dupont de Ligonnès said in this letter he was bound to go back to the United
States because his presence was requested over there as witness in a drug criminal case. In the same
document he added, he would be placed under the Witness Protection Program in this country and
provided a new identity.
The recipient of the letter said that in the early 2000s, when Dupont de Ligonnès ran a company
in Florida, he claimed he would have been cooperating with the FBI or the DEA or both, and that
the reason of this cooperation at that time would have been to acting as infiltration agent in an
investigation on French-owned nightclubs in this Southeastern State, involving in a large drug-
trafficking scheme.
If the reader feels able to put himself in the shoes of the average French people, he is going to say
that this story of cooperation with the FBI and of witness protection program cannot but be
complete fantasy. Not that so from the viewpoint of any FBI agent however, nor even from that of
an intelligence officer of the DGSE. As about the viewpoint of French journalists, all this goes well
over their heads, except for a handful of them who abstained from tackling the latter peculiarity in
this affair, seemingly. Thereof, there is ample room for envisaging an additional hypothesis, saying
this drug-trafficking scheme could very possibly connect to French intelligence activities. Actually,
the SDECE had a long and attested record of drug trafficking in the United States, and one recent
affair of this sort at least suggests this activity resumed since this agency changed its name for
DGSE.
Nonetheless, all particularities I just reported were highly likely to catch the interest of the DGSE,
and at the very least to spur this agency to ascertaining whether Dupont de Ligonnès was not a
deluded individual or else. Moreover, his activities in Florida in the early 2000s, attested by some
U.S. records, were much likely to have collected the curiosity of this agency at that earlier time,
already. Then what about the possible connections of Dupont de Ligonnès’s partner in Florida,
Corona, with French spies? In any case, a French consulate the nearest to Miami registered him as
French citizen “having business activities in the United States”—the reader will see why in the
chapter 25.
I noticed also a number of oddities in the police investigation that followed the disappearance of
Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès. First, French police were unusually quick at investing much of their
interest, time, and technical means in investigating thoroughly on what was first presented to them
as no more than concerns about a sudden trip of the Dupont de Ligonnès family abroad. More
troubling, the police were similarly quick in searching for dead bodies, and in finding them with the
same rapidity, at a time they had no clue suggesting a criminal case, nor any reason to suspect such
a thing from the kind of family I described earlier. The house of the Dupont de Ligonnès family was
in perfect order and clean when the police entered it, and the forensic investigation of the premises
resulted in no clue whatsoever that could suggest five murders, plus these of two dogs. In similar
circumstances, the police and the Gendarmerie take weeks and even rather months before they begin
to envisage the hypothesis of murder and lead searches for bodies; they never carry on forensic
investigation forthwith, unless they deal with known criminals or listen to serious testimonies of
assassination projects.
On one hand, it is true that all the aforesaid makes many “ifs”. On the other hand, as the affair
Dupont de Ligonnès today is cited as both one of the most mysterious French criminal cases and
disappearances to date, there is no rational in denying so conspicuously and promptly any
hypothesis other than an access of despair, be it this of an espionage case of which clues and
testimonies indeed exist. Logically and normally in police proceedings relating to a case of this
gravity, the French police if not the DGSE or the DGSI is supposed to have requested an answer
from the FBI, as to whether Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès indeed ever involved as informant in a case
of drug trafficking in the United States, as a matter of routine to the least. Any answer to this simple
question would allow determining whether this man was mentally unbalanced at the time of his
disappearance, attempted to delay the search for him, or said the truth, and feared for his life due to
his impending testimony to the U.S. justice therefore. Not only the existence of the latter request
and of its answer if ever there was any remain unknown, but none of the numerous journalists who
wrote about this affair ever hazarded a single line about this question, fundamental since it concerns
the last known statement of the prime suspect in a multiple homicide investigation.
Subsequently, my knowledge of the uses and customs of the DGSE makes me saying that Xavier
Dupont de Ligonnès and his family might well have had knowledge of incriminating facts of a
particular nature, I strongly suspect, which would amply justify the physical elimination of all of
them in the eyes of this agency; especially if ever indeed he was bound to testifying officially about
it, and regardless whether this would have happened before a French or U.S. justice court.
 I conclude this series of anecdotes with a short but spectacular one, I heard about a longtime ago.
There were talks about an agent of the SDECE or of its successor the DGSE sometimes between the
1970s and the 1980s, I could not say exactly, today. This agent was caught and jailed in Spain in a
case of terrorist activities in the latter country. As what he knew was at the same time highly
sensitive and embarrassing to France, it was decided to eliminate him in the prison where he was
incarcerated, before he could talk. His wife talked to him regularly by yelling from a street running
along a wall of this prison, thus obliging the agent to show himself at the window of his cell, and
long conversations ensued between the two in this condition. The noisy ritual was taken as an
opportunity to shoot him dead at this window from a long distance. The story says that the dirty job
was accomplished with a civilian rifle firing a powerful ammunition designed for African big game
hunting, as a precautionary measure guaranteeing a single shot would suffice. The agent indeed was
shot dead in the chest with a single hollow-point bullet, under the eyes of his hapless wife.[189]
Most of the violent physical eliminations of the kind I narrated above have a dual purpose:
getting rid of people whose existences became undesirable at some point for one reason or another,
and making a profit of the spectacular way they are done as a deterrent. For there is a need to
making known that the sacrosanct reason of State supersedes anyone’s life, regardless of his rank.
The sorry truth about this is that, too often, the reason of State actually covers the vested interests of
pundits, as the Taiwan’s La Fayette Frigate Affair exemplifies it. Another example I know about
firsthand, of a much lesser importance and never publicly known to date, is that of a regional
executive of the DGSE who, in 2008, threatened one of his colleagues to kill him if ever he revealed
his attempt to scam an insurance company for an amount of about 1 million euros. The fraud was to
allow the former to restore at no cost the large roof of his castle. The witness took the threat very
seriously because the DGSE executive was strongly suspected to having made murdered one of his
former employees for the same reason already. Indeed, the witness died a bit more than one year
after he thus was threatened, from a cirrhosis. Soon, the reader will see why a death from the latter
illness can be suspicious, much possibly.
The frequency of those bloody State affairs in France is high enough to have earned them the
popular name of “barbouzeries,” after the previously explained word barbouze and meaning
generally politico-financial affairs in which the SDECE now DGSE has a hand. By the same
occasion, it comes as an indisputable evidence of the permanent and highly influential interference
of the DGSE in French political affairs, at home as abroad. When the national interest is said to be
at stake, often it is also that of Russia not to say especially in actuality, as it will be explained in
detail later in this book.
Pending those other examples, I recommend the reader to spare some of his time on looking in
particular at the “Mitterrand–Pasqua affair” in the 1990s. In this affair with no assassination were
involved former French Socialist Party figure and Southern Africa expert Jean-Bernard Curial, Jean-
Christophe Mitterrand, son of then acting President François Mitterrand, and Pierre Falcone, head of
Brenco International (a consortium of companies) and adviser to Sofremi, a French publicly-owned
company officially run by then acting Minister of the Interior Charles Pasqua, chief barbouze
himself. Later in 2007, were involved in this affair of Russian arms sold to Communist Angola a
number of prominent French, all in touch with Russian agents and SVR intelligence officers.
Among them we find Jean-Christophe Mitterrand again, Jacques Attali, former special advisor of
President Mitterrand, Jean-Charles Marchiani, former intelligence officer of the SDECE and
politician, Russian spy and billionaire Arcadi Gaydamak, novelist Paul-Loup Sulitzer (called “The
Fat” in the DGSE, colloquially and unflatteringly), and justice judge and politician Georges Fenech.
The trial started in 2008, in absentia of Gaydamak who had left for Israel, arguing of his Jewish
origin.
The former of the two real motives of the DGSE repeats well enough to become widespread
public rumor in France as abroad. As if ritually, unreported details and official statements prevent
those cases from being proven State’s assassinations. They remain State secrets of the highest
sensitive sort, yet numerous DGSE employees and executives know well about them. This is a
subject no one is supposed to talk about; though less and less apparently, as we shall see in the
chapter 23 on the Special relationship between France and Russia.
In France, a variety of spies carries out violent assassinations, on a case-by-case basis, among
which a number is not the exclusive works of barbouzes and men of the Service Action but of
Russian hit men in actuality, for a number of reasons largely explained in this book and supported
by strong clues if not evidences in a few cases. Then physical eliminations of French citizen and
foreigners abroad are jobs for the Service Action. Many intelligence officers and senior executives
of the DGSE, and even French senior civil public servants for decades acknowledged repeatedly the
latter fact, more or less officially. The staff of the Service Action is composed of military selected in
the special units of the COS according their particular skills and other specifics, for the record. Not
coincidentally, the headquarters of the Service Action is located in the Fort de Noisy near Paris,
where is also located the Service Technique d’Appui (Technical Support Service) of the same
agency, responsible for providing special devices, guns, poisons, and support in surveillance and
shadowing teams between many other things of a more “ordinary” sort. An internal rule of the
Service Action says that those who are instructed to kill must not have been personally in prior
contact with their targets. An assassination is not carried out by a single agent but by two at least,
and it has to be planned carefully, following the close monitoring of the target and of its habits,
tastes, communications, etc.
Former senior intelligence executive Constantin Melnik wrote an entire and serious book with
rather old yet interesting details on those dirty missions, he titled La Mort était leur mission: Le
Service Action pendant la Guerre d’Algérie (1995) (Death Was Their Mission: The Service Action in
the Algerian War). Previously, Melnik touched upon the subject in a no less interesting pretense of
fiction, he titled Des Services très secrets (1989) (Very Secret Services), telling the truth in
substance.
DGSE’s assassinations either are done commonly with firearms or poisons or through staged
accidental circumstances, sometimes with explosives because this agency has a real expertise in the
sophisticated use of explosives and bombs of all sorts, and it takes a particular care with finding and
manufacturing untraceable bomb components. Actually, bomb making is part of a culture in the
DGSE, and many of its intelligence officers and agents are taught about it during their recruitments
and trainings, even when this is not expected to be part of their specialties. I do not know the reason
justifying this breach in the rule of the need-to-know; I can only assume the custom is old and
intended at its inception to giving a particular and useful knowledge to those people in the
eventuality the country would be occupied again, as in the WWII. A summary training in pistol
shooting, and extensive and intensive others on martial arts and street fighting also are mandatory,
even though a large majority of recruits will never have any need of this other knowledge either. I
know, however, that the use of explosives offers the advantage to suggesting a killing done by
terrorists, as an additional and effective way to dispel suspicions of a physical elimination by an
intelligence agency.
My brother and I were trained summarily and had theoretical teachings in bomb making. Exactly
as with terrorists, this training focused on manufacturing bombs with items and substances freely
and easily available in stores; that is to say, Improvised Explosive Devices–IED, as they are called
today. As examples: how to make a shaped charge with an empty bottle of Champaign, a pipe bomb,
a fragmentation bomb with a French pétanque steel ball, and how to make an incendiary time device
entirely chemical. Additionally, there were few theoretical explanations on varied sabotage
techniques, on trains in particular.
Otherwise, the DGSE happens to shroud its physical eliminations in further anonymity, by luring
its targets to tripping to a remote foreign country, where police and justice are poorly effective or
about inexistent. Moreover, there are dangers of all sorts in such places, offering as many plausible
causes for deadly accidents, fatal diseases, disappearances, and kidnappings that may exonerate
France easily. As a matter of fact, France has a known record of agents and other people it contrived
to make caught, jailed, killed, and even tortured with the complicity of the intelligence agencies of
some third-world countries, such as Morocco in particular.
I do not know the name of a French agent who thus, was notoriously sanctioned in Morocco some
decades ago, but I do remember he was tortured and imprisoned for several years in a secret prison
of this country, from which he managed to escape his death. He managed to go back to France with
the idea in mind to find out the intelligence officer responsible for his ordeal, which he did without
difficulty, and shot him dead with a revolver, in plain sight.
The SDECE in its time had made for itself a proven reputation to hiring mobsters to kill people,
as we have seen in an earlier chapter. In 1965, it would have been decided internally in this agency
never to attempt anymore to hire such people to carry out assassinations of VIPs, which measure
precipitated the dismantlement of the Service Operation Spéciales–SOS aka Service 7, headed at
that time by Colonel Marcel Leroy aka “Leroy-Finville”. The case of General Mbaou seems to
question this, today.
 “The 1950s-60s are remembered as the ʻera of political assassinationsʼ by SDECE agents as one
of the agency’s main jobs was to assassinate members of the FLN. The number of killings
dramatically stepped up in 1958, when Charles de Gaulle gave to the SDECE’s Service Action carte
blanche to kill suspected members of the FLN, under the cover of a pseudo-terrorist group called the
Red Hand (Main Rouge).
“The first two murders took place in West Germany, where an arms dealer who sold arms to the
FLN was killed when the SDECE planted a bomb in his car while an anti-French Algerian politician
was killed in a drive-by shooting. The fact that the Länder police forces of West Germany were
ineffective in investigating the ʻRed Handʼ assassinations committed by the SDECE, was the result
of a secret agreement with General Reinhardt Gehlen, the chief of the Bundesnachrichtendienst
[BND] under which the French and German intelligence were to share information in exchange for
allowing the SDECE to commit murders on the German soil. One SDECE agent Philippe L.
Thyraud de Vosjoli in his 1970 memoir Lamia wrote: ʻDozens of assassinations were carried outʼ”.
[190]

The Affaire Ben Barka (Ben Barka Affair) became a scandal of worldwide dimension, after the
name of Mehdi Ben Barka, Moroccan politician and opponent to King Hassan II, and was at the
origin of the dismantlement of the SOS, actually. In 1965, two SDECE agents acting under the
cover of police officers kidnapped Ben Barka and killed him. They hid his body, which has never
been found since. Shortly earlier, the SDECE had hired former Resistant turned infamous mobster
Jo Attia to physically eliminating Ben Barka, but this first attempt failed lamentably because of his
inexperience with safety provisions in spycraft. Since then, the SDECE and eventually the DGSE
multiplied attempts to exonerate the French Government from the responsibility in the physical
elimination of Ben Barka, mainly because of special interests France has in Morocco and of close
but discreet relationships she has with the ruling elite of this country.
Then and now, I heard hints of deadly “settlements” within the barbouze class of spies, and of
physical eliminations justified by obscure reasons they carried out against third parties with the tacit
agreement of the DGSE or “more or less” unbeknownst to this agency; that is to say, without its
technical support. Since the barbouzes generally have close links with the police, the Gendarmerie,
and the GOdF, this is very helpful when the work is botched. Typically, the word given comes to
answer a question as the same simple sentence accompanied with a glance, “Don’t waste your time
with that; it is of no interest”. Typically, the word given comes to answer a question as the same
simple sentence accompanied with a glance, “Don’t waste your time with this; it is of no interest,”
and everybody understands.
The less an individual is known and respectable, the greater the odds he will be assassinated if he
makes himself a threat to state affairs the public opinion must ignore. Inversely, an individual who
managed to expose the secret and made himself known for this already runs much lesser risks to be
thus sanctioned. Nonetheless, the risk indeed exists in both cases, according to a number of obscure
variables and unpredictable reasons including mere revenge and the necessity to make “examples”.
There is one thing France cannot swallow and is always eager to punish the harshest way,
regardless of the time and cost it takes, which is to have been publicly outsmarted by a single or a
few individuals in a way that ridicules and belittles her or questions her power. France wants to have
the last word in the end, at all costs, and to make her revenge known to everyone.
For now, I talked about political assassinations mostly, but the reader must understand they make
up for the tip of an iceberg, whose invisible part is comprises a much larger number of other
suspicious deaths of little notoriety that never or exceptionally collect the interest and scrutiny of the
public.
The DGSE holds mastery in the art of killing, acquired from a long experience granting this
agency a capacity to assassinate without leaving any clue that could challenge a statement of natural
decease, indeed. Since this agency is capable to do “clean” natural or accidental deceases or to
arrange “shabby” assassinations at will, the purpose of the latter is only to leave a “signature” and
the previously explained implicit “message” to the attention of all those who would be mulling over
the idea to stray. Each time the message does not seem to have been clearly understood to all, the
DGSE spreads a rumor crafted enough to raise suspicion in the simpler minds, as suspicion is no
proof.
Sometimes, an assassination is ordered in emergency to prevent a known and imminent disclosure
of highly sensitive information, as in the case of Thierry Imbot. When this happens, and if the target
is rather young and in good health, there is seldom time enough for artfully designing a scheme that
will challenge all suspicions, obviously. Therefore, the alternative limits to suicide or deadly
accident, as the sudden deaths from illness no one heard of before are difficult to justify and claim
delicate and tedious interventions with a large number of investigative journalists, as it happened
with the case of Matra’s CEO Arnaud Lagardère. Hearth attacks are surprisingly rare, although they
are so easy tom arrange, as the reader will see shortly, for a reason I could not explain.
Coincidence makes that Rudy Lainé, my predecessor for a position I was offered and accepted in
the early 1990s, died young of a hang glider accident two years after he was fired for grave
misconduct. The accident did not raise the suspicion of the media, as Lainé had no notoriety, but his
former colleagues in the DGSE who bemoaned his decease strongly suspected he was truly
assassinated. To them, the news of his death and of its cause was taken with stupor and bred
rampant fear. The inclination of this man for bragging about was well known, a fact that for long
worried his superiors. About me, I only found bizarre that my superiors had formally ordered me
never to meet this man and talk with him before he died; no reason whatsoever was given for this.
Otherwise, the DGSE most frequently resorts to an elaborate, say “scientific,” method to do clean
assassinations. To put things simply, it consists in arranging for the target a significant increase of
natural factors likely to shorten his life expectancy, so much so that no one can be possibly
suspected to be the murderer. When a death of a mere liability is wanted within a couple of years,
the increase must apply to as many factors as possible, and suitable opportunities are arranged. This
particularly discreet way to assassinating someone is always devised by a physician because he
alone has all required knowledge for this. Thus, the deadly weapons will remain invisible, even to
the understanding of his closest relatives and acquaintances, and up to forensic science technicians,
unless they have good and convincing reasons to assume there might be foul play.
As the reader might ask how a physician, a person who was taught and trained to save other’s
lives, could kill instead, he must be reminded that a physician is entitled to have a weak empathy as
anybody else. Then as in all other social middles and professions, a small percentage of physicians
have an antisocial disorder. Typically, they are people who want to become doctor only for the
money and the respectability this profession vests its practitioners with. The history of criminology
abounds with cases of killer physicians, starting with that of French serial killer Doctor Petiot. The
reader probably knows that the United States and other countries have their own share of infamous
deadly nurses and physicians in their histories of common law crimes. Does he know that surgeon is
fifth in the ranking list of activities in which psychopaths are the most represented in his country,
behind CEOs, lawyers, people working in audiovisual media, and salespersons, respectively?—
spies are also cited among the most concerned activities, but not ranked, and put in the same special
category as traders, special forces in military and police, and male inmates who would be more than
15%. Anyway, the DGSE is very interested in this peculiar combination of high skill and
psychological profile in a recruit, as we have seen in the chapter 8 on psychiatrists and lawyers.
Therefrom, it is relatively easy to spot a student with antisocial disorder in a university of medicine,
and even easier to spot one with a narcissistic personality disorder after a few years, months, or even
weeks of survey when he is learning his trade in a hospital and in close relations with staffs and
patients. I recollect having once known a dental student in the early 1980s who, although he was a
pleasant, smiling, very smart, and handsome man, was also a mischievous character to be dreaded.
In point of fact, he became arms dealer and not dentist. He was indeed one of those exceptions some
take as examples to assert that “appearances are deceptive”. Again, one should rather say,
“Appearances are deceptive, sometimes”.
An assassination of this discreet kind is planned carefully and scientifically, and it begins with an
appraisal of the general health of the target, inclinations, hobbies, strengths, weaknesses, and tastes
in everything. Does he smoke, heavily or moderately, in the affirmative? Does he drink or consume
drugs? What kind of food does he likes, and does he eat a lot or normally? Is he a sportsman, and
which sports is he practicing, in the affirmative? Each of all of these innocuous characteristics is
likely to support a logical explanation to the cause of a premature death, which no expert in forensic
science will question, therefore. Better, and somehow paradoxical, even if the perpetrator happens to
be known accidentally, yet justice and police would have no admissible evidence in hand to convict
him, as he had no connection with the victim and even no motive since it is a State secret.
Although I brought the reader in the category of slow assassinations, their delays can be
shortened considerably by resorting to particular chemical or biological substances, still without
running the risk to arouse suspicion. Wholesome, what I call “slow assassination” ranges from a few
days to a couple of years. In a number of instances, however, its success may largely depend on the
country where the elimination must take place or if the DGSE can count on complicities in the
hospital where the target will be treated.
I have firsthand knowledge of two such assassinations on the French territory for which
complicities in healthcare were available and proved effective. It may all depend, chiefly, on the
involvement of the Chief physician of the service where the target is taken care of. For, typically,
subordinates of this executive never dare challenge his authority; especially in France where, for
some years now, public hospitals employ commonly poorly qualified immigrant nurses and
physicians from third-rate countries who, in addition, often are even not fluent in French. Those
underlings have little concern for whether a patient should or not be treated with care, as I witnessed
it. In one of these two cases, an agent of the DGSE bribed a physician of Turkish origin with 50
euros only, as a screen, so that she would not tell the relatives of the target the actual and full
information on his health condition, while he was under care. The reason for this, which this
physician had no need-to-know, was that it was still possible to save the life of the target who,
instead, died “naturally” a week later for wants of appropriate care.
Now, I present some detailed examples of such discreet and slow physical eliminations,
beginning by one of their earliest type, when the DGSE was called DGER; that is to say, from
November 1944 to December 1945.
Typically, one means or another to consult for dental care prompted the target, and he was
recommended or taken to a “good dentist” in particular. Then this dentist, who was also an agent or
even just an accomplice motivated by some political commitment, managed to introduce a particular
bacterium in the mouth of the target, unbeknownst to him. This is easy to do since it may be done
while doing the simplest act of dental care. Within a period of six months following the inoculation
of the bacterium, the target contracted an infective endocarditis; that is to say, an infection of the
inner surface of the heart—valves, generally.[191]
The first French citizens who were assassinated discreetly with this method were officials and
police officers of the RG who had collaborated with the German Gestapo and the Abwehr, during
the WWII. They were admitted to the Institut Pasteur in Paris when they felt the first symptoms of
endocarditis. There, they received about no medical care, in addition to the fact that endocarditis
was a fatal heart trouble in France at that time, anyway, and still for many years thereafter. Those
people died so through much suffering in a few weeks, and the official cause of their death was
“bacteria owing to bad hygiene,” which was in no way surprising nor even concerning in the
immediate aftermath of the war.
In the 1950s, the discovery of certain particular effects and properties of suxamethonium aka
succinylcholine[192] offered an opportunity to kill someone in less than five minutes, from apparent
heart attack. Today, in its intravenous form, 100mg of suxamethonium will depolarize every muscle
in the body of a 140lb man in about 20 seconds. He will not be able to take another breath for five
minutes at least; much enough to cause death by suffocation in most people.
When used for assassination, suxamethonium offers certain advantages over curare and other
substances whose effects are similar; for enzymes in the body break down suxamethonium naturally
and almost immediately. This makes this poisoning very difficult to detect in forensic examination,
unless its use is strongly suspected. The analysis of the presence of suxamethonium in the body of a
deceased person (i.e. quaternary ammonium neuromuscular blocking agents) in a forensic setting is
challenging for two reasons. The first is that the chemical behavior of these compounds, involving
both hydrophilic and lipophilic characteristics, makes them difficult to isolate from biological
specimens. The second is the extraordinary variability of the types of specimens encountered, which
is such that each specimen must be considered unique. Suxamethonium remains the poison the most
frequently used by intelligence services, to date, yet not that so by the DGSE.
From the 1960s, there was aflatoxin B1, a type of aflatoxin and a common contaminant, whose
interesting particularity with respect to sophisticated and slow physical elimination is its capacity to
trigger a cirrhosis evolving into fatal liver cancer. Aflatoxin B1 is a very potent carcinogen with two
particularities that makes it one among the best chemical substance to assassinate someone without
arousing any suspicion. In the first instance, a tiny dose of aflatoxin B1 causes a very common but
fatal disease, whose readily explainable cause may be heavy alcohol consumption or Hepatitis B.
That is why this poison is privileged when the target has a known tendency to drink, an unbridled
sexual life (Hepatitis B), or when he loves seafood (Hepatitis B, again). Never the police will find a
reason to investigate the exact cause of a cirrhosis, of course. Even if a friend or relative of this
person hazards to suggest that the cirrhosis might be the result of poisoning, his claim will have all
chances to be dismissed promptly, and he will be taken for a conspiracy theorist. This is true
because most physicians ignore that this contaminant in peanuts, cottonseed meal, and corn,
happens to be used intentionally by spies as a sophisticated poison. Second, since the speed of the
effects of aflatoxin B1 depends on a precise ratio between the weight of the person and the quantity
of it to be ingested, it allows to planning with relative accuracy when the first symptoms of cirrhosis
will occur. Thus, one can die from a given dose of this aflatoxin in a few weeks or within a couple
of years, on demand. That explains why aflatoxin B1 qualifies as “time poison”.
In 2008, the DGSE slowly assassinated an elderly woman or say, this agency “helped her to die”
by using even more sophisticated means. The fault of this person, made a target accidentally, was to
provide financial help to her son who was deserter of this agency and had had the bad idea to
attempt to flee to the United States, for worse. As the mother was not very cooperative when she
was asked to keep an agent of the DGSE abreast of what her son was doing and of his whereabouts,
this did aggravate her situation, to put it mildly. She was under medical care for hypertension
problems, already, which facilitated the task from the viewpoint of a physician of the DGSE. First,
she was socially eliminated with some methods among these described in the previous chapter, and
this worsened her hypertension problem, obviously. Yet no cerebral vascular accident happened to
her, and her health was just lingering, contrary to what was expected.
So, the DGSE found some new “friends” for her, including a woman hired recently by the local
bureau of the post office who went to buy groceries for her each week, “spontaneously and
charitably”. Then another woman—an agent of the DGSE and a known sociopath on her late 50s—
introduced herself as someone who wanted to help the target in anything. Thus, she succeeded to
win the trust of the target so that she could act on her behalf for certain administrative matters. The
latter provision allowed making the target passes for a mentally disturbed person. Therefrom,
anything she complained about, starting with her ongoing and by then obvious harassment, was
dismissed as delusion.
Once the latter situation was set forth, the DGSE managed to have the target’s son—i.e. the
deserter of this agency—understand what was happening to his mother, in the hope he would
renounce to flee and to “go back to reason”. However, the deserter knew well the DGSE would not
forgive him for having sought to flee to the United States, obviously, and he would be assassinated
at once after his repentance instead, or he and his family would be socially eliminated for good in
the most optimistic case scenario. Nothing would be done to save his mother, additionally, of
course.
By a sad irony, the other son of the target, brother of the deserter, therefore, was an executive of
the DGSE. The latter brought to his mother some food in tin cans whose deadline for consumption
was passed for more than ten years.[193] The old woman could not read the tiny and blurred
characters on those cans because she was known to have a cataract that had not been treated, and
even no spectacles. On the same day, this man took advantage of this visit to raise the temperature
of the boiler of her house up to maximum, so that it would be very hot in all rooms, again on
recommendation of the physician of the DGSE who was called for technical support to this physical
elimination.
A few days later, the target fell seriously ill at last, and by a night she had a violent fall in her
bedroom that caused to her a cerebral hemorrhage. The second friend of the target, the sociopath
woman agent, gave a phone call to the employee of the DGSE who had fled, to explain to him that
his mother was brought to the emergency in serious condition. The other son telephoned to him, too,
to make him understand in cryptic terms of the kind I explained in the previous chapter that, if he
came back to his senses, “doctors at the hospital could save their mother, doubtless”. Additionally,
he made him understand that otherwise, he, too, would be physically eliminated, by firearm in his
case. Notwithstanding, the fugitive son was no fool and kept on his position firmly, in spite of his
sorrow and despair anyone could imagine.[194] Upon the negative and clear answer, at the hospital,
the chief physician stated the old woman could not be saved due to her age, and he ordered the
nurses to put her under permanent infusion of morphine first, followed two days later by a
permanent injection of sodium thiopental. The target died two days later from her worsening
condition.
As soon as the death was pronounced, the DGSE ordered the second son of the target to go to his
mother’s house urgently to make disappear all written record of the existence of her psychopath
friend; those tracks that could possibly point to foul play had to be wiped out or be blurred
forthwith. That was not yet all.
 One more “charitable woman” who introduced herself as police officer, which claim was true,
had helped for a few weeks the elderly neighbor next door of the target. The role of this woman had
been to convince the old man that the old lady was in trouble with justice, and that he would be well
advised to stop talking to her, therefore. In addition, “he would demonstrate he is good citizen” if he
reported all visits this old lady had, especially her son’s because the police “suspected he was a
terrorist”. Overall, the slow and clueless assassination of the old lady was carried out in less than
two years.
The DGSE resorts to certain chemical substances under very specific conditions to trigger serious
lung diseases, especially with targets known to be heavy smokers or who were so formerly. This
agency favors the soft method with its own employees when it has some good reasons to eliminate
them quietly, without awakening the suspicion of their colleagues. First, the target must be lured to
lodge in a building apartment equipped with a collective extractor fan usually located on the roof,
which draws air from all apartments to the outside. Nearly all apartment’s buildings where the
DGSE lodges its employees in Paris have this system, similar in its principle to a cooker hood, and
described in this version as an anti-pollution system, good for the health.
Then a representative of the building’s owner warns all tenants except the target of a problem
with the aeration system, which is untrue, obviously. Thereupon, a “technician” comes to condemn
temporarily air vents in all apartments, except the one where the target lives. From a technical
standpoint, as the apartment of the target is the only one in the building whose air vents have not
been condemned, this modification of the whole air system transforms it into a powerful “vacuum
cleaner tube,” for the power of the fan is normally set to work correctly for ten apartments at least.
Therefore, the air is strongly sucked through the doorway of the sole apartment where the system is
working, by the thin space between the bottom of the door and the threshold. Once these technical
conditions are set forth, any thin powder poured gently towards the threshold of this entrance door is
drawn silently and entirely inside the apartment, where it spreads first in all rooms and then towards
the air vents that suck it.
Every nights and for a given period, an agent is sent to pour quickly and silently a small quantity
of the chosen chemical product on the door threshold of the target—this takes a few seconds and
leaves no trace—who breathes it unbeknownst to him thenceforth. The life expectancy of someone
who is thus tricked can be shortened considerably, and no police officer will be imaginative enough
to conceive a so elaborate murder. Otherwise, if ever the contrivance is set in a large city as Paris
and for a duration of several years, the pollution in the air alone is enough already to cause serious
lungs and throat damages naturally.
However, after a few months of this devilish plot, an attentive person can notice something is
wrong, simply by looking at the black and viscous deposit that forms quickly in the entrance
doorframe, typically. If ever the person is not stupid in addition, he, too, will condemn the air vents
in his apartment by his own initiative—too late, perhaps. I have been once tricked thusly, but I
quickly noticed that something was wrong with the air system because the entrance door was
inexplicably harder to close, while I could feel and hear an abnormally strong air draught. I
understood instantly what was going on.
As an aside, the DGSE uses the latter trick in the other context of a social elimination, in which
case the need limits to make the target repeatedly sick thanks to other suitable substances. Other
tricks may be used instead or simultaneously to reach the same goal, such as simply polluting a door
lock with an (in)appropriate substance. The thus induced sicknesses typically are rhino-pharyngitis
alternating with gastroenteritis, with a monthly periodicity.
The reader may assume rightly that poisoning a smoker is an easier thing to do than to tamper
with the air extraction system of an entire building. See how easier it can be today with the spread
of electronic cigarettes using liquid substances of unclear origin! Except when the smoker is a well-
trained spy, in which case he will be wary of cigarettes casually offered by people he does not know
or of a pack of cigarettes someone “forgot” on a table in a café—remember the trick of the wallet. I
will not name the nature of the required substances for this use because I do not know them, but I
know they are as varied as numerous. I learned that particular poisoning substances the DGSE uses
trigger certain types of cancer. Some such as cesium–137 and cobalt–60 are radioactive. However,
some other substances producing the same effects neither are hard to find nor expensive, such as
radium. Many other simple and inexpensive substances such as mercury and lead satisfy this
particular use either.
 Actually, poisoning someone is more a matter of quantity than of product; wherefrom, there is a
very large number of common and inexpensive substances, including air by intravenous injection,
which can kill more or less rapidly. However, intelligence agencies that assassinate look for rare and
very exotic poisons because they need to make it fast and unbeknownst to their targets, which claim
tiny quantities of rare and highly toxic substance. Sometimes, they want to “sign” their murders in a
way that must exclude common law crime, lethal disease, or a plausible accident; I explained why
already.
Otherwise, many DGSE recruits are explained how to find and use an efficient poison without
leaving any records of harmful substances purchases. To do this, one simply must find out a very
common plant called datura, whose all varieties contain tropane alkaloids such as scopolamine,
hyoscyamine, and atropine in their seeds and flowers primarily. Because of the presence of these
substances in this plant, it has been known and largely used for centuries in some cultures as deadly
poison. That is why the word “datura” is used colloquially in the DGSE to allude in a cryptic way to
a discreet assassination, and to send death threats to agents who know what it means.
There is one last form of discrete physical elimination, I only alluded to in the previous chapter,
consisting in an indefinite extension of a social elimination. The method cannot be applied in a
foreign country for the same obvious reasons, which explains why it is used in the contexts of
domestic intelligence and counterespionage to get rid of agents and employees who committed
grave faults or made a nuisance of themselves in some way. The DGSE conceives metaphorically
this physical elimination as a corrida and no longer as a siege, although the technique remains the
same in almost all respects; that is to say, as the killing of a bull in the center of a crowded arena,
and as a Spanish bullfight more precisely. From a symbolical and metaphorical standpoint, this
arena must be compared to a “public opinion” that would have failed to attend the first part of the
bullfight. For during this part, called tercio de varas, two picadors perched on horses, whose flanks
are protected by caparaçons from the inevitable blows of the bull’s horns, torment the animal by
wounding it with long and sharp lances. The latter metaphor must be understood as endless stalking
and taunting meant to unhinge the target. In point of fact, the first stage of the killing of the bull is
meant to both annoying and weakening it; the matador would put his life at stake for real if the bull
were in good health. The reader who remembers everything I explained in the previous chapter has
no difficulty understanding the metaphor, and he learned how Man reacts to stress and aggression
and what are the three options his reptilian brain offers to him.
Now, here is the sequel awaiting those who are expected to die this way, to go to prison, or to be
interned in a psychiatric hospital where it is still easier to kill them discreetly.
During the second part of the bullfight, called tercio de banderillas, three banderilleros and the
matador plant three pairs of banderillas in the spine of the bull, between its shoulders. The reality of
this metaphor may slightly vary from one case to another, but this is unimportant because what is of
interest is that the three banderilleros attack the bull simultaneously, and always according to the
same tactic. One of the banderilleros distracts the bull’s mind by running, waving his arms and
jumping, so that the two others can weaken and further upset the bull by surprise by planting these
banderillas in its spine; that is to say, in a region of its body neither it can access nor even see.
Therefore, the bull will not be able to remove those painful things from his sore flesh. Indeed, the
whole process is a hit-and-run game, still mixed with repeated taunting meant to make the bull’s
mind seethe with anger and to unhinge it suitably, exactly as in a mission of social elimination with
a human being, but by other means in this less popular instance.
Thereupon, the matador, hero of the show, enters the closed and doorless arena, larger that the
cage A. in the experiment of Laborit with the rats but about the same with respect to the size of a
bull. We are reaching the final part of the killing of the bull, called tercio de muerte. The matador,
supreme authority in the eyes of the crowd in the arena, the one who carries the noble sword,
symbol of justice in the society of men, will soon be able to justify his murder by showing to
everybody how dangerous the furious animal is, and how prompt he is to attack and to kill, if
possible. The bad guy cannot but be that furiously mad beast, in the understanding of the attending
crowd.
It is ever possible, however, that inhibition behavior takes precedence over that of fighting in the
mind of the bull because, as with the rat in the electrified cage, this other animal sees no exit to flee;
he can only try to fight against the matador, if ever. The door of the arena by which it entered has
been closed either, which additional provision makes a bullfight an exact reproduction of the
experiment 3 of Laborit. In the present case, the goal is not to see how the animal will react to a pain
he cannot flee, but to fight against the matador, as in the experiment 2. Otherwise, the crowd in the
arena—metaphorical version of the public opinion in a physical elimination, let us keep in mind—
will not accept the killing to proceed. All those people would turn against the matador to question
his courage, honor, and rightfulness. No matter how proudly he would behave in his colorful and
glittering outfit, the crowd would see him as no more than a narcissistic and callous murderer, and
would be sorry for the wanton cruelty inflicted to the poor bull. It would be a catastrophic reversal
of situation, and of roles for the organizers of the bullfight. Aren’t those spectators still
sleepwalkers, receptive to passion only, once reunited as a crowd?
The bull could not possibly understand all this, obviously; it has not been gifted the intelligence
of Man. Moreover, the persistent pain in its spine, all the blood it lost already, and the crowd of
hundreds of excited spectators, mindless accomplices in its slow assassination who are shouting,
whistling, booing, and jeering, all thwart its need to rest even a single second and to recover its
strength and calm. The animal is distraught; it could not possibly think, even if it were endowed
with the faculty of thinking ahead and planning defensive measures. Being suitably overwhelmed,
now, the bull cannot but fight until its last breath because the game, rigged from the inception,
planned it so.
This is exactly what happens to the human target of this kind of physical elimination, who loses
his composure and bearings, even, in a situation of daily taunting, harassment, frustration, and
stalking. For he truly is not so different from a bull; both of them have a reptilian brain, whose
orders take precedence over all reasons their mammalian brain and neocortex can process. A
desperate situation of this kind leaves no time to think, even to Man. That is why, as an aside, many
people when caught in dramatic situations also die “stupidly” from having taken the “wrong
decision” among two or three that were available to them, just because danger, pain, stress, or all of
them at the same time overwhelmed their minds.
The human target of a physical elimination by prolonged harassment is even left with fewer
options than the bull has in a bullfight. If his pain is psychological only, yet it may last for weeks,
months, and even years. The prolonged treatment is tantamount to physical pains inflicted in the 20
minutes on average of the ritualistic slaughter of a bull. I explained the important nuance between
the intensity of an annoyance and of a pain, and its duration in repetitions. We have seen, also, what
the ordeal of a social elimination can be, or thereabout because telling it exhaustively would fill an
entire book. When the target gives in to inhibition in spite of the torments that continue to befall
him, it is because he has sunken into a deeper stage of a depression that affected him for several
months or years at that point. It would be possible to kill a bull without ever wounding it, indeed,
just by exhausting mentally the animal, as with a human being in an elimination of this elaborate
sort, or as in the experiment 3 of Laborit; but it would be too long for a bullfight, of course.
At some point of his quiet “corrida,” the human target will be hospitalized for a psychosomatic
illness or he will go to a psychiatric hospital for his induced disorder. In either case, and as someone
who is socially isolated and discredited already, few people if any will express interest in the exact
circumstances of his sudden disappearance. He will die of a natural cause consequent to the joint
effects of his broken will, weakened physical condition, and necessary medical treatment that
“might not be appropriate”. Or else he will commit suicide, which outcome is much likely in a so
extreme situation of despair. If he did not give in to inhibition because of his exceptional
resilience,or because he managed to flee the “picadors” and “banderilleros” who were there to
deprive him of all means and chance to find out some help, then other dangers await him abroad.
Some official or even any ordinary person will want to find out who this bizarre immigrant is;
especially if he seems to flee a danger, as he does not come from one of those third-world countries
at war or banana republic ruled by tyranny.
Very possibly, the fugitive will have to face the hassle of some foreign intelligence officer
expecting to coerce him into becoming a police informant. He will be asked to “cooperate,” to spy
on certain immigrants of French origin, whose language and habits he knows well. The latter case
scenario, by the way, was treated with realism by creator and writer Roy Haines in a BBC-produced
TV series, appropriately titled Informant (2018). In it, British actor Paddy Considine in all respects
plays convincingly the role of the average police handler I am alluding to. The other excellent
American film The Departed (2006), directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Matt Damon in the
role of the informant, shows an alternate version of the scheme, similarly convincing.
If ever the target now made a fugitive denies his recruitment, he will be threatened to be sent back
to the “arena,” his country. Nonetheless, yielding to the pressing demand will not change much his
situation. He will be treated as a wretch, with that contempt ordinarily given to those immigrants of
the underworld who have little decency, no respectable connections, and no money to afford any
appearance of respectability. The services he will possibly render to the local police or
counterespionage agency will never be recognized. A few years later, he will be sent back to France
on the official pretext that he is “strongly suspected to be a spy” or an individual “known for his
questionable frequentations;” this so often happens with poor and desperate immigrants. Who will
care?
Nevertheless, the French intelligence community has an effective ploy in reserve to catch back a
deserter who thus attempts to evade its unofficial authority. It consists simply in requesting the
EMOPT to registers him as individual “in relation with a subversive movement with violent
potentiality”.[195] The expected result of the provision being that, once abroad, the fugitive will
quickly find himself in the same situation as in France because soon the local authorities will ask for
information on him to their French colleagues. This may happen upon the normal checking of his
identity while crossing a customs checkpoint or on an all-ordinary police control. Thenceforth, he
will be considered a “dangerous individual,” regardless of his claims, and dealt with accordingly.
All European countries signed a European treaty named Schengen Agreement, which extends to
the common exchange of information between law enforcement and security agencies, and in the
feeding of a common international police and security database. The French intelligence community
has no compunction with abusing the provision in order to blacklist its targets, and people expected
to “cooperate” more especially, by adding their names and files in this database, as person “tagged
S”; the letter “S” standing for Security, for the record. The devilish trick is called ficher quelqu’un S
(carding someone “S”) and claims no more effort than a few typed words and clicks on a computer
keyboard.
Similar agreements exist to cover the whole World, such as the International Criminal Police
Organization–ICPO aka Interpol in particular. In point of fact, abuses in the international search for
individuals by intelligence agencies are known to have been repeatedly covered by the ICPO. Still
today, there is an ongoing concern with regard to the protection of human rights about the election
of nationals of certain countries as head of this World police organization, such as the People’s
Republic of China, recently. See also the Wikipedia page of “Interpol,” on which the question is
raised and documented. The integrity of the ICPO has been questioned since the successive
elections as its presidents of four German nationals and members of the Nazi Party: Otto Steinhäusl
(1938-1940), Reinhard Heydrich (1940-1942), Arthur Nebe (1942-1943), and Ernst Kaltenbrunner
(1943-1945). For the record, Kaltenbrunner was chief of the RSHA, the organization encompassing
the German secret police and the Sicherheitsdientst–SD or intelligence agency of the SS.
Physical eliminations can also be carried out through a mix of the provisions just described and of
physical violence. Such cases remain rare, for much I know, because they can hardly remain
unnoticed by ordinary people or even by journalists. Often though not always, they concern French
nationals of little importance who cooperated with the U.S. intelligence community or with
intelligence agencies allied to this country, while remaining on the French soil.
On a general basis and fom the viewpoint of the DGSE in particular, “State violence” (violence
d’État) is inevitable because it is sometimes necessary to maintain the stability of the Nation.
“Jupiter starts by unhinging the one he wishes the destruction”.[196] Discreet physical elimination
preceded by long moral sufferings, and by madness if possible, is used in France to punish even
more harshly traitors and individuals who managed to attack the State successfully. In this case, the
reader better understands the justification of a physical elimination intended as “example”.
Now, I talk a little about weapons to conclude this chapter.
The earliest special weapons French spies would have used date back to the 19th century, and
they would have been silenced guns using carbon dioxide as propellant contained under pressure in
a removable cartridge. French engineer Paul Giffard is credited to be the inventor of these pistols
and rifles firing lead bullets of calibers superior to 6mm. I once read that air rifles would have been
first experimented for a short while for special operations during the Napoleonic Wars of 1803-
1815, but the hearsay must be taken with a grain of salt for wants of any trace of those guns or
authentic document, however.
In the aftermath of the WWII, one of my ex-colleagues once told me, most assassinations were
carried out with all-ordinary firearms of all calibers, but chiefly with U.S. ordnance pistols Colt
1911A1 cal. .45 ACP, and with .22LR silenced pistols eventually. For some years, the SDECE used
single-shot “pen guns” firing .25 ACP ammunitions, designed after an American-made similar
weapon of the WWII. I have been unable to find on the Web the same I was shown, full steel made
with a black finish for a length of about 6” and an exterior diameter of about 0.5”. The thing did not
resemble a pen actually, as it is bulkier and much heavier.
Between the late 1950s and the 1960s, the SDECE ventured in the use of small carbon dioxide
dart guns this agency called “sarbacane” (blowgun). In fact, those guns ejecting tiny syringes had
been purchased in the United States, and the SDECE just substituted the tranquilizing drug with a
lethal poison. The victim showed all the symptoms of having suffered a heart attack. Several
different types of the French sarbacane derived from the U.S. original version and were put on test
in real situations with unequal successes. One was concealed in an ordinary portable radio-receiver;
another was a “pressure sarbacane” to be used at point-blank, as a ring at the tip of its barrel acted as
trigger. In all those spy guns, the dart was propelled silently by carbon dioxide released from a small
metallic cartridge, as with the Giffard system. As example among a number, in Geneva in
September 1957, the SDECE used one such weapon to eliminate arms smuggler Marcel Leopold.
This means to killing people with poison is not discreet at all, and it inescapably leaves the
signature of a state assassination owing to its particularity, let alone for the dart that the killer could
hardly expect to retrieve. The DGSE has not been using those sarbacanes for a long time, in part
because they were not hundred-per-cent reliable means to kill. For an undetermined period since
then, this agency uses a new small device I sketched from recollection, below. The small and
compact one-time syringe is in dark khaki-green plastic molded in one piece.

Owing to the latter characteristics, the device may easily suggest a military field syringe, though I
have been unable to find out on the Internet one about similar that would be in use in some special
military unit. Because of its short length of 4” or so and great lightness, it can be concealed in any
pocket. The needle its sole metallic part is less than 2” long, but its diameter is much larger than that
of ordinary syringes because it must not bend or break when used through thick garments. The
protective cap that has the additional function of safety is maintained on the needle by a couple of
plastic wires integral to the syringe, thus preventing the possibility of a leak consequent to an
accidental pressure on the tank. The use of this killing device, simple and quick, is as follow. One
pulls the grooved tongue of the cap, stings the target strongly through his pant or shirt, and presses
the tank; that is all. Since this syringe is supposed to contain a lethal dose of suxamethonium for an
intramuscular injection–IM, the first incapacitating effects occur after a few seconds, and death
ensue in less than five minutes.
My sketch on the next page, I drew from recollection either, presents a double-barrel pistol with
folding triggers, acting as the gearbox lever of a car. The idea of this gun, in its principle, is said to
be old and French, initially designed sometimes between the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Modifying or adapting the knob of a car to install this pistol can be a complicated job, however.
For the whole center console of the vehicle has to be disassembled, and correctly reassembled once
the modification is done, which in a modern car typically filed with much electronics and wires can
be a delicate work. Then adapting the sheath of the gun to the gearbox mechanism may claim a bit
of welding work. Therefore, only a handy spy with a good tool set at his disposal or a trusted
mechanic, with no witness around, of course, can do all this. Once locked in his sheath that is the
actual gearbox lever, and covered with its dust proof cover, this gun is invisible. The second shot is
provisioned in case the driver-killer would have wrongly adjusted the first one, which is likely, as it
is difficult for him to face the passenger, his target. Loading this pistol is the tedious part of its use,
though not difficult at all. It must be disassembled in two main parts screwed together, highlighted
on my sketch as the line between the triggers and the lock pin. Once reassembled, the two triggers
must be kept folded in their resting position, while sliding the gun in its sheath. The fact that the two
triggers are folded back is also a simple and reliable safety preventing any accidental discharge.
 Its use, contrariwise, is simple and quick. First, the shift
lever must be pushed down, while turning it about a sixth of a
complete turn to unlock it. Then it must be pulled upward to
disengage it from the sheath. The latter move releases the two
triggers instantly, which take the position as shown on my
sketch. Henceforth, the pistol is set to fire. The whole
manoeuver takes one to two seconds, and it is so fast that the
passenger cannot figure what is happening before it is too late,
doubtless; the more so, as how to believe a gearbox lever
could be a deadly weapon?
As I had had the opportunity to examine this pistol, I can
say it is a fine example of handcrafted mechanics, very neat,
with a polished metal finish; all features that would ravish
more than one gun collector. I was explained, this weapon
worthy of a James Bond film would have been first designed
and built between the 1950s and the 1960s. One can cross a
border with it in one’s car with little concern about a possible
customs search.
Since 1991, French company PGM Precision is designing
and manufacturing high-precision rifles for special operations
and law enforcement, but recently it is trying to interest the
civilian market. This company has close ties with the COS and
the DGSE, and for them it designs sniper rifles with
suppressors using big calibers and exotic ammunitions it also
designs, experiments, and manufactures either.
By big caliber I mean .380 (9 mm) and bigger because the
necessary low velocity of ammunitions specially manufactured
for suppressed guns—i.e. 1050 ft./s. maximum; the speed of
sound—obliges to compensate with bullets of higher mass to
keep high kinetic energy at distances in excess of one hundred
yards. PGM Precision also manufactures caliber .338 Lapua
Magnum and .50 BMG conventional military sniper rifles it
sells to the French Foreign Legion and to the regular military
and special police forces of a dozen of countries: Brazil,
Slovenia, and Israel, in particular.
 PART II.
Domestic Intelligence
and

Counterintelligence
I remember this interview of Alexandre de Marenches
[Head of
the SDECE from 1970 to 1981], broadcast on History a
long time ago,
at the time of the revelations about Anthony Blunt as being
the fifth of
the Cambridge spies. On this occasion, he was asked,
“What would you have done if you had discovered this spy
nest in
your services?” He answered, “I would have been very
happy
to have people with such intellectual capacities”.
—John Kieger, « Une Perception britannique du renseignement français ».
Le Renseignement à la française, 1998, p. 598, tr. by the auth.
 12. The all-encompassing active measures.
A s the Virgil of the Divine Comedy did, I decided to guide my reader through the logical
progression of an initiatory path, but with the greater clarity that behooves to a contemporary work
of information, of course. In point of fact, the reader probably noticed at times certain reciprocity in
the latter pretense. This was deliberate in the Part I, already, as its last two chapters intend to befit
the mood Dante similarly expected when he completed his journey in Inferno. If the Inferno of
Dante epitomizes my perception of the dailies of most spies, my reader must also know that this
allegorical parallel does not entirely owe to a conceit of mine. Indeed, about all intelligence
agencies of the Western World, secular France included, resort commonly to symbols and particular
words, bywords, and parables Dante created for his Divine Comedy. By trade, all spies are
constantly looking for ways to deny their plots. In this endeavor, they seldom stop short of referring
to authors they may disapprove or dislike in truth, as long as they best fit the circumstances.
Serendipity is all it takes, and it is good enough, they think. It is true, however, that, as with the
Odyssey by Homer that also happens to feed the DGSE with opportunities for coding secret
meanings, the Divine Comedy nowadays commonly satisfies a general demand for mere fantasy and
mystery that far outweighs the moral intent of its author.
Now I take my reader on a tour in a secular Purgatorio, where souls are still allowed to live in
groups that they feel free to choose. In this new part, he will learn again on Man, this time with a
focus on his collective behavior and on the ways spies with other specialties manipulate and
influence his species by clusters, groups, and masses.
The DGSE has the little-known particularity to integrate the encompassing notion of “active
measures,” this agency borrowed to the Russian foreign intelligence service. As the reader may find
this as unexpected as surprising, I must begin with explaining why and how, therefore.
At the turn of the 1950s, the SDECE, ancestor of the DGSE, secretly developed relations with the
Soviet KGB, when General De Gaulle took the power and reformed the Fourth French Republic to
install the Fifth. The relations that naturally extended to politics grew steadily closer after the end of
the Cold War, until today. The U.S. CIA knew this all along, yet this other agency leaked it to the
media twice only in the history of the relations between the United States and France. We shall see
this historical aspect along the following chapters, and more especially in the first ones of the Part
III.
Today, French people interested in the subject of French-U.S. relations and intelligence are left in
a quandary not to say disbelief when hearing for the first time about the latter situation, obviously.
For the French mainstream media release regularly news on counterterrorism joint operations
deceptively suggesting the U.S. CIA and the French DGSE “are working hand in hand”. This
cooperation on terrorism issues indeed exists, but not at all on a regular basis, and it is plagued by
reciprocal distrust and deceptions attempts, about as the makers of the French TV series The Bureau
depict it. The latest of this kind of American-French cooperation has been the rescue and exfiltration
of four hostages from Northern Burkina Faso, Africa, on the night of May 10 to 11, 2019. The
hostages included two Frenchmen, one South Korean woman, and, most remarkably, an American
woman aged 60 whose identity and anything about her stood mysteriously undisclosed in France as
in the United States for unclear or dubious reasons. In this special operation relating to
counterterrorism, twenty men of the French Commando Hubert of the Commandos Marine were
constantly helped by the U.S. aerial (drones) and electronic interception intelligence capacities
without which, a French Army General said two day later on May 13, this would have been
impossible on a so short notice. The hostages had to be quickly saved and exfiltrated as their six
captors were heading aboard a vehicle toward Mali and had halted for the night. Two marine
commandos and four of the six captors were killed during the operation while two of the latter
managed to flee.
I would be unable to say when exactly the SDECE or the DGSE integrated active measures in its
proceedings, as the decision has never been officially enacted. I know, however, the common use of
the term by strategists and executives of this agency began to surface a few years ago only, although
its provisions began to be implemented between 1980 and 1982, when the SDECE was thoroughly
overhauled and changed its name for DGSE. Then a few clues suggest that the change occurred in
an inchoate state from 1979-80 on the preparation of one large scale operation at least in French
foreign policy, to be presented and explained in the chapter 23. For the past decades, the Russian
concept of active measures fascinated a number of people in the DGSE. Many executives,
intelligence officers and experts in this agency studied it with great interest, me included. This
makes me hazard the other guess that France would have adopted this other way to envisage
intelligence even in the absence of her special relationship with Russia. For active measures
subsume about all particular yet common missions of the DGSE that many other foreign
intelligence agencies either eschew or carry out exceptionally and reluctantly.
Taking the example of the United States for comparison, the CIA, that today the DGSE holds as
its main adversary, unbeknownst to the public, has some principles and a culture of its own that
exclude certain methods and practices the latter agency favors. However, still at this time, the U.S.
intelligence community in general enjoys the permanent availability of particular technical means
and resources that stay out of reach to France and to Russia; I name the Internet and the GPS,
chiefly. The latter fact is naturally encouraging France and Russia to persist in the difference to
resume a rivalry the three countries perceive as an unofficial war. This is particularly visible in
today’s Russian military culture because Russia’s military-industrial complex is collectively
conscious of its incapacity to parallel its American counterpart in all areas simultaneously. That is
why this country takes the party to focus its efforts, instead, on developing and mastering particular
and unique technologies and weapons that the United States either did not yet probe, missed to
envisage, or tried and abandoned. The goal is to challenge the U.S. military capacities and
technologies in few and very specific areas, at least, in an attempt to move the battlefield and the
goalposts. This explains why Russia has some particular and unique weapons and continue to
develop others that have no equivalents and even no real counter-measures in the United States at
this time.
The common practice of active measures escapes this logic because the United States could
decide at any time to retaliate against it simply by doing the same. Relying on active measures is not
a question of technological and scientific expertise, and still less of scientific and financial
capacities. Instead, it is a matter of moral limits beyond which the United States would no longer be
what they are, if they decided to adopt them; we will see why soon. The United States do not rely on
active measures, does not want to, and does not even want to fight them head on because this would
question its founding principles and scale of values, up to its domestic politics, to the point of
making this country unrecognizable. For the other flip of the coin with using active measures is a
Pandora Box, a Skin of sorrow, a pact with the Devil to anyone decides to adopt them as doctrine.
For a while, the U.S. intelligence community had an Active Measures Working Group,[197]
created in 1981 under the presidency of Ronald Reagan to strike back against Soviet active
measures, passively only, however. This particular body was dismantled circa 1992, on the ground
that the Soviet Union had disappeared plus some other arguments, although its final report,
published in June of that latter year, warned of the existence of several ongoing Russian hostile
actions against the United States, indeed relevant to active measures—in nineteen ninety-two, as the
Russian Federation was created, yes.
Contrary to what says a common belief, active measures do not reduce to a set of particular
techniques in disinformation and deception. A number of countries in the World commonly do
disinformation and deception, although they did not adopt the doctrine of actives measures, and in
that other case we are talking about “information warfare”. As most recent example of this
misunderstanding, in May 2019, I read in the news that a U.S. ambassador in Moscow claimed to
have been personally “attacked by Russian active measures”. I do not need to have the specifics in
hand to say that this statement makes no sense. In reality, this diplomat has certainly been attacked
by various human and technical means under command and control of the Russian intelligence
community, probably analogous to these I described in the chapter 10 on social elimination, and
soon in the chapters 14 and 15 relating to counterintelligence and monitoring methods.
Actually, as managed by an intelligence agency, actives measures aim to altering durably the
perception and understanding of many possible things in countries they target. Conventional actions
of influence, disinformation, and propaganda cannot do this alone since about the end of the WWII.
Simply because the governments and intelligence agencies of countries that are thus attacked today
are in capacity to identify these aggressions and to oppose to them counter-measures, called
counterinfluence, by retaliating with analogous methods whenever they want to. They do not need
to adopt actives measure for this. As example, Charly Chaplin did it in 1940, already, by directing
The Great Dictator, one year after was released the first American anti-German propaganda film
titled Confessions of a Nazi Spy, by film-maker Anatole Litvak. Shortly after, from 1942, the U.S.
Office of War Information recruited other film directors and specialists in advertising to resume this
effort during the whole war.
 Essentially, influence, disinformation, and propaganda are about lying and swelling truths,
whereas active measures consists in making yourself the lie in order to transforming it in a truth,
difficult to question, therefore, since thus, the lie becomes a tangible reality having a permanent
existence. That is why and how actives measures go much farther than mere deception and
disinformation. I develop, now.
Active measures name an all-encompassing doctrine that subsumes not only about everything an
intelligence agency is in capacity to do, but also diplomacy, foreign affairs, domestic policy in
general, and even industry and commerce, private, therefore, in a highly organized and planned
fashion. In the latter respect, remember my description of the super-agent, or go back to read it
again, and figure that French CEOs, moguls, and prominent investors are all serving the national
interest of their country above their personal interest and the interests of the businesses they lead,
permanently and regardless of what appearances suggest, since they are maintained. For without
those appearances, all claims of privacy, independence, and democracy would be impossible.
Therefore, the lie that active measures engender and then breed is a vital reality that can be so on
condition that the liar believes it himself. To make active measures succeed, the ruling elite itself,
and even first, must apply them to its own domestic policy; that is to say, to the State and even to the
Nation in its entirety, private economy and industry included. In my endeavor to make myself clear
about the latter explanation, I take the metaphoric example of the car salesman who lies to his
customers when he praises the brand that hires and pay him for this. Herein we can say this man is
doing influence and even disinformation, therefore. However, if this salesman is sincerely
convinced that the brand that hires him indeed builds the best cars, to the point that he owns one and
love it, then we could say he is doing active measures when he is attempting to convince his
customers to buy one, too, because whether he truly indulges in self-delusion or not is of little
importance.
The doctrine of active measure merges public and private interests for the sake of serving an
unofficial war economy, without even having to resorting to nationalization, but still maintaining
economic planning however. We will see how all along this book henceforth, which makes this
chapter rather an introduction to active measures.
A good understanding of active measures as summarily defined in this chapter will probably
strike the reader knowledgeable in strategy and history of modern international politics. For he will
notice great similarities with the other doctrine of German geopolitik as it existed and was perfected
from the early 1930s to the end of the WWII. More than that, he will find that, at their core, actives
measures appear to be based on it, entirely. I will soon pinpoint this reality and explain why and
how it happened with conclusive evidence otherwise easily available in history books.
Now, the following is a presentation of what active measures are as a means in intelligence, and
more exactly in information warfare, cultural warfare, and economic warfare. Their understanding
calls also for a minimum knowledge of the Russian approach in intelligence, when including all
very varied activities this generic term subsumes, especially these I just named. In May 2019, the
Wikipedia English page on “actives measures” focused on Soviet deceptions operations during the
Cold War and other cunning plots, whose timeline itself is vague and inaccurate; all this at the
expense of a satisfying definition, for worse. Then there is no more information on the subject on
the Internet in general, nor any book or consistent press article at the same period, unless I am
mistaken. All this compels me to broach the subject, therefore.
“Active measures,” when reduced to an array of practices in intelligence, is an all-Russian
invention without equivalent elsewhere and in history of intelligence, even if we may find a number
of its principles and applications in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, indeed, today a reference book in
French intelligence, not coincidentally.
Then, actives measures, when extending to the State and to its domestic and foreign policies as
they have to be, and thus made an all-encompassing doctrine, actually were set forth for the first
time by Adolf Hitler who fully integrated them at all levels of the German State and Nation in the
early 1930. Simply, the doctrine had no name at that time, and this certainly caused the ignorance of
this fact until today. If the Soviets coined the term “active measures” eventually during the Cold
War, its public knowledge owe entirely to the United States, when this country revealed its existence
at the same latter period. For the record, neither the Soviets nor the Russians eventually ever said a
word about active measures beyond their name, simply because explaining their aims would be
detrimental to their application as doctrine in the country where they are designed, to begin with.
Due to the earlier summary explanations, a full understanding of active measure is a particular
knowledge and an awareness degree that only minority in the intelligence agency that uses them
needs to know.
Notwithstanding, as some name the earliest Soviets intelligence agencies, while attempting to talk
about active measures, the discipline does not seem to have been formally rationalized and taught in
the Soviet Union until the 1960s, in reality, and even rather in the late 1960s. Of course, this does
not preclude the possibility of their existence earlier, but in the inchoate form of an array of varied
practices by then named “camouflage” and “disinformation”.
The noun “disinformation” is not really of Russian origin because it would be a translation of the
French désinformation. French etymologists, however, reject the origin of the word to the Soviet
Union between the WWI and the WWII. An ongoing theory says that Joseph Stalin himself would
have coined “disinformation” in 1923, exactly,[198] by giving it a French sounding in order to
deceive all nations into believing it was a practice invented in France. The noun “disinformation”
was thought as an action of disinformation itself, therefore! Nonetheless, for long it entered the
Russian tongue as дезинформаци (diezinhformatziyah), translating as “misinformation,” in
English. Note that the noun has the variant дезинформациoнн (diezinhformatziyohn), translating
as “misinformative” and “misleading,” from which we find the verb дезинформировать
(diezinhformirovat’yi), or “to misinform”.[199]
It is correct that the Soviets created a Special Disinformation Office in 1923 on a personal
initiative of Joseph Stalin.[200] Far from to be a body with a specialty in active measures, however,
its mission limited at that time to black propaganda, and to disinformation of course; that is to say,
“spreading false and misleading information, often of the slanderous sort” or “fake news,” as U.S.
President Donald Trump re-coined it, recently.
Soviet defector Vasili Mitrokhin first reported the existence of active measures and the word that
names them to the Western World, accordingly. He testified that the Soviet Union did not really
begin to make propaganda abroad a powerful and sophisticated weapon before the appointment of
Vladimir Semichastny as head of the KGB, in 1961. From that year on, Mitrokhin went on, a new
department called Directorate D was created in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB—note that
the letter “D” stood for “Disinformation”. In this early time, the unique purpose of this directorate
was to invent and to spread sophisticated forms of disinformation aiming Western Europe,
accordingly again. The first person to be named head of the Directorate D was Colonel Ivan
Agayants, an easygoing, smiling, and witty intellectual born in Armenia, polyglot and fluent in
French in addition. For before this event, interestingly, Agayants had been sent twice in intelligence
missions in Paris, a first time from 1937 to 1940, and eventually from 1947 to 1949, where he is
credited the recruitment of numerous French sources. This feat awarded him the position of head of
the Western European Department of the MGB[201] upon his return in Soviet Union, the same latter
year.
Agayants held expertise in deception and forgery, and so he had a global and exhaustive
perception of the greater potential power and effectiveness of this compound of knowledge that
limited to operations in intelligence and support to them at that time. So much so that the latter set
of eclectic methods, techniques, and means that each could not always qualify as disinformation,
formally speaking, actually was a global capacity serving a unique and particular objective entirely
opposite to what espionage is about; so, without a name that could clearly denote what is was,
exactly. Additionally, all those very varied measures consisted in imagining, creating, and then
exporting “finished abstracts products and services” to the Western World, and to an entirely
different type of agents, since the role of the latter was to spread information instead of collecting it.
To highlight the latter difference, intelligence essentially is a set of passive measures all aiming to
watching and to listening things and notions to be imported and analyzed. Contrariwise, the job of
Agayants and of his Directorate was to fabricating things and notions to be exported and spread as
largely as possible. Herein the latter were active provisions or measures, whose particular natures
implied an extreme secrecy that only an intelligence agency could handle. That is how and why, at
some point of an evolution toward eclecticism, the missions of the directorate of Agayants could
hardly be qualified otherwise than “actives or special provisions or measures,” vaguely and for
wants of any precise and clear word as “espionage” can be. Note in passing that the same applies in
Western intelligences agencies to another compound of similarly actives and eclectic missions,
rather relevant to measures of paramilitary and criminal natures, named “special operations” with
the same vagueness, due to the identical difficulty in being specific.
 From its inception, and under the leadership of Agayants, the Directorate D had proved an instant
and huge success in misleading the target countries of the Soviet Union, and in sowing discord and
disorder among their populations, thus distancing them usefully from their political establishments
and leaders. These results awarded enormous additional funds to this sub-body of the First Chief
Directorate, which thenceforth recruited steadily and massively. Sometimes between the 1960s and
the 1970s, the Directorate D is said to have recruited the amazing number of up to 10,000 full-time
employees. So many people only to contrive clever deception operations and to craft fake news, at a
time the Internet did not exist, and print publications were much less numerous than they are today?
Of course, not; the reader will see why.
Circa 1967, the name Directorate D was changed for Service A, the letter standing this time for
“Active measures,” with the same first letter in Russian. The change accompanied three events of
importance. First, the health of Colonel Agayants was ailing seriously and incapacitated him.
Second, the man chosen to take over the position was Yuri Modin, who eventually made a
reputation for himself in all Western intelligence agencies by being known as case officer of the
“Cambridge Five” from 1948 to 1951, and then as controller (supervisor) of their new case officers
until 1963.[202] In passing, it should be said that the job of the Cambridge Five was essentially
relevant to offensive counterespionage at some point; that is to say, deception, of which Modin
became a specialist ultimately, almost the same way as Agayants did when he was entrusted
intelligence missions in France. Most likely, Agayants played a role of considerable importance in
the gradual rise of Soviet influence in France from the end the WWII to 1960, by doing the same
job as Modin did in Britain from 1948 to 1963. Third, the apparent downgrading from “directorate”
to “service” was not of pure form because the active measures by then had evolved toward a
doctrine, with its own rules and highly organized proceedings, which together not only were
changing the way the whole KGB was working, but even the strategy of the Soviet governmental
apparatus. Therefore, the thinking body Agayants had created had gained an importance that
justified greater trust in its managerial staff, thinkers, and experts, and greater secrecy around its
existence and works. Indeed, active measures yielded results even greater than the espionage
activities of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB itself, since it was in capacity to take over
foreign countries silently instead of just spying on them.
Agayants died on May 12, 1968 from tuberculosis he had contracted in the 1930s, one year after
he was named Deputy Head of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. The promotion was more a
reward for his accomplishments than effective, and perhaps even of pure form given the influence
he had gradually gained over the entire KGB as its eminence grise. Agayants is regarded in the SVR
RF as master in camouflage and deception, founding father of the active measures, famous figure in
the history of Soviet intelligence and even of Russia as it is today.
The Service A remained the name of the KGB department responsible for active measures until
the dissolution of this foreign intelligence service, in 1991. Thenceforth, I could not say how it was
integrated in the SVR RF, the foreign intelligence agency of the Russian Federation, under a new
name, possibly, yet unknown to date.
At their inception, active measures based conceptually on military camouflage, from which the
practice extended to more abstract applications and forms fitting the missions of the Soviet
intelligence service. They gradually extended to politics and foreign affairs as a surer and more
sophisticated means to conceal real aims that we use to call “hidden agenda” today. This was
shrouded in an all-Soviet perception and definition of intelligence, which fundamentally differs
from these of the Western World. The latter remark calls for an explanation before elaborating on
this connection between military and intelligence affairs.
First, it is important to know that the Soviets defined the activity of intelligence as a highly
patriotic and ideological commitment bestowing honor upon its practitioners. Wherefrom, the
extreme gravity and shame of betrayal in the eyes of the Soviets, actually greater than in the
Western World, and generally punished by death as if in wartime. The perception resumed in
modern Russia. Reciprocally, it justified, and still justifies, a paraphernalia of official diplomas,
certificates, identity cards, honors, photographed special events, medals, insignias and uniform,
formal pledges of allegiance, and special academies that went along the recruiting, training,
indoctrination, and definitive admission of intelligence officers in this country. Save for sanctions,
this is strikingly different of the perception France always had of spycraft, where there is none of all
the above but one magnetic badge for some, one or a few medals crowning a long and
irreproachable career, ideological and patriotic commitment, and loyalty. It must be noted, however,
that the Russia of after 1991, too, relinquished the aforesaid paraphernalia when it adopted an
overhauled version of active measures in which the intelligence officer, for example, is
undistinguishable from the CEO of a private business, the senator, and the ambassador, since
reaching the objectives overwhelms these older notions newly perceived as unimportant forms. For
the cult of political Soviet icons and symbols has disappeared officially, although it still is respected
and belongs definitively to the history of the country.
To put it otherwise, the Russians of after 1991 resumed these interpretation and perception I just
explained, but with a new approach defined and shaped entirely by actives measures, precisely. That
is to say, a political and ideological commitment in which the formal aims and the real aims merge
and coexist permanently to make one, so that their designers and practitioners themselves are
compelled to believe the former in order to reach an unique goal. The Westerner would certainly
call this “doublethink,” which is one more step past the classic doubletalk of the average politician
who does not practice active measures. In short, under the doctrine of active measures, the liar must
believe his own lies, indeed, to reach the real aims, and he must ignore all contradiction between the
two. Herein modern Russian active measures could qualify as “secular antinomianism,” in which
faith in a religion, for example, can coexist with secularism. To be “on the left,” “to be on the right,”
or even to be both simultaneously is equally possible because these notions, too, not only are
unimportant in the absolute, but also constitute a handicap in the pursuit of the unique objective. As
seen from the viewpoint of the detached and unenlightened observer, this appears as an extreme
form of patriotism in which myth, narrative, and any other doctrine and scale of values are
unnecessary or seem to be of secondary importance although they are not.
The core principles of active measures overshadow the need to be formally an intelligence officer
to partake in this activity consistently. This also explains why there is no clear boundary between
spycraft, politics, and business in Russia today, and why it is become the same in France since this
country adopted this doctrine either.
However, the Soviets, and then the Russians, did not and still do not easily extend the
honorability of spycraft to foreign nationals they recruit as agents and sources. They do it very
exceptionally and only to agents who committed in a lifetime and accomplished deeds whose
consequences for their targets proved tremendous. Inversely, they express contempt toward all the
others who are not bestowed upon the latter honor. This explains why the Soviets were known for
having called “useful idiots” many of those who served their interests, for all their lives sometimes.
In the chapter 23 and followings, I will explain the particular way the Russians solved this problem
in their ongoing secret relationships with all French people who consciously collaborate with them,
without the latter actually committing to the Russian national interest. How those French people
could do this, and why, from a rational standpoint, it should be asked.
The points above provide me with an opportunity to say that the Soviet, and the Russian
intelligence community and its French counterpart eventually, share about the same views on the
role of spies inside and outside the homeland. Just the comparison stops short on the value they
respectively accord to those spies, however. I can only guess this owes to the leadership of the
Russians in their special relationship with France, for wants of anything else that could rationally
explain France’s carelessness toward her agents and even her insiders in intelligence, as described in
the Part I.
Basing on clues I spotted along years, I go as far as saying that the value attributed even to a
senior executive of the DGSE is inferior to that of a flying agent of the SVR RF. The former is not a
Russian, to begin with, which distinction is of great importance in the eyes of Russians. I will not
teach anything to the reader by stating that Russians are very nationalist, racist, and even
xenophobic and homophobic, without any qualms about it. For they have no concern for the latter
notions they perceive, first, as “Western palavers”; second, from the viewpoint of intelligence, as a
clever way of their own, in point of fact, to arouse inhibition in the minds of the countries they aim.
For the Russians active measures actually devised these notions and attitudes and exported them to
those Western countries for the latter purpose, precisely. My adding the latter adjectives
“xenophobic” and “homophobic,” unrelated at first glance to the former, lays on my need to
underscore how actively the Soviets, first, and then the Russians have been discreetly supporting
relevant minorities in the Western World. For, from their viewpoint, minorities, whichever they may
be, truly are nuisances whose promotion, therefore, further undermines the stability, social fabric,
and national pride in countries they target.
To exemplify the latter explanation, Russia indeed gives a hand to racial minorities, the LGBTQ
minority, green activism, feminist movements, and similar, the more often via proxy organizations,
agents of influence, and varied types of media. Yet this country, we notice, never does this on its
own soil and within its own nation, and it would never do it. For what Russia wants for herself,
quite rationally, is unity under a common banner, observance to a common scale of values, peace,
balance, and respect and praise to the State, which thus she obtains successfully, in spite of a
domestic policy Westerners would hardly approve from their governments. As about why what is
possible in Russia can hardly be in Western countries and in many others, this will be explained all
along this Part II that presents in detail the implementation and management of actives measures in
France.
Everything I just explained underscores the limits of active measures, beyond which they would
infringe their objective. Then note that those limits are not the same or even they may not really
exist in countries over which Russia exerts her influence more or less discreetly. Russia has also a
stake in not to allowing France breeding similar pride and objectives for herself, as I often witnessed
it firsthand when I worked with her agents in the DGSE, and as the reader will understand while
reading the rest of this book. Then I can only guess it was certainly the same in the East German
Stasi during the Cold War, and the more so in the Polish intelligence service Kds.BP.[203]
I explained already why in the DGSE a flying agent is and must be considered as a “weapon” or
as a “sensor,” and nothing else that could approach the value given to his Russian counterpart, even
remotely, which description I complete for comparison between the two, below.
In Russia, since the early days of the Soviet era and until today, a field agent is and must be
highly regarded as a noble scout who goes in reconnaissance / scouting to enlighten the country on
what is going on behind the enemy lines. In Russian, “scout” is разведку (razviedkoo), whose
prefix развед- (razvied-) is found in the words “scouting” or разведка (razviedka), in the sense of
“reconnaissance”. It can also be understood as “intelligence” (with the same Russian noun),
depending the context, but still in the noble sense the term conveys. He is not regarded as a man
who spies on[204] because “this is a despicable vice”. “Intelligence service” is also
разведывателъна служба (razviediivatiel’naya sloojba). For the record, the acronym SVR RF of
the agency that succeeded the foreign intelligence branch of the Soviet KGB means Cлужба
Bне ней Pазведкi (sloojba vniechnieii razviedkee), or “Foreign Intelligence Service”. However,
the noun pазведкi (intelligence) in it means more exactly “scouting” or “reconnaissance,” again. RF
simply stands for Poссийской Федерации, or “Russian Federation”.
Therefore, it is out of question to the Russians to admit that their field agents are spies. Only
foreign and hostile field agents are so, in the pejorative sense they give to this word. The words
пион (shpion’) and пионаж (shpionage), for “spy” and “espionage” respectively, pronounce
entirely differently, but still for a different and negative perception, whereas in France and in the
United States alike, employees, agents, operatives and even executives in intelligence do not mind
to be called or to call themselves “spies”. They trivialize mindlessly the sense this word conveys,
contrary to the Russians. This further explains why Russian spies hold their foreign counterparts in
contempt, instead of just seeing them as adversaries, even when they happen to cooperating with
them.
As in France, however, all Russian nationals working in intelligence for Russia are “agents” or
агенты (aghient’i), so, exactly the same noun with respect to Cyrillic characters, but with the final
“i” added for indicating the plural form. Then “secret agent” is тайный агент (taiinh’yi aghent).
As a matter of fact, “agent” (агент) in Russian extends to “agency” or агентво (aghientvo), as in
English, and then to “agentura” or агентура (aghientoora for the right pronunciation). The latter
noun may be used as a shortened version of “intelligence agency,” though it rather means “a group
of agents” usually acting in a Russian embassy, or else a “network of field or secret agents” acting
behind the enemy lines. It may also mean the whole Russian intelligence community.
In the view of the Russians, words, and the exact meanings they convey matter more than in
Western countries, where the importance of this notion often is taken lightly or even dismissed.
Wherefrom, the success of the Russians in inhibiting the Western society with the concept of
“political correctness,” essentially based on new meanings given to words and on the power that can
be derived from those alterations. To put the latter explanation otherwise, the goal is how to cripple
a nation by altering the meanings of its own language, and by closely associating violence with as
many of its words as possible in order to “poison” them. The process is invisible because it does not
consist in creating new words carrying influence in themselves, but in altering instead the meaning
of words that exist already, by converting nouns into adjectives or the reverse, as (most frequent)
example and as we shall see at the end of the chapter 19. Thus, it is possible indeed to sow discord
that seems to erupt and to grow naturally within a nation while the unenlightened observer will
perceive the process as a society that self-destructs or “suicides,” “entirely by its own”. Obviously, I
will come back to this topic in a next chapter and in detail, as it is specific to semantics in
information warfare, and to other associated notions that meta-communication and its derivatives
subsume. Semiology will not be forgotten, since it is integral to clever tactics that are hard to
Westerners to identify and to understand.
Now I talk a little on camouflage since it is the founding principle of active measures. Summarily,
active measures are presented as a largely encompassing doctrine in intelligence, originally and
directly inspired by the purpose of camouflage in the military and in wartime, well-named
mackирoвка (maskirovka) in Russian. For maskirovka means “disguise,” “disguising [oneself],”
“masking,” and “concealment,” which sounds less military, already. Note the root “mask,” here
taken from the other Russian word mackа (maska), which means “mask” literally, and “guise”. All
the latter words must not be confused with “lure” that in Russian translates as “temptation”
(соблазн, “soblazn”), and “bait” as “tempting bait” with the same root (соблазнительна ,
“soblazneetihel’naya”). As an aside of minor importance, the etymology of “mask,” common to
numerous Indo-European languages, including French and English, remains unknown or disputed in
all cases to date. Importantly, now, a mask, African in particular but also Venetian or of theatre or
whatever, is a recurrent secret symbol in the DGSE—this explains why the cover of this book
features a mask. The DGSE attaches a great symbolic value to masks in general, and its intelligence
officers and even agents often use one as reconnaissance sign put in discreet display in their living
rooms and offices, although this is not known to all categories of French spies. Is it or has it been
the same in Russia, too? This I could not say.
As a matter of fact, the conscious practitioner of active measures sums them up with the
epigrammatic formula, “I advance masked,” or Я заранее в масках, in Russian, and J’avance
masqué in French. Therefrom, everything the enlightened practitioner of active measures contrives,
undertakes, and does must be “camouflaged”. On the long term, the practice must transform in a
second nature. As examples, you go to buy a pack of cigarettes, then say you go to the bakery to
anyone is asking to you where you are heading. You are disappointed or angry about something,
therefore, show you are pleased with it. You are very glad to hear this, therefore, show you are not
so. You are working in an office in a known place where you commonly welcome co-workers and
guests, yet all very important and highly sensitive matters are debated in a room underground,
formerly a cellar you transformed into a comfy place fitted out with some chairs and a table—called
“chambre conspirative” (conspiracy room). You are the CEO of the company, yet your accountant
is the real boss and your watchdog. Then by extension, sometimes, you live in a large and
comfortable house or mansion, yet it is not yours in reality. Your car is old or looks as a wreck, yet it
has good tires, a powerful engine under the hood, and everything is mechanic is well serviced. And
so on, and on.
If the initial military purpose of camouflage is to hide (something or someone) from other’s view,
in active measures it is done so by “contriving deceptive appearances suggesting something or
someone else”. The military camouflage themselves and their material with grass, leaves, branches,
and rubble, and even snow, the sea, the sky, and countless other things and type of backgrounds. At
some point in the history of warfare, camouflage evolved to frank deception, when was found the
idea to downright manufacture fake soldiers, canons, planes, up to inflatable real-sized tanks and
missiles. This clever military contrivance adapts suitably to active measures in immaterial, virtual,
and abstract ways.
Once the idea thus fits immaterial and abstract notions, the limits to camouflage / deception are
those of the mind. When applied to the other field of intelligence, why not inventing spies that do
not exist in reality. The same with missions and operations that are bogus or are hiding others, fake
secret documents and untrue statements, claimed untrue capacities and capabilities in anything or
the reverse, active secret facilities that are not so and the opposite, very official and bureaucratic
positions, services, and departments that are bogus, or a specialty hiding a another that is different,
untrue political stances and religious beliefs, fake intents and tactics designed to be red herrings,
official honors and high responsibilities bestowed upon idiots in the same goal, master spies posing
as simpletons or second-rate spies introduced as master spies, and innumerable variants of Trojan
horses of course.
Therefrom, things can go further by mixing the notions “true” and “false” to make a reality that
yet is neither “entirely true” nor “entirely false,” but something else in between, or even constantly
alternating between the two possibilities “true” and “false”. That is to say, arranging a rigged
situation intending to elicit in the target a response or a posture that will prove to be a mistake
eventually, regardless of the chosen option. See the following tactic that consists in setting up an
abstract situation such as a dilemma aiming to elicit from a target a correspondingly abstract
response or attitude, or else an action, preferably.
There is a varying number of possible options / actions when one is confronted to a situation that
may be either “true” or “false” or “somewhere between these two absolutes”. Regardless of the
number of available options / actions, each is relevant to one among three possible responses, only,
which are “fighting,” “fleeing,” and “doing nothing i.e. inhibition,” for the record.
Therefore, someone who arranged for the dilemma above to occur knows in advance whatever
the target is going to do, for it will be a more or less elaborate expression of one of these three
possible responses. Even, an advanced version of the dilemma can be schemed out so that each of
the three possible responses actually is another alternative itself, as in game theory. But this remains
theory because Russians, and French the more so, very rarely plan complex dilemmas of the latter
sort; things are simpler than that in real situations. Nonetheless, the game is rigged in all cases, as
the goal is to put the target in check whatever he does. The more often, it is designed to hamper the
ongoing political process in a target country by putting its political apparatus in a mire of palavers,
while sowing doubt and discord among its masses, as we shall see in the next chapters.
This kind of deception that is integral to active measures is seen in the DGSE as an additional
provision in deception, this agency calls logique floue or leurre (“fuzzy logic,” and “lure”).
[205] Indeed, fuzzy logic is elevated to a status of culture in intelligence in the DGSE, sustained by
theoretical courses in classrooms for executives and specialists in deception. For the record, and at
the simplest, fuzzy logic is a form of many-valued logic, in which the values of variables of the
truth may be any real number between 0 and 1. It is used to handle the concept of “partial truth” in
which the value of the truth may range somewhere between “completely true” and “completely
false”. In contrast, in Boolean logic, the values of variables of the truth either may be the integer
values of 0 or 1, only.
The reader familiar with logic notices certainly in the aforesaid an analogy with the other field of
game theory since my description seems to imply a matrix payoff and even brings upon the notion
of non-cooperative game. It is also comparable to the uncertainty principle of Werner Heisenberg in
quantum mechanics, although French intelligence specialists tend to move the subject to the
paradox of the Shrödinger’s cat that even comes as a byword in the DGSE. However, the
comparison with game theory would be an all-American perception the DGSE does not share. This
agency happens to include in deceptions of this kind the other notion of random distribution of
suggestions “true” / “false,” according to the importance of the stake, and experts borrow these
schemes to the other fields of cellular automata and fractals that strongly inspire them.
Then, by the force of things, events, and needs, active measures come to encompass as corollaries
many other types of missions that do not seem relevant to deception at first glance. For the term
“active measures” in itself has no clear meaning anyway, and camouflages its own purpose, already.
In Russian, it writes активиые меропри ти (aktivin’yeh myehropriatiyah), which indeed
translates literally as “active measures,” with several possible nuances for the second word.
However, the nuances changes nothing in the meaning as they are “action,” “arrangement,” and
“undertaking” or “enterprise”.
From the inception in the 1960s, active measures in intelligence applied to culture warfare i.e.
influence in politics, and diplomacy; essentially to culture warfare, actually—not to be confused
with cultural warfare, even though the final aims of the two activities are the same. Still the latter
scope does not really suggest anything new in intelligence, an activity in which treachery and
deception are integral to it. However, we may notice a sudden rise and trivialization of dupery in the
realms of politics and diplomacy beginning in the 1930s, and in the Germany of Hitler in particular,
which did not come purely coincidentally. The change was imputable to the adoption of an entirely
new and very German set of values in international politics, federated under the name geopolitik,
eventually translated as “geopolitics” but for a very different meaning. The German definition of
geopolitik from around the late 19th century to 1945 implied a number of notions that indeed are
those of active measures, when extending to the national interest and strategic aims. For all
terminology and principles in geopolitik were defined according to the German national interest of
the latter period, only. German Nazi geopolitics could not be transposable to any other country,
whereas, today, geopolitics is and means “Closely connecting international politics and strategy to
regions and territories and their characteristics on a map,” to that effect. From the 1930s, a new way
of seeing and waging warfare was rising. Eventually, in France in the 1990s, it even gave birth to
the new word géoéconomie (“geo-economics”) that, after all, is the same as geopolitics since the
battlefield in warfare moved to economics.
The reader should find enlightening that the closest American equivalent to German geopolitik at
the same period of history was “political geography;” as in Germany until the 1910s. This other
name, though very close or even the same at first glance, in itself implies a much-reduced definition
of geopolitik and even of geopolitics because it was only an incipient version of the latter. To sum it
up, the American implications of political geography, set by strategists Alfred T. Mahan and
Halford J. Mackinder, were inspired by the Monroe doctrine and by the notion of “sphere of
influence” used to denote strategic areas of British influence in Eastern Asia. That is why
Americans definitively abandoned the use of the term “political geography” after the WWII, to
adopt a softer and Americanized version of the German geopolitik, which their strategists naturally
translated as “geopolitics”. In France, geopolitics is taught in universities since about the 1990s, and
today, it is a fundamental at the École de Guerre (War School). In the 1970s, Henry Kissinger was
instrumental in the teaching of the German perception of international politics and of the Austrian
way in foreign affairs. Kissinger is born in Germany before the WWII, and he is fluent in German in
addition to hold a doctorate in history, it should be reminded. Nonetheless, Kissinger can be credited
with the introduction and understanding of the other word of German origin, realpolitik, which
implicitly conveys the notions of formal aims vs. real aims and of deception when closely associated
with foreign affairs, contrary to geopolitics.
Before Hitler, courtesy and the value accorded to the word given still seemed to matter, and
perceptions and misperceptions in foreign affairs were largely accidental. Soldiers went to the
battlefield in colorful uniforms with shining buttons, insignias, and helmets, all things purely
ornamental. This situation lasted until the WWI, and even until the WWII in some instances
including in France where the troops had blue and impracticable uniforms and an ornamental helmet
that could not stop a revolver bullet. Hitler precipitated the advent of modern conventional warfare
as we know it today, and he waged war in general by other means before the Soviet did.[206] He had
no compunction with lying and with deceiving all other countries, and he integrated the practice not
only to German diplomacy and foreign affairs, but also to industry, economy, and domestic politics
in a way unparalleled by the Soviets at that time.
All along the 1930s, Hitler had fighter planes and bombers designed and built in secrecy; an
enterprise camouflaged under the appearances of sport race planes and airliners building to
constitute a powerful air force in violation of the Versailles Treaty of June 1919. The trainings of
pilots for those fighter planes ere camouflaged, too, under pretenses of aerial acrobatics and sail
gliding clubs through Hitler’s youth movement. Meanwhile, in German factories, tens of thousands
of workers mass-produced armaments under pretenses of other activities. All this while German
diplomats were negotiating concessions on the Versailles Treaty on claims of good intentions, self-
defense, and of regaining sovereignty, to rebuild a war navy with a focus on submarines. German
industrialists on business trips abroad all lied consistently about what was secretly underway in their
country. Germans investors tried to produce films in Hollywood, touting the virtues of the new and
peaceful German society under Nazism, while the Olympic Games were unfolding in Berlin.
When he started the war, Hitler contrived to launch all his attacks on the eve of weekends,
knowing that the decision-makers of the countries he invaded were all gone from offices on
Saturdays and Sundays. Blitzkrieg was the word meaning swiftly waging war, catching the
adversary by surprise … before Monday! For the record, the scheme Hitler found to justify his
invasion of Poland was to stage the attack of the radio station of Gleiwitz by few German
commandos disguised in Polish soldiers, who from this place broadcast false anti-German
propaganda.
All of the above epitomizes what Soviet tricks were not before the 1960s, and to succeed with it,
the whole German Nation had to be deceived, too, first, save for a tiny minority. Internally in
Germany and with respect to deception again, see the event known as the Night of the Long Knives
in 1934.
However, the ideas for the future of Germany and its agenda were not really Hitler’s. In the facts,
his ideological Doctrine was a promotion of 19th century Pan-Germanism, which itself originated
much earlier along the German Romantic nationalism period during the Napoleonic Wars. Hitler’s
ambitions in domestic and foreign policy were those of a Prussian national current of the 1897-
1920s that developed from the interest his predecessors manifested at that time in naval power, and
whose founding father was geographer Friedrich Ratzel.
 Ratzel first coined the term politische geographie (political geography) in 1897, by including it in
the title of one of his essays.[207] In passing but remarkably, Ratzel was much interested in the
United States and in the manners German immigrants influenced culture in this country! Thereupon,
he published a voluminous essay in two volumes on the United States, which became authoritative
at that time.[208] Eventually, Ratzel indeed brought the idea on which Germany had to perceive
herself collectively from the 1930s, and on which the doctrine of active measures based decades
later, for Ratzel actually was a zoologist[209] and not a geographer, and he was particularly interested
in Darwinism[210]. From this interest and knowledge, he developed the concept of Raum (vital
space), itself based on his idea of the State as multicellular organism. He became a self-taught
geographer, while traveling and working as journalist to make a living in the Mediterranean region,
the United States, Cuba, and Canada. In 1876, he had published Profile of Cities and Cultures in
North America.[211] On his journey around the World, Ratzel developed a thorough knowledge of
the human nature, from which he authored a set of two volumes on anthropology, he titled Human
Geography.[212] At this point, the common characteristics Ratzel established between a country and
biology became evident. He authored in English an equally voluminous History of Mankind,[213]
one year before he published his book and definition on and of political geography that made him
famous.
Henceforth, Ratzel inspired a number of brilliant thinkers, including political scientist and
politician Rudolf Kjellén in particular. Based on Ratzel’s works, Kjellén at last coined the word
“geopolitik” in the early 1900s.[214] Kjellén, a Swedish, laid the foundations for the German
geopolitik in a book that exerted—along with Mackinder’s theories, it is true—deep influence on
German geographer and strategist General Karl Haushofer.
Eleven years later, Kjellén wrote, “Geopolitics is the science of the State as a geographical
organism or as entity in space: that is, the state as a country, a territory, a domain or, more typically
a Reich or kingdom. As a political science, it firmly establishes the unity of the State, and wants to
contribute to the understanding of the nature of the State”.[215] Still walking in the footsteps of
Ratzel, Kjellén even talked about staatsbiologie (biology of the State)! We obviously understand
that each time Ratzel and Kjellén and their followers wrote “State,” they meant the “Nation-State”
in the sense of Reich implicitly: an organic structure encompassing the Nation, its institutions, and
governmental apparatus.
The theories of Ratzel and Kjellén influenced German economist and theoretician of Socialism
Werner Sombart, who became one of the most influential sociologists in Nazi Germany between
1931 and 1938. The concept of the Nation-State as biological entity, multicellular, along with the
other concept of “autarchy” that Sombart borrowed also to Ratzel and Kjellén and shared with
Hitler, all along pervades his discourse. Sombart, as a socialist ideologue and exponent of economic
planning, was unable to see the industry otherwise than as a feature of capitalism serving
individualistic profit. He introduced this biological perception in the Nazi economy, whose theory
he explained in an essay, published in 1934.[216] In this book, Sombart defended also the virtues of
propaganda.
Telling more about all this would definitively convince the reader that about all marks of the
Soviet System were the same as those of Nazi Germany from the mid-1930s. Even the real aims
were the same; the formal aims of Marxism-Leninism only were entirely different. The sole
difference lies in the myth and its narrative, therefore; socialist-communist for the former and
national-socialist for the latter. If the reader finds the time and courage to reads English translations
of the books I cited above, then he will see all this by himself.
If active measures are a doctrine, it did not name this particular system of governance of the
Nazis, yet it needs it to be applicable and effective. Active measures in their principle are
incompatible with a democracy based on free entrepreneurship and fostering individual freedom of
moves, thought, and speech. Because of their aims, they are a provision in wartime or serving a
preparation for war acting together as a particular security system, whose function is to camouflage
everything in the country under the appearances of convincing and even compelling realities that are
decoys in the facts. If those who think, design, and implement their ongoing process are working in
or for an intelligence agency, it is because there is no other body in a governmental apparatus in
which those specialists could logically work. Actives measures are complementary to a security
service in a government, somehow analogous to a quality department in a company. They intervene
at all levels of an organization to help it disguise everything it is doing, not to let others
understanding how and why it is done, exactly. I remember vividly, in the early 2000s, Vladimir
Putin quizzically answered to a foreign diplomat who just told him he wanted to understanding
Russia, “You cannot understand Russia”. The answer meant much more than what it seemed.
Back in France today, the system of governance thus protected and coached by active measures is
called in the DGSE, dictature raisonnée (reasoned dictatorship), never openly explained by any
political theorist to date. Internally, those who know about it claim it is the best type of governance,
yet nobody in this agency ever recommends the reading of any book on “reasoned dictatorship,” nor
provides any written theoretical explanation on it.[217] One must learn it heuristically, like many
other matters one learns in this agency along a lifetime. This is all logical; things relevant to the real
aims of the French domestic policy not only are most sensitive, but also their nature justifies that
never they must be written. The term “reasoned dictatorship” does not fail to surprise or to confuse
any French having a modicum of education because it obviously sounds analogous to the
“enlightened despotism”[218] of France’s monarchs of the Age of Enlightenment.
Some years after that, a complementary explanation is given, at last. It says that France’s
reasoned dictatorship is led by a synarchie (synarchism), suggesting again an organic and
multicellular leadership. It is no longer question of politics, of “the right,” “the left,” and “all similar
narratives good for the sleepwalkers”. A few more years after that, one is brought to understand that
the synarchy is a small group of sages (“the wise men”), and those who seem to know who they are
call them familiarly les vieux (“the old guys”), without specifying how many they are. Eventually,
again, some clues are cryptically given on the identities of some of the “old guys” in question. In the
1990s, when I was entrusted this “additional layer of knowledge,” those names were ex-Director of
the DGSE Alexandre de Marenches, ex-diplomat Jean-François Deniaux, co-founder of Médecins
sans Frontières and former Minister of Foreign and European Affairs Bernard Kouchner,
Kouchner’s wife and prominent journalist Christine Ockrent, and prominent journalist and former
head of TV channel France 2 Michèle Cotta.[219] Today in 2019, two of these people are dead and
the name’s list may not be exhaustive. Moreover, are things still thus working? Possibly not, in my
opinion and in the light of facts I describe all along this book.
Active measures make the DGSE, the military, the political elite, and the French liberal
Freemasonry together a single and omnipotent organic entity in the country. The result is an
oligarchy that is opaque but strictly divided into a number of concentric circles of trust and power.
Along their lives, some go inward or outward, some remain motionless, and some disappear. The
system that is a hierarchic structure of trust and knowledge, and not formally of dominance, is ruled
by the system of awareness degrees, and comes to parallel the official hierarchic structure of
dominance that everyone know and can see. In the DGSE, the unofficial structure rules the
appointments of directors of directorates and of the director, while the official structure rule about
normally the appointments of heads of services and of managers below this rank. This comes to
explain why directors of directorates and the director seldom made their career inside this agency
before they were appointed; they even did not hold any official position in any intelligence agency,
although they were gradually entrusted a highly sensitive knowledge. In most instances if not all,
those who rose silently the ladder of the unofficial structure are the first surprised to access a senior
position at a high level in the official hierarchic structure of dominance, overnight and without prior
notice. As no one could say why this, exactly, in any case, in the 1990s, it spawned a running joke
of bad taste, eerie more than funny in the context, and absurdly borrowed to … the first episode of
the film series Toy Story that is, “The Claw is our master. The Claw chooses who will go and who
will stay”. Who pushes the buttons of the “Claw” from behind the windowpane, then? This I could
not say exactly beyond clues, I give in the Part III.
Therefore, the difference between the practice of deception in intelligence and disinformation
alone and active measures as a doctrine lays essentially on the fact that the second is
institutionalized for the whole country, unbeknownst to most who thus are perceived as cells by the
few who are the makers of active measures. The only purposes of those cells are to make the whole,
to which they each are insignificant parts, exists and acts in a middle that is “the country,” much as a
jellyfish in the sea, to take on a running metaphor in the DGSE, whose origin I ignore.[220] For, we
notice, this “multicellular organism” has no central nervous system.
I found didactic to add on the next page a representation of the State as Leviathan by Thomas
Hobbes, who pioneered political philosophy in his eponymous essay Leviathan, first published in
1651. Although the meaning Hobbes gave to this famous representation of the State loosely
connects to the subject of this chapter, the striking picture he wanted for illustrating his explanations
fits mine in a meaningful fashion, and more especially the perception Ratzel and Kjellén had of the
state as a multicellular-like organism. The Latin quote from the Book of Job at the top of the picture
translates as, “There is no power on Earth compared to him”.[221]

Military who are trained as snipers learn that, in certain circumstances and conditions, it is
preferable to wound their targets rather than killing them because a wounded soldier is a burden to
be taken care of by his brothers in arms, who thus are forced to move slowly and become more
vulnerable. The DGSE, military in spirit, for the record, has a byword saying by analogy and as an
epigram alluding to an objective in economic warfare, “Dead people cost nothing to a state, but
unemployed people cost dearly to it”. The cruelty and recklessness one may finds in these two
principles in modern warfare and offensive intelligence activities, respectively, yet are elevated to
the degree of a duty likely to be rewarding to the soldier and the spy. New heights in contradictory
perceptions of that sort are reached with the ruler who, by endorsing active measures, elevates lies
and trickery with everyone, including himself, to the degree of virtue and even of a way of life, as
we have seen.
It does not matter to the ruling elite to deceive its own population in order to reach any objective
deemed of value, since it must benefit the Nation-State in the end. That is exactly what the French
Government and its diplomats, the Ministry of Defense, the DGSE, and the GOdF are doing,
permanently. For active measures, when fully integrated in one’s policy, do not limit to occasional
missions and operations. It necessarily becomes an ongoing and permanent process that is integral
not only to diplomacy and foreign affairs, but to many aspects of domestic politics and economy
alike, since together they are seen as one. It is done so in order not to put in jeopardy the efforts and
sometimes sacrifices devoted on one side by yielding to moral considerations democracy entails on
the other. The real aims can only be reached after very long periods, and what determines the
appropriateness of about any action reshaped by active measures limits to a simple cost /
investment–benefit ratio, since all other notions of morality, reputation, decency, promise, and word
given, written and signed regardless, count all for nothing in reality.
Now, I guess the reader sees how big the difference between mere disinformation and actives
measures is. At this moment, he just reached a higher “awareness degree” without which he would
find difficult to understand the many more facts, notions, and anecdotes to come.
 13. Domestic Intelligence.
A ll police services acknowledge, domestic spying in France is the most stringent and the most
effective in the Western World, to which I add domestic influence, as the reader shall see. In point of
fact, France taught and trained the police of a number of countries in the areas of
counterinsurgency, paramilitary law-enforcement, and forensic police either. In spite of what the
reader possibly assumes, neither the special relationship of France with Russia, nor the adoption of
the doctrine of active measures are at the origin of this extraordinary effectiveness. This obliges me
to explain how and when it happened, as introduction to this chapter, and to many other facts and
notions, I explain in this Part II.
The birth of the modern intelligence community in France happened in the wake of the
Revolution of 1789. At that time, it was much more justified by an urgent need to restore a political
order in the country than to send spies abroad. Political leaders of the 1790s neither wanted to hear
about religion anymore; that is to say, Roman Catholicism because it had been too closely tied to the
monarchy and to political power. However, ruling a country that used to respect a central political
figure and to believe in God for centuries was much a challenge. In the immediate aftermath of the
Jacobin Revolution, chaos had erupted everywhere, and the Nation had become a pandemonium
stricken with chronic and opportunistic thefts, savage destructions, arsons, and bloody massacres.
Scapegoats who did not flee abroad had nearly all been burned alive or guillotined by a revengeful
crowd that was not educated enough to see the real ends in all this, to the point that the Jacobin
revolutionaries were beginning to behead each other. “Revolution devours its own children,” it is
well said. If ever the American reader knows the detailed account of the period, as French historian
Hippolyte Taine in his thrilling The Origins of Contemporary France famously reported it, then he
knows also that the Civil War in his country could almost seem a sinecure by comparison.
So, with no real leader and an overwhelming Roman Catholic religion newly presented as
specious by an unclear political collective, the only solution readily available seemed to be more
police, more gendarmes, and more snitches and spies, of course. Additionally, the new judicial
power was expected to display a ruthlessness in proportion to a climate of general violence and
opportunistic hunger for power. All revolutions are heavens to scoundrels.
The police ran the first intelligence agency of those revolutionaries, called police secrète (“secret
police”). One among its first missions was to prevent all politically unfit would-be-leader to access
power in the largest cities, and one of the most influential men in the shaping of its role in domestic
intelligence was ruthless and devious Joseph Fouché. Shortly earlier, in 1792 and 1793, Fouché had
been sent in the region of Nièvre, where he had carried out an intense enterprise of de-
Christianization. It is during Fouché’s missions in the center of France and in Burgundy in particular
that some drifts erupted. Those were destruction of churches, broken crosses, plundering of church
treasures, burnings of pious books and priestly clothing, and so on. In 1794, Fouché had been called
for enforcing a decree ordering no less than the destruction of the city of Lyon. There, he
encouraged the utmost forms of cruelty committed in that obscure time of French history. That is
when and where Fouché had earned the nickname, “the machine-gunner of Lyon,” for having
substituted the guillotine, he considered too slow, to the mass execution of suspects by the
grapeshot;canons had fired on groups of dozens of convicts. It was reported that 1,683 inhabitants of
Lyon of all ages and genres thus were butchered, victims of the repression of Fouché.
Finally, circa 1795, Fouché was hired to exert a leading role in the secret police. With the rise of
Napoleon Bonaparte to power, he had reconsidered his Jacobin principles to become a fervent
imperialist. His new stance earned him to be appointed Minister of Police in 1799, a position he
held successfully until the fall of Napoleon and of the First Empire in 1815, owing to his
unparalleled shrewdness in domestic spying and ruthlessness in repression. The methods of Fouché
stood in practice until today. For example, from the works of Fouché, Napoleon once expressed the
view that it was rare if not impossible to find a French national, whether a military or a civilian who
could really put his heart into the business of spying. Thenceforth, it was Napoleon’s custom
whenever possible to employ in either capacity men or women of the cosmopolitan or immigrant
type. Such views would hardly fit in with racial preconceived notion that most of us entertain
nowadays, yet they remain in use, as I explained in the chapters 7 and 10.
After the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the French Empire, from 1814-1815, some attempts
were made to invent a noble philosophical justification to the political shortlisting of entrepreneurs,
the new fermiers généraux (general farmers), as the beginning of the secret system of the selection
of the elite by the secret police proved effective. The logic was partly supported by remnants of the
political theories of the Jacobins of the previous Revolution, and partly by down-to-earth
considerations about the circulation of elite Napoleon invented and put into practice in a
bureaucratic way with the creation of the French Civil Code.[222] Indeed, when he took the power,
Napoleon found an ingenious means to make quickly disappear the heirs of the surviving monarchic
elite who might not be in favor of the Empire, and to control the circulation of elite in a general
way. It is a French writer and not a thinker in political science who explains this to us, relying on a
proof any good historian would not reject.
“Today rich families are between the danger of ruining their children, if they have too much, and
that of extinguishing themselves by sticking to one or two; a singular effect of the Civil Code that
Napoleon did not think about, it is said.
“It is, on the contrary, an effect Napoleon has perfectly thought of, and which he deliberately
sought as testifies for this passage of a letter to his brother Joseph, King of Naples, text of which Le
Play and his school pulled the happiest party:[223]
“ʻMy brother, I want to have a hundred fortunes in Paris, all having risen with the throne and
remaining alone considerable, since they are only trusts, and all that will not be by the effect of the
Civil Code will disperse … Establish the Civil Code in Naples: all that is not attached to you will
destroy itself in a few years, and what you want to keep will consolidate. This is the great advantage
of the Civil Code. You must establish the Civil Code at home; it will strengthen your power, for by
this book all that is not trustworthy falls, and there will be no longer any great houses other than
those you erect as fiefs. This is what made me preach a Civil Code and brought me to establish
it.ʼ”[224]
It would seem, however, the system of secret police in France, specifically, reached its
completion earlier in the early 17th century, when the influence of the roman papacy in Europe,
supported by a vast spy network, was everywhere overwhelming. In the early 19th century, a
contrast in conditions suggests that the French Government, based on autocratic principles, could
not be efficient without intrinsically corrupt and vicious influences Machiavelli had explained in
detail, previously. Those influences enabled successive ruling elite to maintain their own existence
and power along methods described in this chapter. Actually, the history of the secret police can be
separated into two distinct periods. The first began in forgotten times and ended at a point when the
disappearance of the absolute monarchy, wholesome, coincided with the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution that was also the time of Fouché. Then, there has been a sudden “boost” in 1871
precisely, with the birth of the Third Republic and the definitive adoption of French-style
progressivism that Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon had inspired. Therefore, I make a jump in time
there.
In the 1870s, Prefect of Police Louis Andrieux created a special brigade of secret agents. He was
a man who, it should be said, had to make for himself the reputation of a political turncoat, as
Fouché. The mission of Andrieux’s brigade was to spy on all rightist and imperialist opinion
leaders, groups, and parties. At any grave political crisis in the country, those political activists
displayed more than their usual energies, and they trusted more or less their favorite candidates—as
they still do, today. The brigade of domestic spies became correspondingly active, and it did far
more and better than any other force for the permanent stability of the country. Already, most of its
spies were recruited among newspaper’s reporters and writers in Paris and among those of other
larger cities of the country, for their businesses afforded them better opportunities than other given
to most men to get in touch with those who are anxious to move the public mind with respect to pet
principles. To put it in simpler words, with those who have an axe to grind.
Andrieux organized the system of fractional divisions of police, still in existence today, and he is
associated with the creation of another body of secret agents that spied on political extremist
movements, anarchists, far-rightists, libertarians, and far-leftists in particular, not only in the country
but also abroad. This body began to work in collaboration with chiefs of similar police bureaus that
had been recently created in continental Europe: in Britain and even across the Atlantic in the
United States, as examples. The works of this specialized espionage unit was accountable for the
chronic failure of small extremist groups to do serious damages and outrages at that time.
Beyond doubt, divisional police chiefs actually were the real controllers of the police
organization, and not their hierarchical superiors the ministers. These police chiefs were practically
irremovable, and they were invariably so well acquainted with the inner workings of state affairs
that no government dared dismiss one of them without grave motive. Another reason for the
appearance of this brick wall between politically elected executives and a still inchoate intelligence
community, was an equal development of the special provision for the discreet shortlisting of the
former before they could be democratically elected. The provision in question included the
continuation of their monitoring even after they were elected, and of the written records of about
everything they could do and say. This part of the shortlisting process of the elite, held as
indispensable to the guarantee of their loyalty, materialized itself under the form of a secret
individual file that kept its old name dossier aka dossier secret until today. Fouché would have
invented it and coined e its name earlier, sometimes between 1799 and 1810.
Since then, the system of dossier secrets has always been the most effective ploy to secure the
loyalty and obedience to the progressive doctrine of all French politicians, prominent businessmen,
and personalities in France. In 21st century’s jargon, the reader would like certainly to compare its
container to a “cupboard” and its content to “skeletons”. For each time the former opens, a national
scandal about tax dodging, embezzlement, corruption, or weird sex breaks out. This does not
necessarily mean all those prominent persons were corrupt or perverts at the inception because, in
any case, they were either encouraged in corruption or were tricked to sin in whatever way grave
enough to constitute a sure leverage guaranteeing to the State they would not stray once they would
be endowed with significant power and notoriety.
Back to the divisional system, the 1st and 2d Divisions of the police were considered of
“secondary importance”. In the 1st Division specialized in domestic spying, there were four sub-
services, described as follow.
1st Bureau: spies specialized in the surveillance of important or suspicious persons, often round
the clock, whom we could name “VIP”.
2d Bureau (not that of the military): corps of men tasked to watch women frequently visited by
prominent politicians. Those were instructed to “engage the sentiments” of the ladies at their
dwelling places whenever necessary. Their cash-expenses were allowed in proportion to the rates
charged by any given prostitute who was suspected to knowing anything. Some of those prostitutes
were fit to engage in sentimental and sexual relations with persons of their kind, since
homosexuality is not a novelty of our modern time.
3d Bureau: spies tasked to monitor all actions and movements of notable foreigners. This body
included smart and well-educated men available for hire by great bankers, heads of large business
houses, directors of national newspapers, etc. There were those who, introducing themselves as
private detectives, could be of interest to any private individuals of great wealth and position who,
for reasons of their own, wished to have their employees, acquaintances, or mistresses to be
shadowed and their movements reported upon. In addition, foreigners and others whose presence
was not considered desirable in the country were invariably tracked down, harassed, and stalked by
agents of this bureau.
4th Bureau: spies whose qualifications enabled them to look out for traits of insanity or
eccentricity, especially in persons of wealth and “in the interests of public health and safety,” was it
officially stated. Once found, dutifully documented, and reported, the traits often were used as
efficient threats to recruit their unfortunate practitioners as informants or agents.
Then there was the 2d Division, composed mainly of a single bureau whose agents were stationed
at the different ports of the country. Those were tasked to watch all suspicious characters landing in
or leaving France or to visit foreign ports in quest of criminal evidences, as occasions requested. A
subsidiary body of its agents was tasked to watch malefactors and politicians of the municipal order.
Secrecy applied to these two first divisions of police in a same fashion as to the 2d Bureau of the
military, common ancestor of the DGSE, DRM, and DRSD. No way to talk about what they really
did, it was hush-hush as no law nor any official provision could be publicly enacted about their real
missions. For example, the official mission of the services of the 2d Division was to check whether
shop tenants and individuals making their living from varied sorts of services were holding an
official license to practice their specialties, paid their business taxes and commerce fees, and were
persons of good morality. The cover activity was true, yet nowhere was written that all professionals
controlled could lose their rights to exercise legally their professions, if ever they refused to do a
secret police job of surveillance on their customers and to report about anything and anybody they
could deem suspicious. Thanks to this special provision, circa the early 1880s, the 2d Division of
police alone enjoyed the services of a huge and eclectic crowd of informants and snitches in large
French cities and towns, detailed as follows.
 There were about 5,000 market porters and longshoremen, more than 800 postmen, 400 train
drivers and mechanics, more than 10,000 itinerant dealers, 300 prostitutes, 600 circus performers
and itinerant musicians, 250 tramway controllers, 54,000 coachmen, 850 water porters, more than
5,000 tenants of more or less officially registered brothels, game rooms, and other similar
businesses, and about 20,000 children working in varied workshops. To whom, in passing, came to
add the countless regular and occasional informants of the Gendarmerie in the smaller towns of the
rest of the country.
Finally, there was the Bureau d’Identité (Identity Bureau), whose forerunner had been created in
1833. This police bureau began to use photography as early as in the 1840s, and from 1883 on,
famous anthropometrist Alphonse Bertillon transformed it in a body of modern scientific police
service. Arrived in 1903, it had become a large service with several millions of individual cards,
called sommier (bedspring) in the police colloquially until the 1980s. There, common criminals
were measured, photographed, and fingerprinted. Had the police been anxious to possess the fiche
d’identification (identification card) of any person who was “suspected of criminal relations,” a
police chief had the “suspect” arrested under one pretext or another. Then he was brought at once to
the Bureau d’Identité where officials went through the mock process of recording his measures.
Subsequently, it was discovered that, “after all, he was not the person expected,” and he was
released with much apology. The Bureau d’Identité nevertheless kept his card, which was the goal.
When, if ever, the “suspect” was caught in the act, he was sure to be confronted with his record in
measurements, even though he lived under aliases.
Coming to be of great help to the police bureaus was that type of inferior spies known all around
the World as mouchards (informants). At that time, informants were generally found among
municipal inspectors of lodging-houses and supervisors of night-houses. Additionally, there were all
those individuals who still today have opportunities to pick up clues to crimes of greater and lesser
gravity.
Then there was a corps of more active individuals but even inferior to informants, known by the
expressive term remueurs de casserolles, or “pans’ stirrers,” literally; that is to say, persons whose
business was to “stir up the social saucepan” in any district in order “to bring minor details to light”.
As may be supposed from their name, pans’ stirrers moved in the very lowest circles of the society
and were generally hired for very little among waiters, moneylenders’ goons, racecourse’ snitches
and similar gentry. Those, somehow collectively, were an evolution of the blouses blanches (white
blouses) of the Third Empire, paid to incite the people to riots, and so to provide the police with
pretexts for incarcerating leading popular spirits likely to become harmful to the public order, if
allowed their freedom. They are the ancestors of a category of agent provocateurs of our 21st
century who recently proved as active as effective in discrediting the Yellow vest movement of
2018-2019 under the name “black blocks,” after their particular tactic in riots and dress code—a
number of the latter volunteered as mercenaries to the Russians in the Donbass region of Ukraine.
Other specialized spies also were—and still are—sent in the guise of convicted offenders to
infiltrate the population of real inmates, in the aim to elicit further details on crimes the police could
not know about. This trick had been earlier invented in the first half of the 19th century and quickly
institutionalized by Eugène-François Vidocq, himself a convict who succeeded in being appointed
Chief of the police of Paris. Such snitches were usually known, and still are today, by the name of
moutons (sheep) among professional criminals. Nowadays, they are run by a particular intelligence
agency named BCRP.
Informants, “sheep,” “pans’ stirrers” and also snitches usually came under the supervision of the
3d Division, common ancestor of today’s DGSI, SCRT, and DR-PP, a unit of political police that
took charge also of that portion of the system tasked to keep an eye on mining activities,
manufacturing, and wine districts for the purposes of reporting on anything could relate to labor
unions disaffection. The forerunner of the 3d Division was created in 1811 in the time and under the
authority of Fouché, and its chiefs by then were named Commissaires Spéciaux (Special
Commissioners).
In 1907, the 3d Division was transformed into a larger and better-structured police unit of
domestic intelligence and was renamed Renseignements Généraux–RG (General Intelligence).
In the early 1900s, the secret police and the special bureaus of the military that together
constituted the French intelligence community and its system of shortlisting of the elite had become
a sophisticated and almighty power; a “state within the State” as some elected politicians sometimes
alluded to or said openly. Paris had always been the center of the French spying organization, where
it worked silently, yet rarely came into contact with the works of the President or his cabinet. On the
contrary, it was permanently in touch with regional officials in all important public offices. On the
authority of a divisional chief, it was once declared that even the Chief of the Police in the capital
only rarely heard of the business’ details of his own department. Therefore, the system of
compartmentalization, I explained in the chapter 4 was already in use at that time.
When the French intelligence community entered the 20th century, its works in domestic
intelligence by then called Sûreté de l’État (State Security) was largely based on police cards and
dossiers, and on a very large crowd of informants, to which came to add the network of the liberal
Freemasonry that served as watchdog of the middle and upper classes already. In the country, any
person who had had or even was likely to have anything like a career of a public nature was duly
taken cognizance of by the police. Everything in the way of private information, gossip,
documentary evidences, and the like was collated, the result being archived forthwith in the offices
of the Chief of the Police. The merest novice who entered in any capacity into the limelight of
publicity, even artists, literary men, frail impudent, prostitutes of the underbelly of the society,
businessmen, politicians, homosexuals, jockeys, theater actors, clerics, opulent mistresses, editors,
and all those whose profiles, peculiarities and occupations justified their pédigré (pedigree)[225] be
recorded were better known to the domestic branch of the intelligence community than to their own
parents.
Therefore, when a man attained to high political power and was courted by ministers, it happened
that he invariably made it his business to become as intimate as possible with the Chief of the
Police, his goal being to recover and to destroy all incriminating documents concerning his past life.
In former times, French kings and emperors were wont on occasion to ask to their useful retainers if
they had anything to solicit in the way of favors. And from the beginning of the 20th century on, if a
President is to invite a rising or a risen politician who had well served the party to make his
particular request, it is certain that first and before all things the politician will ask to be put in
possession of his dossier secret. For no man great or small cares more about what the World should
know on what arts exactly he taught himself to rise. The dossier secret is frequently asked by
arrivals at high political position, and the police—today the DGSE—of course makes a pretense at
surrendering it. However, the keepers of the coveted dossier do not actually surrender each and all
of the documentary proofs and tit-bits of domestic spying that had come into their possession
regarding the person most concerned. The great man was and still today is given a “dossier” of
sorts, instead. A few years later, when the politician has fallen from his high office, the pedigree is
replaced in the keepers’ archives, often fatter and more succulent than ever. The “ritual,” if I may
name it so, was still in use when I quitted the DGSE and is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Ex-
Chief of Service in the DGSE turned whistleblower Maurice Dufresse once told his own experience
about it.[226]
Since the days of the invention of the discreet shortlisting of the fittest by the State, that is to say,
of the politically most orthodox mainly, feeding the dossier secrets has been a fixed official custom
of the French intelligence community. At the beginning, in the 19th century, the cost of its
maintenance was charged on municipal rates. All constant foreign visitors to the capital, no matter
whence they came provided they possessed high political or social importance or notoriety in their
own countries, unconsciously went through the ordeal of having their pedigrée taken. From the
1900s, when the art of police photography began to be common and systematic, more often than not
and unbeknown to themselves, such visitors had to submit to the official process of having their
portrait taken, or being “mugged,” as the American police so expressively describes it when dealing
with criminals.
With the exponential multiplication of formalities, files, and computer databases of various kinds,
and with the availability of new technologies, everything I explained above is done unbeknownst to
the concerned person today, unless there is a particular reason to bully, inhibit, or openly harass
someone as a form of threat or deterrent. From circa 1890, domestic political spies and agents of all
grades of the society, men and women alike, are expected to earn their living among the class of
people upon whom they report to the police. This rule is still true today, with the addition of those
(numerous) who receive their incomes from military retirement or as welfares of varied sorts, so
that being in regular employment, their movements could not be open to suspicion. That is what we
familiarly call today a “cover activity,” or “cover” in the shortest form of the term.
When the Chief of a police Division required the service of a particular spy at an established
point, the chosen individual was formally requested to present himself at the headquarters—this is
no longer done so openly and clearly; provisions for better secrecy and denial have been taken
since. There, the presiding chief informed the spy that some details had been gathered concerning
his relation with a dishonest and punishable piece of business, which had taken place perhaps ten
years earlier in another neighborhood or even a different town. The visitor admitted the fact but
pleaded the occurrence was statute-barred, of course. Then the police official declared himself ready
to forget the matter, provided his visitor would consent to work on his behalf among the people of
his factory or municipality, as the case could be—this still is a common practice of the intelligence
community, and of the ordinary police and Gendarmerie alike; more especially when recruiting on
the spot French nationals who expatriated abroad, as it will be explained in detail in the chapter 25.
Then there would be a little money in it according to the person’s standing. All the informant was
required to do was to forward once or twice weekly a letter detailing conversations, opinions
expressed by others, various acts, meetings and so on, of any or all of those with whom he worked
and consorted—informants, snitches, and agents alike are no longer paid in cash and directly by the
police or the Gendarmerie, nor by the intelligence community in general; they work according to the
processes I explained in the previous chapters, and the more often under some threat. The
“prospective spy” did not know nor could he ever know which aims the police had ultimately in
view and how important it was, nor for what stakes he was playing—the rule is called need-to-know
today. He was in reality on the outside rim of some gigantic movement, of which the penetration of
the innermost workings was being sought. Naturally, he consented and thus entered the public
service as “secret agent”—more exactly in a case of this kind as agent in place or sous-marin
(submarine); or “mole,” as the public names this sort of spies nowadays.
In the great banks of the capital either, there were spies, naturally paid for from inside, but also
from outside, to spy on employees and on the special details of the ongoing business activities; their
investments, agendas, and plans—the practice remains in use today, but the reverse is true, thanks to
modern telecommunications interceptions, as a way to help the French economy. Given the
opportunities to being a spy in a bank could provide, such agents were spied on themselves to
prevent always-possible abuses of their privileged knowledge in respects to the stock market—the
practice not only remains in use today, but it largely extended to other businesses. Secretaries
watched politicians, senators and all those, and colleagues, then paid for by the Fonds secrets (secret
funds) as this state financial source existed and thus was called for more than a century already—the
practice is still in use today, but the concerned agents are no longer paid with secret funds. Below is
an anecdote exemplifying the remarkable effectiveness of the French intelligence community and of
the 1st Division of the police in particular circa 1890.
In 1889, General in the Army and former Minister of War Georges Ernest Boulanger had failed in
his attempt to become democratically elected, following a strong counter-action of the government
in place against his rising popularity because of his right-leaning and Catholic stance.The action
simply consisted in quick and apparently minor changes in electoral laws. A mission of counter-
interference followed the legal contrivance, consisting of a smear campaigns, threats, and stalking;
so much so that Boulanger found himself forced to flee to Belgium at some point. However,
Boulanger’s valet, named Georget, was a paid agent in the service of the police, and Boulanger had
taken him in his flight. Furthermore, the mistress of Boulanger, Madame de Bonnemain, was also
the sweetheart of Georget the valet. More than that, she was an agent of the 1st Division of police,
paid for with money taken in the Fonds secrets. The result of these two latter facts being that each
and every moves of Boulanger and his mistress were well-known to the secret police, which then
could have arrested him at any one of the twenty railways stations between Paris and Brussels
where he was heading. Actually, the chief of the 1st Division was as fully aware as Boulanger was
that, his cause being discredited, he no longer counted in politics or in the French society; he was
socially eliminated, subdued already.
I confirm that this method of infiltration in domestic intelligence missions still is largely in use
today, to the point that the concerned targets cannot even trust their relatives, as we have seen with
another and recent true anecdote in the chapter 11 on physical eliminations. Typically, the relatives
are either tricked or threatened to elicit their passive or active cooperation; the French intelligence
community has no qualms with this. To which must be added telephone and Internet tapping, and
car and house bugging, as we shall see in the chapter 15. Indeed, it is difficult to a target to evade
his surveillance in France, unless at the cost of extreme countermeasures. As seen from inside the
French intelligence community, this will to know every moves and intentions of a target, is
characterized by a stubbornness bordering on ferocity, exactly as if the lives of the agents in charge
of such missions were at stake. In point of fact, I will present in the chapter 14 some true examples
of this that will surprise the reader, doubtless.
 The devastating Affair of the Cards of Denunciation and of a whistleblower of the masonic grand
lodge GOdF in 1904 had resulted in the creation of the RG three years later, in 1907. At its
inception, the RG was subdivided into four services named Recherche (Research), Analyse,
Prospective and Faits de Societé (Analysis, Prospective and Facts of the Society), Ressources et
Méthodes (Resources and methods), and Surveillance des Jeux, des Casinos et des Courses de
Chevaux (Surveillance of games, Casinos, and Horses Races). The RG was to become the new
police intelligence service, but above all a political police force in practice.
Police officers of the RG all worked in plain clothes, and they never carried arrests officially.
Customarily, RG’s regional bureaus were hidden in buildings of the ordinary police, a fact that few
among the population knew, as Renseignements Généraux was written on no door nor wall. All this
could easily be taken as a kind of paradox because the RG has nevertheless made constant efforts to
make its existence and its name known as a fearsome political police force with a reputation for
deviance mixed with ruthlessness. Indeed, the RG was known to resorting in never officially
acknowledged forms of nuisances against its targets instead of arresting them, and even to gross
criminal measures that could go as far as break-ins and assassinations, as we have seen in the
chapters 10 and 11.
Popular rumors said that police officers of the RG were often hanging out in cafes and bars,
unbeknownst to everyone, passing as ordinary customers in the sole aim to listening to what the
populace thought of the government and about politicians, and which politicians the people would
certainly vote for at the next elections. There was more than an ounce of truth in all this, but few
people were perspicacious enough to understand the RG did not need to thus waste the precious
time of its officers. For all bartenders of the country or almost were police and Gendarmerie
informants already, lest they would be in trouble with the tax office or with another public service. It
was the same as with restaurants and hotel tenants, taxi drivers, and some other professional
activities of similar interest, I will name eventually. It is no exaggeration to say that the reaction the
words “Renseignements Généraux” caused in the country was one of fear, as the acronym KGB did
in the Soviet Union. Come to testify about this the popular nicknames “political police,” “secret
police,” and its shortened form la secrète that the masses living in the most rural areas gave to this
intelligence service.
Arrived in the late 1930s, the RG proved so effective that when the Germans invaded and
occupied the country, they kept it as an auxiliary indigenous service of their military intelligence
service the Abwehr and of the Gestapo. Actually, I have had firsthand knowledge or almost of what
the RG was, did, and how far it could go during the German occupation because my stepfather
Henri Renaudet was one of its regional chiefs (Commissaire Divisionnaire), first in Moulins and
then in Le Havre harbor. My mother remembered she was among the first to see the U.S. troops
landing in Normandy and the bombing of the German forces in Le Havre. She said she heard the
bombs whistling in the air, followed by a short silence, and then there was a terrible explosion. My
stepfather and mother fled to Paris where he was assassinated shortly after.
In the 1970s, I read some RG’s work documents they had brought with them, stuffed in a tired
and dusty suitcase I found in the attic.
Although Renaudet, head of the RG in Le Havre and of the département of Seine Maritime, was
assassinated by poisoning soon after the Liberation, his wife my mother had survived him. Often,
she told me about him and his professional activities she had witnessed. Without entering into
details, which would be too numerous, although this man was a descendant of a highly respected
family and the smart and well educated son of Augustin Renaudet, a reputed historian still known
today, he had proved a callous individual, utterly arrogant, and even physically violent. Not only my
mother was increasingly afraid of him, but even his own father was growing wide apart from him
and took side for her. Neither my mother, nor anyone and even not his parents went to mourn on his
grave after he died. Not coincidentally, perhaps, his son my elder brother entered intelligence—in
the SDECE, years before it changed its name for DGSE—from the late 1960s on, with a specialty in
counterespionage against the U.S. and the U.K.
Despite all this, not only the RG survived the end of the Second World War with the same
reputation in violence and dirty tricks, but also it remained in existence until 2008 when it merged
officially with the DST to become the DCRI, renamed again DGSI in 2014.
I have also a firsthand knowledge of what this political police was between the late 1970s and the
1990s, this time because I had many opportunities to meet their officers in several of their offices
through varied circumstances. My feeling about what kind of people they were would bring nothing
spectacular upon however, essentially because I found those particular police officers all similar to
many of my other colleagues of the intelligence community. Often smarts and educated people, as
spies they had the particularity to being holders of a police card, and as police officers not to bother
carrying a gun although they were entitled the right to. Remarkably, most of those I knew graduated
in a branch of social science before joining the RG, which explains why they were smarter and
better educated than police officers of the ordinary police, on average.
Surprisingly or not to the reader, French domestic politics, and provisions and methods in interior
security and domestic intelligence of the late 19th and early 20th century stay about the same today;
only technology changed them since. The comings and developments of modern behavioral
sciences, psychiatry, and sociology brought a better understanding of how and why Man invariably
responds to tricks and methods in influence and manipulation, some of which being in use for
centuries or even millennia actually. The spectacular discoveries and inventions Man made in this so
short period simply was the outcome of tedious and painstaking stacking of acquired knowledge and
errors, slightly delayed by his innate drives. The 20th century did not give birth to “Man 2.0”; his
brain still is the same as that of his ancestors who founded the first civilizations. We do not yet
dismiss the architectural feats, literary works, and inventions of ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians,
Arabs, and Asians; don’t we? So, the considerable evolution of domestic intelligence in France is
not a progress that would be unparalleled elsewhere in the facts; it is just an extraordinary increase
in stringency. All other World-leading countries enjoy access to the same scientific fundamentals
and technologies serving security and intelligence and use them to spy on their own populations
according to their own needs, worries, and agendas.
Then, why France is so ahead of many other developed countries in domestic intelligence today?
Why the police of this country have always been among the best in the World at catching criminals?
Why it needs so much all this more than all other countries of it class? The previous chapter
presented a doctrine; this one is going to present the agenda and its effects. Techniques and methods
will follow in the next chapters.
The French all out in spying on started in the mid-1970s, although generalized domestic
telephone tapping began earlier in 1960. Yet it was nothing but a harbinger of what it is become
today, and no one among the public would believe how far it goes. There was a new agenda dictated
by concerns and worries that entirely new and partly unexpected economic forecasts had caused. At
that time, the French ruling elite, or rather thinkers who advise its members, were alarmed by a
dwindling domestic economy they thought hopeless. The starting point of the panic locates in time
in 1971, when the Government of U.S. President Richard Nixon decided to put an end to the gold /
dollar convertibility—Nixon and his cabinet were not as bad as American people assume today;
good governance and popularity seldom mix well. Then the first oil crisis of 1973 came to confirm
the end of an era of plenty in France, unlikely to happen again anytime soon. It is important for later
to see how and why the first of these two events caused all this, and so I go back earlier in time, for
a few paragraphs.
In 1945, the United States was about the only country that had been spared the damages of the
war, and so the dollar was the sole currency strong enough to be convertible into gold. In 1947, its
price was set at $35 per ounce, and it became the reference currency for international trade.
Economists nicknamed the provision “Bretton Wood system” or “BW system” after the Bretton
Wood Agreements. By the force of things, all other currencies had their values set in relation to the
dollar, and through it in relation to gold. The United States had already become the World’s creditor
during the WWII; that is how it owned three quarters of the World’s gold reserves arrived in 1946,
while the European and Japanese economies had drained. The World economy and resources
together is finished as a cake is, and not things that come permanently from the outer space in
unlimited quantities.
That is why the United States decided to help the reconstruction of the European industrialized
countries under the Marshall Plan, and Japan either under the coaching of General Douglas
McArthur. From 1947 to 1952, 27 billion dollars, value of that time, thus were paid to Europe and to
Japan. Of this colossal amount, 21 billion were given as a gift and 6 billion in the form of loans.
As long as the reconstruction was not complete, the situation did not present any inconvenience.
The influx of dollars boosted global economic activity. Money was a rare commodity, and so it
could be reinvested easily. This accelerated monetary creation did not cause inflation, however.
Therefrom, the United States relied on their virtually universal currency. Thus, Western economies
did rebuild their strengths year after year, while becoming full-fledged economic partners to the
United States of America.
 In the mid to late 1950s, however, the balance of payments between the United States and the rest
of the World grew dramatically in the latter’s favor. The problem owed to growing U.S. military
expenditures overseas because the Cold War had begun, adding to corporate investment outflows
and to the aid to a rebuilding Europe and Japan. As a result, European and Japanese central banks
accumulated continuously currency reserves in U.S. dollar; their economies indeed were booming.
In 1958, when the European currencies attained full convertibility and private capital flows began
to accelerate, some Western countries argued the Bretton Wood system was doomed. There was a
rumor saying the United States would be forced to devalue their currency to staunch the outflow.
The U.S. Government reacted by trying to incite foreign central banks to keep their dollars, and
even by setting travel limits on American tourists overseas and U.S. private investments in Europe,
to no avail. For in the same year 1958, those Western countries cautiously began to exercise their
gold-for-dollar convertibility rights, and in significant amounts. So, U.S. gold reserves fell 10%
from 20,312 metric tons to 18,290 on that year alone. In 1959, they fell again with a minus 5%. In
September 1960, foreign banks went again to New York City for the metal, and this caused to the
United States the largest weekly decline in gold reserves since the year 1931 in the Crash of Wall
Street period.
More and more dollars had circulated after the Western World was back on its feet, but from this
year 1960 on, the U.S. gold reserves became inferior to the external economic commitments of this
country; the economic euphoria of reconstruction began to fall back. From early September to
October 25, 1961, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen to a concerning 12%. The
unrevealing reached a tipping point in 1970, when the U.S. economy was suffering from a host of
ills.[227] Some European countries asked to the United States to stop their unbroken creation of
currency; the demand was fulfilled beyond expectations, and quickly. For on August 15, 1971, U.S.
President Richard Nixon abruptly stated the end of the Bretton Wood system. The prime architect of
the decision actually was U.S. Treasury Secretary John Conally—he who was hit by two bullets and
seriously injured as passenger in the convertible Lincoln of John F. Kennedy when he was
assassinated in Dallas.[228] At the G-10 Rome meeting, held shortly after in this same year 1971,
Conally proclaimed before a befuddled European audience, “The dollar is our currency, but it’s your
problem”. Under-Secretary George Schultz famously added, “Santa Claus is dead;” a depreciation
of about 20% of the dollar ensued at once.[229]
The latter events marked the birth of today’s free-floating exchange rates. To France, it was the
death of a period of prosperity her historians since then call “Les Trente Glorieuses” (“The Thirty
Glorious”), alluding to less than thirty years in reality, as it had started in 1947. Indeed, the “death
of Santa” was a watershed moment to the French ruling elite and a catastrophe to the French
economy. The French franc plummeted, but it had never been in good shape since the end of the
war, it should be said. For after the WWII, France had devalued its franc on several occasions. To
say, in 1945 the French franc was worth 119 to the U.S. dollar, 350 four years later in 1949, and
493.7 in 1958 when De Gaulle took the power through a quiet revolution of palace backed by the
military—of which the multitudes never knew anything until the late 1990s, be it said in passing.
Following this, in January 1960, the French franc had been reevaluated, with 100 existing francs
making one “nouveau franc” (“new franc”), shortened into the acronym “NF”. The abbreviation
“NF” was used on French banknotes until 1963. Yet the French people stood confused with it until
as far as in the 1980s, and virtually until the introduction of the euro when people often continued
saying “anciens francs” (“old francs”) each time there was a need for adding emphasis on large
sums. When the euro finally replaced the franc, on January 1, 1999, the French currency was worth
less than an eighth of its original purchasing power of 1960.
As seen from the viewpoint of French politicians and economists, when in private, the change of
the French franc for the euro in the facts was a new and helpful disguised reevaluation. With this,
they counted on a simple marketing trick to confuse the population on the value of money, which
says, “0.99 is little when compared to 1”. Prices tags in French francs that transformed in centimes
(cents) once converted into euro quickly rose to 1 euro at least, since “1 still is the smallest unit”.
Thus, about every ordinary goods of consumption in France knew a rapid two-digit rise. Before
1999, French politicians and economists had dreaded the psychological threshold effect of “10
francs a liter of gas” at the pump, and the same with the price to pay for a pack of cigarettes. For
many people threatened to go out in streets and on strike if ever these two events happened. That is
why the changeover to the euro solved the problem as magic, though temporarily because wages did
not follow the adjustment. In France, wages are set based on a legal minimum wage established by
the State, as a customary expediency to rein in inflation.
 Today, in April 2019, the gas price in euro in French cities just jumped to 1.58 for 1 liter of mid-
grade, equivalent to 10.66 French francs, should we consider the admitted virtual convertibility of
around 6.75 francs for 1 euro; that is to say, $5.98 a gallon. So, the chickens are coming home to
roost, with a still rising gas price that is gently heading toward a new psychological threshold of 2
euros for a liter, or $7.57 a gallon at a today’s change rate; all numbers to be compared with an
average monthly salary in this country of 1,910.59 euros in early 2019, before social charges and
income tax, or $2,139.86. However, this index one may find published in official French statistics
seems rosy not to say unrealistic, as it is very rarely true to most French people. It does not reflect at
all the reality of more than 50% of the French population that makes 1,600 euros a month or so; less
than 1,300 euros once social charges are deduced, or about $1,460. The latter figure is also the
salary or thereabout of an overwhelming majority of staffers in the DGSE, by the way. In 2019, in
France, the starting salary of a physician in a public hospital is about 1700 euros raw, and according
to the 2019 GINI index of distribution of family income, France rank 137th on 158 reference
countries, above Albania 138th and below Afghanistan 136th. Surprised?
About all French living outside large cities need to go to work by car, of course, and prices of
public means of transportation follow the rise. As for the average price of a pack of cigarettes that at
once rose 5% upon the introduction of the euro, it then skyrocketed to 7 euros or 47.25 French
francs. This triggered a boom in sales of rolling tobacco and of cigarette trafficking in the country
since then. Yet no one went out in streets for this, thanks to new other provisions of an entirely
different sort, to be soon explained.
Unlike other countries as Germany, Britain, and Japan, France had relied on the Bretton Wood
system to venture into an overprotective but costly domestic policy in exchange for much
interfering in people’s privacy, based on the saint-simonianist progressive doctrine. As seen from
the angle of macroeconomics, and with respect to French practices in domestic economy between
1947 and 1971, actually, the United States had consciously financed what their citizens today call
“nanny-state” policy. The U.S. Government had decided to cope with it its own way, if I may put it
thusly, because during a period spanning the early 1950s to the late 1960s, the CIA thought
socialism à la française could oppose hard Soviet Communism. The CIA had understood it was
unrealistic to attempt converting the French people to Protestant-inspired capitalism and
individualism. This intellectual perception proved a misperception on the long run, not to say
wishful thinking. Other considerations relevant to international politics and diplomacy were at play;
we will see them later in chapters relevant at some point to foreign policy.
I just summarily explained why and how the French ruling elite anticipated the coming of
discontent in the country decades ahead. The chosen solutions were to nip it in the bud by whatever
means, and to stifle it softly each time the first method would fail. Various provisions in domestic
policy and security had to be thought and implemented in emergency, therefore. As considered
together with respect to the effects they could produce on the masses, their effectiveness implied no
less than a new way to rule France, and even to envisage diplomatic relations under a new angle
with certain major powers. It should be said, however, the change in French foreign affairs had
begun in 1958 already; we will see why later in more suitable contexts and with details opportunely
relevant to espionage. About domestic policy, an increase in domestic intelligence capacities began
very discreetly circa 1975-76, first with a focus on counterintelligence—although significant actions
in counter-interference had been taken in 1958 already.
The provisions officially implemented all or so came together twenty years later, but suddenly
from 1981-82, upon the victory at the presidential elections of May 1981 of Socialist Party (PS)
candidate François Mitterrand backed by the French Communist Party (PCF). Together, they
overthrew the ageing ruling elite in an apparent takeover. Committed progressive and communist
upstarts replaced the French liberal upper class overnight and the private sector was not spared. The
promises of the new breed of politicians and politically spirited entrepreneurs aimed to galvanizing
a nation reeling after a decade of economic downturn, mainly by spreading an incisive critique of
“what had gone wrong in Western societies”. The slow shift of the 1960-70 in the French political
agenda at last became visible and known to all—or rather its formal aims still at the moment. The
socialist-communist narrative came to justify the formal implementing of those provisions
materializing as new official rules and regulations. A number of others could not be that so and had
to be covered by a secrecy that could not be officially enforced by law, since they were consequent
to the adoption of the doctrine of active measures. The SDECE was considerably overhauled
between 1981 and 1982, and it changed its name for DGSE in May of the latter year. Everything
had to change in the country, actually.
 The socialist upheaval reshaped the French society in about all respects, political, economic,
social, and even cultural, and it took no longer than the decade following 1982, which was
extraordinarily fast. The new agenda aimed no less than to changing the scale of values of the entire
population into an entirely new one. The enterprise included—and still includes today, since it is
still ongoing—new tastes, concerns, perception of the purpose of life, and countless other notions of
that sort. The sophisticated techniques and methods of influence and propaganda this ambitious
project claimed will be explained in details in the next chapters, for the DGSE, and more
particularly a number of its contractors among the best talented in social sciences, were its main
architects.
This is in the decade 1980s that the domestic intelligence apparatus really began to develop
beyond normal, justified by a new aggressive policy in intelligence activities abroad and more
especially against the United States and its allies, with a logical focus on economic intelligence.
France, therefore, had to shelter herself against inevitable and logical retaliations of similar sorts,
first by implementing an absolute but stealthy control over all media and the industrial sector.
“Classic espionage” was no longer relevant; the new roadmap of the DGSE pointed toward
economic intelligence and information warfare, the later branch subsuming agitprop, influence,
cultural influence, propaganda, and more especially disinformation because France could not afford
economically to pose as a foe to the United States and its allies.
Changes brought on by the would-be-Socialist new elite proved costly, with as unintended
consequence to further aggravating the French economy. In passing, did the still incredulous reader
ever wondered about why France is the sole automobile manufacturer in Europe that do not export
cars to the United States, although they are not that bad? The new public expenditures triggered an
unprecedented rise of the public debt. To say, in May 1981, the previous government of rightist
President Valéry Giscard-d’Estaing had left a public debt of less than 100 billion euros (real value in
today’s euros), or less than 5% of the GDP. Arrived at the end of the presidency of Mitterrand, in
1995, fourteen years later, it had reached close to 700 billion, or 35% of the GDP. Due to the new
policy that never changed thereafter and in spite of pretenses of returns of would-be-rightist
governments and policies, in 2017, the figures had jumped to 2,200 billion euros, or 100% of the
GDP. To be precise, among other facts accountable for this situation to exist, the new policy of
decentralization—i.e. moving a part of the French political representation to regions outside Paris,
in addition to the already existing préfectures—that truly aimed to secure the power of the State and
socialist politics in the country, translated in a sudden and enormous increase in public expenditures.
For the latter reason, the political heirs of the same ruling elite today question the real usefulness of
this regional representation that brought nothing but a strong increase in the number of public
servants, elected officials, and their associated running costs.
It is true that other European countries that had historically been Roman Catholic knew about the
same problem, though for different reasons in the cases of Belgium and Italy, whose public debts
went even over 100% of their GDP. Yet in the case of France, there is also the unknown amount of
money borrowed to banks and invested by large said-to-be-private groups, all publicly owned or
under unclear control of the State in reality, to finance large merges, colossal acquisitions, and other
strategic ventures abroad. From firsthand knowledge I can say that the latter are discreetly ordered
and supervised by the DGSE in a context of economic war, and that the loans are seldom
reimbursed not to say never. This hidden part of public expenditures, colossal today, is unknown
because there is no need to justify it to any public body nor elected official, still less to the public.
Arrived in the 1990s, as seen from the unenlightened viewpoint of the multitudes, the Sweet
France of the famous Charles Trenet’s song had disappeared, gradually but very visibly, to leave
place in the early 2000s to a country ruled by a political elite obsessed with control on everything
and everyone, and with censorship and repression it introduced anonymously and informally as a
new array of social uses the media called “political correctness” (correction politique, in French).
Therefore, in France, the birth of the expression “political correctness” in the early 1990s and what
it denotes has not been a trend consequent to some social evolution, but a way to the state to enforce
a stringent form of censorship without ever assuming the responsibility of this measure. Ironically,
the first uses of the words “political correctness” and associated meaning as we know it today
appeared in the United States between the 1970s and the 1980s, in both proponents of the far left
and of conservatism. However, in France, neither the state nor its agents in charge of censorship
ever utter the expression, while they truly enforce it increasingly since the 1980s by relying
essentially on the media over which they exert a tremendous control, as we will see in a next
chapter. Actually, in this country, only those who express their discontent over state censorship use
the words “political correctness” in their attempt strike back against it. For the practice by the state
of this form of censorship not only is very visible, but is done increasingly openly, as if a tacit
consensus with the public has been reached about it. The latter attitude truly is resigned submission
to an authority that wants to assert its absoluteness.
In the 1990s, the new form of censorship was intended to promote the new scale of social values
to which I referred earlier. It was enforced by launching smear campaigns and by enforcing
unofficial blacklisting that became increasingly formal. The trend reached a point at which the new
mores indeed became laws, with sanctions enforced this time by justice courts, and whose attributed
gravities were qualified as crimes in all respects similar to assault and battery. That is how state
censorship finally became an official reality that however is never named that so. Not only the
multitudes accepted it, but they also wanted it, indeed. For the masses had been lured into believing
that they, alone, asked for the social change to come in the name of “social justice”. The reality of
the latter upheaval that seemed to come spontaneously and naturally from nowhere actually laid on
an elaborate technique in domestic influence, designed in the early 1970s and explained in detail at
the end of the chapter 19.
Domestic spying in France knew its strong increase in the wake of the latter event or at about the
same time, and was officially justified by a new other concern over Muslim fundamentalism and
terrorism; it coincided with the Gulf War in 1991, precisely. The irrational cause-to-effect relation
between more state surveillance and the latter event, largely promoted by the media, was nothing
but a formal aim hiding opportunely a still more important reality. For 1991 was also a year of
upheaval in Russia, accompanied by the implementation of an overhauled doctrine of actives
measures serving a new perception of intelligence and war for the 21st century to come. In France,
the new concern for greater security seemed to have been triggered by a brief and bizarre popular
rumor saying Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was on the brink to trigger a third world war. Actually,
the real origin of the rumor was a journalist’s statement, saying that Saddam Hussein would have
declared to be in capacity to send ICBMs in Southern France, and that “he meant it”. Additionally,
the media spread the same rumor exactly about Iran. The popular gossips proved influential enough
to cause in the French capital an absurd shortage of sugar and vegetal oil for about a week. The
mainstream media reported the latter incident either, yet never said a word on its possible cause
beyond saying it was “an unexplainable shortage due to a panic the Gulf War had caused,” and that
was all. However, domestic spying did not abate upon the end of the Gulf War, and the alibi of
Muslim terrorism resumed to justify more domestic surveillance, new rules, and regulations of
various sorts.
On one hand, I must honestly acknowledge I do not have firsthand knowledge of the political
decision to use terrorism as a formal aim to fulfill the real aim of greater mass surveillance in
France. Terrorism actions that themselves served the formal aim of Muslim claims indeed have been
as many realities in this country at that period. On the other hand, I do know firsthand that France
and her intelligence apparatus very frequently use the argument of Muslim terrorism to ostracize
people who are guilty of entirely different things, and that they use it again with the public to
explain events that truly are consequent to entirely different aims. Alike, as I am explaining things
of importance and consequences in this chapter in this chapter and even all along this book, I do
lose sight that we often appear to be saying something very important about something, while we
actually are only saying something about our own feelings. Beyond this, the reader shall face the
dilemma either to listen to France’s defense that my sayings are conspiracy theories impossible to
prove, or to take the time to check them by perusing an important corpus of press articles, video
records, works of scholars, slips of the tongue and passing references in political statements that are
all publicly available. I did the effort all along the writing of this book to ascertain the validity of the
latter statement either.
In the early 1990s, the narrative of the fight against terrorism is “one rule that fits all cases” was
accompanied by one more called “ecology,” previously launched by the Service A of the Soviet
KGB, as we shall later in detail. Ten years later, in the early 2000s, the latter novelty had evolved
and was become green activism, and a new alibi to France’s domestic politics for justifying still
more stringent regulations and taxes aiming to force the population to adapt to a need of the state to
further reduce imports, oil chiefly, due to a trade balance that was always in deficit. Additionally,
the change for socialism of 1981 had to materialize as a collectivization of the masses that could not
possibly be thus named, since France still officially claimed to be an ally of the capitalist United
States. The Government of Mitterrand had enacted the nationalization of a number of private
businesses and industrial groups, but this could not yet be enough. In a chorus effect, the French
media began to spread a narrative extolling the virtues of frugality and sharing, necessary to “save
the planet” in all possible ways. Thus, ecology became a grab bag of eclectic claims, often irrelevant
because of the real aims, I just presented. Exactly as what was happening with political correctness,
the meaning of the word pollution evolved to adapt to more abstract needs such as “light pollution”
to justify the reducing of energy consumption, “visual pollution” to justify a decrease of advertising
since it fuelled consumerism, and even “verbal pollution” to ostracize proponents of capitalism and
individual freedom. Propaganda was reaching an unprecedented peak since the WWII, difficult to
identify as such however because it served real aims that people could hardly understand or even
believe.
Indeed, the myth of ecology was a feat in ingenuity in domestic politics because it could support
an elaborate and coherent far-leftist political doctrine without ever using a word connecting to it, or
even suggesting a political aim. Ecology thus could justify to the masses about any economic
provision and restriction under threat of an impending of catastrophic nature; strikingly similar to
the Genesis flood narrative, we notice. Interestingly to the reader, possibly, I know firsthand that the
Soviet KGB, and eventually the Russian SVR RF, instead found their inspiration to design green
activism and the “global warming” in the story of Utnapishtim who abandons his worldly
possessions to save the World from the Great flood, in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh.
The reader notices again: green activism supported by the narrative of global warming, and
greater domestic surveillance supported by the fear of terrorism have in common to be myths
designed to elicit submission to their coiner lest of anonymous dangers coming from nowhere, or
everywhere. This was a big change by comparison with earlier threats that ever had a face and a
place anyone could point on a map. The additional cleverness in both contrivances is the implicit
and “logical” obligation to rally their “prophets,” not to be associated with the threats themselves. In
other words, they rely also on the false dilemma or “either-or fallacy” in epistemology known as
“You’re either with us, or against us”. Nonetheless, the threats each did fit the alternative of the
three fundamental drives explained in the chapter 9 of this book, with the expected chosen option of
inhibition behavior—the key points and timeline of the influence action of ecology aka green
activism will be explained in detail in a next chapter.
As I said, the political narrative the Socialist government had launched in the early 1980s was
establishing a new myth and formal aims, in order to reach the real aims defined in the 1970s. As
seen from the conventional viewpoints of economy and politics, the aims were economic and social
adjustments to a crisis that was not cyclical, but structural, and its future evolution was therefore
unknown; that is to say, ominous. In fact, instead of socialism and communism, the change was
rather towards greater social-capitalism, that is to say, stricter Saint-Simonianism, to be more
precise. Keep in mind that “change in the continuity” is the cardinal rule of the French political
system, and note that acting (2019) President Emmanuel Macron and his closest advisors have been
taught and trained by the former ruling elite of the Mitterrand’s era, which was not really socialist
either.[230] The prophylactic measure, radical in both senses of the adjective, nonetheless could
hardly be successful in a nation that had been used to take for granted that tomorrow will be better
than yesterday, obviously. The decade 1981-1991 was one of expectations for the ignorant
multitudes, but the growing discontent of the second half of the 1970s resumed with greater
momentum, and with claims about a larger number of issues, economic for most because the
previously explained campaign of persuasion had soothed frustrations of the abstract sort, only.
From the early 2000s, the discontent further evolved to general distrust to an elite introducing
itself as a “new generation,” and finally into ostensible resentment from those in the provinces who
now struggle to make the ends meet. For as soon as the methods and means of this anticipation
became known or visible to the masses, largely thanks to the spread of the Internet, their natures
added fuel to the already burning grievance of precariousness only caused, from their viewpoint
located “down in some dark woody valley,” by a mix of enforced collectivism and institutionalized
cronyism. Thenceforth, a vicious circle surged, and what should have limited to discreet domestic
monitoring and astute influence evolved to acknowledged surveillance, censorship, and lately to
police repression and state violence (even condemned by the UNO itself[231]).
Today, the French ruling elite and its domestic intelligence apparatus are no longer looking for
how to tame popular discontent; they are probing solutions to fight unrest, and they are seriously
considering the likelihood of general insurgency.
That is how domestic intelligence in France gradually reached a degree about similar to Poland’s
before 1989. As seen from abroad, nowadays, the new social climate in France is most visible on
the Internet, on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and in comments to press articles and blog’s posts,
now impossible to control and censor. As seen from a wider angle, for the last decade 2010s, a
growing minority of French people see the political evolution of their country as a concerning
march forward toward an Orwellian society marked with fear and paranoia. This perception is
justified indeed, as testifies for the technical explanations I present in this book. As early as in the
mid-1990s, even some DGSE staffers, when in private, quietly acknowledged an evolution of
France toward a police State overwhelmed by domestic spy-mania.
On one hand, the conspicuous ignorance or downplaying from foreign officials about what is
happening in France today lays on embarrassed diplomatic and economic needs for the most, which
position resumes as foreign media censorship and self-censorship.[232] In some of those instances, it
is easy to guess that the shyness owes to fears of French accusations of subversive activities by the
intelligence agencies of their countries (as China is prompt to do nowadays, with threats of
economic sanctions).[233] On the other hand, a significant rise of domestic spying that also started
about everywhere in the World in the aftermaths of the Cold War, it is true, has been naturally
breeding a tacit and quiet consensus around common concerns, regardless of the agenda of each
concerned party. Indeed, the official disappearance of antagonism between two blocs of countries
obliged each to stop publicly exposing the vices and faults and crimes of the other, in the name of a
universal peace that never went beyond wishful thinking, in actuality.
Now, I present the general organization, rules, and methods in French domestic intelligence for
the last decade 2010s.
Indeed, I seem to be the first to write on domestic intelligence in France, and so the first, too, to
write on domestic influence in this country, the more so in English. This should come to no surprise,
however, because the former activity encompasses the later naturally and logically; as much as as
domestic intelligence is not confused with homeland security, called sécurité intérieure (security of
the interior) in France. As I explained in a previous chapter, only “vetted” persons can expect a
French publishing house to publish their works on French intelligence and true espionage stories. It
is still more complicated with counterintelligence, for reasons I barely more than hinted at this
point, and it is downright impossible with domestic influence because “there is no such a thing in
this country”. Exceptions are few books on the old RG.
Nevertheless, the RG is still in existence as it was before 2008, in the facts, because under new
names it now seconds a new similar agency called SDAO, military in essence, as we are going to
see. For under the new names SCRT and DR-PP, the RG could resume its mission of domestic
spying and interference with the same personnel as before, indeed, but with a clean slate because
these two would-be-new agencies do not yet have any history. The change, of a bureaucratic order
in the facts, obviously aimed to nothing more than a symbolic reform, and a burial of questionable
practices inconsistent with political claims of democracy and freedom of speech. The sorry
notoriety, again, is the tip of the iceberg, I depict in this book. For everything the ordinary French
citizen knows about it, limits to censored press articles and books narrating deceptions operations
presented as failed missions, ordinary infightings, political rivalries of no consequences, and spicy
tales tailored to cover up grim realities, of the kind I presented in the chapters 10 and 11.
Down the pyramid of the domestic intelligence apparatus, two main bodies are carrying on the
most menial and inconsequential tasks in the field. These are the Police National that is the ordinary
police, and the Gendarmerie National of the military. Then each of the two corps has its own
specialized intelligence agencies, to refine raw intelligence collected from the mouths of ordinary
citizens on informal and friendly interviews, essentially. These agencies for the police are the
already named SCRT and DR-PP, and their equivalent in the Gendarmerie the SDAO, created
recently in 2013. Then there are other and more specialized intelligence agencies and services to
fulfill completely the ever-growing need for domestic intelligence; all bodies named and summarily
presented in the Lexicon of this book.
The Gendarmerie is at the same time a law enforcement force and a particular corps of the French
Army; with the few following equivalents in continental Europe: Carabinieri in Italy, Zandarmeria
Wojskkowa–ZW in Poland, Guarda Nacional Republicana–GNR in Portugal, and Jandarma Genel
Komutanlığı in Turkey. Until 2009, the French Gendarmerie acted under the direct and exclusive
authority of the Ministry of Defense, even though it was empowered by the State to enforce the law
in the civilian population; rural in particular. Since the latter year, this corps is attached to the
civilian Ministry of the Interior. However, the Gendarmerie remains integral to the French armed
forces of the Ministry of Defense, renamed Ministry of the Armed Forces in 2017, while the French
police are a civilian body acting under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior. As such, the
French police are similar to any other ordinary police force of the Western World.
Therefore, the Gendarmerie is a particular law enforcement body due to its military nature. Yet its
men are bestowed upon the right to carry arrests of military personnel either. The Gendarmerie is a
rather secretive corps, as the military notoriously is in France, altogether. Since 1848, and following
an election affair, the military are called colloquially by some la grande muette, or “the great silent
corps”. Actually, there are two specialized military branches of the Gendarmerie that are acting as
military police for the Air Force and for the Navy, while there is no need for this specialty in the
Army because this corps belongs to it. Then the Gendarmerie has three other specialized branches,
whose common mission is relevant to security and counterespionage, and which is a recruitment
pool to the DRSD.
From the viewpoint of the public, the Gendarmerie is integral to the Gallic culture because of its
omnipresence and largely respected authority in the countryside and in rural towns for several
centuries. French civilians are not indignant at all when they have to comply with the demands and
orders of those police that are military, in the facts. Actually, French people can hardly find
differences between the police and the Gendarmerie; they just use to see the former enforcing the
law in large cities, and the latter resuming this role outside of them, in towns and everywhere else in
the country. Privates, non-commissioned officers, and commissioned officers of the Gendarmerie
are all called gendarmes, popularly; and they understand that civilian may not be necessary able to
identify their ranks and to make the difference between a corporal and a captain. Until the end of the
20th century, gendarmes have been unanimously seen as good and rather caring police, though not
as benevolent as their American counterparts are. Gendarmes are not going to help a woman
changing a tire on her car; they call a mechanics for her, instead. In France, when moving by car in a
town or in the countryside, it is very common to be stopped by the gendarmes; just to check your
identity, whether the police might want you, whether you paid for the insurance, whether the tires
are in good condition, and many other little things of that order. The popular perception of the
Gendarmerie gained further notoriety abroad between 1964 and 1982, following the releases of The
Troops of St. Tropez,[234] a series of six successful French comedies of which the episode 2 unfolds
in New York City.[235]
However, the popular benevolence toward the gendarmes began to fade from the early 1990s,
when official and unofficial internal reforms on discipline and recruitment in this corps transformed
it thoroughly. Within a decade, the good and understanding gendarmes disappeared to leave place to
a new generation of stern, noncommittal, uncompromising, and intrusive military cops. The
upheaval came along a similarly striking abandonment of their elegant uniforms, consequential to
new operational provisions that also applied to the police. The drum-shaped kepis, the nicely ironed
lounge-like suit jackets with shiny ornamented buttons, and the dress-shoes of the gendarmes
disappeared at the favor of martial, cheap, crumpled dark blue combat fatigue, field hats, and
combat boots. The evolution owed to bouts of unrest and to a concerning rise of petty criminality,
both consequent to the general discontent and frustration of the masses that the thorough changes in
interior politics, sudden multiplication and stringency of rules, regulation,and a large variety of new
taxes, had caused. The new popular worries badly mixed with a steady rise of unemployment, which
nowadays is officially hovering in the area of 7 to 10%; much more, in actuality. Drugs trafficking,
car thefts, burglaries, and wanton street violence were booming in the 1990s, and are rising at a fast
pace since the 2000s. The disturbances were ominous harbingers of insurgency, and even of civil
war, some journalists and essayists still say openly today.
In 2016, there were about 144,000 police in uniforms and plain clothes, and 98,000 gendarmes,
working increasingly in plain clothes either, for a population of 67,500,000. With a total law
enforcement force of 242,000 police including administrative personnel, this translated a ratio of
358 police per 100,000 inhabitants. For comparison, the same year, the number was 284 in the
United States and 210 in the United Kingdom. However, when looking up at a map of Europe, one
would notice there are more and more police as we go from North down to South, with 159 police
only per 100,000 inhabitants in Finland, and 506 in Spain.
For more than sixty years, the French law of April 23, 1941 ruled the distribution of territorial
powers between the police and the Gendarmerie. According to this text, the National Police were
responsible for public safety in cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants, and the Gendarmerie in all
other communes (towns).[236] Since 1941, demographics brought important adjustments of practical
orders, and the “safety orientation and programming law” of January 21, 1995 modified the criteria
of 1941 by laying down a rule saying that the national police have competence in the smaller cities
that are “chiefs of départements,”[237] and in “urban entities fulfilling the conditions of density and
continuity of urbanization,” i.e. in all towns with more than 10.000 inhabitants. Towns with more
than 20,000 inhabitants stay under the full responsibility of the National Police, in which it has
stations, called commissariats de police. The Gendarmerie kept for itself an important role in those
greater agglomerations however, and also in the “smaller Parisian crown,” i.e. Paris’s immediate
suburbs, divided into towns administratively. For the growth of suburbs made suburban territories
and towns interwoven, thus making responsibilities in law enforcement between the police and the
Gendarmerie unclear or confusing. Therefrom, the police are formally responsible for ensuring the
safety in municipalities with populations of over 20,000, and “where the characteristics of crimes
are those of urban areas, both criteria being cumulative”. The Gendarmerie is responsible for
carrying out public safety missions in all other communes; that is to say, up from towns and down to
hamlets and houses scattered everywhere around cities and in the countryside.[238] If, at first glance,
and apart from the extent of the areas to be monitored, the situation appears unbalanced to the
disadvantage of the police with 60% of the staff of the law enforcement forces, this civilian corps
nonetheless remains responsible for 50% of the population.[239] The setting being duly presented in
today’s time, I can review what the French ruling elite is expecting from this large police force
today, beside arresting criminals, recording complaints, and fining drivers.
The Gendarmerie took over the civilian police in domestic intelligence and surveillance of the
population outside of larger cities. French people are largely ignorant of the latter fact, due to the
media being effectively under control of the government, and more exactly of the military and of the
DGSE. The Gendarmerie names internally its mission of domestic intelligence renseignement de
proximité (proximity intelligence), as the police do. However, in the Gendarmerie, the latter is more
formally called recueil du Rens, or “Int. collection,” a contraction of “intelligence collection” and a
terminology of military intelligence origin. In point of fact, the DRM uses the same words exactly,
and all military intelligence units of the Com-Rens alike. This special mission of the Gendarmerie
remains a sensitive topic that the Ministry of Defense acknowledges half-mouthedly and reluctantly
only, and it is always unwilling to elaborate about it. However, there is a considerable difference
between the mission of proximity intelligence of the Gendarmerie, and that of domestic intelligence
that the police and its agencies the DGSI, SCRT, and DR-PP are executing. For the Gendarmerie
does not keep an eye on “individuals of particular interest” only; it spies on the entire population
outside of large cities. On their initial trainings in classrooms, ordinary police and gendarmes are
taught to identify information pertaining to the mission of domestic intelligence collection, and they
are instructed to transmit it to specialized services of their corps, as a routine.
The police has such specialized services either, which until 2008 were cells of the RG, called
antennes (“antennas”), each settled in the premises of ordinary police stations (commissariats de
police) of all mid-sized cities that are chiefs of administrative départements, and several in large
cities such as Lyon, Marseilles, and Paris. The French intelligence community has an old
administrative custom of its own with naming formally “antenna” any small local cell of one of its
intelligence agencies, e.g. l’antenne de Bordeaux, meaning “the local intelligence bureau of
Bordeaux”. On one hand, I hazard the guess that the origin of this strange name alluded to means of
telecommunication, as those bureaus communicate together through a specific and encrypted
national telecommunication network (formally radio telecommunication, and now Intranet national
networks); as do the military, but by coding and decoding messages and corresponding specialized
personnel working in offices located in the underground of a building in barracks and bases, each
called “le chiffre” (“the number”). On the other hand, certain French public services having no
direct relevance with intelligence and the military name “antennas” their local representations
outside Paris either.
Eventually, in 2008, the French Government announced officially that the RG (domestic
intelligence) and the DST (counterespionage and counterterrorism) merged to form a new agency
christened DCRI, but this reduced version of the fact actually is untrue and misleading. So, I explain
the truth.
Police officers of the RG who had been in charge of “special operations” in GERs never joined
the DCRI, save for a tiny minority. Instead, they remained at their usual desks in the same premises,
and their agencies the RG-PP for Paris and the RG for the rest of the country were simply renamed
DR-PP and SCRT, respectively[240]. The two new names truly were adjustments of the cosmetic
order, due to the persisting bad reputation of the RG, I explained earlier. In 2014, the DCRI was
“reformed” and changed its name for DGSI, which it kept until today in 2019. Some official and
unofficial facts about all these changes deserve to be explained, below.
 The false merge of the RG and the DST, intending to give birth to the DCRI, was officially
presented as a would-be-old wish of Nicolas Sarkozy when he was France’s Minister of the Interior.
It was certainly not an idea of Sarkozy alone anyway; regardless, the Council of Ministers enacted
the change on June 20, 2007, shortly after Sarkozy was elected as President of France. Bernard
Squarcini aka “Le Squale” (The Shark),[241] I named earlier in the affair of the physical elimination
of barbouze Daniel Forestier, had been Director of the DST at that time, and was named head of its
successor the DCRI upon its creation in 2008; two central adjunct directors assisted him from the
outset, as customarily since the early 1980s. The latter people were former senior executive in the
RG René Bailly, and former senior executive in the DST Patrick Calvar. In June 2009, Bailly left
the DCRI to take the leadership in the new DR-PP in Paris, new name of the old RG-PP. In early
2010, Calvar left, too, because the DGSE hired him as Director of the Directorate of Foreign
Intelligence. In 2012, Calvar was called back to the DCRI, this time as Director of this agency in
replacement of Squarcini, with a new experience in foreign intelligence he learned, therefore, under
a military authority. In other words, Calvar thus was made the man of the DGSE heading the
civilian counterintelligence and counterterrorism agency.
On February 28, 2013, upon his quitting the DCRI, Squarcini founded Kyrnos Conseil, a “global
strategic intelligence” private company, whose main customer is French luxury group LVMH. Then
Squarcini joined Arcanum, a British-based private intelligence company, subsidiary to Magellan
Investment Holdings, with positions of “responsible for European operations” and “Senior Advisor
to the Chairman on Intelligence Operations”. Squarcini is currently (Jan. 2018) President of
Arcanum France, now presented as the European branch of Magellan Investment Holdings. The
team of Magellan Investment Holdings is quite international and eclectic, and the American reader
might be interested to know who these people are. Magellan Investment Holdings is co-managed by
Former U.S. Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis C. Blair, acting as Senior Advisor to
the Chairman, former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and Southeast Asia
James Clad, acting as Senior Advisor to the Chairman, former U.K. Chief of the Defense Staff
Charles Guthrie, acting as Senior Advisor to the Chairman, former Vice President Cheney’s
National Security Advisor John Hannah, who headed his Office of National Security Affairs, acting
as Senior Advisor to the Chairman, and former General of the U.S. Marines Corps and former
Commander in Chief of the CENTCOM Anthony Zinni.
I could not say what Squarcini, former Director of a counterintelligence agency that uses to hunt
American and British spies, for the record, is doing exactly with a company whose team includes
former prominent figures of the U.S. intelligence community. To the least, Squarcini seems to be
working in France and not in a same office with his “former” foes. However, for much I know and
understand, the apparent oddity actually owes to a tacit and unofficial agreement between the
United States and France, saying that a French national with relevant competencies must head all
U.S. business subsidiaries having activities in France. The rule may extend to European
headquarters when France is included in the activities, under the threat from this country of dirty
tricks and harassment with which concerned U.S. companies and groups resigns to comply,
generally. Even in the French-speaking region of Switzerland, CEOs of U.S. subsidiaries often are
French nationals. Therefore, as Magellan Investment Holdings is a private intelligence company, its
French head in France must be someone having strong competencies and experience in intelligence.
Thereof, the reader understands that the relation between the managerial staff of the latter company
and Squarcini are necessarily marred by profound reciprocal distrust not to say animosity, under
pretenses of common understanding exemplified by broad smiles on official pictures. I shall present
a number of similar cases eventually.
If the acronym “RG” disappeared definitively in 2008, it was internally replaced with
Renseignement Territorial–RT” (Territorial Intelligence), which detail further confirms a change of
pure form with respect to domestic intelligence. Actually, all changes I am describing and others to
come are nothing but appearances of changes masking visible patterns of a political will to increase
domestic intelligence and surveillance to an unprecedented level in peacetime, for all the reasons I
earlier explained, again.
For more than a century, the Gendarmerie has always been very active in domestic intelligence,
unbeknownst to the public until today. Since the end of the WWII, this military corps naturally
maintained relations with all intelligence agencies working under the authority of the Ministry of
Defense. The Gendarmerie perfected its expertise in domestic espionage during the Algerian War of
1954-1962, in the framework of a joint intelligence committee with the DST, the SDECE, the
SNLA, and the 2d Bureau, named CROGG. Of late, the Gendarmerie is becoming still more active
in domestic intelligence, spurred by the will of the Ministry of Defense much more than by party-
elected politicians, in reality; to the point that the Gendarmerie has even created the CNFRO, its
own school teaching on domestic spying, counterintelligence, and counterterrorism.
The new internal intelligence agencies of the police SCRT and DR-PP then may decide to send to
the newly created DGSI certain pieces of intelligence they receive from the ordinary police,coming
in addition to those the latter agency collects by its own. The Gendarmerie does the same with its
own and more elaborate chain of command, as we are going see in detail soon. Nevertheless, in the
end, domestic intelligence gathered by both the police and the Gendarmerie feed intelligence
databases they share together, in keeping with the new policy of mutualisation du renseignement
(intelligence sharing between agencies).[242] Furthermore, since the 1990s, there is the additional
antiterrorism mission that includes the burdening surveillance of the large Muslim community
living on the French soil with an overwhelming presence in certain French cities and regions;
poverty-stricken suburbs in particular. For the record, France is the European country with the
largest Muslim minority, with an estimated 7.5% (4,710,000) of her population for the year 2010.
[243] This is worrying the French intelligence community because it seriously impedes on its other
usual missions, and entails considerable financial expenditures.
The problem with this loose connection between North-African immigrants and Muslim terrorism
lays mainly on the former being unskilled, uneducated, and generally stupid. For the three latter
reasons, they are literally packed in shabby suburbs where they become streetwise at best; an
improvement that does not come as a relief to the concerned law enforcement and intelligence
bodies. This situation ends up stigmatizing them as the outcasts of the country, living hooked on
welfare because their chances to find a job in a country suffering a high rate of unemployment
already are very slim. The reader who at this point learned everything on the causes and effects of
frustration has no difficulty understanding why some of those unskilled immigrants convert to
Islam, and become terrorists eventually or rather loners even not affiliated to any terrorist group or
organization, as this increasingly happens. The Muslim narrative, when promoting a myth unifying
the minority of socially excluded North African immigrants of whichever generation, even happens
to call to young outcasts of French origin who feel an identity withdrawal. Thus, it comes as an alibi
justifying an overwhelming resentment toward a society that collectively seems to deny them any
chance to be integrated; being socially eliminated, they are experiencing a situation, much alike that
of the rats in the experiments of Laborit. They fight as they cannot see any other place to flee, and
finally yield to inhibition when they reach 28, on average, while a minority professionalizes in
crime past this age.
The causes of the situation above are special trade agreements France for long has with Algeria
chiefly and with other African countries, never made public in their exact terms because of their
sensitivity and in respect to stringent political correctness about minorities and racism. Until the
1980s, France welcomed waves of such uneducated and unskilled immigrants to do menial and
repetitive tasks, often in automobile and trucks plants. The economic downturn, earlier explained,
transformed in a thorny problem as about what to do with their children who are customarily barred
from accessing higher education. Germany has about similar agreements with Turkey, explaining
why the largest and similarly unskilled immigrant minority in this country is Turkish; yet Germany
forestalled its transformation in a liability, apparently.
I have a short and amusing anecdote to tell about those Algerian immigrants, even if the subject is
not funny, I reckon. Reda, one of my ex-colleagues in intelligence with a specialty in African
affairs, happened to be a smart and well-educated Algerian, in addition to being a calm and pleasant
person, I sincerely appreciated. Visibly, Reda suffered the French popular hasty generalization about
Algerians living in France because he once told me, in substance from recollection, “I can
understand why French are racist against us, Algerians. For in Algeria, the government didn’t know
what to do anymore with those who at last immigrated to France. We don’t want them over there
either”.
In the chapter 15 on surveillance techniques and shadowing, the reader will see how costly in
human resources can be the round-the-clock surveillance of an individual suspected to partake in
intelligence activities against France; that is to say, no less than ten people per target and close to
twenty with cases of a preoccupying sort. As I am writing this paragraph in early 2018, some
representatives of the French intelligence community are publicly talking about 20,000 people in
France who are “carded S,” including 10,500 suspected to be Muslim radicals. The theory in French
counterterrorism says the whereabouts and activities of all those must be known and monitored
about round-the-clock. The problem with that is, in the most optimistic hypothesis, this human
surveillance would claim about 100,000 full-time intelligence or police employees, contractors,
agents, snitches, and sources assigned exclusively to this mission for an annual cost of about 11.3
billion dollars, according to my own estimate. This is financially impossible to the French
Government, of course.
Consequently, and should these figures be correct, we may infer that most Islamic radicals living
on the French soil are not under any surveillance, at all; or, more exactly, they are lightly monitored
through formal but poorly effective measures, such as periodic checks of administrative nature, and
unpaid and unskilled informants and social vigilantes i.e. ordinary citizens. As an aside about the
latter question, in 2017, several representatives of the Ministry of Justice and of the intelligence
community, introducing themselves under various cover activities,[244] expressed their concerns on
French television about the likely return of French jihadists and of their families gone in Iraq and
Syria to join ISIS / Dahesh. For those people not only are carded “S”, but also, they are thought
dangerous and highly likely to make proselytism upon their return on the French soil. According to
those officials, there would have been 500 to 700 such French nationals in December 2017.[245]
Placing them all under stringent surveillance for years would not yet be enough; it would be
necessary to incarcerate them downright in specialized institutions or in high-security prisons. The
cost of their repatriation would be enormous, therefore, with little hope if any for they would be fit
to live freely and out of any monitoring in the French society again. Therefore, said overtly on
television some of those officials, it would be more appropriate to eliminate them all on the spot
before their attempting to return to France. Then they considered seriously the two following ideas.
Either asking the Iraqi and Syrian governments to sentencing them to death upon their capture or
sending a French special unit i.e. of the COS in Iraq and in Syria to eliminate them all discreetly,
one by one.
The latter talks that took place on the popular TV program C dans l’air broadcasts by France 5, a
publicly owned TV channel, caused a bit of a stir. For the mere idea of the so expeditious measure
clashed obviously with the official view of the French Government about the death penalty. In the
following weeks, France 5 quickly deleted from the Web the recorded video of this edition of
C dans l’air, which makes it publicly unavailable today.
Eventually, still in early 2018, the same TV program exactly organized the same debate again, but
the same remarks were nuanced this time. However, well-known politician George Fenech could not
help himself rant when interviewed on the thorny question, “Those who have decided to leave
France to return arms against France from these battlefields outside must assume all their
responsibilities. France has no obligation of relief in to them. They are questioned and arrested on
the scene of their crimes. They must be judged by legal and territorially competent judicial
authorities”.[246]
The other interviewed specialists remarked that what bombastic Fenech calls “legal and
territorially competent judicial authorities” in the regions of Iraq, Syria, and Kurdistan would result
in the killing of those French nationals on the spot, or they would be arbitrarily sentenced to death
anyway; the more so since there is no government judicial system in Kurdistan, in actuality.
Reporter for the foreign affairs section of L’Obs newsmagazine Sarah Daniel retorted to this with
similarly polished ranting, in substance, “France has no right to intervene in the judicial process of
Kurdistan because this would be a despicable colonialist attitude; especially while considering that
Kurds allied to France in the fight against Daesh aka ISIS”. Another guest outbid by contending that
France “sent its special forces to assist the Kurds in their fight”. As the publicly broadcast debate
was gently evolving again toward the same conclusion, the guests and the TV presenter together
snickered in embarrassment, getting rid on the spot of all those French jihadists as discreetly as
possible would be good enough; no way to let them scot-free.
However, neither on any edition of this TV program, nor in the French media in general, was the
most embarrassing question ever addressed, “What about all French nationals who were recruited
and trained by the DGSE and the DGSI to penetrate those jihadist factions and cells, and how many
of those infiltration agents and snitches are still among them, over there?” The latter fact is publicly
known thanks to the German BfV that disclosed some information about it a year earlier, in
November 2016. The official avowal actually was caused by the incident of a BfV infiltration agent,
German national, who was turned in by the Jihadists he had been tasked to spy on; together, they
had planned no less than bombing the headquarters of this intelligence agency where his own
hierarchy was working.[247] End of aside.
 I talk a little about the question of the financial means allowed to law enforcement and domestic
intelligence at police and Gendarmerie levels.
As I have always been in touch with the Gendarmerie and the police with varied frequencies
during my experience in intelligence, I can testify that the shift from typewriters to personal
computers and the general use of the Internet, to which comes to add a need to upgrading and
renewing frequently these new tools, resulted in costs the concerned ministries never coped with.
Commonly, but unofficially, gendarmes are often required to buy their office computer with their
own money; they are officially requested to pay for their uniforms, already. The latter expectation is
abusively presented as a manner to put the commitment of young recruits on test, and older
gendarmes are caught out at this trick through cognitive dissonance or are asked to “jouer le jeu”
(go by the book) under threats of fabricated and abusive sanctions and office harassment. For long,
civilian police officers bought their guns at their personal expense, due to the poor quality of those
they have always been outfitted with until recently. To confirm these first remarks, below is an
official testimony of Philippe Dominati, official recorder for a French Senate General Report on
police and Gendarmerie in 2016.
“I have seen a real impoverishment of the means of our [police] forces. Without gas for cars,
without bulletproof vests, how will our men accomplish their missions? On Friday, at the National
Assembly, however, the government announced a cut of 20 million euros on the budget of police
and Gendarmerie. On a inspection trip, I saw thirteen Territorial Intelligence Officers sharing a
single Internet connection! Not to mention the car fleet that continues to age”.[248]
I witnessed about analogous problems in the DGSE, in which good equipment seem to be
provided erratically; it may turn out to be up-to-date and performing, yet incompatible with the
older others, or unsuitable for the job to be carried out promptly, or poorly practical due to the
particular policy of enforced hardship, as we have seen earlier.
Now, presenting the specifics of how the police and the gendarmerie execute their mission of
domestic intelligence: it is true, gendarmes weave as many informal links as possible with the
population to best accomplish their mission of proximity intelligence; to the point that the more
discreet RG police officers for long used to ask to their colleagues of the Gendarmerie to provide
them with all intelligence they were not in capacity to collect by their own. Moreover, RG police
officers never were numerous enough for this. Before 2008 and still today probably, the police
officers of the RG / SCRT provide Prefects of districts[249] with periodic domestic intelligence
reports, but they all abstain from telling to those senior civil servants that much of the work is done
by the Gendarmerie, actually.[250] In exchange for this unofficial help from the military, the RG /
SCRT provide gendarmes reciprocally with their own intelligence they collect in larger cities. In
other words, domestic intelligence pooling between civilian and military police, and domestic
intelligence agencies, existed already long before party-elected politicians decreed the practice in
January 2016.
Among the populace, many French people find themselves flattered to be held in good esteem by
“the good gendarmes,” in exchange for reporting neighborhood gossips and giving tips; that is how
the mission of domestic intelligence collection goes on, essentially. Yet the gendarmes are instructed
to remain wary never to keep their informants abreast on what they did or did not with their
confidences; they are left free to guess it, for two main reasons. The first is to forestall the
possibility for an informant to indulge with a self-aggrandized perception of his self and to behave
off-handedly; the second is not to tip the occasional informant accidentally in return on the real aims
and importance of proximity intelligence. Additionally, the Gendarmerie enjoys another and more
valuable category of informants, I shall present in a suitable context.
Most of the domestic intelligence gendarmes collect in their respective geographical area, i.e.
jurisdiction, stays local and available for their own use. As gendarmes are dispatched on the French
territory by small units called brigades, they transmit a part of this intelligence they deem of
“particular interest” to their Cellule de Renseignement–CR (Intelligence Cell) départementales
(district) aka Cellule Rens. (Intel. Cell). A CR is integrated in a larger district body called Centre
d’Opérations et de Renseignement de la Gendarmerie–CORG (Gendarmerie Operations and
Intelligence Center). There are 101 CORGs in the country including overseas territories, each
attached to a Groupement de Gendarmerie Départementale–GGD (Departmental Gendarmerie
Group). CORG “antennas” are identified with the number of their administrative district, e.g.
CORG 89 is the station for the district (département) of Yonne. Gendarmerie stations each are
identified with a three digits code number, irrelevant however to the numbers of their administrative
districts—numbers beginning in 600 in the same district of Yonne, for example. The general
mission of these regional CORGs limits officially to Gendarmerie emergency call centers, patrols,
and emergency management.
Back to CRs, each is under the command of one commissioned officer of the Gendarmerie called
Officier-Adjoint de Renseignement–OAR (Deputy Intelligence Officer), with the rank of lieutenant
or captain. Two non-commissioned officers, each with a specialty in domestic intelligence and in
spycraft in general, assist this local head, generally. These assistants are commonly called to
monitor and, investigate in the field in plain clothes, and to do a bit of shadowing, exactly as police
officers of the SCRT do. In point of fact, all CRs remain in permanent touch with the
Renseignement Territorial–RT (Territorial Intelligence) of the civilian police; that is to say, the
SCRT. The OAR of a CR provides also intelligence and recommendations to the Prefect of district.
Thus, a CR receives and classifies continuously intelligence that Gendarmerie stations (brigades)
send to him, proceeds to their analysis, and archives it on database servers.[251] The archiving part
includes the database of the Sous-Direction de l’Anticipation Opérationnelle–SDAO (Sub-
Directorate of the Operational Anticipation), which is the recently created central intelligence
agency of the Gendarmerie, expected in 2018 to merge soon with the SCRT of the civilian police.
“Operational anticipation,” therefore, is integral to the general mission of all CRs, and it means
“Foreseeing events of various kinds likely or potentially harmful to homeland security and to the
national interest in general”. The general mission of the CRs is largely passive, as it consists in
monitoring, spying on, and analyzing the collected domestic intelligence at district’s levels.
Gendarmes working in those antennas say internally their job is to be “the barometers of the
Nation”. In the facts, they are permanently looking for crises of all kinds that may erupt in towns
with a population inferior to 20,000 inhabitants, and in the countryside. Together, the SCRT and the
DR-PP of the civilian police together resume the mission in all larger cities, including Paris. By
“barometer of the Nation,” the reader must understand spotting, identifying, and monitoring
individuals, clusters, and larger groups, whose activities or / and claims are challenging the values
decided and promoted by the political elite. Thereof, the worrying activities and claims may be
ideological / political, religious, relevant to foreign intelligence, terrorism, organized criminality,
and anything else that may cause trouble to public order. Internally, concerned suspicious groups are
said to be relevant to or in connection with mouvements à potentialité dangereuse (“potentially
harmful movements”). Of late in 2019, as example, all CRs and the central SDAO are much
interested in monitoring ongoing popular unrest such as the Yellow vests.
The active part following this intelligence effort is taken care of by other intelligence agencies in
respect to the kind of threat spotted, e.g. DGSI, DGSE, DRSD, DRM, EMOPT and BLAT, DNRED,
etc. Eventually and all along this Part II., we will see how unfold the missions of this active second
stage.
The SDAO poses as a sub-directorate of the Direction des Opérations et de l’Emploi–DOE
(Directorate of Operations and Employment) of the National Gendarmerie, which multipurpose
body is also responsible for other missions unconnected to intelligence. The SDAO is made up of
two main departments named Centre de Renseignement Opérationnel–CRO (Operational
Intelligence Center), and Centre d’Analyse et d’Exploitation–CAE (Intelligence Analysis and
Treatment Center).
Ultimately, all domestic intelligence jointly collected and gathered on computer servers by the RT
(i.e. CRs and SDAO of the Gendarmerie + SCRT and DR-PP of the police) is made available to
about all other intelligence agencies, beginning with the DGSI (Ministry of the Interior) and the
DGSE (Ministry of Defense), chiefly followed by the DRSD of the Ministry of Defense. Recently,
the latter provisions have been made official with the enactment of the new policy of intelligence
pooling. In the facts, as the reader may surmise, the leading and most sensitive intelligence agencies
do not share reciprocally their own intelligence collections with all other intelligence agencies
because their need-to-know is very low. In the chapters 17 and 22, we will see that those less
sensitive bodies, and the intelligence agency of the customs, may however access the huge
computer databases of the DGSE on condition of precise requests subject to approvals. Doubtless,
the number and variety of the databases that the Gendarmerie, police, and intelligence agencies each
created since the end of the WWII would take aback the reader, to the point that he would take my
summary description of those for exaggeration. I created the chapter 17 for the sole sake to provide
him with facts and figures about those databases as they were in 2008. Pending this, I specify that
the Gendarmerie by far remains their biggest contributor.
 In the Part I., I presented extensively the psychological aspects of French spycraft, in which I
included descriptions of the sensors we find down the chain of human intelligence; that is to say,
sources, informants, snitches, and under-agents. The purport of this second part allows me to
describe them by categories and groups because they may act collectively by clusters and even by
large groups in certain instances, as we shall see in the next chapters. If this part concerns largely
domestic intelligence, counterterrorism, and counterintelligence, i.e. “at home,” specifically, yet in
many respects and on various occasions, the three latter branches connect naturally with intelligence
activities abroad; at least because of natural and incidental connections and reciprocity in action,
and also with respect to the doctrine of active measures. Herein I mean the political and the
religious activist, and of course the terrorist, are quite frequently in connection with the intelligence
agency of a foreign country, regardless whether those people are aware of this or not in actuality.
Therefrom, we find, “by extension,” if I may say so, the foreign student, worker, tourist, subsidiary
or local bureau of a foreign company or organization, the local branch of the foreign sect or
religious movement, and similar.
All those foreign people and entities that at times are truly hostile under appearances of normality
and nicety, therefore mingle with the local population that is already monitored by the tight web of
the domestic intelligence apparatus, I am describing in this chapter and in the following others. In
short, I am saying that the reader who wants to put himself in the shoes of the domestic spy for a
while must bear in mind that, when we are talking about domestic intelligence, we are also tackling
the other subject of foreign intelligence, already. Whereof, an additional interest in active measures
because in all countries the reasons justifying domestic intelligence are twofold, necessarily. The
first, I already explained at the beginning of this chapter, is to rein in the natural reactions of the
population to the decisions of the ruling elite that often are unpopular. The second is to forestall
foreign attempts to turn those decisions into opportunities serving the interests / agendas of other
countries, by arousing these reactions precisely; that is to say, counter-interference. I guess my
earlier quote of U.S. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell sums up what this other
mission actually is better than I could, and with greater authority than mine.
Occasional and regular informants who are contributing to the global domestic intelligence effort
in France chiefly are small business owners, and more particularly of cafés, bars, restaurants, hotels,
and garages. Those individuals may be more or less willing to cooperate, without running the risk to
be openly harassed when not. However, refusal to cooperate with the police or gendarmes is often
insidiously sanctioned by special measures, such as insufficient mutual police assistance in the event
of disturbances or even unfavourable prejudices, in addition to bad publicity. Then petty troubles
and wanton rebuttals on ordinary administrative steps may follow, in addition to bad publicity. This
is especially true in small towns where “everybody knows everybody”. To this already large
network come to add firefighters, military and private security guards, postmen and mailmen, taxi
drivers, and ambulance drivers, who all can be counted on as zealous collaborators, usually.
Then, gendarmes more than the police use to pay impromptu visits to their best informants,
especially after dusk and on their usual night surveillance patrols to warrant suitable discretion.
Worthy local domestic intelligence is collected through those discreet meetings made casual and
even friendly around a drink—or two. Yet the nature of the thus collected intelligence stays various,
sometimes mixed with rumors and gossips of poor interest again, inescapably. The job of the
gendarmes is also to separate the wheat from the chaff, and there is much chaff or redundant
information the more often, simply because the source wants to show his good will when he has
nothing of interest in hand. When the informant is the owner or manager of a local business, the
gendarmes use the opportunity to give some names and descriptions of people living around, whom
“one should be wary not to hire”. This is how simple blacklisting orchestrated by the State is carried
out in rural France, between other particular provisions; this is very common but does not mean the
thus blacklisted people are socially eliminated, formally speaking. Typically, the beleaguered ones
evolve down the marshes of petty criminality, delinquency, and marginality in general; that is to say,
of the French lumpenproletariat. Then in this minority we find people expelled from the
Freemasonry or who pose as their foes, ex-cops, ex-military, and ex-officials of small ranks and
their relatives who caused “troubles” or attempted to.[252] In exchange for their cooperation, those
domestic sensors enjoy a relative tolerance when they should normally receive a ticket for a traffic
offense, and the same unofficial rule applies the easier with the police. However, since the early
2000s, cancelling traffic tickets and speeding tickets in particular became a difficult service to
render in return for the tips because the government took particular provisions against it, in reaction
to an enormous number of abuses. Before the 2000s, unofficial estimates of the number of traffic
tickets that were thus cancelled amounted to several hundreds of thousands a year, and the sole task
of cancelling them was reputedly a time-consuming burden to each police officer.
The capacity of the gendarmes and police to retaining and recruiting new informants rests on a
natural need in Man to feel “safer than the others,” mainly, and even more to hold the intimate
feeling “to be an active part of the power of the State,” he perceives as a special privilege.[253]
Schadenfreude is not so far with this, and all gendarmes and police are taught about this leverage in
human intelligence, even though most of them fail to realize they enlisted for this very same reason
themselves, more or less consciously.
Voluntary firefighters are implicitly expected to report to the Gendarmerie or to their Chief
Firemen about anybody’s abnormal or suspicious behavior, as in France they are assimilated to
military, and formally in large cities where firefighters indeed are a military corps under the
command of the Ministry of Defense. Nobody formally asks them to do this; they all do it
spontaneously because they feel their duty subsumes preventing all risks of events hazardous to the
well-being of the society and to public order. This goes without saying in their understanding, and
that is why firefighters in France’s towns and countryside are regular and particularly zealous
domestic spies; but everyone knows this in the country. The corps of firefighters thus is an
additional and potent force in domestic spying of about 247,000 men.
Then we find town’s mayors numbering about 36,000. In France, mayors are elected people who
by law are also Judicial Police Officers and Chiefs of Police in their cities and towns. Indeed, a
decree bestows them upon the extraordinary power of local Officier de Police Judiciaire–OPJ
(Judicial Police Officers), especially when their towns and budgets are too small to hire such
subordinates.[254] Mayors of hamlets and towns enjoy dependable local informant networks,
beginning with that of town employees. Then about all inhabitants of a town want to be in good
terms with their mayor; it is a normal attitude in any country. This title of Judicial Police Officer
gives French mayors the right to receive complaints and denunciations, to ascertain facts and do
minutes, and even to carry arrests of suspects and to place them on custody. Mayors very rarely do
all such things though, at least because they do not have the right to carry a gun, and because they
are not trained for this anyway. Notwithstanding, mayors are naturally in close and nearly daily
touch with local brigades of Gendarmerie or / and with the police. As an aside, mayors lose this
capacity to know everything is happening in their towns when they are too large for this. From this
critical point on, they even do not know anything anymore, simply because the local elite drag them
out of the multitudes who elected them, and they are overwhelmed by politics and local influence
games and schemes. Thus, they become members of local elite, whose privacy and moves must be
monitored and recorded by police officers of the SCRT each time they are deemed “of interest,” to
fill their dossier secrets.
Retired officials, police, gendarmes, and military either, constitute together an additional and
enormous network of occasional and regular informants. The same applies to people working in
private security companies, whose number is rapidly growing since the 1980s, and in private
detective and investigation agencies, even if they are a tiny number of sensors. For this privileged
status makes them stumbling on interesting and profitable discoveries and opportunities highly
pertinent to domestic intelligence, and so they are accounted for as valuable permanent contacts
with legally justifiable and effective capacities in monitoring and shadowing. Actually, owners and
managers of private security companies and of private detective and investigation agencies often are
active intelligence employees undercover of the DGSI and DGSE in the context of the privatization
of the services.
The costly military conscription was abolished in France in 1997, to the regret of many in the
intelligence community because until that year conscription allowed to know many things on nearly
all French males.[255] In each military unit, commissioned officers were tasked to fill an individual
card on each conscript detailing his behavioral profile. This information came to add to an IQ test
note of a sort with a maximum of 20 points, and to a physical and health assessment, both done on
the draft physical exam. Once reunited, those pieces of information made highly detailed and
accurate individual cards of great and instant help to the Gendarmerie, the police, and intelligence
agencies, of course, each time those bodies had to investigate on a French male subject from one
reason or another because they could figure accurately what kind of person they were about to deal
with, beforehand.
Nonetheless, the central carding system of the conscripts of the Ministry of Defense stays in
unofficial use, as the last drafted Frenchmen just reached their 40s in 2018. Since 1998, however,
the government embarked on an intensive recruitment campaign for the Army, the Gendarmerie,
and the police, which indeed attracts numerous young French, woman alike thenceforth because of
the important rate of unemployment in France. Earlier in 1983, was even created a Groupement de
Gendarmes Auxilliaires–GGA (Auxiliary Gendarmes Group) that recruited people as civilian
contractors of the Gendarmerie, wearing a particular uniform unlike that of the gendarmes. The
special provision was abolished at the same time of the military conscription in 1997, and recreated
one year latter only, in 1998, to give to recruits the new status of Gendarme Adjoint Volontaire–
GAV, which still today offers an opportunity to civilians to join the Gendarmerie for assisting non-
commissioned officers of this corps upon their signing of a military contract for a term of six years.
Officially, the provision is available to anybody envisages enlisting in the Gendarmerie upon this
six-years probationary period. There would be 14,000 such Gendarmes Adjoints Volontaires
(Volunteer Assistant Gendarmes) as in 2018, and the same for the police, with the re-creation in
2000 of a similar civilian police corps of Adjoint de Sécurité–AdS (Security Assistant) upon the
signing of a three years contract. There were 11,000 ADS in 2018. Both GAV and AdS are paid less
than the minimum legal wage of about 1,300 euros once social charges are deduced or $1,460, and
even much less in the Gendarmerie.
 14. Counterintelligence.
T he counterespionage mission of the DGSE often overshadows that of the DGSI. The claim is
justified, regardless of the power game of the Ministry of Defense. The United States at some point
in its history gave to the FBI, counterpart of the DGSI, a reach abroad that France never had any
intention to endow to this civilian agency. a reach abroad that France never had any intention to
endow to its civilian agencies. The will of the former country to defend its interests abroad and the
controverted impartiality of Interpol–ICPO, French owned, in addition, justified its need of a
reliable police international network, to begin with.
In the French culture of intelligence, the word “counterespionage” (contre-espionnage) holds the
preference over “counterintelligence” when officially used; for the latter has an Anglo-Saxon origin
and remains so. In an entirely different realm, but to best exemplify the importance of the French
cultural and linguistic claims, there are three possible words in French, at least, to name a human
being traveling in space, astronaute, cosmonaute, and spationaute.[256] The choice of any of them
depends largely on political claims. English-speaking spies enjoy the alternative “intelligence” and
“espionage” their French-speaking counterparts do not really have, only by the faults of jingoism
and rivalry. However, as the French word renseignement is the exact translation of “intelligence,”
one ought to ask why the French translation contre-renseignement for the English
“counterintelligence” was never used to solve the Gallic problem; especially when noticing that the
intelligence agencies of the Ministry of Defense, the DRM in particular, make their resistance to the
Anglo-Saxon culture conspicuous by using the letters “RO” to stand for Renseignement d’Origine
(Intelligence of … Origin) as prefix to denote all categories of intelligence, e.g. ROHUM for
“HUMINT,” ROEM for COMINT / SIGINT / ELINT, etc.
Nonetheless, everyone in the DGSE would accept my explanation in a previous chapter on the
differences in definition between “counterespionage” and “counterintelligence” as such. In the
French intelligence community, the English words “intelligence” and “counterintelligence” are
understood unanimously and correctly, but their uses are seen as inopportune Anglicism.
Having cleared the subtlety in translation, I can say that in the higher spheres of the French
intelligence community and in those of the DGSE and SGDSN more especially, everyone
acknowledges importance of the link between domestic intelligence and foreign intelligence, I am
stressing in this book. The chapter 12 on active measures helped the reader understand why,
although these perception and scope of intelligence activities do not appear in the French
Constitution, nor in any other legal text. As the DGSE cannot formally and officially state the
existence of this linkage therefore, to the least, this agency does it by self-censoring the words
“domestic intelligence,” and by subsuming “counterespionage” in it, implicitly, as former Director
of the DGSE Claude Silberzahn thus did: “The function of counterespionage is the matrix of the
spirit and methods of the intelligence services [i.e. the DGSE]. Within it, this is the service
specifically in charge of CE [i.e. Contre-Espionnage] that sets forth the whole system of search,
cards, facts cross-checking, and of men”.[257] We find the relation again with the term contre-
ingérence (“counter-interference”) also in use in the DGSE, which subsumes implicitly the other
activities of counterinfluence and counter-propaganda.
On the French territory, we find regional chief officers of the DGSE who have their offices
hidden in the barracks of ordinary regiments in most instances, unbeknownst to the ordinary
military quartered in them. The main criterion to choose the location where a regional DGSE officer
has his office is not “the largest regional city,” nor “the regional administrative city,” but, on the
contrary, to be safely sheltered in a generally isolated military barrack, in an area where few
civilians live and do not have logical or justifiable reasons to go or to wander around.
A regional Chief Officer of the DGSE somehow equivalent to a Chief of Station always works
under military status, and he is a middle-ranking commissioned officer, i.e. from captain to
lieutenant colonel. He and the intelligence officers, non-commissioned officers the more often, who
are under his direct command in the regiment’s barracks that serve as cover, are given phony official
responsibilities ranging from “hardware responsible officer” to “social assistant officer” of the
regiment.
Those regional staffs of the DGSE are relatively sparred the permanent scrutiny of the Security
Service, as they are small clusters of people who must regularly investigate in the field. They enjoy
a proportionally large number of sources, contacts, and agents who are active and retired ordinary
military and employees in intelligence, mostly. Additionally, they may enjoy at any time the
cooperation of the Gendarmerie, and of the regional units of the DGSI in the framework of the
regular cooperation with this other agency.
Regional DGSE cells on the French territory are concerned with offensive counter-espionage
mainly, but also with intelligence operations abroad when their regions have a common border with
a foreign country. Switzerland, Italy, and Spain are particularly aimed at with respect to this last
point, and the United Kingdom because of important traffic exchanges with France across the so-
called “Channel” via ferryboats and a railways line under the sea.
The most active—burdened would be more accurate—regional Chief Officers of the DGSE are
working in French territories overseas, where they enjoy greater human and technical supports
including the military, plus very active exchanges with the DGSE of “metropolitan France”.[258]
Based on a frequency in patterns, I noticed, I would say that the Territorial collectivity of Saint-
Barthélémy, called colloquially “Saint-Barth’” in the DGSE, is the most active among all with
respect to intelligence and counterintelligence, against the United States in particular. This is
mainly, and about only, justified by the geographical location of this small island near the U.S.
coast. “Saint-Barth” actually is the DGSE hub / command center for the whole Caribbean, in
immediate connection with the other island of Saint-Martin located about 20 miles hence.
Before this, in the 1960s and 1970s in particular, the small French archipelago Saint Pierre and
Miquelon, located further North-East from Saint-Barthélémy and only 15 miles West of the
Canadian province of Newfoundland, had been an important SDECE station from which French
intelligence activities were carried out in Quebec, the French-speaking region of Canada, and also in
the United States.
Then, ranking second in French intelligence activities in French territories overseas, come the
islands Martinique and Guadeloupe, still in the French Caribbean. This particularity owes to
locations close to the U.S, coast again, but also to Northern South-America. For the SDECE and
then the DGSE have been concerned for more than half a century with drug trafficking between
Columbia and the U.S. State of Florida.
Réunion, another island located near Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, has been active rather
because of its proximity with continental Africa, which comes to explain the existence in it of a
French Air Force base. Things possibly changed in this island, since France took over Mayotte
officially in 2011 and made it a new French overseas district (département) after she vetoed a
resolution of the Security Council of the UNO that would affirm Comorian sovereignty over this
island. Wherefrom, the interest to France in being one of the five members of the Security Council
of the UNO when it comes to matters of this kind, be it said in passing.
I seem to recollect I never heard of all other French territories overseas as particularly active in
intelligence except once about French New Caledonia, near New Zealand and Australia; but this
does not mean there would be no activities of this order in these other places. French Guyane, as
example, has all it takes to be an important hub in French intelligence activities in South-America,
even if Martinique and Guadeloupe are often cited in this respect. Nonetheless, French Guyane has
a strong need of counterintelligence and security, due to the space center France has in the area of
Kourou, currently in close cooperation with Russia.
All those French territories overseas together come at a huge financial cost to France because
none has natural resources in significant quantities, nor industries with the exception of the space
center in French Guyane that hires less than 2,000 French nationals and several hundreds of Russian
nationals. They all are plagued with two-digit unemployment rates that go as far as more than 50%,
and more than 80% of people living below the poverty threshold in some instances. French
governmental representations, costs in infrastructure, roads, and important expenditures in welfare
are largely justified by a constant need to taming local irredentist claims and stifling rampant unrest.
[259]

France has a very particular and unofficial provision to settle her authority in all her overseas
territories, which actually dates back to her colonialist era. It consists in bestowing half a dozen or
so of families of local indigenous people upon monopolies over the private economy, and in giving
to them a free hand with setting prices of consumer goods and services. This explains why those
prices are making the cost of living in those places about the same as in New York City and
Switzerland. Higher wages for officials working there are defined to adapt to this demanding
prerequisite, while the averages wage of indigenous people stays that of metropolitan France, with a
marked predominance of the minimum legal salary of around 1,300-1,400 euros ($1,460-1570).
Thus, those indigenous people are put in a situation of permanent financial precariousness and
vulnerability, therefore of expected powerlessness against the French tiny minority of
“metropolitans” who all belong to the local upper-middle and upper classes, de facto. Consequently,
as those few indigenous families represent together the top of the economic upper class, exclusively,
this fact dismisses all complaint for colonialism and racism, implicitly and unquestionably. In return
for the extraordinary privilege, the super-rich families are the biggest and most reliable tax
contributors in their respective territories, thus helping France paying for the welfare of the rest of
indigenous population. To the point that in the Ministry for the Economy and Finance in Paris, they
are known as among the biggest taxpayers in France.[260] Taking as example the island of Reunion,
five such indigenous families share with each other all local business sectors, imports / exports and
wholesale included, in the place. This situation makes them, directly or indirectly, the only
employers in the private sector of this island with a total population of 866,000.
The aforesaid explains why domestic intelligence and spying activities in these territories to
which we could add Corsica in the Mediterranean Sea are the most active in France. The only real
reasons for which France is making the sacrifice of this handicapping running cost are maintaining
advanced military and intelligence capacities around the World serving the conquest of foreign
territories, the defense of natural resources she thus appropriates, and supporting foreign
intelligence activities of various natures.[261] France prefers to federate these concerns and activities
under the generic and softer arguments of “geopolitics” and “defense of French interests overseas,”
often supported by pretenses of assistance to her allies, cooperation with them, and commitment to
humanitarian activities.
To the regional stations of the DGSE come to add the special “villages,” I described at the end of
the chapter 4, in which C category intelligence employees are treating and refining raw intelligence
sent by telecommunication interception stations and centers, places where some special military
units are stationed,[262] clandestine regional surveillance teams, training teams, and other
decentralized intelligence units and cells, contractors, agents, and contacts.
Overall, the DGSE has a much closer relationship with the DRSD and the DRM than with the
DGSI, mainly because of a mutual understanding around an all-military culture. The DGSE and the
DGSI each catches most of the attention of the public in France as abroad, due to the notoriety of
their official activities mainly, thus putting the DRM, the DRSD, and a number of other agencies in
a shadow they obviously appreciate. In spite of this, cooperation and joint missions and operations
between the DGSE and the DGSI within the French borders remain common, the latter agency is
actually acting as a “stooge” of the former in this perception, so to speak.
The DST, ancestor of the DGSI since the end of the WWII, was haloed for long with certain
prestige among the French public. French people—including myself in the 1980s—regarded spies
of this agency as their movie’s avatars that film-directors Henri Verneuil and Claude Pinoteau
pictured flatteringly: savvy and committed middle-aged cops in trench coats chasing Soviet spies in
Paris. From the late 1990s, there was a first perceptible change in this popular perception of the
DST, which portended what the counterespionage agency would indeed become arrived in 2008.
The birth of the transient DCRI marked the official burial of the French spy-hunters as the public
had always imagined them, and the newborn DGSI following the miscarriage did not soothe the
national mourning; it was even worse. For it shown up as a would-be-modern administrative body
hiring stern clerks spending their days listening to the telecommunications of desperate North-
African immigrants on the brink to blow up themselves in some subway stations. This new
perception is not so remote from the reality, as a number of testimonies of the unflattering sort on
what the DGSI actually is come to foster it.
The DGSI that logically should have had the same leading role in counterespionage and
subsequent prestigious position the FBI enjoys in its country actually does not; at all. Beside a new
avowed general mission focusing on counterterrorism, the DGSI today has a reputation of Stasi-like
bureau, following a series of hyped arrests and interrogations of would-be-spies, small
whistleblowers, crackpots, and even journalists as of late in 2019. For much I knew firsthand at the
time of the DST, too often the arrests in question actually are consequent to setups that the DGSE,
the DRM, and the DRSD arrange against its own when these agencies have an urgent need to
disavow them. On the contrary, the reader who keeps abreast of the French news noticed, while
some journalists and scholars then and now name very suspicious Russian nationals living
permanently on the French soil, the DGSI fails conspicuously to express any interest in them each
of those times; to the puzzlement of the public, obviously. Most relevant to the latter fact, the Affair
Benalla, to be explained in the chapter 23, epitomizes the oddity that has become the norm for
several decades already, without the political apparatus ever brings any explanation in its defense
for it.
For much I could understand, the DGSI has its own networks of sources, contacts, and henchmen
on the French soil; and also a small foreign network of officers posted in certain countries with
official positions in French embassies, consulates, and other public or private bodies, I surmise only.
The spirit of those would-be-spy hunters is much different of what it is in DGSE’s similar
networks; in the sense, chiefly, that it is inspired by instantly recognizable French police mentality,
perceptions, and values. This leaves the feeling of a neat caesura between two distinct tribes in a
same middle sharing little in common, I take the liberty to caricature as the much Gallic old school
gumshoes of the previous century versus hardheaded modern mafia people. The obvious imbalance
in power and capabilities between the two comes to confirm the ongoing extinction of the
counterintelligence agency. Today, the DGSI eerily suggests a “super-RG”.
Indeed, the DGSE is permanently informed on everything may happens in the DGSI, without
reciprocity. The DGSI perceives the DGSE as “the secretive military” endowed with extraordinary
powers, to be dreaded. The DGSE has the power to “pick up” anyone is working in and with the
DGSI, temporarily or permanently, as it sees fit. It reciprocally has the power to “give” its own
sources, contacts, under-agents, agents, intelligence officers, and even senior executives to the
latter, which it does condescendingly. The DGSI has no say about all this; it just proceeds
accordingly, and that is all. Sources, agents, and contacts of the DGSI thus happen to find
themselves in touch with intelligence officers of the DGSE, overnight and without any formal
notice; from this instant on, they report either to both the DGSI and the DGSE or to the latter alone
when the former reverently retire. It is not so rare that someone be thus shifted several times in his
lifetime. From deductive reasoning, I cannot but believe the pattern reproduces with all other
civilian intelligence agencies France has created since the early 2000s… especially because they
much resemble directorates and services of the DGSE, to me!
Then comes what I call “informal and occasional domestic intelligence and surveillance,” which
area encompasses the fields of counterinfluence and counter-interference. For they materialize
spontaneously under the form of a very large number of occasional and isolated informants, all
ideologically and politically committed, typically. Those are acting as agents do, though on their
own, largely. This new breed did not exist at all still in the early 1980s. In an earlier chapter, I
included it in the general category of mouchards (“little snitches,” or occasional informants), as
most of them are not regular informants of any intelligence agency, nor even of the police, the
Gendarmerie, or the internal revenue service. Their number, on a steady rise since the 1990s, owes
to a particular action of domestic influence, I will explain at the end of the chapter 19. The most
visible individuals of this category act virtually on the Internet, and physically as founders and
members of small associations. This does not necessarily make them “state trolls” formally
speaking, but one can hardly guess to whom they are “working” for, exactly, because there are
agents of influence and counterinfluence in France who exist only by the miracle of their all-
personal and independent commitment, already; unaware to be agents having an importance that is
much too small to make them assets. About all of them are manipulated or influenced only, and not
formally handled by anyone in particular; they are forgotten as soon as they are not helping in some
way. I call them “committed citizens” because I cannot say “militia” for wants of any real hierarchy
ruling them either.
Those “committed citizens” exemplify a social phenomenon of our time that also gave birth to the
blogger’s generation, and to those countless people who spend much of their days and even personal
money to painstakingly copy, convert, and make available 24 / 7 all songs, films, and digitalized
versions of books for free on peer-to-peer websites. Through the same conditions, others
spontaneously make themselves defenders of some abstract causes they picked up among as many
as the mind can find or invent, irrelevant to their actual personal concerns in all cases. Yet the zeal
they prove capable of with this may go as far as fanaticism. To a number of those, the hobby turned
to be peering, prying, spooking, disparaging, and hacking and pirating, of course. Why all those
ordinary and normal people are doing these crazy things?
The two causes are boredom and frustration. In both cases, they just need to act; “to do something
with their lives,” some others say—does the reader remember? So, the phenomenon in question
cannot be new in actuality; it is as old as humanity is, and it is simply booming. In 1951, already,
Eric Hoffer described accurately the profiles of all those people in his The True Believer: Thoughts
on the Nature of Mass Movements. I would not question even a comma in this must-read that is
more of our actuality than ever. Notwithstanding, the thing is the French intelligence community has
the clout to make a profit of as many of those idling people as it possibly can, since they sincerely
believe in their causes with a dogged devotion, and are ready to work for free without ever shirking.
There is no “troll farm” in France; they are everywhere in the country and abroad, even if some act
in few small cells of a dozen or so, consciously for an intelligence agency in that case, as we shall
see in the chapter 20.
It would be impossible to present a comprehensive schema or detailed organizational chart of the
French domestic intelligence apparatus that comes regularly in support to counterintelligence
because for more than a century, multiple and endless crosschecking in intelligence have been
integral to a culture of the trade, passionate in this country. At the image of the Levée en masse of
1793,[263] the involvement of the whole population in the effort is constantly sought after. At least, it
is possible to figure the extent of the effort by reading the Lexicon, I wrote for this book.
Alike, it would be difficult to evaluate the total number of informants, contacts, snitches, agents,
gendarmes, and police who invest themselves in this need for mass surveillance. Based on the
previously mentioned, the reader will find easier to figure out the proportion as a single digit
number on ten, as Albert Speer did in his Memories,[264] meaning the figure cannot be inferior to
one informant on ten people in peacetime, or 10% of the population in any case. If we exclude the
17% in France of all people aged under 15, this makes 5.6 million people. However, given the
extraordinary efforts invested in a quest for more people ready to report to a public body about
suspicious activities of any kind, the proportion 2 on 10 seems closer to the truth, or 11.2 million
people including the intelligence community and all categories of sensors I presented earlier.
The latter figure would deserve to be compared to the very small estimated number of French
who joined the Resistance movement against the Nazis. Then I would willingly provide my own
estimate of the percentage of those who refuse to cooperate, whatever the threat commonly used can
be. As I noticed the two abstract figures seem close, wholesome, we would find 0.5% of
unabashedly uncooperative people in the most optimistic hypothesis. I would add, we find again this
proportion in all countries, with some regional exceptions that anthropologists, specialists in the
military, and intelligence specialists can explain, with surprising arguments and patterns in some
instances.[265]
From an administrative standpoint, but not officially, France drowns and conceals domestic
intelligence in the general mission of “homeland security” (my translation for Sécurité intérieure),
whose official prerogatives reduce to “Ensuring the internal security of the country and the
population”. Then homeland security is separated into two distinct general missions, of which the
second only is publicly commented.

1. Domestic intelligence, counterintelligence, influence, and counter-influence

(counter-interference).

2. Counterterrorism.

The National Police and the National Gendarmerie carry on the first above in its simplest form.
Then, to these two bodies it is advisable to add the municipal police, the rangers (Gardes forestiers),
the customs, and private security companies. Then the same staff, the DGSE, DGSI, DRSD, and a
number of other recently created agencies are officially concerned by this mission. Moreover, the
military also intervenes in this activity with the provisions of the Air Force and the Navy, which
constantly ensures together the protection of airspace and maritime approaches, as well as frequent
deployments of Army ground forces in public places, where they carry on open surveillance
missions. From 700 to 1,100 soldiers in combat fatigue and armed with an assault rifle[266] are
deployed for the terrestrial side, nearly half of them in Paris and suburbs, alone.
Again, the reader may be surprised to learn that the DGSE assists the police and the Gendarmerie
on a case-by-case basis; that is to say in contexts of criminal investigations deemed important or
“preoccupying,” such as very active and hard-to-catch criminal gangs, money counterfeiting,
kidnapping, computer hacking, sects, and large-scale frauds. It should be said, the line between
common criminality and espionage happens to be thin, and not “sometimes only” because
“increasingly,” indeed. In addition, as no country could possibly get rid entirely of its criminality,
the French law enforcement apparatus finds more pertinent to “tame” the most powerful and
influential criminals and gangs than to arrest and to jail them. This attitude that may surprise the
reader sums up as an unofficial rule saying, “It is better to control a known nuisance than to fight
again against new ones you don’t know at all.” Thereof, the logical and often chronological
progression of actions in the context that is of interest to us in this chapter: crime watch = domestic
surveillance, therefore, crime watch = foreign intelligence and terrorism watch.
Since the 1990s and possibly earlier, the DGSE in particular perceives metaphorically as a
“spider web” its capacities to spot and to track individuals and activities it deems suspicious, and
itself as a “spider”. The analogy differs somehow from that of the “octopus” inherited from the
times of the 2d Bureau. Actually, this cultural evolution in symbols is a direct consequence of a
potent development in monitoring / interception of telecommunications, I present in the chapter 22.
While the French population at least presumes of those exceptional passive capacities for want of
knowing their real ranges, it is still largely ignorant of their common uses and purview today;
exactly as it is misled about the realities of the counterintelligence mission.
Far beyond what the capacities of the DGSI should be, the DGSE has contacts and even
employees in about all administrations and public services including police, Gendarmerie, customs,
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, TracFin and the Ministry for the Economy and Finances,
administrations and services responsible for immigration and for ensuring the application in France
of international conventions, agreements or arrangements concerning the protection of refugees.[267]
Let alone a large number of contacts and employees undercover this agency has in all French major
companies and groups; not necessarily justified by the privatization of the services in particular, but
more largely by the doctrine of active measures that includes it.
Come to exemplify the latter fact, at some point in the 1980s, the DGSE had so many of its men
in ELF, that it was popularly said this oil company was a “subsidiary of the DGSE”. ELF was also
an unofficial and large funds provider to the SDECE, and then to the DGSE. Finally, ELF merged
with its local challenger TotalFina to form TotalFinaElf, and this new company changed again its
name for Total in 2003. Implicitly, the exceptional provision was meant to say to the masses, “There
are no French spies anymore in French major oil companies”. The reader may easily figure the
secret business resumed with Total, for there is no oil business without spies in France, and one may
find them even in SMEs manufacturing parts for oilrigs, to cite one true such example, I knew
firsthand.
I do not know how the French counterintelligence keeps an eye on foreign diplomatic and
consular staffs in the country, as I was never concerned with this activity specifically, yet I learned
enough about it to explain the followings.
Of course, both the DGSI and the DGSE do their best to arrange for their people to be hired in
foreign embassies and consulates on the French soil, to the exception of Russia[268]—and to that of
certain other countries, possibly; this I do not know. Then ordinary French nationals who happen to
be so, when entirely by their own or purely coincidentally, yet are inescapably bumped into and
encouraged to cooperate each time their positions are deemed “of interest”. Well, they are always of
interest, actually, lest a spy under diplomatic cover might recruit as agent a French national that a
consulate or embassy hired. The latter hypothesis remains valid, even though foreign diplomats
assume by default that all French nationals they hire either are tipping the French
counterintelligence or are their agents. By the way, did the reader know that a French who has been
hired in a U.S. embassy or consulate has no hope to emigrate and to settle in the United States upon
this professional experience? For, should the professional integrity of those French nationals
working in foreign embassies seem to outweigh their expected loyalty to France, then their hostile
recruitment must takes place or they will be considered by default, reciprocally, as foreign agents;
the French intelligence community never gives up with special cases of this kind. Fortunately, if I
may say so, the more often the corruption is carried out the “soft way” because it is as simple as to
find out a good friend or even a relative to those workers, whose job is to gently worming
information out of them. As sad as it may be, a relative is no more trustworthy than an acquaintance
when dealing with French intelligence. A couple of times, I heard in the DGSE this principle of the
trivial sort: “If you cannot get in by the door, try the window”.
Recruiting people who are already in the place does not limit to diplomatic representations. As I
said, foreign companies having activities on the French soil are targeted either, especially when they
are American, British, and Japanese. Indeed, there is a discreet but aggressive hunt for possible
American and British spies on the French territory, which often resembles phobia. For much I know,
Japan ranks third in the list of the bad guys, even before Canada, South Korea, Australia, New
Zealand, not to forget Thailand and a handful of other Southern Asian countries.
One of my former colleagues in the DGSE, a lawyer who also happened to be a mason in the
GOdF, I will name Hervé, worked for some years as infiltration agent with a specialty in maritime
affairs at the Paris bureau of the well-known British insurance company Lloyd’s. One day, in the
1980s, I was instructed in emergency to go to see this man I knew already, at his office, posing as a
visitor. The thing was to extract a large batch of sensitive documents from the Lloyd’s building.
Once in his office, Hervé reassured me by saying that everything was going to be fine, and that I
only had to behave as an ordinary visitor. I had been previously instructed to wear a fine suit for the
latter reason. Indeed, getting out of this building while carrying about ten pounds of sensitive
documents proved to be quick and easy. Hervé normally resigned from his position of lawyer in
Lloyd’s a few days later, as if nothing of particular ever happened. Then he created his own law firm
he settled Rue de la Faisanderie, in the rich 16th arrondissement of Paris. He is one of those lucky
individuals the DGSE rewarded well; he owns his apartment located near his office, and a large
estate in the countryside near Montargis with a nice swimming pool. Before he worked at Lloyd’s,
the DGSE had sent him in Africa, where he had been advisor in legal affairs for several African
heads of states, and he was the legal assistant of my step-brother in intelligence affairs for a number
of years.
Defensive counterespionage may easily evolve to espionage, penetration attempts, influence and
deception; that is to say, offensive counterespionage. When so, the technique consists in finding out
the best candidate for a job offer in a targeted foreign regional bureau, with the expectation that this
person will rise in the company eventually, and then will go to work at the headquarters in the
United States. In the 1990s, I was in frequent touch with one such penetration agent, whom I shall
present in the chapter 27. Large foreign companies, and groups, looking for settling a bureau in
France know all this, usually, and foreign diplomatic and consular representations the more so. Of
course, French counterespionage services know that they know it, or else they assume “by default”
that they know it. Consequently, the reader may ask, possibly, “What the purpose of all this is, if
everybody knows, then?” Several possible reasons are called upon to answer this question.
Of course, any foreign diplomat is wary not to talk about sensitive matters in presence of an
employee who is a French national, yet certain patterns remain of interest. Here I mean things such
as unusual agitation in the premises, particular behavior of certain diplomats or sudden changes in
their demeanors, visits deemed unusual or “strange,” and so on. As example, thanks to snitches of
this category, the DGSE can be informed promptly of a French national who came in a foreign
embassy and asked for a meeting with the military attaché; possibly a “walk-in,” therefore, as
American counterspies say colloquially.[269]
Then there is an obvious need to give a bit of hard time to foreign spies who work in a consulate
or an embassy under diplomatic covers. Otherwise, their premises would transform into intelligence
stations. Then comes the simple will to annoy the diplomatic staff of a country in particular, just
because French relations with it are cold. Often, political and spy games appear more as fights
between little brats in a sandbox than as exchanges of shrewd skirmishes between top brains, for it
is all about getting on the opponent’s nerves and attempts to elicit mistakes, i.e. provocations.
As about the surveillance of foreign companies, things are different, since their raison d’être is
supposed to limit to business activities. Yet a foreign company may be thought to be active in
espionage, if it is trying to poach an engineer who masters a particular expertise or an executive
who knows much. At this point, we are entering the realm of industrial and technological
counterespionage, a field in which the DGSI and the DRSD are more active than the DGSE,
although the DGSE may take over a case to make it an offensive counterintelligence operation. In
short, the technique is to hire legally someone who knows a secret, instead of trying to steal this
secret. That is why the DGSI and the DRSD are constantly monitoring job ads in certain
publications and headhunters’ websites. The goal is to spot the suspicious offer whose particularly
restrictive criteria cannot but match the experience, knowledge and skills of one person only among
hundreds, i.e. a bait. As an aside, the DGSE itself very frequently does this on the French soil for
recruiting highly qualified French nationals and foreigners alike it previously spotted; the reader
must remember what I explained about opening a contact, and remember also when I said that the
DGSE can “forecast the future” of people it targets. The DGSE and the DRM are constantly looking
for such candidates whose qualities make them fit for penetration attempts. This case exemplifies
how counterespionage and espionage can merge, and thus justify joint operations between two or
more agencies.
 To the foreign company that is “fishing” with job ads, the risk to be outsmarted and penetrated
remains elevated, therefore, because once this company found out and hired the right person, the
DGSE may coerce him into becoming its agent in place, i.e. submarine. Or else the DGSE or
another intelligence agency may have recruited the person before his recruitment took place, in
order to make him attractive to this foreign company, in particular. Therefrom, not only the DGSE
or the DGSI can fabricate a suitable légende for the candidate, but it can also manipulate an
ordinary person to make him a sleeper agent unbeknownst to him. In either case, the candidate is a
bait, called chèvre, or “goat” in French intelligence jargon. As the candidate, once recruited by the
targeted company, is highly likely to have at least one dear relative who lives in France, or to have
some property, whose ownership could be questioned one way or another, then he is vulnerable to
corruption, inescapably. I shall present true cases of the latter sort in detail, in the chapter 27.
As about the raison for the choice of the word “goat” French spies use to name colloquially a bait,
instead of “fish” the U.S. counterintelligence uses for long, the reader possibly remembers a scene
in the film Jurasic Park, in which one such animal is used to make the tyrannosaurus rex show up.
The latter analogy is perfect, yet its origin is different, certainly older, and involves a wolf, I believe.
There are other ways to go round someone’s unwillingness to cooperate, as I explained earlier in
the chapters 3, 9, and 10. Now, I specify that coercion may begin with an anonymous and cryptic
warning sent to the employee the DGSE selected and helped to be hired unbeknownst to him at the
inception, about as it does with the unconscious super-agent of the socialite type, the reader saw
earlier either. The message may allege in terms obviously made vague and unclear that his
reputation of loyalty and honesty in his company might be sullied easily. Should such eventuality
arise, the warning alludes to the likelihood that not only he will lose his job, but also any hope to
find another one thereafter, as punishment for his denial. To the threat by the stick is added the
assurance of a carrot presented as an enviable position in a reputed company once the mission will
be accomplished. The promise may be truly honored or not, since the interest of a case officer who
will be eventually entrusted the running of the recruit is to make the cooperation profitable as long
as possible, as we have seen. Thus, the French employee of a foreign company can be trapped
without ever having done anything wrong; or because he is a loyal and honest people, precisely. As
a rule, the French intelligence community never stops short of ethical considerations, and it never
lets sentiments interfering in its affairs; it appeals to its targets’ softer side without ever committing
to any such reciprocity.
At this point, we are not far from the temptation of a deception operation, which French spies use
to call enfumage, or “smoking-out,” and also montage, which must rather be translated as
“undertaking” or “enterprise,” in this context; otherwise formally specified as “code 51” when the
goal specifically is to recruit the source by blackmailing him. In other words, when a foreign
company is visibly looking for a technological / scientific secret, why not “sending” to it a specialist
who will reveal the wrong formula or the formula that has just been abandoned for a new and better
one? There is even better than that in the range of dirty tricks.
For example, harassing and manipulating an executive in a French company in the expectation he
will take the initiative to solicit its foreign competitor, entirely “by his own”. In this case, the goal is
to infiltrate a foreign company, and then to deceive it from within with bogus sensitive information
previously leaked to the exclusive knowledge of the thus tricked unconscious agent. The interest
with this option is that this individual is unaware to have been selected as penetration agent. As he is
made unconscious agent, the foreign company that must hire him will see by itself that he does his
“walk-in” in good faith. American spies are talking about a “loaded agent,” i.e. a fake defector
carrying bogus secrets, whereas the DGSE names him colloquially a “goat” in that other case, too.
In case of success, the organizers will discreetly and patiently (very patiently) monitor the activities
of their goat inside the foreign company, until he visibly wins the trust of his hierarchy. At this
point, the “revelation stage” of the mission (the last one) may take place. It consists in “awakening”
aka “activating” the still unconscious agent, by making him aware he has been manipulated all
along in actuality. Thenceforth, he is given precise instructions he must follow to the letter, under
the threat to be reported as a spy or as a con artist to his hierarchy.
In this montage, the organizers generally secure their position with a gathering of additional
evidences of past wrongdoings the agent did or was lured into doing. Such threats range from
evidences of cheating on one’s partner, to tax dodging, or worse. The stage of the terrible revelation
to the employee that “he actually is a spy” is craftily arranged in the expectation to set a strong
psychological shock, and to arouse in him a feeling of helplessness. Once more, we are brought
back to the psychological aspect of hostile recruitment, and to the driving of the recruit to inhibition
behavior, here translating as “unconditional surrendering and obedience” to a “master” who may
never show in person, in order to leave no evidence and even not a clue about his identity and
country.
Of course, the latter trick has been used to penetrate foreign intelligence agencies, and not only
by France; so much so that all intelligence agencies in the World are wary of the risk, to the point
that many solved the problem simply by never recruiting defectors anymore.[270] Typically, this kind
of deception operation consisted in encouraging an intelligence officer into becoming a defector,
after he was suitably “loaded” with few but decisive disinformation mixed with numerous true
secrets that are not so important in the absolute. Once more, this is the same in the principle as in Le
Carré’s famous novel The Spy who came in from the Cold.
A game of this kind may even go farther, as the targeted intelligence agency may pretend to give
the defector his bona fide, although it holds or just suspects him to be a penetration agent in reality,
in the aim to make him work on a number of bogus documents and cases especially fabricated for
the circumstance. The expectation is the defector deceives the enemy that sent him by transmitting
to it fake information in return via its penetration agent. Eventually, the would-be-penetrated
intelligence agency pretends to unmask the fake defector, who is given a heavy prison sentence, and
makes the whole of it a fake affair it leaks or releases to the media. Then the agency makes a
pretense that the secrets he truly gave to the enemy have devastating consequences, which is untrue,
of course; for this is a “message” meant to convince the enemy that their penetration agent indeed
provided it with intelligence of great value.
No matter how known the trick above is, still today, it is used frequently in industrial espionage
and sabotage, as the managerial staffs of private companies are obviously not enlightened in
spycraft as a large and modern intelligence agency is. Certain French intelligence and
counterintelligence agencies are monitoring French private companies, largely for preventing this
eventuality to happen; it was an exclusive mission of the DST (now DGSI) and of the DSM (now
DRSD) until the 2000s. French provisions otherwise taken against this risk consist in placing “ex-
spies” in French private companies and groups, with positions in human resources or security
departments. Today, the DGSE is especially concerned in this respect, and this agency thus proceeds
by hiring people for three to five years only (as contractors), and then by arranging for them to be
hired in those French private business with positions of this kind. Thus, they are made watchdogs in
“retirement,” either permanently or temporarily until they are called to work in intelligence again,
i.e. long enough to foreign intelligence agencies to forget those agents after they framed them. In
French intelligence jargon, it is said about an agent who must stop working in intelligence for some
years because a foreign intelligence agency is strongly suspected to have framed him, “il doit se
refaire une santé,” or “he must be healthy again,” and otherwise, “il est en congé maladie,” or “he
is on sick leave”.
The reader could be struck by the number of cases of French executives who worked in large
foreign companies for years, until they resigned suddenly to joining a French one, be appointed
unexpectedly to senior positions in the French public service, or be hired by an NGO. This actually
is their reward for their long and successful penetration missions.
Most defensive counterespionage investigations and missions on the French territory are
consecutive to happenstances, that is to say, spontaneous reports from ordinary citizens and contacts
who act out of patriotism or else. Those occasional informants even did not think about espionage;
they just thought they noticed “strange things” or “strange people”. Along with time, serendipity is
the best ally of the spy hunter.
For decades, the French counterespionage does not hunt Russian spies anymore; the DST did it
until 1958, when its Director Roger Wybot was dismissed for this reason, precisely.[271] Diplomatic
and economic reasons, political more especially, prohibit any attempt to reveal publicly that the
French counterintelligence focuses its efforts on the countries I named earlier. Thus, this leaves the
French public with the deceptive assumption that the missions of the DGSE and the DGSI, the only
two agencies on more than twenty they hear of in the media, today limit to tracking Muslim
terrorists. In turn, the unconscious self-censorship comes to provide teams in charge of French
domestic influence with an opportunity to question openly “the American spy mania”. Since 1998,
to be precise, there is not a single day in France without a news on television, radio, print medium,
or on the Internet reporting about U.S. espionage versus very few reporting the same in France.
Exceptions relate to telecommunications interception exclusively, and to generalities only, as very
rarely a case of espionage involving France is reported. Moreover, this French actuality on
espionage is crafted in way meant to foster enlistment in the DGSE and the DGSI, generally.
French counterintelligence has as striking particularity that its specialists and more especially its
executives are encouraged to rely on intuition. Those do not even wait for a shred of a clue to
launch an investigation on someone and to set up a surveillance mission. More to the surprise of the
reader, this approach even outweighs rational psychology; meaning they do not stop short of facts
saying that someone has no rational in doing or not doing something. Often, it is all about
confirmation bias, for much I could see and understand, and as the reader is going to understand
with true cases. On three occasions at least, I tell below, I witnessed an investigation launched on an
individual for reasons that were completely fanciful, imagined out of the whole cloth. “We never
know” is the recurring argument brandished against all exonerating evidences.
In the 2000s, the owner of a Chinese restaurant was suspected to bribe some of his customers
who worked for a defense contractor company nearby; no evidence whatsoever came to support the
idea. Actually, someone had identified a pattern in the fact that there was, in another city, a Chinese
restaurant also located near a company manufacturing highly sensitive electronics, yet without any
apparent connection between the two. That was all, but enough already in the eyes of a
counterintelligence officer to launch a harassment mission against the owner of the restaurant, in the
hope “to elicit something” supporting the hypothesis.
So, the neon lights of the luminous sign of the restaurant were broken repeatedly by some
“anonymous and mischievous people, wantonly,” while police in uniform paid frequent and
unexpected visits to the owner and each time behaved inquisitively with him, in front of the
customers. The apex of the thing was reached with no less than a fabricated police cold case
justifying the digging of a large hole in the dining room of the restaurant, in the hope to find the
remnants of some fictitious body. The “forensic investigation” legally justified the closure of the
restaurant for weeks, therefore. Upon two consecutive years of this treatment, no evidence of any
wrongdoing was found against the beleaguered Chinese owner, who yet found the strength not to
give up his business. Of course, he never knew that all the wrong done against him was not just a
streak of bad luck.
The second anecdote, unfolding in the early 2000s, relates to an American who lived in France
for a while. The DGSE suspected this man was an agent of the CIA. This time, it turned out that the
assumption was correct, as this man proved able to thwart the elaborate trap of this story in a way
that first unsettled, and then unnerved the men of the DGSE; for they had prepared painstakingly a
triple plot that involved important means and a number of agents and collaborators. The goal, in
case of success, limited to satisfy certain prerequisites suitable to the psychological weakening of
this American, to recruit him as double agent, or rather as triple agent since the DGSE would have
acted as proxy in the benefit of Russia.
The target, I will name “Peter,” was invited to a wedding that was to take place a hundred miles
or so from his home. It was an invitation he could hardly decline because the bride was a sister of
his wife. The wedding was authentic, but the DGSE jumped on the opportunity to make it a plot for
tricking Peter in several cunning ways, as we are going to see.
On the morning of his departure by car with his wife and his two kids, Peter took as a first safety
provision to take with him his desktop computer, he concealed in a large bag. However, as seen
from a spot where the surveillance team monitored 24 / 7 the entries and exits of Peter and his
family, the bag seemed to contain only a thick and heavy blanket that actually camouflaged the
computer.
The surveillance team had a key of Peter’s apartment, given by the realtor company that rented it.
For they had planned to tamper with this computer, to make mirror copies of its hard disks, and to
install on it a particular spying software, all this while Peter was away. A few hours later, however,
as the wedding meal had begun, the men of the DGSE understood their target had foresaw their plot,
possibly, and foiled it shrewdly; or else Peter just took a routine measure of safety with his
computer; no one could say, exactly. In any case, the American indeed had fooled them with his use
of these large bag and blanket, as the coveted computer was no longer in the apartment anyway.
The team leader was not yet discouraged, for he had planned two additional setups for Peter on
this occasion. No less than six agents and two officers of the DGSE under covers of ordinary guests
attended the wedding on that day. In the first place, they were there to watch all moves of the
American, just in case he would make a profit of the event to meet discreetly an agent or a source,
between other possibilities.Second, these other men had arranged to place him at a table in
particular in the restaurant where the wedding meal took place; so that Peter be seated in front of a
DGSE officer posing as an ordinary guest, but tasked to open a contact with him. However, the
officer was also instructed not to go as far as to bump into Peter, as it was thought preferable not to
arouse his suspicion at this point. This other stage of the plot had been made possible by opening a
contact with the partner of the bride the year earlier. The provision had been easy to secure because,
by a happy coincidence to the DGSE, the young man was a non-commissioned officer in the French
Army. Thenceforth, he had become an informant in capacity to collect information on Peter, thanks
to his close and natural relation with the family of his future wife.
However, once more, either Peter found suspicious not to have been seated with some of his
relatives he knew well, or else he just took elementary measures of precaution. In either case, all
along the dinner, Peter remained noncommittal and even unambiguously contemptuous with the
intelligence officer who posed as a good old friend of the just-married man. Possibly, Peter’s
diffidence owed to a clumsy move of the men of the DGSE present at the wedding party. For as
Peter had taken his place for a few minutes at another table with a guest card bearing his name,
someone had come to tell him in an embarrassed and clumsy manner, he had been placed at the
wrong table.
All DGSE agents and future intelligence officers are taught that “nothing ever goes exactly as
planned”.
Then, all along the dinner, the men of the DGSE who zealously monitored all moves and attitudes
of the American noticed he went frequently out of the restaurant to check the trunk of his car in
which he had hidden his computer; each of those times under the pretense to smoke a cigarette.
Anyway, the attempt to open a contact with Peter proved a second fiasco.
Finally, late on that night as the wedding party was nearing its end, Peter and his family went out
to take their car and to head back to their home. As he had been driving for less than ten minutes,
Peter came across an impromptu police checkpoint that turned out to be a random breath alcohol
check. The police checkpoint was not random, obviously; for the DGSE was confident in its
expectation that its target had drunk more than reason on a so special night. Yet Peter’s
unexplainable negative breath alcohol checking came as one more disappointment, very annoying to
the agency. That is why, about one hour later, as Peter was close to his home, he stumbled on a
second random breath alcohol check, carried out this time by two non-commissioned officers of the
Gendarmerie. As the gendarmes were dumbfounded by the negative result of the new checking,
they had no qualm with asking Peter to submit a third time to the test! The American did not
complain at all, remained perfectly calm, courteous, and cooperative with the two gendarmes, yet
the result of the last chance alcohol checking proved definitively negative.
Peter the American was anything but an idiot. Doubtless, he found very suspicious to be alcohol-
checked thrice on a row within a couple of hours by a same night he was supposed to drink.
Anybody but a thoroughbred agent would take this as a very rare yet fortuitous coincidence; even in
France, this is a one-chance-on-a-million case.
Not only the triple plot of the DGSE against Peter had turned out to be a complete humiliation,
but also the surveillance team held as a certainty that thenceforth their target would never take any
risk until he would go back to the United States with his family. They understood they had lost any
hope to recruit this American as their agent someday.
I guess the reader might be interested to know what the DGSE had planned, in case the alcohol
checking were positive. Well, Peter would have been heavily fined, his driver-license would have
been taken for months, and the DGSE would have made a reputation of alcoholism for him… unless
he had accepted the “help” of the man who seated at his table at the wedding dinner. For, “by
chance,” this “guest” would have had “influential connections in the police”. Anyway, this would
not have been possible, as Peter never addressed this man during the entire dinner yet they had
together, and even face to face.
The negative alcohol checking befuddled the DGSE for a little while because some of the agents
present at the wedding dinner managed to serve warmly several glasses of whisky to Peter, which
added to several other glasses of wine and Champaign the American never denied, as far as they
could see. At last, they understood what happened while attending their mission debriefing, when
one of them remarked, “the target” brought his glass with him each time he went outside to smoke a
cigarette. Surely, he had discreetly poured all his glasses in a plant pot instead of drinking them;
there was no other explanation to the mystery.
 I kept my third example to conclude the series because it is the most striking, to the point it might
possibly leave my reader in disbelief. It is about a man suspected to be a source of the CIA or of
another U.S. agency, a French citizen this time. So, a team of more than ten agents watched him and
his wife round the clock, and the surveillance mission involved spy microphones in their apartment,
and one in their car in addition to a GPS tracking device.
On a day the couple was chatting in their kitchen, the woman confided in her husband her worries
about a photo she thought she had forgotten in a book she had just brought back to the public library
of Troyes—they lived in a small town of the suburbs of this mid-sized city. She pressed she had to
return to the library to retrieve the apparently important picture absolutely. The couple were regular
patrons of the library, and the angst of the wife just for a photo came as the evidence of guilty
activities, the surveillance team leader who had eavesdropped the conversation was expecting. Of
course, he deduced instantly, the couple was using the books of the public library as BLM (dead
drop),[272] under their noses in addition. He posited the women exchanged with a courrier secrets
messages slipped between the pages of particular books; for telling an agent where a message was
thus hidden was as simple as giving two numbers only: the reference number that the library gives
ordinarily to all books, and the number of the page where the message was slipped.
Thereupon, the couple was put under more stringent surveillance each time they went to this
library. The members of the surveillance team had acknowledged, indeed the target or his wife
could let slip a small piece of paper between two pages in a book while they were browsing in the
shelves, completely unbeknownst to them. That is how the hypothesis, not so farfetched after all,
transformed into a serious theory deserving to be probed forthwith. More than that, the surveillance
team leader, and the counterespionage officer leading the case alike, even became convinced it was
how the couple had fooled them all along; before their eyes, to cap it all. The problem was, “How
could they catch them red-handed?” On one hand, it was impossible to follow both this man and his
wife everywhere they would go in the library, without ever awakening their suspicion to be
shadowed at some point. On the other hand, since there were several tenth of thousands of books in
this library, it was unthinkable to check them all one by one upon the departure of the couple. The
solution to the conundrum came from the counterespionage officer. First, the men of the
surveillance team just had to tell on which day exactly the couple was thought “with absolute
certainty” to have slipped again something in a book; then the chief knew how to find it out.
They were better rewarded than expected when, shortly after that, the wife of the suspected man
was heard again, in their car while they had just left the library this time, saying to her husband she
was worried indeed to have been unable to retrieve “the picture” she left in the book. This happened
on a Tuesday.
Late on the night of Wednesday to Thursday, there was a fire in the library. It was a fire unlike
any other because, as the local newspaper reported on the next Monday, its heavy black smoke had
been caused by the slow burning of the plastic sheaths of some big power wires. Not a single book
burned out in the fire, happily; nothing but a bundle of big wires, had said the firefighters who had
quickly intervened. Yet everything in the library was stained with a thick and greasy layer of thin
particles of burned plastic, including the edges of all books therein. So, the library had to close for
weeks and perhaps even for months before all books and everything else were cleaned. As the task
was huge, volunteers were called in support to do the job, to be finished it as soon as possible.
When the cleaning of the books began, the volunteers were asked to seize the opportunity to
check all books for those bookmarks and pieces of paper that careless patrons often slip and forget
between their pages. They were provided with plastic trash bags for this, regularly removed and
replaced by new ones. Then the trash bags were discreetly retrieved, and all pieces of paper they
contained were carefully examined one by one. The painstaking task lasted for five months and
requested the cooperation of dozens of volunteers selected for their seriousness and zeal; they
proved good and unselfish citizens, indeed.
The disguised search allowed finding out the “golden ticket” at last, which turned out to be a
photo of the wife of the suspected man. It was a Polaroid featuring her posing naked on their bed,
with no secret message nor any hidden code of some sort on it. That is how the counterintelligence
officer finally understood what worried so much this woman with this picture. As for the numerous
pieces of paper the volunteers found in books, none bore a message worthy of further interest or the
slightest mark of invisible ink.
As an amusing aside, the major of Troyes, who happened to be François Baroin, son of former
intelligence officer of the DST and Grand Master of the GOdF Michel Baroin,[273] asked for a
forensic investigation to be lead on the exact cause of the mysterious fire. The electrical installation
of the library was recent, and it had been particularly well designed because the library contained a
large collection of old and rare books. However, Baroin’s initiative transformed into a small affair
itself because “someone” sternly advised him not to get involved in this and “to mind his own
business,” a local newspapers reported in substance, though without elaborating on this other oddity,
obviously.
The reader is certainly wondering about the consequences to the counterespionage officer who
had had the idea to set the elaborate and limited fire in the public library. The answer is “none”
because in this case as in any other of a similar sort, it would have been found inconceivable not to
check the highly likely possibility for a suspected source to be exchanging secrets messages with his
foreign agent on the French soil. Furthermore, probing this theory was done at no cost, since the
cleaning of all books was financially supported by the city where the library is, and done by unpaid
volunteers for the most. This may probably surprise the reader and debunks in passing a popular
belief saying that an intelligence agency must take care of all the interests of the Nation. By rule, the
DGSE does not have to feel concerned with the possible additional costs and unintended
consequences of its actions when serving the country, regardless of their amounts, as long as they
are not to withdrawn from the coffers of this intelligence agency. The rule applied to the unfortunate
owner of the Chinese restaurant of the first anecdote, who neither received any compensation of any
sort, nor ever knew why all this happened to him.
Of course, the official duties of the DGSE is to prevent wrongdoings about to be done against the
Nation and the State, but this does not include other’s goods and money, be they public or private
regardless, simply because their value is seen as inferior to the interest of any intelligence mission.
This does not preclude, however, that such costs, damages, and destructions must be rationally
justified under threat of sanctions. After all, the provision is the same as with police investigations
and searches, which are generally costly to the State and to the taxpayer, and which amount to
millions of euros, sometimes, without any guarantee of positive result either.
I conclude this chapter with two more anecdotes of another kind, whose interest is to show how
far the zeal of French counterespionage agents and officers can go.
One such committed agent of the DGSE, I once met for a short while, a barbouze to be precise,
went as far as to make tattooed on his forearm a large American flag and an eagle. He had done this
in the sole expectation to trick and to identify French people who secretly have a favorable stance
for America and its values. The final objective with this was to recruit them as informants under a
false flag; that of the United States of America. The initiative, all-personal and owing to pure zeal in
commitment only, can be rightly perceived as an excess bordering on fanaticism. The more so since
this man who was on his late fifties, and not early twenties, as one could assume, had no real and
personal reason of any sort to justify rationally such an extremity in his hatred for a country where,
he said, he once enjoyed tripping to for a week.
In spite of its anecdotal simplicity, the latter example should not be taken lightly because it
epitomizes a more interesting practice of the DGSE in deception and counterinfluence, which will
arise again in the following chapters. Of late in 2019, one may notice the presence of American
conservative and libertarian symbols on a number of French rightist websites, blogs, forums,
Facebook pages and YouTube accounts, whose real purpose actually is to lure people into getting in
touch spontaneously with their creators and owners. Typically, those symbols are the American flag,
and then we find, chiefly, the well-known spiraling snake with the motto “Don’t thread on me”.
Some also add pictures of U.S. military and police insignias and the like.
Among the targeted French people disgruntled with the political system and stance of their
country, who send enthusiastically but naively a friendly message or a “Like” to the holders of those
bogus virtual media, a few will be deceived further by being recruited as unconscious informants in
domestic intelligence. On the longer term, still fewer of them chosen among the best educated may
be recruited as unconscious agents or sleepers, encouraged to immigrate to the latter country in the
expectation that they make friends over there and in the American conservative middle in particular.
However, the idea does not go much farther than “fishing,” supported by the mere, frail argument
saying, “You never know.”
Those informants must be sincere in their commitment to the rightist American values all along,
until they will be approached by an actual and conscious French agent or case officer who will
handle and awaken them gradually. On a case-by-case basis, a recruit of this kind may be never
awakened, and be lured instead into believing that his handler is an agent of the FBI or the CIA who
entrusts him the mission to “spotting and spying on traitors to the American conservative cause”. .
False flag contrivances of this sort remain rare however because they are much uncertain. Luck is
much counted on for stumbling upon the rare gifted and persisting true believer one day.
In the 1980s, the large group of an American motorcycle club traveled to France with their own
motorbikes, Harley Davidson obviously. The rare particularity of this club was that all its members
were actual U.S. police officers on vacation. As far as I can recollect, the name of the club was
something as “Blue Angels,” and its travelers numbered in the respectable surroundings of 60 to 80.
The DGSE put them all under surveillance as soon as they landed on the French soil, and so until
they returned to the United States. Actually, all American bikers who trip to France with their
motorcycles to travel in this country are held as suspicious persons by default anyway, to be kept
under surveillance; they are regularly approached in a deceptively friendly way by agents posing as
bikers and Harley Davidson owners until they return to their country.
To know permanently the whereabouts and monitor the activities of the “Blue Angels” on their
tripping in France, a complex and costly mission given their large number, a surveillance team of
several agents hit the road to accompany them friendly everywhere they could go in the country,
riding Harley Davidson, too. I knew of this mission because one of its agents was the son of Colonel
Renard, former head of the Foreign Legion, whom I once knew well, and because I bought and then
rode with my wife for five years and 60,000 miles the Harley Davidson he had used to trip with the
American bikers; it was a splendid metal-blue 1989 Electra Glide Classic (FLHTC) 1340, with
plenty of add-ons of the costly sort.
From the case above, the reader may assume with confidence that Harley Davidson dealers and
motorcycle clubs in France are closely monitored, lest those lovers of American culture and way of
life are highly likely to be recruited as contacts by the CIA, the DGSE considers. As a result, all
Harley Davidson dealers in France are informants of the French intelligence community, exactly as
bar tenants are. In addition, in the early 1990s, the owner of the Harley Davidson exclusive importer
in France was the uncle of one of my ex-colleagues who worked in domestic influence.
This chapter only presented a number of fundamentals in French counterintelligence; the reader
will discover other cases relevant to the topic in the next.
 15. Monitoring Methods.
French counterespionage resorts commonly to various technical means, gadgets, and
particular human methods to monitor suspects and targets; while French spies seldom use spying
devices and even refrain from resorting to secret methods and techniques. For the record,
counterespionage and defensive counterespionage in particular are police jobs similar to
criminal investigation, but with much extended rights and means, special “rights,” and
privileged shortcuts of the illegal sort. For counterespionage cases are very rarely judiciarisable,
meaning, the guilt of the incriminated spy is undisputable, but the kind of conclusive evidences
any courtroom expects are non-existent and will never exist. The unenlightened person who
would be offered the privilege to peer on an investigation in progress on a spy ring would hold it
as no more than a conspiracy theory, doubtless. Besides, indicting and charging a foreign spy
who is acting in the service of a country, the ignorant public holds as an ally, entails grave
diplomatic consequences that may drag for years eventually. Very often, as both parties do not
want to see the latter event happening, this may cost dearly to the spy who must pass for the sole
responsible. The well-known sentence of the denial in advance that concludes all vocal
messages to “Mr. Phelps,” in the first minutes of the TV series Mission Impossible, often is true
in the real world of spycraft. The DGSE even goes as far as to kill its own agents to make the
evidence of its responsibility disappear, as the reader learned with true cases in the previous
chapter on physical eliminations.
French spy hunters have about the same mindset as criminal police officers, and the men of
the DRSD the more so; there are several and very different types of profile in the specialty,
however. To the point that, unlike spies, most of those people bear in their demeanor a striking
resemblance with their caricatures in fictions; French fictions, I mean—as far as I could see, it
seems they cannot help themselves with this. Then many among those who are working in the
field rather look and behave as thugs do, due to the dirty tricks they must often do; those are
barbouzes, actually.
As years go by, it becomes possible in the DGSE to guess who’s who and who is doing what,
or thereabout; yet it may be difficult to make the difference between an analyst and many other
ordinary professions, it is true. Cops are good at spotting thugs in a bar, and the reverse is true; I
had had frequent conversations at times amusing about this with ex-colleagues who were also
experienced cops. “A man cannot conceal himself,” Confucius is credited as saying.
Would my reader fail to spot who is the salesperson on a dinner conversation, who votes
liberal, and who conservative? It is not a matter of facial characteristics, as police
anthropometrist Alphonse Bertillon for long believed, in his vain hope to identify the criminal
just by looking at his face attentively. It actually is about a mix of demeanor and attitudes,
speech style, and dress code, mainly. We just can hardly prevent ourselves from appearing as
who we really are. Then come some tricks and fundamentals calling for good common sense. As
first basic example not necessarily relating to intelligence, is a man with poor self-esteem and
decency going to respect you in anything? If he does not like himself already, why would he like
and respect you, then? On the contrary, it is true, one should be wary of someone who seems to
like himself a little too much, for him first; and you, second in all circumstances. Very often, the
one who is always suspecting everybody to be dishonest and to plot something behind what he
takes as appearances of honesty, actually believes everybody is as dishonest as he is himself.
Beware of those who never believe anyone on his word! Better: read and read again the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder–DSM, or just its DSM Casebook
companion, if you do not have the courage to. The interest of the DSM—a book no one reads in
the DGSE, I must specify—extends well beyond diagnosing crackpots when it comes to
assessing someone you meet for the first time. Besides, we all are bit disturbed to some extent,
as the psychiatrists of the DGSE go on repeating; and keep in mind that Man is the most
dangerous species on Earth. Man is the sole creature that can be very violent, and do much
harm, for no real and practical reason other than his personal comfort or even mere spiritual
satisfaction. Vice is a characteristic that proves absent in all other species. At the simplest, look
attentively at the way someone walks, and you will know instantly in which social middle he has
been raised, and even how his self-esteem truly fares.
 My stepbrother behaved as a social vigilante at the beginning of his career in
counterespionage. In his sixties and last days, he had all features of a dreadful and reckless
mobster, and he was a heavy drinker with a chip on his shoulder. After his wife and children all
ran away from him, every night he was lying on the sofa of his living room, watching endlessly
television channels for preteens he sincerely enjoyed, while drinking wine until he fell asleep
fully dressed with a loaded gun within reach of hand, alone in his twenty-seven rooms castle. He
loved or liked no one, and cared for no one, even not a pet.
Many staffers in French counterintelligence can be called “counterespionage officers,”
whereas employees working in intelligence seldom can be introduced as “intelligence officers”.
When the later can so, it is because they are executives and specialists working under military or
police statuses; they were non-commissioned officers and commissioned officers before entering
counterintelligence already. As most French intelligence agents and even officers are deluded or
self-delude about the real purposes of their missions and believe they are “saving the World,”
those working in counterintelligence often have a correct idea of who they are and of what they
are doing. Exceptions are under-agents who were dragged in the trade under pretenses of role-
playing game, as we have seen earlier, or who were conned with some mind-boggling tales. I
note, American and British espionage novelists, and even journalists sometimes, seem to have a
fancy for the romantic formula “cloak and dagger”; I would rather say “con artists and thugs,”
from my all-French viewpoint. Spycraft is an underworld in all meanings the term conveys.
What makes the difference between a police officer in plain clothes and a counterespionage
officer is, the latter is freed from all laws and decent manners the former must yet abide. Then
some of them can carry out arrests because they work under Gendarmerie or police statuses.
Many French spy hunters do not really need to be officers because never they will have to arrest
anyone; that is why their trainings in martial arts and target shooting are useless in actuality. In
certain other countries with other cultures and perceptions, hunting out spies is an activity seen
as analogous to the old and bourgeois way of foxhunting, metaphorically. For those other sorts
of hunters arrayed in red and black jackets are or would be noble and well-educated equestrians,
assisted by a retinue of beaters of lesser extractions, not smart and educated enough to do
anything else. Still below the latter social rank, they have barking and howling hound dogs
running in packs, figuring their field agents, from both the symbolical and Pavlovian
standpoints. The whole introduces as a joyous party that probably unfolds on a sunny weekend.
The List of Adrian Messenger (1963) is a must-watch film in this symbolical perception of the
trade.
One may be struck by the asymmetry in the fight: a single and not dreadful small fox hunted
down by a crowd of several dozens, with smart and educated men, fast horses, and excited dogs.
The known intelligence and cleverness of the fox, its small size, and capacity to hide in a burrow
—underground, note—where a dog is too big to get in, together offer to it relatively high chance
to escape its chasers, and thus would justify the romantic analogy.
French culture in counterespionage does not share at all the symbolical perception above; at
least because it sees it contemptuously as too bourgeois and socialite, rightist in one word, even
if the French way of counterespionage is the same as in capitalist countries in its principle. The
reader must remember my explanations on bullfighting; giving a target a chance to escape is not
an option. Counterespionage is a violent activity anyway, and it is even associated to cruelty not
to say sheer inhumanity, often, whereas espionage is rather the softer trade of crooks and
thieves. It is too bad that a so intellectually demanding and fascinating activity as intelligence
must be done by so despicable people, someone I do not remember of once remarked.
Some French spy hunters, because not all of them, have a symbolical and eclectic perception
of their trade as a “circus” of the freak show genre. They depict their workforce as the “snake
man,” the “bearded woman,” the “elephant man,” and so on; to be taken as symbolical analogies
to the gifted computer hacker, the stealthy climber and housebreaker, the talented con artist, etc.
They all have been “sentenced” to be held together as a “band of brothers” for life, for the sole
fault of their extraordinary abilities the normal society is not really in need of, without any hope
to resume a normal existence in the civilized world someday. They each have a flaw of some
sort or failed an exam at some point in their lives, and in any case that is why the
counterintelligence officer calls colloquially his team “my circus,” a little kindlier than the case
officer does with his agents. The French film Les Enfants terribles, made by film-director Jean-
Pierre Melville in 1950, is attributed a symbolic value in the latter respect in counterintelligence
in the DGSE. With this much Gallic cinematographic reference, we are at the diametrically
opposite end of The List of Adrian Messenger on a spectrum in the perception of the trade
between France and the United States. The way those spies see themselves is not so remote of
that of role-play players, again; but the large variety of their much superior qualities rather
suggests modern super-heroes of the Marvel comics’ sort. After all, I once heard that the agents
of the Special Surveillance Group of the U.S. FBI would picture themselves collectively as the
“A-Team” of the eponymous TV series.
To the reader who would like to know more about the philosophy of French spy hunters, I
would willingly recommend the reading of some novels by Vladimir Volkoff, himself a former
French counterespionage officer, I named earlier already. As a matter of fact, some in France
call Volkoff “le John Le Carré français” (“the French John Le Carré”). The bad guys in
Volkoff’s novels are the Soviets, but “the Americans” are no friends either. However, the Cold
War era novels Volkoff wrote are not yet satisfying in our modern days, most never were
translated in English, and those that were so are out of print today.[274] If indeed the reader
cannot read French, at least John Le Carré’s novels of the good old days i.e. written between
1964 and 1996[275] will do it or close to. I add a few French movies of the Cold War era, named
in this footnote.[276]
Otherwise, French literary fictions on espionage are largely disappointing; most are filled
with partisan rhetoric and political correctness, and emphasis is put on paramilitary operations
of the existentialist genre. The self-censorship or naivety of their authors, I’m sorry to say, but
the denigration is deserved, makes these novels childish, boring and even annoying. L’Homme
de Prague (The Man in Prague), by former and now deceased French intelligence officer Erwan
Bergot,[277] stands out of the lot still today. The sorry situation of the French counterespionage
literature owes essentially to an unofficial censorship extending to fiction, and to the
impossibility to admit politically and diplomatically the inexistence of Russian spy hunting in
France for several decades.
French counterespionage relies a great deal on old-school human surveillance, psychology,
and behavioral biology, of course. Recourse to the much-enlarged arsenal of the scientific police
is true, yet many spies fail to think they are still human enough to have fingerprints and a DNA.
As about gadgets, we obviously find GPS tracking devices, spy microphones, several types of
video cameras, special tools for housebreaking, and now drones, I strongly assume. To challenge
some popular beliefs, the installation of spy cameras, with thin optic fiber camera lenses the size
of a pin head, in homes of suspects remains an exceptional and rare practice in France, however.
French counterspies use such expensive cameras parsimoniously, and rather in collective
corridors, main entrances halls, hotel rooms, safe houses,[278] and in outdoor surveillance, which
in this case may commonly include FLIR[279] cameras and other types of night vision systems.
In all the cases, they are installed in non-smoking areas, and where they are easy to service and
to retrieve after use, preferably. French spies are eager to retrieve their gadgets after use, and
they may go to great lengths for it!
One specialty in French counterespionage is to conceal a motion detector in an entrance hall
that sends silently an alert signal to a surveillance team nearby, or turns on automatically a
camera or another device because a microphone used as noise detector is not reliable for this
use. The reasons for the restrictive use of spy cameras are three. First, they are more difficult to
conceal than spy microphones, at least because their lenses must aim a specific place in a room.
In second come the problem of their energy consumption, much greater than a microphone’s,
and then of the transmission of a richer radio signal to a remote receiver when wired or optical
fiber signal transmission is not possible. Third, there is the problem of their lenses that can
hardly remain clean for several months. Any skilled and cautious spy can blind easily such
cameras without even need to know where they are exactly, under the pretense of redoing the
painting of the interior of his apartment or simply by “smoking” them with the slow burning of a
product leaving a layer of opaque deposit on everything in a room. In addition, a heavy smoker
can “cloud” the lens of a spy camera concealed in a room within a year.
As about lock-picking tools, the increasing use of modern and effective mechanical high
security door keys is often making them useless. When the DGSI, the DGSE, or the GOS of the
Gendarmerie wants to make a discreet visit in the apartment of a target—a mission called
“fontaine” in French spy slang—, these agencies attempt to trick him one way or another in the
aim to know the exact type of the key. A quick print in a small flat box filled with clay or even
a couple of pictures taken with a smartphone is good enough, as a starter. Then they have
specialists able to identify any brand and type of key and to make a double of it. The more often,
they simply manage to obtain a duplicate copy of the key from the owner who rents the place,
either via an official and discreet request from the police or by temporarily stealing it, or else
because it was manufactured by a French or European company. If ever the latter solutions are
not possible, then the plan B is to stage a false burglary, knowing that the pretense will not fool a
thoroughbred spy. In all cases, and if the target is a trained spy, he will know his place has been
visited because he learned to leave invisible “mouchards,” or “alert marks,” during his moves
outside.[280]
Talking about spy microphones, the reader certainly saw countless times in movies that
cautious spies turn on their radio or TV set to cover their conversations. This relatively effective
countermeasure gave rise to many reflections and researches in all intelligence agencies in the
World, some of which being exotic if not surprising. About this, the French counterespionage
relies first on the quality of its microphones, and second on specific sound analysis computer
software designed to dissociate and isolate certain sound frequencies and patterns. A continuous
background noise, such as a humming, wind, white noise, pouring water, and similar, even when
loud is very easy and quick to eliminate totally from a sound recording. Proceeding by sampling
and eliminating ambient noises offers good results, but it ceases to be effective when they vary
constantly in frequency. The brain of Man as this of all other species has the extraordinary
capacity to isolate noises of interest from the others, whereas a microphone and a sound recorder
cannot do this. This explains why the audio recording of a conversation in a noisy bar may be
very difficult to understand, and many words in it may be impossible to isolate electronically
and to hear. Actually, the best way to cover one’s voice is to use as ambient noise a record of
one’s own speech; played on good quality loudspeakers and to a normal volume or slightly
higher, preferably. Recording the sound of a noisy bar may be good enough either. Yet the
DGSE found out a solution against this countermeasure.
A sound engineer working as contractor for the DGSE found out several particular solutions
to bug the home of a target. The first was to use a loudspeaker as microphone because as the
diaphragm of a speaker actually is a transducer that inter-converts mechanical vibrations to
sounds, therefore it can do the reverse; that is to say, to work exactly as a dynamic microphone
does.[281] Moreover, a common three-ways loudspeaker can make an omnidirectional
microphone of satisfying sensibility, range, and quality. The DGSE did extensive researches on
materials and coils to manufacture loudspeakers extremely sensitive to sounds. Additionally, spy
microphone detectors cannot spot this type of bugs because they naturally react to loudspeakers
and cannot make the difference with a microphone; unless the latter is autonomous and sends a
radio signal, of course. That is why the Soviet intelligence service invented the passive and non-
powered spy microphone decades ago; undetectable, therefore.
Noises and human voices can make about everything vibrating in a room. This explains why,
in the 1970s, some intelligence agencies imagined sophisticated devices capable to transform the
vibrations of the glass pane of a window into intelligible sounds, intercepted from outside and
distance by using laser technology. However, the latter technique too often proved to be
disappointing due to other noises outside that make the glass plane vibrating either and because
of the spread of double pane windows eventually, very effective for stopping noises. Then there
were super-directional micro canons for spying on a conversation outside and from distance; but
those gadgets are not very discreet, and their ranges remain limited.
As nearly all loudspeaker cabinets are sealed boxes, it is relatively safe to install in it an
additional electronic device whose purposes are to amplify the electromagnetic signal its
magnetic coils produce, and to store a part of the energy the stereo amplifier sends each time the
speaker is playing music. Additionally, this hidden electronic contrivance may comprise a small
short-range radio transceiver sending the collected signal to a radio-receiver located nearby. As
the rechargeable battery of this device is regularly fed in energy by the music amplifier, it can
power the radio-transceiver. Thus, a loudspeaker is transformed into a spy microphone that can
work for years without any servicing. The remaining problem, much likely to occur, is that the
target who assume his conversations at home might be spied on, is highly likely to use this
loudspeaker to cover his voice with music when he is talking about sensitive matters, and thus,
he will reduce to nil its listening capacity, unwittingly.
This is why was invented a second device working in synergy with the first. It consists of an
“ordinary” spy microphone that can be concealed inside the loudspeaker cabinet, or outside of it
on condition it be installed in the same room where the loudspeaker is used. For a same tune
when played in two different rooms will make two different audio signals when recorded, due to
the acoustic particularities of each room. Then, when someone is talking in this room, while the
speaker is playing music, the modified loudspeaker sends send the music it is playing to the
nearby radio-receiver, and the spy-microphone sends the music the speaker is playing, mixed
with the additional sound of the ongoing conversation. In the place where are radio-received
both the signal of the music alone and the signal of the same music mixed with the sound of the
conversation, the two signals are put side by side and automatically compared with a particular
software. Thereof, it is (relatively) easy to extract the noises that are absent in the music alone to
make it a third soundtrack, which is the conversation alone. This particular technique can be
otherwise described as “comparative sound analysis”. In France, it would be studied and
perfected in the other field of sound patterns analysis under the sea in submarines.[282]
Tricking a target by resorting to the technique I just described proves to be simpler than one
would assume, for once the brand and type of music equipment the target commonly uses to
cover his conversations are known, a specialist in spy microphones will buy the same, exactly.
Then he will have all the time he needs to modify it accordingly. Finally, the team in charge of
concealing spy microphones will only have to replace the music equipment of the target with the
new one, since both are identical; this will be as simple as fast. Perhaps, the reader assumes such
spy-speakers are made in some amazing laboratory under the direction of a French “Q,” as in
James Bond movies. Not at all in actuality. On a couple of occasions, I saw parts of the
manufacturing process of two pairs of high-quality cabinet loudspeakers. The electronic
components on one side and the precut wood panels on the other were brought by two
technicians in a small apartment located a few hundred yards from the DGSE headquarters.
There, everything was assembled with great care, and a wood veneer finish covered with a
quality varnish was expected to be applied. The two technicians did not tell me who these
speakers were made for, since they did not know it themselves. Eventually, I learned the second
pair had been offered as a gift to a middle-ranking executive of the DGSE. The contrivances I
just explained all suggest that conversations to be spied on occur necessarily in living rooms
and bedrooms. As this seems a little too obvious, most Western intelligence agencies favor the
bugging of kitchens and bathrooms; the former because most conversations in a home take place
in them; the latter because “it seems to be the best place to have a sensitive conversation”. When
acting on the French soil in the context of defensive counterintelligence, the French intelligence
community uses frequently the energy wire network of a house or apartment to both power spy
microphones and transmit the signal to a signal receiver and radio transceiver hidden in the
energy main electricity box; it is the same in its principle as ADSL signals running through an
active telephone wire. The flaw in the method is, simply switching off the energy for the entire
apartment or house is good enough to make all the bugs deaf. I will present an old but still
frequently used French method in the chapter on COMINT.
Nonetheless, the reader must bear in mind that all spies learn how to communicate secretly in
a room by writing silently on pieces of paper they burn and throw in the toilet after use. Indeed,
this is the best solution to date to communicating secretly in clear talk in a room. For long,
French staffs in consulates and embassies use inexpensive magic slates drawing pads and
magnetic drawing boards for children to spare themselves the burden of destroying pieces of
paper. That is why the French counterintelligence happens to goes as far as to installing a
particular filter in the sewage pipe of the house where a suspected spy lives, in the expectation
to thus retrieve interesting finds. Skilled spies know a good trick for checking this: flushing a
few small and thin plastic bags in the toilet bowl will instantly plug this filter, thus clogging the
toilet and indicating a tight surveillance.
All surveillance team members of the DGSE and DGSI are requested to buy, at their own
expense, a small pocket monocular whose length must not exceed the width of a hand; so that
they can use this simple surveillance device discreetly and quickly by pretending to rub one’s
eye or something, as shown on the pictures, below. Surveillance teams use this monocular from
long distance when shadowing a target in a street and during static surveillance from a car.
When correctly used, passers-by in a busy street can hardly notice the lens, and not at all
through a car windshield. When tailing a target on foot, the agent keeps his monocular
constantly concealed in his hand, so that he can use it at any time and swiftly. Some tailers do
not hesitate to pay much more for a Zeiss monocular because those manufactured by this
company greatly improve the brightness and the observation of details when daylight decreases,
not to mention sharpness.
Of course, the coming on and rapid development of the cellphone transformed surveillance in
many ways. However, cellphones with good cameras do not yet supersede those monocular,
high-end cameras, and video cameras. Still in the 1990s, the DGSE did not hesitate with offering
to its counterespionage teams high-end Nikon 35 mm cameras model F5 and corresponding
lenses; an expensive equipment, indeed. For a short period between the mid-1980s and the early
1990s, DST and DGSE surveillance teams used commonly wireless telecommunications and
Tam-Tam pagers, slightly bigger than a Zippo lighter. Eventually, tailers began to use cell phones
permanently connected to wire headsets. As this was not yet common, they were instructed to
act as if they were listening to music with a Walkman.

Aged from 18 to 35 overall, French tailers are rather young because the job is often physically
demanding. This explains why those field specialists often wear sports shoes and carry small
backpacks in which they put things such as food, cereal bars, drinks, and disguise accessories,
without appearing to be unusually dressed for their young ages, therefore. One would not see a
single woman tailer wearing stiletto heels, of course. The latter specifics come to explain why
trained French (and Russian) field spies train to walk at a fast pace, as the goal of it is to make
their possible tailers easier to spot, and so to give them a hard time in their job. If you walk at a
faster pace than other people on a street, your tailers have to do the same, which is very helpful
in spotting them.
In Paris as in others large French cities, it is mandatory to tailers to learn by hearth where are
the buildings with two or more entrances offering accesses to different streets because foreign
spies are interested in such spots to evade their surveillance. Therefore, tailers learn that when
their target seems to be heading to a place known to have several exits, they must prepare for
coordinating their moves together in the expectation to outsmart his likely attempt to shake them
off. There are relatively large numbers of tailers in large French cities. Round the clock and at
any time, they must be ready to shadow a target, exactly as firefighters must be ready to jump in
their boots and go in a hurry. When a foreign spy is spotted anywhere in a city such as Paris,
Lyon, or Marseille, there is always one tailer at least who is living a few hundred yards from the
area where he is heading. A large majority of those tailers in stand-by status are paid indirectly
by unemployment benefits[283] or by the welfare state agency,[284] thanks to informal and more
or less direct connections between Pole Emploi job agency and the French intelligence
community.[285] Additionally, they register to a complicit private interim jobs agency that gives
to them full or part-time odd jobs that seldom last more than six months. They work through the
carrot and stick system; the carrot being to benefit from welfares without having to worry about
finding a job, and perks such as valuables goods sold for cheap prices.[286] The stick is a cut in
their unemployment benefits as a warning, and, second, their complete termination if ever the
gumshoes persists shirking, until “he gets back to reason”. The DGSE and the DGSI enjoy a
large number of occasional small spies, henchmen, immigrants, petty delinquents, and other
folks of the underworld, on whom they can count on for odd tasks .[287]
As an aside, while talking about shadowing, as the DGSE and DGSI dread their insider
staffers might be identified and monitored by foreign spies, they are advised to favor the use of
buses over the subway when they have to use public means of transportation in large cities, for
the simple reason that it is easier to spot whoever might follow them in a bus than in a long
subway train. For long, tailers tasked to follow cars in large French cities do it on bicycles, for
bicycles are faster than any sport car in cities, nowadays. In the 1990s, some did it on rollers
because this toy was trendy in France at that time. Bicycles are even as fast as motorcycles
because of the numerous red lights cyclists typically turn round by using sidewalks. It is easier
to cyclists not to respect traffic’s rules, and they can quickly get off their bikes for a while to
walk on sidewalks and climb stairs. Even, they can carry their bicycle in buses, subway, and
trains, plus a few other advantages forbidden to motorcyclists. Of course, the use of scooters,
motorcycles, and cars for shadowing remains common, even in Paris downtown when a target
moving by car is suspected to go outside of the city.
Contrary to what espionage movies show us, and what private detectives who do not use to
tail skilled spies do, shadowing a target is not tasking one gumshoes to follow him discreetly
from a distance; not in French counterespionage anyway. Varying in accordance with the known
or supposed skills of the target, the number of individuals involving in his shadowing may range
from a dozen to a hundred or so when the happening of an important event is expected.
Basically, the tailing of a known foreign spy moving on foot in a city unfolds according to the
schema on the next page. This diagram helps understand that tailers move with their target as a
cluster or “cloud” surrounding him, including ahead of the path where he seems to be heading.
Thus, together they accompany him rather than to follow him. Tailers must swap their positions
around the target regularly, to arrange for the latter he cannot spot twice a same individual
behind him and in parallel streets. Otherwise, this would at once come as a warning sign to a spy
trained to spot his shadowing. The reader understands that crossing suddenly a street where
there is much traffic, out of pedestrian crossings on purpose, will help the target in no way to
checking whether someone does the same, unlike what some movies show; for there is one tailer
at least on the walk side across this street, already. As a matter of fact, French tailers learn for
long to see their job as a Pac Man video game; would this come as a surprise?
Tailers know also that a thoroughbred spy, or a courier, is expected to walk for several hours
on a row, possibly, if ever he is heading to a secret meeting, dead drop, brush contact, or quick
wireless transmission. The spy does this to spot patterns, such as seeing twice a same individual
during his walk, precisely. DGSE agents call this security measure, “parcours de sécurité,”
which I translate as “safety trial course”. That is why the counter-countermeasure of the
surveillance team’s members is to giving their jobs to fresh tailers called in support, about as in
a relay race. Tailers are instructed to use reversible jackets and other accessories to modify their
figures they call “silouhette,” such as caps, scarfs, spectacles, and even wigs, some carry in a
small and light urban backpack. In the DGSE, changing one’s figure in order to go unnoticed or
to evade a surveillance is called “silhouettage”. This technique implies also changing one’s way
of walking and moving for a better deception. As the word silhouettage does not exist even in
French dictionaries, the closest translation I find is “defining a figure for a spy bound to be sent
in mission” or “designing one’s figure”; but “camouflage” or “disguise” are correct, too. The
difficulty with translating this word owes to the fact that the DGSE use the same word as a short
way to say, “Spotting and memorizing the figures of pedestrians in one’s surroundings, in order
to spot one’s possible shadowing”.
 As an aside about the latter explanation, in one episode of the excellent U.S. TV series The
Americans, Russian spy “Elizabeth Jennings” trains realistically a young recruit on his late teens
on “silhouetting” people in streets, also in order to spot one’s shadowing. Yet the name of this
technique is never said in this fiction, as far as I can recollect. Overall, the ways on-foot and by-
cars tailings The Americans shows are realistic, and still relevant to the latest actuality,
regardless of the improvements that cell phones and GPS brought to methods and techniques.
End of aside.
Meanwhile, a team leader all along supervises the evolution of the shadowing by giving
orders with his cell phone, and he remains in permanent touch with a supervisor in case the
target appears to do something thought to be of further interest. A tailing of this sort is reputedly
impossible to spot or to ascertain.
For long already, in the other case of espionage, one or several specialized tailers may
discreetly back spies who go to a secret meeting. Thus, they act as watchdogs of the spy to help
him spot his possible shadowing, and to warn him discreetly if ever this problem happens or
even just in case a situation seems abnormal, suspicious, or just eerie, as a bad feeling. Often,
too, such watchdogs monitor flying agents freshly sent to a foreign country, unbeknownst to
them. The goal with this may be dual, and even more. First, this is done in order to determine if
the agent appear to be under the surveillance of the local counterespionage. Second, this allows
to see how the agent behaves and adapts to the country, and to help him discreetly in case he is
facing problems or is in danger. Third, the watchdogs may be tasked to act as agent
provocateurs, pretending to work for the local counterespionage, and attempting to bribe or to
entice the agent in order to put him to the test in real situation. Customarily, the DGSE sends its
agents to bump into certain foreigners who come to live, work, or study in France, in the aim to
sound them and, if possible, to corrupt and to recruit them as sources or agents eventually. This
may happen even when the foreigner seems unlikely to be a spy, at first glance, as in the film
Norman, again. Such encounters must appear purely accidental, of course, i.e. to open a contact,
yet they would not fool a trained spy and would arouse his suspicion instead, which would be
counter-productive. The benefit of those staged encounters is to see how those who are thus
approached react to it; for this may greatly help determine whether someone might be a spy or
not. Most skilled spies act noncommittal or nonplused in this circumstance; whereas many
ordinary foreigners often show their joy to get to know locals, as far as those who approach
them seem to be honest, of course.
When shadowing a target by car or motorbike, this takes over the general principles of tailing
on foot and bicycle, though with some particular provisions adapted to other countermeasures a
spy may resort to. For example, shadowing a target by car claims two following cars, or
“escort,” to begin with; for the target riding on a highway may take an exit at the last second on
purpose, or he may do one or two dead safety turns around a traffic circle—traffic circles are
very numerous in France. Or else the target may pull over anywhere and at any time, on an
occasion he deems opportune, to check openly whether someone is tailing him or not.
Additionally, he may go faster and slow down alternatively and repeatedly, while on a highway,
in the same goal.
On one hand, as the U.S. FBI for long does not hesitate with tailing a car with small planes,
the French counterintelligence does not do this—until very recently, however—for the sole
reason of the financial cost it entails in France. On the other hand, the French
counterintelligence use Gendarmerie helicopters each time they consider a case justifies this
extraordinary and costly measure. In any case, as those planes and helicopters do not activate
their ADS-B tracking system, as military and police do, it is not possible to the target to spot
them from afar with a dedicated application on a smartphone or else. Of late (2016-2017), I read
in the news that the French police is investing in surveillance drones to track criminals and
terrorists; therefore, I assume with confidence the same or perhaps better is done in
counterespionage today.
For espionage purpose only, the DGSE for a long time has been using delta-shaped kites with
a wingspan of about 4 foot, carrying an aluminum-made gimbal (or any other hard and light
material) used as articulated support carrying a compact camera or a smartphone. Certain types
of cameras to be embarked on those kites can be programmed to take a shot every X seconds, or
they can be remote-controlled; and certain French flying agents learn how to home-make such
spy-kites. The advantage of a spy-kite over a drone is that its use does not imply sending and
receiving radio electric signals, since these can be detected and jammed. The DGSE uses also
homemade telescopic masts or fishing canes that can be quickly unfolded and folded when there
is a need to take pictures from behind a high wall or through a window in a building.
As an aside, certain flying agents happen to train in flying para-motors for crossing a border
or else; for military radars hardly detect those flying machines capable to fly at a very low
altitude and to land anywhere. Nonetheless, the DGSE is much interested in drones and drone-
like flying machines, and this agency leads extensive and various experiments with all sorts of
prototypes. Those remote-controlled mini-planes are not necessarily designed for spying on, but
rather for swiftly and stealthily carrying payloads. Some I saw in experiment are powered with
chain saw or motorcycles gasoline engines up to 250cc and even real small jet-propulsion
engines; they are designed to be easy and inexpensive to build in all cases. In spite of their short
wingspans of about six feet, they can carry payloads in excess of 20 pounds. Certain agents
learn how to build such machines entirely by their own, using components freely available on
the civilian market.
Actually, the DGSE and the DGSI favor concealed GPS tracking devices and ordinary
cellphone geolocation, when the target has one and does not use to turn it off—trusting the latter
too simple measure is deceptive anyway. However, the risk the DGSE runs with installing a GPS
tracker in the car of a target is that he may find it with the help of a specialist in such
countermeasures, which is likely if he is under diplomatic cover and thus enjoys this service
from the security service of his embassy. Concealing a microphone in a car also is a common
practice either, the more so since many cars nowadays have one or several embarked
microphones already, which make things even easier.
 The French intelligence community is always eager to enquire on who exactly is any
foreigner who comes to stay in France for a time longer than the usual vacation stay; as the
special bureaus of the police did it in the late 19th century, already. The concerned agency wants
to know if this individual might be dangerous, and then if it would be advisable or promising to
establish a friendly relation with him via an agent, in prevision of “once he will return to his
country”. This is a recurrent tactic for recruiting agents abroad; especially when they are young,
still naïve, and easy to trick, therefore. When the foreigner is thought likely to be a spy,
everything is undertaken to compel him to staying in touch with one local “friend,” at least. If
ever he shows his unwillingness to develop a relationship with the agents who will be sent to
him in this endeavor, this will be considered by default as a strong encouragement to put him
under permanent surveillance. Thenceforth, the kindness he enjoyed hitherto will change for
disingenuous disappointment first, and for increasingly hostile measures if ever he persists
shirking.
In case the target resigns to accept a fake friendship with an agent, then the agent will be
entrusted the additional mission to be his watchdog for the duration of his stay in the country,
and to report dutifully about all French nationals he may have met by happenstance. A
surveillance team will be instructed to sabotaging promptly all those relationships, except when
with other agents he befriended through arranged circumstances.
When the French counterintelligence is approaching someone thought to be a spy, the agent
who is entrusted the mission is chosen and briefed enough to adapt to the circumstance. He must
pretend some tastes and interests similar to those of the target, if ever those have been known
through the process I explained in the chapter 9 or by resorting to other methods, I will soon
explain. If the agent develops the relationship with the target successfully, to the point that the
latter naively considers him as a true friend, the next step will be a manipulation, whose goals
may be varied because defined on a case-by-case basis.
The DGSE and the DGSI often resort to select an authentic foreigner they recruited as agent
for this type of mission, and instruct him to befriend the target on the pretense of country
fellowship. The purpose of this scheme is to lure the target into believing his new friend “cannot
be a French spy,” simply because the latter is not a French national.
If ever a foreigner who is formally framed as a spy comes in France with his wife and
children, those additional individuals will be unscrupulously targeted, too; and more especially
the children, if ever the wife is deemed likely to be a trained spy either. The provision implies to
hire an agent tasked to influence or even to manipulate his own children, indeed, to make them
unconscious informants. Of course, this extreme measure breaks the rule saying that recruiting
teenagers under sixteen is forbidden, but the DGSE counts on the zeal of its agents who have
children because they often take the initiative entirely from their own, and present the mission as
a game for kids.
The reader guesses it, the method is a plausible and natural reason to the parents to meet each
other “by happenstance,” on the pretense that their children know each other already. The first
step is often done “while waiting for the kids at the school gate”. Some quick exchanges of
warm and complicit smiles and the like with one of the targeted parents may lay the ground
suitably to open the contact. The other option is to give a friendly phone call to the target for
asking the child “not to come back home too late”. It is hard to the target to act noncommittal on
a circumstance of this kind, which makes the contrivance among the best to “corner” a target
who has young children. For the authentic friendship between the children is a very effective
and lasting pretext for arranging all kinds of situations, setups, and encounters with other agents
eventually. If ever the target understood it is only is a cunning way to approach him, and
remains distant with the parents of the friend of his child, then this attitude can be used as a
pretext to report it as a “suspicious behavior with children”. When this point is reached, one can
say that the game is bordering on straight blackmail, already. Parents who are entrusted this kind
of mission are not necessarily actual agents; they may be ordinary people who act out of
patriotism or who are social vigilantes.
Talking now about spotting transmission and exchange of secret messages between a target
and its handler via a courier or some go-between, it should be said first that technology and
inventiveness are permanently challenging the efforts of surveillance teams; especially in the
last couple of decades. Today, we find the common availability of an array of technical
possibilities to convert easily text and pictures into immaterial and weightless digital
information. Therefrom, a gathering of intelligence can be given to a courier through fast
wireless transmission, without any physical contact between the two parties being necessary.
Possibly, in the past fifteen years, the reader read in the media about espionage cases in which
sources, agent, and operatives exchanged sensitive information stealthily through short-range
Bluetooth or Wi-Fi wireless communication. The devices used for this can be computer laptops,
smartphones, or even more exotic and discreet devices such as a camera with inbuilt Wi-Fi.
The typical case-scenario is the operative, agent, or source who enters a café in the apparent
goal to rest a bit and to take a drink or a meal. There, he seems to play with his smartphone, or
he takes a laptop out of a bag, as many ordinary people do in the same circumstance. In reality,
he is activating the Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connection of his device to send quickly an encrypted file
to a courier who is waiting for it somewhere in the same place, in another café across the street,
in his car he parked in front; or else (better in a large city) on his motorcycle he parked
temporarily in front. In the latter instance, the courier can quickly get away and move between
cars in a dense traffic, under the noses of the hapless surveillance team members.
French surveillance teams know the latter alternative, and they may be fooled once with it,
but perhaps not twice. Of course, they are taught on Bluetooth and Wi-Fi phreaking, and on
other tricks about tampering with other’s smartphones. Reciprocally, they know that a well-
trained spy must be familiar with those techniques. The DGSI and the DGSE are quick at
monitoring the computers and smartphones activities of an individual they suspect to be a
foreign agent. Better, the DGSE, in partnership with Russia, developed their own such
sophisticated methods, as we shall see in the chapter 27.
If a framed spy is looking for a place to live upon his arrival in France, the counterespionage
will go to great lengths to interfere with his searches to lure him into believing he found out the
right apartment without having been influenced in his choice. On occasions of this sort, the
French intelligence community congratulates itself for all its efforts in domestic intelligence and
monitoring I presented in the previous chapters. As a result, the target will move in a place
where his neighbor next door, upstairs, or across the street is a cooperative French citizen, a
retired mail carrier, military, or police as examples among many. The alternative provision may
be a newcomer in the same building who actually is a DGSE or DGSI agent. Again, these
agencies often favor an immigrant to play the role of the sympathetic neighbor, still in the goal
to allay the possible suspicion of the target. Moreover, the place where this neighbor lives is
much likely to shelter the equipment intercepting all electromagnetic signals coming from the
apartment of the target; that is to say, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other standards of signal
transmission, should the need arise. Surveillance specialists of the French counterespionage
consider that a foreign spy may give a wireless access to his computer in his home, occasionally
and for short periods planned at particular times. The expected recipient is a courier, whose
mission, very simple and easy, limits to parking his car for a short time within a distance of 50
yards from the place. There, without moving from his car, he can establish a quick connection
with the target by using a laptop computer, cell phone, or another device, and download
wirelessly a file from it. If the courier set up in advance the Wi-Fi connection of his device with
the correct password, the anonymous and stealthy data transmission can be done at a precise
time within a couple of minutes, or in less than ten in the worst case scenario. It is up to him to
find a plausible pretext to park his car there for a short time. In a case of this kind, a foreign spy
does not need to bother himself with an elaborate and stressful security trial course to check his
possible shadowing or to evade it. Better, the spy and his courier do not even need to see and to
recognize each other.
That is why, in the context of a surveillance of the target in his home i.e. “static surveillance”
because he is suspected to be an active foreign spy, the surveillance team is instructed to remain
in permanent connection with his Wi-Fi encrypted access, and to monitor all suspicious signal
activities going to and from this wireless communication channel. The stream of all his Internet
and Wi-Fi activities are dutifully recorded for mise-au-clair and analysis. This may be done with
an IMSI-catcher aka “Man-in-the-Middle” to intercept the communications and Internet
activities the target has and does with a smartphone, and even to tamper with this other devices,
if necessary.
 To succeed in the latter endeavors, the DGSE and the DGSI enjoy the collaboration of
technicians and engineers who work regularly with all French telephone and Internet providers.
Those employees are able to obtain at any time the user-names and passwords of all customers
of the company they are working for; an extraordinary provision enforced by law.[288]
Additionally, these two agencies have their own permanent technicians hired full-time, and
technical means to solve difficulties; that is to say, when the target has good skills in computer
network engineering. Many of those specialists are geeks hired as contractors or tenured
employees. In either case, they must keep abreast of “zero-day exploits,”[289] and they have been
trained to do their job on Linux computer environment.
Everything a framed foreign spy who is under surveillance may purchase is carefully
monitored. The additional provision aims to assessing and recording his character and
behavioral patterns to make his habits known and predictable, as previously explained in the
case of a social elimination. This knowledge is used to trick him in as many possible ways
eventually, such as staging accidental encounters, chiefly. Most of all, pending this moment, the
monitoring of his shopping aims to spot items and products likely to be used for suspicious
activities. Thus, if ever he buys a computer, a specialist will be consulted about this forthwith.
Why this brand and model in particular? In which way this computer could be more suitable
than any other for a spy to execute his mission?
So much so that if ever the target orders a particular type of wireless router[290] on an online
retail store, as other example, it will be deduced he is planning to set a wireless personal access
point.[291] What for, then, since any ordinary citizen is happy with the DSL or cable modem and
Wi-Fi gateway his Internet access provider gave to him? Given the oddity, it would be pertinent
to know if he also bought anything likely to be used as component of a homemade Wi-Fi
directional antenna, recently. Of course, a trained spy in mission abroad is wary not to draw
attention on himself by buying openly such a thing already manufactured for this particular and
very rare use; it would be tantamount to a suspected hit man buying under his true identity a
.22LR pistol with a suppressor in a registered gunsmith shop.
Should any of the events above arise, the surveillance on the target will tighten. The team will
be instructed to look for the place where he put in his home something resembling a directional
antenna, as he will be thought willing to establish a private wireless communication channel
with someone in a distance of one hundred yards or so. For the record, a Wi-Fi directional
antenna considerably improves the range for signal transmission with this protocol, and it
prevents other parties nearby from intercepting it.
Then it is easy to a trained spy to encrypt a small file of less than one megabyte in a way that
will make it undecipherable, even to the best code-breakers using the most powerful
supercomputers of the DGSE. The text of a book of several hundreds of pages makes a
computer file of less than one megabyte; sending a file of this size through a Wi-Fi
communication channel can be done within one second only. For some years, spies of several
countries, Russia and France notably, use steganography and Linux compatible software to send
coded secret messages.[292] However, in case the surveillance team intercepts successfully an
encrypted message a foreign spy sent by the means I just described, it would be in possession of
an indisputable evidence of foreign intelligence activity; “judiciarisable,” therefore. The reader
understands that acting as operative in France is very difficult, due to exceptionally stringent
domestic spying in this country.
The DGSE or the DGSI may also try to determine if the target is looking for one of those
home telescopes many innocent people put behind a window in their homes, for this may
possibly be consistent with another and entirely different channel of secret communication
between two parties. This other technique consists of communicating with another party using
simplified visual signs at long distances, i.e. from several hundred to a few thousand yards. The
signs, though necessarily simple, may be various and sophisticated yet limited to some extent
because they generally are put in display behind a window upstairs in a house, apartment, or
office. Thus, no passerby can see those cryptic signs from down a street, still less understand
their meanings anyway, since very few people could figure they actually are secret codes; that is
to say, according to the same principle as blank copies I explained in the chapter 4. In other
words, the message is sensitive in its meanings, yet its form and conspicuous exposure itself is a
contrivance meant never to arouse the curiosity of anyone, including that of a counter-espionage
specialist.
As an aside relevant to the method in its principle, the reader must notice a recurrent pattern
in French intelligence, integral to a culture indeed, with exposing secrets in full view to best
deny their sensitive nature, precisely. Anyone sees need for secrecy and possible guilt in
someone’s intent to conceal something, whereas it is harder to argue the same with something
that is exposed in full view to everyone, even when suspecting “it might be a secret”. The
principle, the reader has seen in other contexts, says, “To learn a secret, it is necessary first to
know it is a secret”. Otherwise, it is something of no particular interest. Thereof, the secret
message can be particular symbols drawn on a large piece of paper stick against an interior wall
facing a window, a picture or a cryptic sentence left in display on a computer screen or large
digital TV set, also visible through a window. At best, a surveillance team may see this sort of
secret message and assume it is; yet it cannot possibly guess what it means and still less where
and who is the other passive party to whom the message is addressing.
A variant of this communication technique, suitable for long distances of more than a
thousand yards, but at night as a prerequisite, is to lightening a room with a particular colored
light, whose secret meaning is known to the two parties only. This other technique goes on a par
with a list of planned dates and places, each associated with a particular color. Such as, “Red
means the next day of the month ending with the number 3 and at 6:34 PM in a particular café”.
In case of failure of one of the two parties to arrive at the rendezvous at the right date and time,
a plan B meeting is planned by resorting to the same mean of communication Therefore, a blue
light lightening the room may indicate another particular date, time, and place on the list, orange
may mean a third one, and so on.
From the viewpoint of a surveillance team, the way a target is reacting to his surveillance is a
very important information because it obviously helps determine whether he is trained spy, and
how so. Basing on this first information, the surveillance team can draw further inferences and
conclusions. When a target never seems to do a security trial course nor take any
countermeasure to evade or deceive his surveillance, this does not necessarily mean he is not a
spy. For behaving as any other ordinary people who have no reason to be wary of anything and
anybody is also a countermeasure French field-agents favor. In any case, the French
counterintelligence does not leave alone people they suspect just because nothing in their
demeanor supports the hypothesis of their culpability. The cases of the owner of the Chinese
restaurant, and that of the woman who had forgotten a photo of her in a public library, exemplify
this French belief in intuition and in groundless personal opinion. When the French
counterintelligence finds itself unable to determine in any way the innocence or guilt of
someone it yet strongly suspects, it reverts to looking for ways to corrupt this person in order to
ascertain conclusively he cannot be a threat.
The scope of the human and technical means invested in the surveillance of an individual
depends entirely on the importance attributed to him and of an estimate of his potential
dangerousness, of course. In any case, from the viewpoint of the target this time, behaving
consistently as most ordinary people do aims to putting a surveillance team to “sleep,” with the
long-term objective in sight to transforming a stringent surveillance into light monitoring; in the
less optimistic case-scenario. The target may possibly use this tactic in prevision of a day he will
need to catch by surprise those who are monitoring his activities, to evade his surveillance
successfully at this crucial moment. As example, the target may conspicuously buy a new
cellphone upon his landing on the French soil, instead of bringing one from his country—
although this is logical in theory, as the U.S. cellphone broad bands are different of France’s.
Additionally, the target will choose the leading and publicly owned French telephone and
Internet access provider i.e. Orange, preferably; that is to say, the one any ordinary French
would cite as the most likely to be eavesdropped by the State. By behaving so, the target
deliberately makes the job easier to the French counterespionage, if ever he deems highly likely
that his privacy will be monitored anyway. Therefrom, he can assume with confidence he has
secured a means to deceive permanently a surveillance team about who he is, his domains of
interest, and his moves in the country alike.
Even though the French counterespionage knows the latter trick, it will be to the target a
better means of deception on the long term than to do anything is possible to protect his privacy.
For the latter option is much likely to arouse further suspicion, scrutiny, and heavier surveillance
consequently. This posture is integral to the building of one’s légende and façade of honorability
in an agent who expects to stay for several years in a foreign country. Passive countermeasures
of this sort put the nerves of a surveillance team to the test, of course, as “nothing of particular
ever happens”. As an amusing aside, in the 1990s, certain French recruits, future spies and
counterspies, were recommended the reading of Dino Buzzati’s novel The Tartar Steppe. The
purpose was to teach those recruits the effects on the mind of the long waiting for an expected
event that never happens, and the state of dangerous unpreparedness that steadily installs
consequently.[293] That is also why a surveillance team may attempt to provoke the target by
staging fake opportunities, such as accidental encounters, honey traps that will eventually
backfire, and the like, in order to lure him into believing he succeeded to collects intelligence or
to recruit a source “by chance”.
Everything has been explained up to this point applies to stringent surveillance, but often it
happens that the DGSI, the DGSE or both in a joint effort, make their surveillance conspicuous
to “bully” a foreign spy, as King of Prussia Frederic II did with Voltaire. When so, the goal is to
playing on the nerves of the spy, either in order to encourage him to give up and to go back to
his country, or to suborn him to yield to a cooperation; herein to become a double agent. It may
go as far as stalking.
As an aside, as the latter measure in counterintelligence also happens in other countries, it
epitomizes why it is so crucial to the French flying agent not to be spotted, and to take great care
with protecting his cover and légende. For, when he is targeted by a local counterespionage
agency abroad, the DGSE is not necessarily going to call him back home because of some
reasons of its own. The latter motives may range from further putting the loyalty of the agent to
the test in real situation, to arousing his anger against the country where he has been sent to hone
the motive he must have; or else the goal may be to teach him “a lesson” for his carelessness
with taking care of his légende. If the life of an operative who finds himself put in a predicament
of the latter sort will inescapably transform into a “hell,” this does not apply in the same
measure to the legal agent enjoying a diplomatic cover. For the lucky would-be-diplomat is
greatly sheltered from this contingency in reason of his privileged status. Notwithstanding, a
diplomatic cover or even a cover of press correspondent may prove poorly effective; it all
depends on which country the field agent has been sent to, and on the habits and methods of the
local counterespionage agency. By comparison with the stressful days of a targeted illegal, the
difference in treatment for the legal agent under diplomatic cover will lay only on restrained
coercive measures, lest of official diplomatic claims of harassment.
I take this last explanation as an opportunity to express myself on the recent affair of the U.S.
diplomatic officials in post in Cuba and in China, who became unexplainably ill and who “heard
persisting sounds coming from nowhere”. In the 1980s, the KGB harassed certain dissidents by
exposing them to high flows of microwaves sent through walls while they were at home.
Exposure to very intense pulsed radio frequency fields, similar to those used by radar systems
(microwaves), has for consequence to suppress the startle response and even to trigger body
movements. In addition, people with normal hearing can perceive pulse radio frequency fields
with frequencies ranging from about 200 MHz to 6.5 GHz; this is called “microwave hearing
effect”. The sound has been variously described as a “buzzing,” “clicking,” “hissing” or
“popping” sound, depending on the radio frequency pulsing characteristics. Prolonged or
repeated exposure may also be stressful. End of this other aside to whom it may concern.
 16. French Intelligence & Freemasonry.
A s far as I know, one book only on French intelligence includes a chapter on the role of the
Freemasonry in this activity: a collective work by several figures of the French intelligence
community and a few foreign experts, under the direction of Admiral Pierre Lacoste, Director of the
DGSE from 1982 to 1985. However, François Thual,[294] author of the chapter, visibly did his best
to fill its fifteen pages without ever leaking a single word on the realities of the subject yet he
pretended to explain.[295] This is an achievement of its kind; ; the more so as Thual could hardly
shield himself under the pretense he never read any of the numerous press articles and books in
which the names of three French grand lodges in particular arise mixed with affairs and scandals of
the spooky sort. The latter are the Grand Orient de France–GOdF, the Grand Loge Nationale de
France–GLNF, and the Grand Loge de France–GLF, in the order of those frequencies. Happily, the
conspicuous lacuna provides me today with the gratifying opportunity to claim, the reader is about
to read the richest literary work ever done on the place Freemasonry occupies in French
intelligence.
The French liberal Freemasonry, led by the grand lodge GOdF, fills the role of one among the
most potent bodies of the French intelligence apparatus. I am going to present its formal aims to
establish clearly how they differs so much from those of the World regular Freemasonry of the
origins and of today, which the American or English reader possibly knows already. Note that I am
not implying that the regular Freemasonry would have some hidden and concerning real aims either.
I am saying the French liberal Freemasonry borrowed the entire form of the latter to serve the
objectives of an entirely different substance. Being aware of the possible perplexity or feverishness
the title of this chapter and its introduction may have aroused, I find justified to begin my
explanations on an explicit and concise presentation of the facts, as they are today. However, I warn
the reader that the stark contrast with his assumptions about a so sensitive subject can possibly
worth to me his disbelief. Precisely, this chapter is unusually long because I had to support this short
description with as many evidences, explanations, facts, and data, its crudeness obviously claims.
Now, below are the real and unofficial aims of the GOdF in France, as they were still in the early
2000s, knowing that this grand lodge holds a leading and authoritative role not only in the French
liberal Freemasonry, but in the liberal Freemasonry worldwide, as we shall see; and considering that
its objectives in the latter case obviously differ, even if they remain largely relevant to influence and
intelligence activities abroad in actuality.
• Breeding French patriotism and spreading the initial core values of the French Republic [i.e.
Jacobinism and progressivism presented as “French Republicanism”] as often and as largely as
possible, both among other Masons and the public of unenlightened people [called profanes, or
“laymen” in French Masonic jargon]. Promoting the Masonic ideals among the unenlightened
public. Fighting far-rightism and monitoring religious minorities and religious activities on the
French soil with a focus on Western Christianity and Freemasons who from outside of France
recognize the authority of the United Grand Lodge of England–UGLE.
• Spotting suspicious people and activities among the French people, identifying their exact
aims and nature, and reporting about it forthwith in case of concern.
• Surveying public opinion and reporting on spontaneous and natural social phenomena and on
abnormally elevated spreads of foreign social and cultural mores [i.e. watching social drifts and
French identity withdrawal].
• Internally in lodges and in fraternal orders / chapters [“fraternelles corporatives,” in French],
fostering, studying, and putting on test new ideas and concepts likely to help the brotherhood
and the French Republic keep standing by their ideals and fulfill their endeavors [i.e. fulfilling
the ideological, social, political, and economic agendas].
• Upon specific requests or otherwise, but commonly, serving the general objective of the
brotherhood and of the French Republic as one. Spreading values, ideas, and concepts, and
promoting trends defined in lodges with focuses on the middle and lower-upper classes to
shape effectively and suitably the public opinion of the lower class. Surveying the subsequent
feedback effect on the non-governing elite.
• Surveying and monitoring the elite and helping in its circulation; and preventing from
entering it all individuals whose ideas are unsuitable to the endeavors of the French Republic
and to its core values as defined by the brotherhood.
 • Protecting the French social fabric against its own distractions, excesses, and drifts; and
reporting continuously on them and on anything is perceived as a harbinger of hazards to all
aims specified above.
My formal presentation of the objectives, further emphasized by complementary explanations
between square brackets, yet must not be understood as a translation of an official text whatsoever.
They must be spoken or implied in written works (“planches,” in French masonic jargon) in
masonic lodge only, due to their sensitive nature with respects to claims of democracy and equal
opportunities for all, integral to the formal aims as they are publicly known. This owes only to my
concern to be as accurate as possible in my description of duties that seldom are formulated so
explicitly—though it happens on discussions between Masons of high grades. I established it based
on more than twenty years of frequent and sometimes permanent contact with members of the
GOdF—much more occasionally with other grand lodges—with respects to domestic influence,
domestic intelligence, counter-interference, and counterintelligence.
Before continuing my explanations, I must answer a crucial question the reader would certainly
ask if he could; especially if he is Freemason himself, and as a necessary aside to the others. Never
was I Freemason myself, nor have I been formally initiated to any Masonic rite; even though my
father and my elder stepbrother both were Freemasons of the GOdF and have been the only
members in my family having this quality. For long, I have never been proposed nor even just
suggested to join the Freemasonry myself, yet I declined the offer when this event finally happened
on my mid-forties. Notwithstanding, I partook very often and consistently in parallel and specific
masonic discussions and activities relating to these I enumerated above, specifically and only, and
each of those times with the GOdF exclusively.
Not all French liberal grand lodges and Freemasons are regularly concerned with all points of the
real aims of the French liberal Freemasonry, however. Some of those points concern Freemasons of
the GOdF specifically, and who have reached higher Masonic degrees i.e. from the 4th grade of
Secret Master in addition, owing to the sensitivity of their exigencies and implications. The
complete reading of this chapter will clarify all this.
Today in 2018-2019, we find a large number of French Masonic grand lodges specifically liberal,
to be put in regard to the size and population of France, as we shall see with relevant facts and
figures. Among these grand lodges, the old Grand Orient de France–GOdF (Grand Orient of
France), whose name often arises in this book, due to its frequent implication in French intelligence
activities, must catch the particular attention of the reader. Indeed, the GOdF can be considered as
the “mother” of all French liberal grand lodges, at the image of what the DGSE is to the French
intelligence community. Wherefrom, those ties and permanent exchanges between the grand lodge
and the intelligence agency, close enough to conclude that the former actually is integral to the
latter, as seen from the viewpoint of its managerial staff.
Consistent with the latter remark, we shall see that the GOdF also gained a leading role in the
liberal Freemasonry worldwide and is supporting actions of political and cultural influence at a large
scale in a number of countries. Since these actions are formally relevant to intelligence activities,
they are truly thought and planned by the DGSE, and not by this grand lodge nor any other. This
point comes to explain the why of an overwhelming representation of senior members of the DGSE
with key positions not only in the GOdF, but also in other French liberal grand lodges; and for a few
years in the unique French regular grand lodge Grand Loge Nationale de France–GLNF (National
Grand Lodge of France), as we shall see in detail eventually.
Then, the number of liberal grand lodges in the World and even in France alone are rapidly
growing since the late 1990s, all things we also shall see in their proportions. This increase owes
only and truly to the terms of an aggressive agenda in intelligence activities with a focus on
influence, and more particularly on “culture warfare” in the sense given to this term in English-
speaking country, rather called “influence politique” in France, and re-translating as “political
influence”.
As for non-initiated French, the profanes, who are interested in the subject of Freemasonry in
France, and who want to understand what it is exactly, those assume that it is a secret power in the
country; “a state within the State”. This popular perception ever prevailed since the late 19th
century, with a strong increase since the scandal of the Affair of the Cards of Denunciation in 1904,
which brought a definitive confirmation of it at that time; to be soon explained. This opinion is
understandable yet justified up to a certain point only however, as it is exaggeration in the absolute
and since the WWII in particular. Today, the belief is supported in the minds of the French
multitudes by a public display of blinding symbols, particular and cryptic words, secret
reconnaissance signs, and highly codified old rites, all borrowed to the regular Freemasonry of the
origins in the early 18th century. Understandably, all this paraphernalia and hermetic culture greatly
stimulates passion at the expense of reason.
In actuality, masonic symbolism, rites, and ceremonies in France come to support the formal aims
of the brotherhood, and then to breed in its midst a tribal culture fostering kinship and feelings of
exclusiveness. As for the frequent public display in this country of these paraphernalia and customs
through orchestrated media hypes, which in passing contradicts a claimed secrecy, it arouses a mix
of respect and defiance among the lay public, and often a needs to join the Freemasonry, perceived
as an exclusive and secretive middle, as intended.[296] The recent multiplication of the liberal
masonic grand lodges and lodges in France translates an ever-untold policy to indoctrinate and to
watchdog French people holding key positions in the public and private sectors in the country, with
a focus on cities and towns outside Paris where the elite have been shortlisted and their orthodoxy
guaranteed already. Actually, the goal is integral to the political agenda and corresponding need of
domestic intelligence, earlier explained in the chapter 13, here expressing as a will to securing
compliance to the political orthodoxy among the middle and upper-middle classes everywhere in the
country. The implementation of this measure of homeland security that must respond neither to
conventional warfare in the same conditions as in the First World War, nor really to terrorism as it
taken in charge by specialized bodies already, is defined and ruled today by the doctrine of active
measures. In absentia of a strong unifying political doctrine, France is breeding a variety of myths
and narratives loosely federated by a notion of French Republicanism that is nothing but a name
given to a hierarchic structure of dominance, in the facts. As to why then diversifying also the
French liberal Freemasonry today by creating new grand lodges, instead of simply aggrandizing the
GOdF, this question will be answered later.
The reality of the French liberal Freemasonry is to be for more than a century a tiny yet powerful
minority at the service of the domestic policy of the French Republic, acting under the close
monitoring of the intelligence community and of certain intelligence agencies in particular. I say
“certain intelligence agencies” and not “the DGSE” because if the latter agency organizes the
activities of the French Freemasonry, the monitoring of its activities, background checking of its
future members, and security are done by the intelligence agencies of the police, the Gendarmerie,
and the DRSD. The latter provisions do not imply that all people who, in these public bodies, are
directly concerned with the activities and security of the Freemasonry are all Freemasons
themselves. Therefore, the GOdF and all other French masonic grand lodges cannot be collectively
a secret conspiracy that would rule the country in all respects, and the less so the World. In actuality,
the Freemasonry in France takes over the role of domestic intelligence and domestic influence
beyond a limit over which the intervention of concerned intelligence agencies would be impossible
in a country posing as a liberal democracy. Wherefrom, a culture of secrecy in the French
Freemasonry that extends far beyond what it is in regular Freemasonry and in other countries.
The reader will still better understand my explanations above, if I tell to him that, actually, the
Freemasonry in France took over the role of influence in political affairs the Roman Catholic
Church had had in this country under the monarchy for centuries. The change did not happen
smoothly and naturally, but by steps that came as sudden outbursts of political violence sometimes:
the Revolution of 1789, the Revolution of 1871 and the creation of the Third Republic, and the
takeover of the Socialist Party in 1981—the sudden and bizarre birth and takeover of the political
party LREM that justified the deactivation of the much masonic Radical Party in 2016-2017 seems
to be one more such step. Indeed, the Freemasonry is the sole responsible for the disappearance of
religion in France since the early 19th century, with a focus on the Roman Catholic Church its
archenemy. Moreover, when comparing the laws enacted in France from the Revolution of 1789 to
today, and the French masonic doctrine, progressive and revolutionary in essence but presented as
philosophical humanism, we notice striking similarities. The claimed utopian objective of the
French Freemasonry is to transform the society in a “universal republic”. Recently in 2018,
Christian Bataille, formerly Socialist Representative and now LREM Representative and President
of the Fraternelle Parlementaire (Fraternal Order of Representatives), meant to propose the vote at
the lower chamber of the Parliament for the participation of the French liberal Freemasonry to the
drafting of the French laws and decrees. The reader shall see that the latter provision, if added to the
Constitution, would be only the formalization of a very old but untold reality.
The popular idea of the French Freemasonry as a conspiracy theory has been promoted first by
the Roman Catholic Church; second by the Soviet Union that saw in it a challenger to its action of
influence in France; third by the Germans during the WWII for the same reason as the Soviets; and
fourth by the Soviet Union again from 1945. The Soviet attitude toward the Freemasonry in France
after the WWII is too complex to be reduced to a single sentence, and so it will be appropriately
explained later in this chapter and in others, with supporting evidences. Actually, not all members of
the French ruling elite are Freemasons, and by far. When seen independently of its mission in
domestic intelligence and influence, the French liberal Freemasonry is at the same time a powerful
lobby and a mafia-like organization because it involves indeed in criminal activities. For the last
fifty years, its criminal activities are regularly uncovered and denounced by investigative judges,
and I have a firsthand knowledge of this fact spanning the late 1970s to the early 2000s, which I
comment in this book with a number of detailed accounts. In Southern France in particular, masonic
connections between the justice apparatus, the law enforcement apparatus, and the mob are
consistent to the point of being public knowledge. As an aside, for a number of decades in this
region, it is difficult to ordinary citizens to find employment without having membership in some
political party; and Russia gained in it a tremendous power of influence since the 1990s with a
minority of around 20,000 wealthy Russian nationals who settle there permanently.
In my time with the DGSE and until the early 2000s, this agency specifically targeted the regular
Freemasonry with a focus on its unique grand lodge in France the Grand Loge Nationale de France–
GLNF (National Grand Lodge of France); this action was supported by a narrative saying the
regular Freemasonry is a U.S. World conspiracy organized from Britain and using the United Grand
Lodge of England–UGLE as its official headquarter. However, in the context of relevant actions of
disinformation and French active measures the importance of the UGLE was implicitly dismissed,
and simply replaced by symbols chosen to strike the minds among the public. Such symbols,
sometimes irrelevant or actually unconnected to Freemasonry, since then are the pyramid and the
All-seeing Eye printed on U.S. banknotes, the Illuminati brotherhood of the 17th and 18th centuries,
the Bilderberg Group, the Council of Foreign Relations–CFR, the Trilateral group, the Skull and
Bones sorority, and more occasionally the Phi Beta Kappa sorority. From the 1990s, the reversal in
Russia from the promotion of staunch atheism to that of Christian faith, and the resurrection of the
Catholic Orthodox Church, resulted in confusion and embarrassment in both the DGSE and the
French liberal Freemasonry. Since then, the objective of the latter agency shifted not only from
discrediting and destroying the GLNF to taking control of it, but also to creating new regular
masonic grand lodges and lodges in France and abroad, as the reader shall see later.
All monthly Masonic meetings / ceremonies in nearly all lodges of the liberal masonic and
politically left-leaning GOdF, called “tenues” in French masonic jargon, have been monitored for
decades by the RG in particular. Then other assemblies of more exceptional natures and sensitivities
are similarly monitored by the military and by their foreign intelligence agency theSDECE, and the
DGSE eventually. In point of fact, there is a reciprocity of a practical order in the latter provision of
monitoring of the French Freemasonry. For French masonic lodges are expected to lead a
background checking on all profanes (laymen) they want to initiate as Masons, of which those
candidates cannot fathom the thoroughness because it is a police job that Freemasons cannot handle
alone. The goal of this background checking is to guarantee before the brotherhood that the
shortlisted regular citizens are “Of good mores and of good moral”.[297] For long, only the police
and more especially the RG were aptly empowered to deliver information of this order. This police
and then military monitoring of the French Freemasonry thus warrants its safety against penetration
attempts by criminal organizations, terrorist groups, foreign intelligence agencies, and con artists
who are looking for the profits they think they might draw from their joining to the secret society,
popularly perceived as highly influential in French public and private affairs. Additionally, we find
in all French Masonic lodges contacts, agents, intelligence officers, and executives of the French
intelligence community who are expected to report forthwith any suspicious activity, behavior, or
mystification that could occur in their midst. The reader may compare this provision to an informal
security service within the GOdF, which applies in all other grand lodges alike; even though the
GOdF holds a role, more or less official, of watchdog of the liberal Freemasonry already.
Therefrom, I must explain further the why and how of the above explained contradictions in intents,
and of this French misleading perception of what the Freemasonry is.
In the first instance, the French liberal Freemasonry, as taken in its entirety, makes a point with
shrouding its existence and activities in much more secrecy than regular Freemasonry does in other
countries; in English-speaking countries in particular, by comparison. In the United States, as best
example, it is common and normal to see very visible and colored roads panels indicating where the
local Masonic temples / lodges are located, exactly. There is no such a thing in France, where all
temples are sheltered in secrecy and in privately owned properties. Then they can be found in phone
books (online websites now) as anonymous associations with unstated purposes, under deceptive
names[298]that experienced Freemasons only can decipher. This secrecy owes to an enormous
difference in substance between regular Freemasonry and liberal Freemasonry, hidden under the
unique symbolism the two have in common.
Regular Freemasonry, born in England in the early 18th century, and even a little earlier as the
central European societies of Illuminati and Rosicrucian, according to some historians, focuses on
the spiritual development of Man around the belief in God, introduced in this brotherhood as the
“Great Architect of the Universe”. This celestial definition of God is of biblical origin, yet it is
encompassing enough to include other monotheist religions sharing a same belief in the existence of
a “supreme and immaterial being” governing the universe with benevolence against other individual
wills. Additionally, the regular Freemasonry is proselytizing a religious scale of values around itself;
the universal Golden rule in particular, i.e. “Love your neighbor as yourself”. By rule, and
importantly in respects to explanations to come, regular Freemasonry precludes debates on political
matters during its assemblies.
Liberal Freemasonry finds its origins in the regular Freemasonry and is born in the late 19th
century in continental Europe, when this region of the World knew a spread of secular political
theories and doctrines, and even much earlier, according to some historians, because it borrows its
symbolism, forms of rites, and even its particular jargon to “operative” lower class craftsmanship.
This older society of craftsmen spirited by a quest for excellence and perfection in one’s works
would have risen to a higher social class through hard work to give birth to the Freemasonry; an
elitist minority minded enough to be interested in a “speculative” philosophical approach of the
development of Man around the idea of secular liberalism. From this tenet, it fostered an
antagonism toward monarchy and clericalism that led it to a struggle against the Roman Catholic
Church in particular; and the Vatican held the liberal Freemasonry as a manifestation of the Devil to
be fought by all means, reciprocally. As it is, this definition is implicitly political. Because of these
particulars of the liberal Freemasonry, political matters and topics pertaining at some point to
politics, the society, economics, and even religions, constitute recurrent themes of debates during its
assemblies, all subjects co-existing with a marked interest in paganism, the kabbalah, mysticism,
spiritualism, occultism, astrology and the like, and in a number of pseudo-sciences. Some dissidents
of the liberal Freemasonry go as far as saying it is Satanist, though in an implicit manner only, due
to certain particularities in its initiation rites to higher degrees. As example chosen among many,
while a liberal Freemason is initiated to the third degree of Master Mason, someone whispers at his
ear the password of the masters “Tubalcain”. In the Bible, there is a filiation from Cain, to
Tubalcain, to Hiram to be taken as an influence of Lucifer, snake of Satan. Some historians of the
liberal Freemasonry indeed claim, “We have a Cainistic origin”. More interestingly with respect to
political ideology this time, liberal freemasons are invited to be interested in Gnosticism, which, for
the record, is the thought and practice of various cults of the pre-Christian and early Christian
centuries distinguished by the conviction that matter is evil and that emancipation comes through
gnosis; to be understood under a political angle as renouncement to materialism and individual
property. This point was exemplified in an earlier chapter with precisions on the important notion of
secret collective ownership of real estate and more within the liberal Freemasonry and the DGSE,
enforced in France through legal provisions that actually were drafted in lodges, i.e. Société Civile
Immobilière (Civil Real Estate Company).
Indeed, secrecy in the liberal Freemasonry is of conspiring nature because of its opposition to
ideological and religious currents not only it does not share, but also it does fight in the endeavor to
bring them down to their disappearance worldwide someday. However, the official credo of the
liberal Freemasonry that actually sums up formal aims is not explicitly presented as the political
doctrine beyond the claim of French Republicanism, which does not clearly denotes any clear
position on the political spectrum left-right. Instead, it describes the latter as a philosophy
advocating the largely encompassing notions of “tolerance” and “humanism”. Then, an uneasy
investigation on the liberal masonic perception of the two latter credos teaches they sets strict limits
around progressivism in all respects; and more specifically an intermediary evolution of saint-
simonianism as defined by the sect of the Saintsimonianists from the 1820s to the 1850s—the
doctrine of Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon gave birth to socialism and inspired Karl Marx in the mid-
19th century.
It is important to specify that not all liberal Freemasons are explained the latter specific in the
clear words I just used, even though it pertains to formal aims only. It is a superior knowledge in no
way relevant to esoteric rites, first defined by the two leaders of the sect of the Saintsimonianists
Armand Bazard and Barthelemy Prosper Enfantin, freemasons themselves and having connections
with the conspiracy of the Carbonari in Italy in their time.
Today, 10 to 15% only of liberal Freemasons access degrees superior to that of Master Mason, 3d
of the 33 the liberal Freemasonry has. Indeed, about 90% of liberal Freemasons stay stuck for their
lifetime in loges initiatiques (initiation lodges) called loges bleues (blue lodges). Then we find the
hauts degrés (higher degrees) internally called degrés de perfectionnement (improvement degrees)
and degrés symboliques (symbolic degrees), comprising all degrees from the 4th of Maître Secret
(Secret Master) to the 30th of Chevalier Kadosh (Knight Kadosh), which in the facts are honorary
degrees only. The 31st, 32d, and 33d degrees, internally called degrés administratifs (administrative
degrees) are bestowed upon Freemasons selected to exert responsibilities of political strategy.
Masons elected to these three highest degrees only are revealed the superior knowledge of the
formal aims, I just summed up and shall explain further in this chapter, and the real aims of the
liberal Freemasonry, both being called internally connaissance suprême (supreme knowledge).
Masons who remain in the “improvement degrees” never are explicitly and formally told the latter.
Additionally, in the 30th degree, and more especially in the 32d degree, liberal freemasons learn, in
a symbolical manner essentially, that the goal of the liberal Freemasonry are the destruction of the
monarchy and of the Church. From the 4th to the 30th degrees, all corresponding rites of
enthronement, called rites d’initiation (initiation rites), consist essentially in pledges of indefectible
obedience to the liberal Freemasonry, which in the GOdF means above family obligations and all
other pledges external to the Freemasonry whatsoever; and they are put to the test in real situation
accordingly. Accessing higher degree implies assiduité (sedulous commitment), precisely defined as
“attending the two third at least of the monthly ceremonies and others,” which means 12 to 15
ceremonies a year. All this spanned a running joke among freemasons holding higher degrees,
saying “The Freemasonry is a religion”.
As a matter of fact, it entails a considerable change in the privacy of the incumbents, and makes
an important difference between the 85 to 90% of masons of the “blue lodges,” and those of the 10
to 15% of the “improvement lodges”. The former are completely unaware of the real aims in
domestic intelligence and influence, I explained at the beginning of this chapter, and can be
compared in this respect to unconscious agents in intelligence; but any attempt to find a similar
comparison for the latter would be excessive and misleading.
Perhaps, the reader notices a similarity between the rules above and the system of awareness
degrees of the DGSE, I explained in a previous chapter; although I do not believe the latter took on
the former because I know they existed as such in the Soviet KGB either.
For long, the French liberal Freemasonry made an elitist reputation for itself by favoring
influential individuals as its members at local and national levels. There is a grain of truth in this,
yet it is inaccurate, due to a simplistic and hasty generalization in popular perception, I must also
debunk. It is true, all liberal lodges makes themselves unambiguous when they say explicitly to the
laymen who want to become freemasons, in substance, “the Freemasonry can bring something to
you; but what can you bring to the Freemasonry?” The question is all about intellectual capacities
and good will, yet it does not stop short of these. All French liberal Masonic lodges find an easily
understandable interest in co-opting people who are influential at their local levels. This is
especially true with the GOdF, as it is the most exclusive and selective French grand lodge.
Notwithstanding, an attentive examination of the membership of the French liberal Freemasonry, if
this information were made public, would show to the reader that the minority of the wealthiest and
most influential people in France is not so well represented in its midst. Why, then?
Among the real aims of the French liberal Freemasonry, we find a reciprocal need to monitor
people made Masons by virtue of their social and economic i.e. influential qualities, whom I will
present more precisely by occupational categories thereafter. Simultaneously, we find the other need
to maintaining a virtual “firewall” between the elite at their highest level i.e. national, and those that
are socially and economically below them outside of the capital and its affluent suburbs. The latter
provision is especially true because the GOdF in particular plays a major role in the circulation of
elite; or, to put it otherwise, to prevent the risk of the overthrow of the ruling elite by a new one
motivated by a scale of values opposing progressivism, either through mere and inescapable
cronyism, or opportunism, or infightings and internal conspiracies. After all, the birth of the liberal
Freemasonry in France and even in other European countries was the outcome of political struggles
and of conspiracies within the regular Freemasonry.
At this degree of considerations, the military take secretly the leading role over the GOdF,
effective since the 1870s; and they have the final say when determining which individuals are going
to enter the elite at a national level, and which are not. The military secure this power by being the
sole keepers of the dossier secrets through the DGSE today. The highly sensitive process in real
leadership is more complex in the facts than what my rough explanation may suggest because some
individuals of various backgrounds who are not military, but who have a rich experience in state
affairs, are called to partake in it. The quality of being Freemason of the GOdF, even at the highest
degree, called Grand Maître, (Grand Master), does not grant the extraordinary privileges and power
that many presume. In one word, this is all about compartmentalization of power between social
classes in this other context. Exactly as any other member of the French elite, masonic grand
masters have dossier secrets hanging over their heads either, coming to guaranteeing their loyalties
to the real ruling elite. For whistleblowers and traitors in the higher degrees of the liberal
Freemasonry have existed, as the reader will see.
In addition to the ordinary monitoring of the GOdF and all other French grand lodges, including
the unique French regular grand lodge GLNF for a few years, as we shall see, there are more or less
formal Masonic bodies called fraternelles, shortened version of fraternelles corporatives,
translatating literally as “corporative brotherhoods”. The initiated English-speaking reader would
probably use the words, “corporative chapters” or “fraternal orders of [professional activity]”. I
assume the comparison between French liberal and Anglo-Saxon regular Masonic cultures must
stop at some point, due to the definition of what are French liberal masonic fraternal orders, below.
There are a large number of such masonic corporative brotherhoods in France, each founded
around a common vocational activity. The formal aim of those masonic sub-bodies is to help
freemasons find further interest in their memberships in the Freemasonry. The real aims are to
create vocational networks having a potent power of influence in nearly all branches of activities in
France, to breed in their respective midst a collective capacity of reflection about constantly
improving civil laws and regulation that rule them, and to watchdog them separately and
specifically. Thus, we find a fraternelle des avocats (lawyers’ brotherhood), which is one among the
largest along with the fraternelle de l’Éducation nationale (National education’s brotherhood).
There is a fraternelle de la Poste (Post office’s brotherhood); a fraternelle des médecins (physicians’
brotherhood); and a fraternelle de l’EDF (EDF’s brotherhood)—EDF is the name of the public and
monopolistic energy provider, for the record. There are even several brotherhoods of water supply
companies! There are brotherhoods that specifically reunite police, gendarmes, and those among
them who claim specialties in road safety, homeland security, up to security and intelligence. There
is a parliamentary brotherhood for the two chambers of the Parliament (the Assemblée Nationale
and the Sénat), as 35% or more of French senators and representative have liberal masonic
membership. A former grand master of the GOdF said in substance, “the first duty of
representatives and senator freemasons is to spread the masonic ideals in their chambers.”
Then these corporative brotherhoods extend to countries where there are liberal Masonic grand
lodges, since those are in connection with a World liberal Freemasonry organization ruled by the
GOdF, to be presented soon.
In a number of instances, and on casual conversations mostly, I have been informed of graces and
disgraces enforced in the society of lay people, in the police, the Gendarmerie, and the military,
thanks to Masonic back channels such as brotherhoods / chapters. Among similar provisions of
other origins, this shows how the control of the circulation of people between classes, and of the
circulation of elite is effectively carried out. Each time those unofficial graces and disgraces are
decided, convincing arguments must support the request, sometimes put side by side with police
records and other testimonies. The values and strengths of the arguments also depend on the
respectability and influential power of those who are bringing them upon. Not so seldom, the
arguments are biased or even fabricated for the sole reason of personal revenge or the reverse. Thus,
many honest, capable, and hardworking lay people yet remain stuck to low social levels for long
periods or even for their lifetime, without ever understanding why and who decided so exactly, since
they could not.
The American reader familiar with the expressions “fast track” and “slow track” just learned how
these mysterious phenomena are made possible in France. However, it would be deceptively
simplistic to assume the destiny of each French people is set so. Of course, other powers of
influence, some authentically natural, are accountable for the rises and falls of people in the French
society. Then we find family connections and transmission of wealth through normal inheritance,
commonly encountered in all countries; although those fall under the influence of the French Code
of civil law, as we have seen earlier with the testimony of Napoleon Bonaparte. We may talk about
cronyism, which often materializes via other corporative networks and a number of exclusive clubs
for the French elite; the French domestic intelligence apparatus must cope with this hurdle, despite
the disastrous consequences it entails at times.
Altogether, there is in the end a necessary trade-off between various factors and purely individual
interests, and the interests and agenda of the military that remain highly politicized. The problem of
the imbecile who rises to prominence by the sole virtue of his extraction is not so thorny, due to the
three simple reasons arising in all societies in the World, which sociologists of the elite Mosca and
Pareto explained largely a century ago already.

It is easier and safer to preserve already well-known elites at their current positions
than to venture into trusting unknown newcomers.

There is a need to restrict the accesses to higher social and economic positions, always
in great demand in the lower classes, and even more in the middle classes of all countries,
logically justified by social and economic considerations at a national level. Otherwise, a
point at which there would be as many executives as simple employees in the country
would be reached quickly.[299]

Privileged positions for the families and heirs of the elite must remain readily
available, since the rule of compartmentalization of the three classes, with a focus on the
upper class in particular, forbids that heirs of the latter be left mindlessly in permanent
contact with inferior classes solely due to their weaknesses. Otherwise, this would result
in innumerable natural social bridges between classes, hazardous to social order or
unwarranted between the middle class and the upper class in particular.

Anyhow, from a general viewpoint, France holds firmly on her will to restricting tightly accesses
to the upper class, even beyond political and economic upheavals, revolutions, and wars. This point
is epitomized by the fact that heirs of the ancient monarchic noblesse preceding the Revolution of
1789 have ever been kept in superior social and economic statuses in the French society; exceptions
have been extremely rare. It is even more remarkable, indeed, that instead of banishing those noble
heirs from the upper class, the new elite of after 1789 and of after 1870 did their best to convert
them to progressive values suitable to their thus maintained privileged statuses. Their accesses to
non-governing elite were limited when those conversions proved impossible or risky, only. For long,
this has been particularly true in the corps of French ambassadors, in which heirs of the ancient
monarchic noblesse are largely represented, still today.
Striking exceptions to these rules at times arise, starting with those few selected immigrants of
second and even first generations whose examples, put in display under the limelight, solely aim to
challenge the reality of their social exclusion and a popular incisive critique against French elitism
and cronyism. One among the best examples of this in French history has been the massive and
quick inclusion in the middle and upper classes of tens of thousands of Algerian Pied-noirs.[300] The
reason justifying the spontaneous and generous grace was, those colonists of French origin who
mixed with the Algerian population along several generations since the colonization of Algeria by
France in 1830, ever had a stake in supporting the colonialist French rule of all successive French
ruling elite until the proclamation of independence of this country in 1962. After he took the power
in France in 1958, General De Gaulle thus rewarded the allegiance and support of a large number of
Pied-noirs to the French occupying forces during the Algerian War of independence, and their
suffering of massacres by revengeful Muslim Algerian separatists. Since then, the heirs of those
returnees who resumed the kinship and use to rule of their parents and their loyalty to France’s
ruling elite, still inherit the extraordinary privilege on an equal footing with the old monarchic
noblesse.[301]
The military and the intelligence community in particular took exactly opposite measures with
refugees from Vietnam and Laos between the 1970s and 1980s. Although those Asian natives had
also served the French colonialist forces and public services, they all fell under a general suspicion
of collusion with the United States, and with no less than the CIA, for worse. For the record, the
U.S. CIA had been very active in Laos between 1955 and 1975, where it assisted Laotian nationalist
forces with creating a resistance movement against the Communist Pathet Lao and the Vietnam’s
People Army. Along with Thailand, this intelligence agency even rose a secret army of several tens
of thousands of Laotians, of which a majority belonged to the Hmong ethnic minority. That is why
the French counterintelligence worked closely with the immigration service in charge of those
Laotian refugees;[302] and the Laotian Hmong ethnic minority in particular was closely monitored.
As the latter task proved time-consuming and led very rarely if ever to the unmasking of a would-
be-Laotian CIA agent, the idea was found to prevent all those refugees from regrouping in close
communities; the Laotian Hmong minority was aimed in particular. Upon their arrival in France,
they were provided with housings and jobs in cities’ suburbs located far apart from each other in the
country, thus making their integration in the French social fabric and their monitoring easier. To
ascertain they could hardly attempt to regroup, the Laotian Hmong were given menial and low paid
jobs, in French tires factories in particular. Very few first generation Laotian immigrants were left
free to evolve by their own in the French social fabric; still less could they access the middle class,
even though many were fluent in French, skilled, and had held senior executive positions in Laotian
public services. Those of the second generation or who came in France as young children were
encouraged to partner with French natives, and thus were granted accesses to the middle class, at
last.
A few cases of intelligence activities of foreign origin among Laotian immigrants finally
materialized from the early 1990s, yet they all were attempts from the new Lao People’s Democratic
Republic to send spies in France, often with real positions in the public service in their country, in
the expectation to lure exiles of the Laotian diaspora of first generation with attractive promises.
The goal was to recruit them or their children as agents in place. A few bit the hook and were
quickly spotted by the French intelligence community; they were made double agents, but whose
missions are not necessarily of the hostile sort, however.
I resume my explanations on the popular misperception of the Freemasonry in France, now with
respect to the profiles and social statuses of the laymen it is looking for. As I said earlier, the middle
class in general and the upper middle class in particular make up for a large majority in the French
liberal Freemasonry, in reality. However, it must be taken into account that, exactly as the DGSE
does when this agency is recruiting, French liberal Freemasons first investigate softly and discreetly
the people they are interested in. This first approach aims to knowing the opinions of those
individuals in many things, starting with the strength of their patriotism and their political opinions.
A far-rightist stance is eliminatory, whereas a far-leftist one may pass muster.
Good moral character counts for much, even if the quality might be called to change to a more or
lesser extent once they will be initiated masons, though not always. In the GOdF in particular,
“recruits” soon are asked whether they are for the death penalty or not since this point also is very
important in the eyes of this grand lodge. “No” is the right answer, even if the candidate might be
expected to tolerate it eventually. Believing in God is not good with the GOdF, as we have seen, but
believers can be driven smoothly toward another liberal grand lodge that commonly accept them,
since the GOdF created some. Nonetheless, beliefs, agnosticism, or frank atheism are put to the test,
though not with same relentlessness as in an intelligence agency such as the DGSE, of course.
At the same time, the characters of the recruits are probed to determine in which of the two main
speculative branches of the liberal grand lodge they can be directed: philosophy, or rather occultism,
astrology, and the like? These two general realms of interest in the GOF actually serve the formal
aims of the French liberal Freemasonry to come true, for the latter branch fits easily and usefully
Masonic symbolism, rites, and history, its own way so to speak. The GOdF in particular introduces
itself officially as a “cercle philosophique” (philosophical circle), for the record, while it claims to
be interested in occult sciences either. The latter point should not be taken lightly, nor as so absurd
as it seems at first glance. There is an ongoing need of the French liberal Freemasonry in particular
and of the liberal Freemasonry worldwide in general to standing officially by unselfish formal aims
breeding an appealing notion of mystery. To succeeding in posing as holder, guardian, and maker of
liberal Masonic principles worldwide, the French liberal Freemasonry must shape and polish a
façade of honorability, and in a fashion that must make it resemble as closely as possible to that of
the old regular Freemasonry of the origins.
The latter definition of the formal aims comes to explain why many French liberal Freemasons
never partake consciously in influence and intelligence activities; those make the majority of the
blue lodges who do not reach the 4th degree of Secret Master, and find their usefulness by giving to
the formal aims a convincing appearance of reality necessary to challenge at any time all possible
accusations of political conspiracy.
Notwithstanding, all liberal Freemasons are requested to partake in the care of the formal aims
because, first, that is what those who involve actively in the real aims are expected to say and to
know by heart; and second, the substance of the formal aims is the myth and its narrative that
attracted them, and then bonds them together in an exclusive society giving value and meaning to
their lives. There is in the GOdF in particular the esprit de corps that does not truly exist among
full-time employees of the DGSE who are not freemasons.
As example, my elder stepbrother at times stated that the Freemasonry was “his true family”; a
striking statement we would rather expect to hear in religious factions and sects. He implicitly
meant the GOdF, to which he belonged for more than three decades, until the DGSE however forced
him to “divorce” this grand lodge in 2005 because of his involvement, direct and personal, in an
affair that at some point was highly likely to gravely damage its reputation. In French liberal
masonic jargon, “divorcing” means quitting the brotherhood officially and peacefully. Masons of the
GOdF use the jargon expression “il pleut” (“it’s raining”) to mean cryptically an incident likely to
damage this grand lodge; and taking measures to prevent this event from happening is called
“ouvrir le parapluie” (“opening the umbrella”). Note that the DGSE uses the same two
metaphorical expressions for the same meaning, which must not come as a surprise because a large
majority of executives in this agency has membership in the French freemasonry.
The latter anecdote and explanation come as an introduction to how the senior management of the
DGSE can seat so effectively its authority upon the lower-ranking staffs of the B and C categories.
To put things simply, the DGSE actually is a two-class society, whose stability lays on the
freemasonic enlightenment of an overwhelming majority of its A-category managers. Contrariwise,
this additional affiliation concerns a minority only in B-category specialists and lower-ranking
executives; and about nobody in the C-category of the rank-and-files. This situation does not mean
the Freemasonry would exert an exogenous influence on the managerial staff of the DGSE because,
all on the contrary, it actually comes as an additional measure of security supervised by the Security
Service. While collective activities and gatherings in common dwellings must foster kinship and
mutual watchdogging in the employees of B and C categories, the same need is guaranteed in those
of the A category by different measures corresponding to the greater commitment this agency
expects from them.
Then as not all highly skilled specialists in the DGSE have freemasonic membership however,
this results in a situation favoring the existence of the two parallel hierarchies, I explained in an
earlier chapter, which for the record are the official hierarchy with clear and known ranks and
responsibilities, whose obedience is guaranteed by masonic membership, on one side; and the
informal hierarchy with no clearly established ranks and levels of responsibility, ruled exclusively
by the system of the awareness degree, on the other side. Those who belong to the former enjoy the
privileges of clear and formal career path and learning program in intelligence, at the expense of
scarce privacy and free time; while those of the latter enjoy greater privacy and free time, at the
expense of a career path in intelligence marked with permanent uncertainty. Consequently, the
former envy and even resent the extraordinary privilege the latter enjoy; reciprocally, the latter
lament over their situation that makes them feel they are “distrusted outcasts”. The former can put
an end to their situation at the cost of becoming assimilated to the other category of the unofficial
spies or barbouzes; the latter can so either, at the cost of the definitive end of their privacy and
liberty of movement. Note that the change can also be imposed to them at any time. For the official
situation of the former can hardly be denied in the ever-possible hypothesis of their flight, public
revelations, or defection; and the opposite is true to the latter. In other words, giving official status
to an intelligence employee necessarily implies that his or her surveillance must be proportionate to
the always possible risk of his breach of trust. In the case of a A category employee, membership to
the Freemasonry grants not only the effective control over his acquaintance network that the
Security Service demands, but also a permanent control over his values, tenets, and thought.
The rules vary or mix in certain cases. The statuses of case officers and intelligence officers who
work essentially in the field place them in a position analogous to that of outsiders, yet all of them
or almost have masonic membership, also because it provides them with a masonic network they
need to execute their missions. Moreover, sometimes or even often, their teachings, need-to-knows,
and awareness degrees are given in masonic contexts and via the additional networks of fraternal
orders, either in collective sessions or one-to-one meetings. Liberal freemasonic membership is
similarly frequent in the DGSI, in that other case because the GOdF in particular has ever been
prone to co-opt police officers and civil servants in the professions of justice, and at lower rankings
than it does in the military.
Therefrom, it should come to no surprise to the reader, at this point of my explanations, that the
most trusted members of the Security Service of the DGSE are closely monitoring these Masonic
membership, and activities, and this body expects that anyone is shortlisted for a promotion in the
DGSE joins a masonic lodge, as additional guarantee of security. Yet this does not mean that those
security officers who watchdog the DGSE are freemasons themselves because people in charge to
guarantee the loyalty of senior executives belonging to a masonic lodge must carry on their duty
with a corresponding objectivity and in respect to the rule of compartmentalization. Moreover, there
must be no room for an ever-possible double-allegiance in the Security Service, including to the
liberal and secular Freemasonry itself. Therefore, there are particular security officers know
everything on the Freemasonry and what is happening in masonic lodges, although they have not
been initiated freemasons themselves.
The latter specific just pinpointed for the reader the innermost circle of trust and secrecy in the
DGSE, which he can consider as “the All-seeing Eye in the All-seeing Eye,” if I may put it thusly. If
the reader is a familiar of the works of John Le Carré, he can also see this small circle as a virtual
place with no clear boundaries nor written rules, in which the likes of George Smiley and Connie
Sachs are quietly thinking and working on what those of Percy Aleline, Toby Esterhase, Peter
Guillam and others are doing and thinking. They are looking for a would-be- “Bill Haydon” tipping
les Americains (the Americans) aka les “Ricains” (the “Ricans”). Closer to the reality of their
dailies, they are doing their best to ascertain that no such a person ever accesses any responsibility
in the DGSE. This activity that is not occasional, but permanent, is relevant to contre-espionnage
préventif (preventive counterespionage).
However, these very particular jobs and measures of security should be regarded as “theoretical”
or must be relativized, due to the special relationship between France and Russia; complementary
explanations about this very specific and sensitive point will be presented in the chapter 23, entirely
dedicated to the latter topic. Pending this other reading, at least the reader will find at the end of the
present chapter an historical anecdote telling in detail the starting point of a new and softer Soviet
perception of the Freemasonry after the WWII.
Masonic initiatory rites of the GOdF are designed to strike the minds of those who are brought to
get through them, and their highly codified unfolding and repetitions perpetuate their memory. With
regard to people working in intelligence, those symbolical ordeals happen to extend in other and
more serious ways outside of masonic temples, and thus are reminiscent of an “ordinary” recruiting
process in the DGSE. The two ordeals, one symbolical and intimately associated with a masonic
paraphernalia, and the other that is very real, crude in its intent, and devoid of any frill, merge to
form a combinatorics intending to guarantee indefectible commitment. This explains the stark
difference between the intelligence officer who is an initiated mason, and a B or C category
employee, agent, or outsider specialist who is not.
It is noteworthy that, in the French liberal Freemasonry, organizing the co-optation of a layman
begins with a particular interview of the candidate in a lodge where he is brought blindfolded. Thus,
he cannot see and possibly recognize those who are asking to him very personal questions beside
the reasons for which he wants to join the Freemasonry. In the context of intelligence and in
counterintelligence the more often, this preliminary examination actually happens to be faked when
it is part of a plot aiming to trick a suspect or to elicit confidences to be used as leverage eventually.
The “candidate” is put in very particular setting and atmosphere aiming to compel him to reveal
details of his privacy to people whose identities he will never know, since the contrivance does not
plan he will be initiated Freemason, anyway. In the end, his candidacy will be denied under the
pretext decided in advance that “his pedigree does not fit the criteria, after all”Patterns found in the
professional profiles of people the liberal Freemasonry is looking for on the French soil are the
followings. In the first instance, we find occupational activities French and Europeans use to call
professions libérales (“liberal professions”); that is to say, independent professional activities. They
are, pell-mell, heads of SMEs, physicians and dentists, notaries, lawyers, and the like. Second, or
rather on an equal footing, we find senior officials in all public services with noticeable focuses on
justice, police, and education. Third, we find executives in medium and large-sized companies. I set
apart elected mayors in towns and cities of all sizes because those who are freemasons were
initiated before their incumbencies, already.
Categories above once reunited make for a large social / professional majority. The minority is
made up of the two extremities of the payroll / social scale, if I may put it that way; and of rather
rarely encountered activities. They are, pell-mell again, owners of small businesses, artisans,
teachers, low-ranking officials in all public services, skilled workers, and junior executives in
private companies of all sizes. Upscale, we find highly qualified engineers and scientists, senior
officials and politicians, prominent actors and directors, singers, writers and the like. Then we find
heads of political parties, labor unions, corporative associations and the like, with a focus on people
expected to be elected parliamentarians. Nonetheless, heads of major companies and high-ranking
elected officials are poorly represented, mainly because they are coopted in the more exclusive and
progressive circle Le Siécle, to be presented in the chapter 21, although the two memberships are
not incompatible. Middle-ranking police officers are well represented among the category of
officials, but not non-commissioned officers of the Gendarmerie who very rarely are co-opted; at
least because their privacy is inexistent already, and because their incomes and all military
obligations are hardly compatible.
With respects to the labor and lower-middle classes, three main prerequisites strictly limit their
entry in the Freemasonry. They must have incomes allowing them to pay the mandatory monthly fee
inherent to Masonic membership, and other accessories expenses in relation to special events and
travels to remote towns and cities. They must be smart and / or educated enough to fit in a middle
highly concerned with very various abstracts subjects, concepts, and other immaterial notions. Last
but not the least, they must a have particular qualities or positions serving the interests of the
brotherhood at some point. Exceptions are not so rare however, again because of the other crucial
need of the GOdF and of the liberal Freemasonry in general to preserve the appearance of an
unselfish, benevolent, and even charitable association. Yet the French liberal Freemasonry much
less involves in charitable activities and expenditures than the regular Freemasonry does; for much I
could see firsthand, those accessory activities focus on occasional aids to poor children in foreign
countries, such as those of central Asia and Russia, for the last example I was brought to know of.
Since the birth of the socialist-spirited Third Republic in 1871, Freemasons of the GOdF have
been largely represented among members of the two chambers of the Parliaments. To the point that
arrived in the early 1900s, few members of the government did not belong to a lodge. Among those,
many were Masons before their incumbencies because they were the revolutionaries of 1871 who
overthrew the French Third Empire. However, Freemasons who became presidents of the French
Republic in the 20th and early 21st centuries are a minority, and the remark applies to heads and
majority shareholders of large business companies and groups. In passing, but importantly, this
explains why the lower chamber of the French Parliament always seems to undermine or to nip in
the bud all truly important, sensitive, or controversial matters that may be brought upon in its
assemblies accidentally. Those sabotages, since that is what they are in actuality, planned in
consultation or following a word given, are done through palavers and disputes that are of pure form
in the facts—that is to say, analogous to filibuster in the United States, but different in their form—,
whose real aims are to keep on a political line and long term agenda federating all represented
political parties. Again, “Change in the continuity” is the untold yet real and cardinal oxymoronic
motto in French politics.
As about political stances, the French liberal Freemasonry is largely progressive; about 90% of
socialists against 10% of liberals in the GOdF that is the more leftist among all French grand lodge.
I must specify at this point that the Parti Radical (Radical Party) is a subset of the GOdF, which
comes to explain why this political party has a large Masonic membership. However, as the Radical
Party has always been small in number for this good reason, the dominant political faction in the
GOdF has been standing by the program of the Socialist Party for long. The creation in 2016 of La
République En Marche–LREM (Forward Republic) by actual President of France Emanuel Macron
changed many things about the latter point.
The Parti Radical (Radical Party) aka Parti Républicain Radical et Radical-Socialiste–PRRRS aka
Parti Radical Valoisien–PRV, sometimes referred to colloquially as “Rad”. The precision
“Valoisien” in the alternate name of the Parti Radical has no meaning of significance because it was
added merely to avoid any confusion with another radical party, after the Rue de Valois in Paris
where it is headquartered.
In 2017, the Parti Radical aka Parti Républicain Radical et Radical-Socialiste–PRRRS aka Parti
Radical Valoisien–PRV has been deactivated “temporarily” in the wake of the creation of the LREM
and the election of Emmanuel Macron as French President. The latter event is noteworthy because it
is unprecedented in the history of the oldest French political party, and because no reason
whatsoever has been officially brought upon to justify the odd decision. The untold explanation for
it, I had no difficulty to understand, is that the political tenets of Emmanuel Macron and of the
LREM actually are these of the Radical Party. Subsequently, we may infer with little chance to be
mistaken that the LREM of Macron and the government of this president comprise strong
membership in the GOdF, possibly unprecedented.
Historically, the Radical Party never aimed to occupy a leading position in its name, but to exert
discreet political influence in France at the image of what the liberal masonic factions in the two
chambers of the Parliament do, and to give its votes to one other major and popular political party
on elections, according to an agenda of its own that is explained in masonic assemblies in the whole
country by word given. Herein the Radical Party must be seen as a discreet and highly influential
progressive lobby, and not really as a political party.
On the year of its creation in 1901, following its first congress held in June the same year, the
Radical Party became the first large political party established at a national level in France, coming
into contrast with the previous parliamentary groups or local electoral committees. On this first
congress, its Delegates represented 476 election committees, 215 editorial boards of Radical
newspapers, 155 Masonic lodges and parliament members, mayors, and members of municipal
councils. The influence of the Radical Party, of a conspiracy nature inherited from the events of
1871, was instrumental in resuming the rise of socialism in France from the early 19th century.
Though the members of the Radical Party initially claimed a far-leftist stance, its tenets were
based on Saint-Simonianism, earliest form of French socialism and social-capitalism that inspired
Karl Marx. The credo evolved eventually toward a moderate form of socialism advocating the right
to (liberal) private property, Jacobin social justice, secularism, and anti-clericalism inherited from
the Revolution of 1789. Nevertheless, its members generally claim to be Republican first, and then
moderate socialists, liberals, and proponents of social-capitalism, alternatively or simultaneously.
After the presidential and legislative elections of 2017, negotiations to merge the Radicals and the
Radical Party of the Left began. The re-founding congress to reunite the parties into the Radical
Movement has been held on December 9 to 10, 2017, owing to two possible interpretations. Either
the GOdF considered its party is no longer of any usefulness and the merge is a disguised
dismantlement, or it marks a step further to the left of the political spectrum in prevision of after the
presidency of Macron.
The explanation about the Radical Party being done, it is timely to clarify the Affair of the Cards
of Denunciation, I earlier alluded to.
At the beginning of the First World War, both the police and the military were highly politicized
already, i.e. with an ever-growing leftist stance. From the viewpoint of the GOdF and of the Radical
Party in particular, the presence of Catholicism in the country remained elevated and was a recurrent
hurdle in their endeavors. In addition, Catholic believers were notoriously on the right of the
political spectrum; one more reason to see them as enemies of the liberal Freemasonry. With the
more or less discreet support of the Vatican, French rightists and Catholics accused the liberal
Freemasonry to being a political and anti-clerical conspiracy that had largely penetrated the
government; this was true. In spite of an already effective censorship system in those earlier times, a
number of anti-Masonic books were freely sold in France and knew certain success. The lampoons
were printed in the country or abroad and imported, but most spread a mix of facts and whimsical
allegations, thus discrediting their own authors and their cause. Many among those who had heard
of the liberal masonic conspiracy theory of the few held it as “too big to be true”. My short account
of the following spectacular event had to sweep away all doubts overnight and until the end of the
WWII, as the Nazi relayed the anti-masonic narrative with greater momentum and countless new
evidences.
On October 28, 1904, at the Chamber of Deputies (lower chamber of the Parliament)
Representative and former officer of the 2d Bureau Jean Guyot de Villeneuve revealed, General
Louis André, acting Minister of War (Minister of Defense) since May 1900 instructed for three
years the GOdF to conduct unofficial and unlawful police investigations on all Army officers in the
country. The final objective of the inquiries, he added, was to determine which ones of those
officers were in capacity to access higher ranks and responsibilities, and who among them had to be
barred from it by all means. As for the main reasons given by the Minister of War to thus keeping a
competent officer down the ladder, it was his belief in God and more especially his regular
attendance to Catholic mass.
In other words, a secret and massive political purge was underway in the country since 1900,
ordered by a tiny yet powerful minority of the population; Jean-Baptiste Bidegain, then Under
Secretary of the Conseil de l’Ordre du GOdF (Council of the Order of the GOdF), was the first to
make the striking revelation. To figure out the effect this statement by Representative Guyot de
Villeneuve had on the lower chamber of the Parliament, I remind the reader that a large number of
its members belonged to this grand lodge, precisely.
In a desperate attempt to prevent a disastrous scandal to shatter the image of the government, a
large group of Representatives summed up Guyot de Villeneuve to provide material evidences
supporting his claims; confident in their beliefs he could not. However, a few days later on
November 4, Guyot de Villeneuve came back to the charge with plenty of such written proofs,
including documents signed by the Minister of War himself. Minister of War Louis André decided
to resign a few days later, against the advice of President of the Council Émile Combes who could
not make him reconsider his decision. In February 1905, Combes and his entire cabinet resigned,
too. As politicians had been the first to be informed of the conspiracy, and considering the good
faith of the whistleblower could hardly be questioned, neither the secret police nor the military and
the 2d Bureau proved able to censor the leak. That is how and why the revelation became a huge
scandal of international scope, whose aftereffects lasted until the Second World War. The press
nicknamed it “Affaire des Fiches,” translated abroad as “Affair of the Cards of Denunciation,” thus
named after the existence of an enormous cards index assembled by the Ministry of War. Indeed, the
cards detailed which Army officers were Catholic and attended Mass, with the unmistakable aim to
denying their promotions. More than that, the scandal triggered a wave of discontent and even of
unrest among the population, and a climate of distrust toward the government and virulent political
oppositions of all tendencies installed in France. The uproar evolved to civil disobedience, riots,
anti-government propaganda, and even terrorism and bank robberies throughout the country. The
creation of the RG three years later in 1907 is a direct consequence of the Affair of the Cards of
Denunciation, censored in the French media and in books since the end of the WWII.
Unsurprisingly to the reader, certainly, the GOdF has been instrumental in the rise of the Socialist
Party and of its leader François Mitterrand all along the 1970s and until their victory in May 1981.
However, we find in the GOdF many people who stand by progressive values yet who do not
register to any party, and those who claim a far-leftist stance are a small minority. The question of
the far-left in this grand lodge is difficult to clear up because many in its membership pose as
proponents of far-leftist values when in private, all the while enjoying the statuses and perquisites of
the upper-middle class and even of the upper class at times. As far as I knew for more than twenty
years, no one in the GOdF is affiliated to the far-rightist National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen, and
then of his daughter, Marine, nor even express a little sympathy for the narrative of this party, quite
the opposite. Alike, a mason of the GOdF cannot like the United States, the Americans, and their
values; unless he acts as agent provocateur, as this case not only exists, but is not very rare because
of the unofficial mission of counterinfluence of this grand lodge. I recount the exemplary case of a
DGSE intelligence officer who was a GOdF freemason with a high degree and responsibilities in
this great lodge, but whose son became a fervent supporter of the National Front. For this reason,
the son was denied Masonic membership definitively, to the deep regret of the father. As a
compensation, the former was given the professional status of computer engineer and a good
position and salary in a publicly owned company managing highway tolls; although he never
graduated in any university or school and did not even obtain his baccalaureate degree.
In France, specifically, the liberal Freemasonry takes great care with building for itself a
reputation of respectability among the population. Given the recurrent popular rumors of special
privileges Freemasons enjoy in this country, the concern implies consistent media censorship about
recurrent affairs and scandals involving the brotherhood. Actually, it is self-censorship the more
often, as numerous journalists and even more chief editors and media owners are liberal
Freemasons. When the media censor affairs and scandals involving the liberal Freemasonry, they do
it by reporting normally on the cases without ever mentioning the quality of Freemason of the
culprits, even when a lodge indeed has been responsible collectively for their happenings. Former
grand master of the GOdF and expert in police and counterintelligence affairs Alain Bauer, asks to
television journalists who invite him frequently to give his opinion on various issues not to mention
the former quality, and to focus instead on his claimed activity of would-be-Professor of
criminalistics and lecturer in Shanghai and in New York City. In reality, Bauer has been paid for
years a comfortable salary for no service by the Caisse des Dépots et Consignations, a public body I
named in an earlier chapter in its quality of funds provider to agents of the DGSE and intermediary
to the Secret Funds of the Prime Minister. In addition Bauer receives fees from about forty French
large companies and groups, including a Dutch subsidiary of Renault-Nissan carmaker upon order
of its CEO Carlos Ghosn, again for no service—all facts known to the DRSD, of course.
 Yet the secret society is breeding simultaneously and subtly a particular perception of customary
benevolent influence in French public and private affairs, aiming to remind to everyone the
unquestionability of its discreet omnipresence and omnipotence. For the greatest fear of the French
liberal Freemasonry, collectively, is to see its real aims being denounced publicly one day, and that a
popular current of Freemason-hunting could sweep the country, as it happened between the 1910s
and the 1930s. Still today, the French liberal Freemasonry remains haunted by the souvenir of the
devastating and long-lasting effects of the old Affair of the Cards of Denunciation, and even more
of the terrible Masonic-cleansing of the German occupying forces of the WWII. Even when in
private and between themselves, liberal Freemasons very rarely cite the first of the two events, nor
even allude to it because it is indeed a taboo; but very often they bring upon the subject of the
second. Even more, the word is largely given not only to remind the general public of the German
Masonic-cleansing, but to imply on those occasions the fair collective share of responsibility of
French laymen for its happening, which actually is a clever way to demonize and to stifle any
questioning of the brotherhood.
Indeed, anyone in France is overtly criticizing the Freemasonry is at once chastised and finds
himself demonized by association with Nazism. As a matter of fact, any such statement or even
slight passing reference is recorded on a personal police computer card, in addition to being barred
access to certain positions and responsibilities for life, coming as a very effective deterrent. The
secrecy of the first of these two countermeasures is sui generis—to take up a Latinism customarily
used in the DGSE—because the freedom of speech of the French constitution and a number of
subsequent decrees make it an offense punishable by law.
Indeed, anyone in France is overtly criticizing the Freemasonry is at once chastised and finds
himself demonized by association with Nazism. As a matter of fact, any such statement or even
slight passing reference is recorded on a personal police computer card, in addition to being barred
access to certain positions and responsibilities for life; coming as a very effective deterrent. The
secrecy of the first of these two countermeasures is sui generis—to take up a Latinism customarily
used in the DGSE—because the freedom of speech of the French constitution and a number of
subsequent decrees make it an offense punishable by law. This fact highlights the fear and actual
vulnerability of the liberal Freemasonry in France because it never forgets that even the old GOdF is
not a public body created by decree, and that nowhere in any code of laws its name appears.
Therefore, it has no constitutional power to sanction its opponents by means other than anonymous
smear campaigns, blacklisting, and suits for promotion of crime against humanity.
The French liberal Freemasonry promotes its image through press articles and exclusive reports
for the most. Each year, religiously-like one could say, a couple of the most popular newsmagazines
makes a front-page with a photo of a Masonic apron, of the inside of a lodge, or of some Masonic
symbols artfully put in display. Golden squares and compasses embroidered on blue moirés taunt
the human soul naturally thirsty for secrets and mysteries, not to forget the so-striking symbol of the
beaming eye in its isosceles triangle. Who is this eye, then, if there is no god? No one would dare
raise the embarrassing question. Well, I pause to say I was once explained that we the DGSE were
the true all-seeing eye in France. A high-flown title comes to cap the glittering masonic
paraphernalia on the glossy cover to confirm to the lay public that the Freemasonry would be the
secret power in France. On the interior pages of those special issues, the text is chased away by
other large photos and old engravings presenting the leading French grand lodges and their current
grand masters. A few selected secret words and signs are leaked in passing as striking revelations.
“There is more to see and to learn at the Museum of the GOdF,” just in case, the article specifies.
Those special issues insist on a claim that the greatest secrets of the French Freemasonry are its
rites, and that everlasting philosophical research, laic in essence, and quest for moral perfection and
personal spiritual accomplishment in each of its brothers are its key goals. Then comes the good to
the society the brotherhood is constantly mulling over and doing, not to the French Nation only, but
to the whole World alike. Yet significant feats exemplifying the latter claim are nowhere to be found
in the hype, at times on the pretense that humility also counts as one among the main qualities
expected in all liberal Freemasons, in opposition to members of the regular Freemasonry, it happens
to be added. Freemasons of all liberal grand lodges must abide a credo of discretion rejecting honors
and fame; individualism is not on their agenda.
The realities I witnessed match the letter claims in part only. Actually, a majority of Masons of
the GOdF indeed shows humility and discretion, but those among them who enjoy superior social
statuses seldom go as far as to give up opulent housing and common pleasures good or big money
can afford them with. The differences with the selfish hedonists they point out as “immature
individuals” are to be found in nuances and practices they must learn, in the facts. The large and
comfortable house is hidden behind high walls or fences poorly maintained. Vehicles can be
expensive on condition to have rather sober designs and colors. Expensive spending and evenings
must be done and enjoyed far from the neighborhood or town. Choices in clothing and jewelry must
follow the rule that should be understood. As for the discreet Masonic accomplishments, those are
not really of the charitable sort or they remain quite symbolical, and not that unselfish in the end.
The real accomplishments are the permanent promotion republican Jacobinism and the
enforcement of the provisions as enumerated at the beginning of this chapter, unofficially and often
at a judiciary level via the numerous corporative brotherhoods throughout the country, and officially
in the two chambers of the parliament at a legislative level. Moreover, with a force in domestic
influence of about 175,000 people (as in 2014) holding key positions in a large majority of
instances, the liberal Freemasonry has a potent capacity in assisting the media to launching social
trends and mores by putting them into application in the field forthwith; as if they were spontaneous
and natural, in the eyes of the public. Freemasons of the GOdF in particular are expected not only to
partake in the fulfilment of the political, economic, social, and cultural agendas of the State at their
personal expense, but also to think about how to improve them. They must provide their lodges—
numbering 1,250, out of about 3,000 liberal lodges—with their thoughts, ideas, and suggestions,
written on papers they must read before lodge’s attendances. The written works are symbolically
called “planches,” plural form of planche, or “plank,” in English.
Why calling “planch” the product of one’s thoughts written on paper? The French liberal
Freemasonry likes to locate its origins in both the crafts of carpentry, stone cutting, and architecture,
the three fundamental activities of house building initially defined as Roman Catholic cathedral-
building, without concern for the contradiction with assumed anti-Clericalism. Wherefrom, the
origin of the word “masonry” (maçonnerie in French) in association with “free” to form
“Freemasonry”—soon, the reader shall see that the French word franc-maçonnerie actually is not
the exact translation of Freemasonry. “Plank” must be symbolically understood as “raw material,”
as the first draft of an idea is supposed to be, still to bring about the notion of humility.
Then the “planks” are burned ritually as blanks are destroyed in the intelligence community, but
very symbolically and on yearly special events to remind to all of the importance of humility,
anonymity, and equality. All those efforts for what, then?
The most pertinent and best ideas are not forgotten, actually; only the names of their so
anonymous authors, who thus never will be thanked for an idea that the State only is supposed to
find out. It is more or less of public knowledge in France that certain rules, regulations, decrees, and
laws of major importance originated as “planks” in lodges of the GOdF in reality, and were truly
thought by people no one ever heard of and who never were popularly elected. As examples, the
abolition of the death penalty in France has been debated largely in lodges of the GOdF first, and
the draft of its text of law has been written collectively there; idem for the abolition of the law
against abortion, and the legalization and common use of the contraceptive pill. From the mid-1990
to the early 2000, many Masons of the GOdF were asked to leave samples of various types of low-
consumption light bulbs permanently lighted on in their homes. The goal was to test the longevity
and effectiveness of the bulbs, in prevision to forbid by decree in France and in several countries of
the European Community the sale of incandescent light bulbs, indeed enacted in 2009.
The authors of the press articles on “The Power of the Freemasonry in France”—one at least was
thus titled, word for word—at some point feel obliged to explain what it is at a World scale, since
about everyone knows in this country that “Freemasons are everywhere, although no one knows
who they are”. The exercise to talking openly about this is a walk on a slippery slope. That is why
all journalists qualified enough to pen it, i.e. who are Freemasons themselves, and who lied by
omission only up to this part of the subject, therefrom are pressed to invent whatever they want to
brush the embarrassing truth under the rug. I describe their lies and put them side by side with the
reality of a tricky situation. It always starts by saying, “The French Freemasonry has warm and
fraternal relations with all other grand lodges in the World, and… that is all. Nowhere is it specified
that, in actuality, French grand lodges do not meet the standards for recognition by the regular and
universal Freemasonry, and that the ongoing different between the two dates back to 1878. The
“Schism of 1878,” as it is commonly known inside the GOdF, at time makes one line or two, but for
the sole sake to shielding the author from a possible accusation of historical ignorance. At this point,
it is timely to explain another important fact.
For several decades, there has been an ongoing secret war between the regular Freemasonry and
the French-led liberal Freemasonry that is struggling to raise a European secular freemasonic front
and, if possible, a World liberal freemasonic dominion. However, the ambition slightly changed
since the 2000s, under a new Russian influence in freemasonic affairs, to be soon explained. The
French intelligence community does play a key role in this antagonism for all the reasons I
explained, and especially because Freemasonry in France is a network indispensable to domestic
policy and economy, domestic influence, counterinfluence, and up to defensive and offensive
counterintelligence. In addition, the SDECE and then the DGSE exported this influence and
intelligence activities in freemasonic affairs to a number of countries. The strategy is, first, to give
the GOdF international recognition and authority in liberal Masonry in the World. Second, to pose it
as a challenging alternative to the regular Freemasonry as defined by the British UGLE. Third, to
make the whole of it a powerful influence and intelligence network abroad. In doing this, the DGSE
has successfully transformed the GOdF into one of its most potent tools in active measures, indeed,
as we shall see, too.
French who belong to the liberal Freemasonry are insisting on the necessity to make a difference
of historical nature between a Freemasonry of the origins they call “operative,” and another one
they call “speculative” (same orthography and meanings for both words in French and in English).
They say that operative Freemasonry related to a more or less formal brotherhood of the medieval
era in craftsmanship, with specialties in stone cutting and carpentry, much similar in the description
to what a labor or corporative union today is. Thus united, the narrative goes on, they had more
strength when negotiating their fees and wages with the Roman Catholic clergy that employed them
as master masons and master carpenters to the delicate building of churches and cathedrals.
However, the so remote origin and its timescale are only supported by very rare ancient masonic
symbols cut in stones and pieces of carpentry that would date back “before the 18th century,”
without further specifics. Then the historical theory comes to explain plausibly the origin of many
masonic symbols; inasmuch as the first Freemasons would not have invented it, however. French
people have been formally resuming the existence of this operative brotherhood under a name and a
body of crafts they call compagnonnage, or “journeymanship,” and whose members are called
Compagnons du Tour de France, or “Journeymen of the Tour of France”—the same I named in the
chapter 3 on recruiting and training.
The term “speculative Freemasonry” denotes what Freemasonry in general is since the early 18th
century; that is to say, a secret society of the middle class mostly, whose members no longer
formally operate in the crafts of stone-cutting and carpentry, and whose occupation instead is to
speculate in lodges on abstract matters as I these I summarily mentioned earlier, and to study
masonic symbolism, they call symbolisme aka symbolique hermétique, or “hermetic symbolism”.
This body of appropriately named speculations on the origins of the French Freemasonry is
however challenged by the other story of a secret brotherhood imported in France from England in
1721, in Dunkirk to be precise. The existence of several English-speaking lodges in France
including in Paris between 1725 and 1732 is documented indeed, to which comes to add one
French-speaking lodge with several British brothers, the Premier Grand Lodge of England recorded
in 1723. Historian-specialists of the French Freemasonry acknowledge a British origin of the French
Grand Orient, forerunner of the GOdF, whose creation is recorded in the year 1732. However, the
GOdF itself is spreading an alternate official version of its founding that would locates in time on
June 16, 1771, explained as a transformation of the Grande Loge de France–GLF (Grand Lodge of
France) created earlier in 1738.
I find myself able to report another version, unofficial because embarrassing yet actual because
recorded, archived, and even still classified indeed, kept in the French National Archives today.
Some members of the French intelligence community do know this version and feel forced to
acknowledge it because it is also their duty to censor it. This version confirms with material
evidences the English import and origin of the Freemasonry in France, which explains why there is
no document on the French Freemasonry that is older than the early 18th century, at last. More than
that, the actual story is all about British espionage in France in reality; I tell it, below.
France and Britain always have been at war against each other since the Hundred Year’s War that
broke out in 1337, save for a few short periods of truce, and albeit the feud really began still earlier
in 1066 with the Battle of Hasting followed by a long period of French occupation in England,
ending in Scotland in 1305 with the capture and execution of William Wallace, agent in the service
of the French crown in actuality, and not a would-be-Scottish free fighter. In the early 18th century,
the British found the idea to resume the war against France by the other means to sow dissent in this
country against the Catholic Church, the abusive monarchic power, and the system of the Ferme
générale that established a state monopoly over private entrepreneurship through astronomic taxes
and fees. The British organization of a movement of French resistance began by the establishing on
the French soil of secret cells of spies called “lodges,” whose members were united by a masonic
bond and recognized each other by using secret signs and symbols—though those cells possibly
aimed first to British espionage and not French dissent, in my personal opinion.
By the end of the 18th century, Britain was desperate in her hope to put an end to multiple attacks
of the Navy of French King Louis XVI against Britain’s interests in America, Cochinchina, India,
and Ceylon. At the same period, and more precisely when the 1790s were nearing, many French
bourgeois of the middle class had joined the Freemasonry of the British. Since the 1720s, they had
founded the impressive number of 1250 Masonic lodges scattered across France, each having
connections with the United Grand Lodge of England–UGLE that defined the masonic rules and
rites since its creation in 1717. By today’s standards, the network would qualify as an underground
organization with a mission of subversion. Indeed, in 1789, in Paris, the French Freemasons had
raised the disgruntled French bourgeoisie of the commoners against both the monarchic nobility of
the ruling elite and the Roman Catholic clergy. On the 14 of the month of July of the same year,
together they had rallied many more people among the lower class, and they overthrow the French
monarchy. Neither King Louis XVI nor his army and police had thought about the danger of popular
insurgency, a war from within or civil war. Totally unprepared against the eventuality, they were
caught by surprise, and did not even had the time to react.
Ironically, Jean-Jacques François Le Barbier, official illustrator, engraver and painter of the King
of France, painted the new constitution of France that had just been drafted by Emmanuel Joseph
Siéyes, a Catholic abbot, and Gilbert du Motier, member of the monarchic noblesse yet Freemason
himself, better known in the United States as Marquis de Lafayette. The painting presents the
seventeen amendments of the constitution on two black stone tablets, whose rounded tops mean
clearly to suggest the tablets of the Ten Commandments of Moses. The text of the constitution is
titled Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, or Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizen. Kneeling atop the right tablet, a winged seraph uses a scepter to point a beaming
isosceles triangle on which is the Eye of Providence. In 1797, as the painting was largely printed,
and from that year on, the striking Christian symbol became the best known of the Freemasonry
worldwide. At that time, the Freemasonry the British had imported in the country more than seventy
years earlier, had become an all-French secret society. In passing, it may dumbfound the reader that,
nowadays, many Freemasons of the GOdF, atheist therefore, put proudly a facsimile of the painting
I just described in prominent display in their homes and offices; apparently unaware of the stark
contradiction in the values and symbols supporting their commitment. Nobody tells them that the
French Revolution of 1789 actually is the outcome of a clever British shadow operation.
A few more years later in the 1820s, as the industrial revolution had begun, two other Freemasons
named Armand Bazard and Barthelemy Prosper Enfantin founded a sect taking up the state
capitalist doctrine of Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, advocated free love between people of both sex,
the abolition of marriage, and transformed the anti-Catholic stance the British had imported into
atheism. Along the following decades, the sect successfully spread in the French Freemasonry its set
of eclectic ideas it called “saint-simonianism”. By 1848, some members of the sect had transformed
the word “saint-simonianism” into “socialism,”[304] which itself inspired Karl Marx to write The
Communist Manifesto, and Louis Napoléon Bonaparte nephew of former Emperor of France
Napoleon Bonaparte to take the power in France through a second revolution. Thereof, Louis
Napoléon Bonaparte, once crowned Emperor Napoléon III, was also called “the Socialist Emperor”.
The latter events together are the actual cause of the birth of the liberal Freemasonry, thirty more
years later exactly.
It is timely to specify that the French noun franc-maçonnerie is not the literal and exact
translation of “Freemasonry”. If maçonnerie translates literally as “Masonry,” there is no possible
semantic relation whatsoever between the French word franc and the English, “free”. The unique
French word for the English “free” is libre, far remote of franc in both graph and consonance, as the
reader can see. I am unable to explain definitively the true meaning of franc, since it is the object of
an endless controversy between French specialists in history of the French Freemasonry. Some
claim it means “frank” or “frankness,” stressing the moral expected from all Freemasons. Some
others retort that it indisputably is the original name of both “France” and “French people”; known
as Royaume des Francs, or “Kingdom of Franks,” later changing for “Kingdom of the French”
between the years 481 and 843. Both theories are convincing enough, and some French Freemasons
are content with considering that the double and satisfying meaning is quite a happy coincidence,
one should not bother about.
 Since the British Masonic conspiracy of the 18th century that led to the Revolution of 1789, the
regular Freemasonry, whose proceedings are conducted according to the Ancient Landmarks of the
Order, always maintained its presence in France; with great difficulty since the 1970s, and gloomy
days were to come thereafter however. Today in 2019, there is a unique regular grand lodge in
France, whose name is Grande Loge Nationale Française–GLNF (French National Grand Lodge),
but since the 1990s, the universal regular Freemasonry considers the GLNF with extreme caution.
Nonetheless, among the 34 French liberal grand lodges in existence in 2018, there are unofficial yet
sincere reciprocal dislike and distrust toward the United Grand Lodge of England and to the Anglo-
American Freemasonry in general. Until I left the DGSE in the early 2000s, the animosity overtly
expressed in private extended to an internal rule of the GOdF saying that no brother of the French
liberal Freemasonry is allowed to step in a lodge of the regular Freemasonry under any pretext. In
the GOdF especially, the rule even said that any casual or deemed accidental meeting with a Mason
of the regular Freemasonry must be reported to the Worshipful Master of one’s lodge forthwith.
Laymen looked over to be co-opted masons of the GOdF all ask at some point inescapably, “Why
all this fuss around the GLNF?” To which even Freemasons who are not members of the
intelligence community answer what they have been taught to, in substance, “Those guys are a
bunch of socialites. They never talk about anything of interest in their tenues [meetings]. They are
only interested in playing golf, showing off in cocktail parties; and that’s all”. Additionally, “Unlike
us, the GLNF does not debate on subjects that really matter, such as important social, political, and
economic issues, and what we can do for the country. The GLNF is no real and serious
Freemasonry; period”. More than that, internally in the DGSE, all Masons of the regular
Freemasonry had to be thought of as “CIA sources and agents, possibly,”[305] and “be dealt with
utmost caution, in case of accidental encounter with one”.
Since the early 1970s at least, for much I know, the regular GLNF has been a domestic target of
the French intelligence community. The activities of this grand lodge were under surveillance,
including the privacy of its members. To say, it was even worse than it is to the Muslim community
to be suspected to breed terrorism and to shelter terrorists; without exaggeration, since French
Muslim believers, generally immigrant from Northern Africa, are protected by laws against racial
and religious discrimination, at least. The special provisions taken against the French regular
Freemasonry consisted in surveillance carried out by snitches and submarines, owing to the near
impossibility to monitor the daily activities of each of its 26,000 to 30,000 known members.
Second, the GLNF was the constant target of all sorts of dirty tricks, ranging from repeated
administrative surveys and controls to professional blacklisting, collusion, and blackmail attempts.
The mainstream media were requested to ignore the regular Freemasonry, the GLNF, and their
complaint, except to report scandals arranged against the grand lodge. The reader easily recognizes
in all this the patterns of a social elimination, applied to a large community in that case.
Arrived in the 2000s, the GLNF was so penetrated and many of its members so compromised that
it had become a lure of the French intelligence community for attracting all kinds of agent-
provocateurs, or being in the process to join them, recruiting agents and snitches, mixed with useful
idiots and crackpots of the affluent society. The membership indeed believed in God or claimed to,
and it counted a minority of commissioned officers of the military, to whom odd Russian nationals
joined on the claim they were Catholic Orthodox believers.
Nonetheless, François Stifani, Grand Master of the GNLF from 2007, had to fighting a powerful
Masonic opposition movement within his grand lodge, aroused and headed by Alain Juillet, a well-
known figure of the DGSE with an impressive résumé.[306] Juillet makes little secret of his leftist
stance mixed with sympathy for Russia; to say the least.[307] Thus, Brother Juillet made himself a
potent figure within the GLNF, even though his sincere belief in any great architects of the universe
whosoever would deserve questions. In February 2012, Juillet announced officially his candidacy as
Grand Master of the GNLF, yet the committee in charge of checking the Masonic legality of the
candidacies rejected it following examination. Juillet struck back at once and successfully by
causing a scission of this grand lodge. Two months later on April 4, 2012, the surprising and
impressive number of 5,000 brothers divorced the GLNF to follow Juillet in his founding of a new
French regular grand lodge, christened Grande Loge de l’Alliance Maçonique Française–GLA-MF
(Grand Lodge of the French Masonic Alliance) aka “The Alliance”. By the same occasion, Juillet
was elected its Grand Master, and claimed no less than restoring good relations with the regular and
Anglo-Saxon Freemasonry and recognizance by the UGLE. The latter initiative followed the
suspension of the relations between the World regular Freemasonry and the GLNF.
 In truth, the DGSE, jointly with the Russian SVR RF had craftily prepared and organized a coup
within the remnants of the regular Freemasonry in France. The aims were either to take it over
definitively or, in case of failure, to create a regular grand lodge this agency and Russia would own
and control entirely and officially with its own men; or to that effect because things appear to be
more intricate than they are already, as the reader is going to see. In any case, the indispensable
approval of the UGLE was needed direly to warrant the legitimacy of the unique French regular
grand lodge still in activity. France, a democratic country guaranteeing freedom of thought, cannot
afford to be taxed of freemasonic segregation. Moreover, Russia her close ally unexpectedly
embraced Christianity in 1991, and since then decided to reject officially Marxist-inspired
secularism and anti-Clericalism this country had always expected from its agents in France for
nearly one century. Turning one’s coat again was much of an embarrassment and a thorny
impediment in France’s submissive fight against regular Freemasonry.
Before I tell the reader what happened and what the UGLE did next, it is noteworthy that earlier
in December 2009, Grand Master of the GLNF François Stifani had to fight an internal opposition
orchestrated against him. The crisis was caused by bizarre political subscriptions from this grand
lodge for the enormous amount of 17 million euros. The infighting became a case that was settled
before a justice court, with effect to transform it into a political affair in which the French
Government mingled in a singular and contorted way. For the Paris Grand Tribunal–TGI made the
date of January 25, 2011 a watershed moment to the regular Freemasonry in the World, by
appointing Ms. Monique Legrand, a female attorney, to administer the all-male GLNF. Pressure and
provocation were definitively obvious this time and brought the case upper to the magnitudes of a
French national scandal and an international political affair with diplomatic implications. That is
how and why, on September 14, 2011, the UGLE officially suspended relations with the GLNF;
several U.S. grand lodges followed the move. On June 10, 2012, the regular grand lodges of
Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Germany, and Luxembourg joined the former in the dissent, and
together added that the damage done to the GLNF was “irremediable”. In all and in the end, thirty-
four regular grand lodges in the World suspended relations with the last French regular grand lodge
still in existence.
On December 4, 2012, the DGSE at last had the skin of beleaguered Grand Master Stifani by
obtaining the vote of his impeachment in the GLNF. On April 24, 2013, the eviction of Stifani from
the GNLF followed the already shattering event because “newly found” compromising documents
proved Stifani had pledged the allegiance of his grand lodge to Nicolas Sarkozy in January 2008;
that is to say, at a time the latter was acting President of France. At this point, the reader knows what
the 17 million euros of political subscriptions from the GLNF were for, yet he may still ask how
Stifani could possibly find all this money in the banking accounts of his ailing grand lodge, with no
one noticing for several years, in addition? It is noteworthy that in the same year 2008, President
Sarkozy was in the process of negotiating important and highly sensitive matters with Russia, which
seem to connect closely with a sudden and considerable aggrandizement of the COMINT capacities
of the DGSE, coincidentally or not.
For some reasons, I would not be able to explain, no more than one year later in June 2014, the
UGLE unexpectedly issued a joint statement with the Grand Lodge of Ireland and the Grand Lodge
of Scotland, recognizing “that the actions taken by the current leadership of the GLNF have actively
and comprehensively addressed the problems which led to the withdrawal of recognition […] and
that peace and harmony have now been restored”; resolutions by each jurisdiction to restore
recognition to the GLNF “were accepted”. To the least, I am ready to believe that secret diplomacy
was at play in this decidedly too fast and bizarre reversal of situation. The reader will make up his
own opinion about the oddity when soon he will read on new and surprising role of the GLNF in
Russia.
One more year later in 2015, Juillet left the position of Grand Master of the GLA-MF, at which
moment this grand lodge had co-opted 10,000 more brothers and founded 747 lodges; an amazing
and unprecedented feat in the history of the Freemasonry. The GLA-MF had also established close
relations with the Grande Loge de France–GLF, another French grand lodge having a particular
status in French intelligence activities, as I shall explain.
In 2017, one prominent member of the GLNF stated, in substance, that all accusations against
Stifani had been fabricated and that, in point of fact, he had always proved his innocence in justice
courts. As about the disparagement against Stifani because he benefited of an expensive SUV and of
bodyguards, this would have been amply justified by his stalking and anonymous threats he was
frequently addressed. On one hand, I do not have any difficulty believing the latter. On the other
hand, I am wondering about which kind of man Stifani really was as Great Master of the GLNF in
the 2000-2010s.
As a reminder, the Russians did not want Freemasonry to exist on their soil until the fall of the
Soviet Union; even not labor unions as the CGT this country secretly funded in France. The nature
of the Soviet regime and the existence of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union–CPSU as
unique and overwhelming political party in the country, with its youth wing the Komsomolsk, was
good enough for watchdogging the population, the political apparatus, and the economy and
industry in the country. The CPSU mastered perfectly the circulation of elite. However, as this type
of organization disappeared entirely in 1991, the need at once arose to find out other solutions to
resume the latter provisions. The most trusted intelligence officers of the old Soviet regime were
called upon to constitute the upper class of the Russian Federation, and to let gangs and mafias
rebuilding the domestic economy. As the new laws and provisions did not include restriction on
Masonic and secrets societies, and as her new ruling elite found an interest in reinstating Christian
religion in the country, although its members had been shortlisted in reason of their outstanding
loyalty to the secular communist regime, ironically, the old grand lodge of the tsarist regime was
reactivated. Once more, the followings might confound the reader.
France, and not Russia, resurrected the regular Freemasonry in this country through the
involvement of her yet despised regular Masonic grand lodge the GLNF. Indeed, in 1992 and 1993,
the GLNF created the lodges Harmony and Lotus in Moscow, the lodge New Astrea in St.
Petersburg, and the lodge Gamayun in Voronezh. Two years later on June 24, 1995, the latter lodges
joined their founder the GLNF to resurrect the old tsarist regular Grand Lodge of Russia–GLoR in
Moscow. That is how the GLoR was the first national grand lodge in Russia since its closure in
1922 when Freemasonry was banned in this country. Since then, the GLoR enjoys mutual
recognition with most of the regular grand lodges worldwide, and of the UGLE. Eleven years later,
in 2016, the membership of the GLoR was surprisingly small however, with 700 only in more than
35 lodges for the whole Russia; unless freemasonry in this country is a very exclusive circle for the
elite or else, this I do not know.
Knowing the way Russia always react when confronted with interference in its domestic affairs,
the aforesaid obviously calls for an answer to the question, “Who is watchdogging the GLNF,
actually?”
For decades, in France, there have been close connections between Freemasonry and charitable
associations and clubs frequented by local elite, such as Lions Clubs International, Kiwanis, and
Rotary. Then there are the much more exclusive Racing Club de France, Cercle de l’Union
interalliée, Jockey Club for the old French noblesse, and others lesser-known circles for Paris’ elite.
The local secretaries of the three former that are of Anglo-Saxon origin often are Freemasons in
touch with the intelligence community, or else are its agents anyway. In France, they serve as
privileged places of observation and approach of influential and wealthy people that the GOdF and
other grand lodges seek to co-opt. There is even a byword among enlightened people saying, “The
Lions Clubs, Kiwanis, and Rotary are antechambers of the Freemasonry”. Those local elite of the
outside of Paris are invited to their evenings and galas, sometimes on the discreet initiative of a
local intelligence officer who wants to recruit them as contacts or sources; this is an additional
opportunity to spot and to recruit valuable sensors and agents of influence in domestic intelligence.
When someone joins the Freemasonry in France, it obviously happens that one of his close
relatives be also co-opted eventually. Yet the case of the Freemason who ends his life as the sole
person in his family with having this particular quality is not so rare either. To challenge a popular
belief, joining the Freemasonry does not guarantee at all success and extraordinary rewards.
Additionally, many Freemasons never reach even the third degree of Master for unclear reasons
beyond “insufficient assiduity”. I would find myself put in a quandary, if ever the reader asked me
“Which moral quality, mix of particular prerequisites, efforts, trick, or IQ grants one the best
chances to access the higher degrees?” So, the French Freemasonry does not really have an elite at
the image of all societies of laymen in which fortunate sons and daughters inherit the statuses of
their parents. I have known masons who lived the very ordinary lives of lower middle-class laymen;
and even half a dozen or so who remained stuck in precariousness for years. As about the subject of
the good moral, frankness, and reputation of honesty dear to the Freemasonry, I said earlier these
qualities might be challenged.
I vividly remember of a Master Mason of the GOdF, with the responsibility of Frère
Couvreur[308] in his lodge, who also was a barbouze of the DGSE following an aborted career in a
military elite unit. This man had a patent and unforgettable acute narcissistic personality disorder
any psychiatrist would diagnose in no time. In the GOdF, he had been initiated, as all his brothers
and sisters were, thanks to his father who was the Worshipful Master of the lodge. He led a busy life
of crookeries, frauds, and offenses of varied gravities, down to thefts as petty as stealing bicycles
and construction equipment he put in the trunk of his Mercedes on dark nights. Among several other
examples of the latter sort, by a night of 1975, he gave an emergency call to one of his brother
masons to ask for his help because his car was stuck in the mud of the yard of a mid-sized industrial
company. Once on the place, the helpful man understood his brother in distress actually had come
there to steal aluminum bars with the expectation to resell them at a good bargain to a scrap dealer.
Yet the brother resigned to help him get out of his dire predicament, though reluctantly and on
condition he would not steal the aluminum. A few days later, the incident was known in his lodge,
yet the Master Thief was spared eviction, as he was the son of the Worshipful Master. When he
passed away in the early 2000s, such was his short but elliptical obituary, I read in a local
newspaper: “Our community bemoans the departure of our friend Claude. He will leave to us the
souvenir of this pleasant and joyful buddy at times he struggled to be”.
I have met other Masons of the latter ilk who held higher degrees in the GOdF or even who were
worshipful masters; one had reached the 30th degree of Knight Kadosh. Some among those were
expelled, at last, because they went so far in their vices that their brothers resigned to let them go
and do prison terms. The truth about the question of moral actually is that the GOdF does not admit
in its midst someone who could be vulnerable to a blackmail supported by a grave or shameful past
fault, exactly as in the DGSE. When I said the moral of a mason might be challenged upon his
initiation, I meant dragging him into a compromising venture is the best means to warrant his
indefectible allegiance, precisely; especially if ever he is called to be the holder of sensitive
responsibilities and knowledge.
Often, wives and daughters of Masons of the GOdF who hold important professional
responsibilities, or who have activities in intelligence at a similar degree, are encouraged to join the
Grande Loge Féminine de France–GLFF, a female grand lodge. However, a number of them deny
the favor for some personal reasons, among which the first is that the middle of female Freemasonry
tends to exacerbate in them traits in character, I explained in the chapter 3, while talking about
women in intelligence. Concisely, some women indeed blossom and find a meaning in their lives
once admitted in a female lodge. Some others complain about atmospheres and situations they
jokingly compare to those they see in Desperate Housewives. No offense to my woman reader; I am
just reporting what I heard and even noticed when in company of women masons chatting together
outside of their lodge. Nonetheless, wives of Masons who chose not to “receive the light”[309] can
hardly escape an overwhelmingly Masonic middle, willy-nilly. This must be seen as a security
provision of a sort, obviously, when those women are brought incidentally to know many things that
they are expected to keep for themselves. On one hand, they feel somewhat disconnected from the
world of lay people; on the other hand, they do not belong to that of their husbands, socially stuck in
the middle of nowhere. Many have the understandable and natural need to talk to friends about
themselves and their problems, which is obviously worrisome.
The particular case of the couple in which one of the two partners is Freemason and works in
intelligence is not so rare. The worse is to be expected when the disgruntled woman finally has an
affair, or divorces and marry again with a partner who is not supposed to know about masonic and
intelligence matters she often heard at home. That is why there are cases of women who are
blacklisted or even socially eliminated only because they made the mistake to confess the reason of
their discontent to lay people, after they quitted their partners. The situation implies disastrous
consequences for the children when there are because the French intelligence community does not
show any particular mercy with those collateral victims, if the divorced refused to join a new partner
discreetly chosen for them.
Now, I talk about the general organization of the French liberal Freemasonry. It is noteworthy that
of the 35 grand lodges in existence in France in 2017, more than half have been created from the
early 1990s, 21 exactly. The boom began when the Cold War ended, exactly.

3 before 1900.
1 only between 1900 and 1945.
3 between 1945 and 1960.
 6 between 1960 and 1980.
1 between 1980 and 1990.
5 between 1990 and 2000.
8 between 2000 and 2010.
8 between 2010 and the end of 2018.

The French intelligence community and the DGSE in particular if not exclusively, have been
instrumental in the creation of all these new grand lodges. Then masons of the GOdF founded most
of their lodges, if not all, on discreet demands from this intelligence agency, and even sheltered
them in large houses they own on papers. I witnessed the founding of two, relevant to the latter case.
Since 1871, many grand masters of the GOdF were military officers and / or active in the French
intelligence community. Michel Baroin, former senior executive in the RG in 1959, and then in the
DST from 1960, the same year he was initiated Mason of the GOdF, was elected Grand Master of
this grand lodge from 1977 to 1978. Alain Bauer, currently working in intelligence and a well-
known specialist in domestic intelligence, security, and counterintelligence, was Grand Master of
the GOdF from 2000 to 2003. Army General René Imbot, former Director of the DGSE from 1983
to 1985[310] and high-ranking member of the GOdF, co-founded the Grande Loge des Cultures et de
la Spiritualité–GLCS (Grand Lodge of Culture and Spirituality) in 1983. Imbot did it together with
geopolitics specialist at the École de Guerre François Thual, I named at the beginning of this chapter
and elsewhere in this book about a case of arms trafficking in the benefit of Russia. Jeannou Lacaze
joined Imbot and Thual to create the latter grand lodge. Lacaze has been General of theForeign
Legion, former high-ranking executive of the SDECE / DGSE and in the DRM, specialist in African
affairs, special advisor to several African presidents, and former senior interlocutor in arms sales to
Saddam Hussein.
The true following reasons justify the liberal masonic upsurge. First, there is a need for an ever-
greater control over the French middle class and lower-upper class, direly expected to keep on
siding with the State and helping reining in the growing discontent of the lower class. However, as
the GOdF carries out the most sensitive masonic activities, this comes to set drastic limits in co-
optations. That is why so many different new grand lodges are created since 1991, each addressing
people / minorities whose profiles do not meet the demanding standards of the GODF. In actuality,
the GOdF uses the media to promote the image of the liberal freemasonry in general, and to woo
new candidates for the new grand lodges it created and not really for itself because it is not in need
of applications.
One among the first of these new grand lodges, created as early as in 1952 to solve this problem
was the Grande Loge Féminine de France–GLFF (Women’s Grand Lodge of France). Much earlier,
in 1901, already, was created the grand lodge Le Droit Humain (The Human Right) aka Fédération
Française du Droit Humain (French Federation of the Human Right), called “DH” in Masonic
jargon. The DH is the first and oldest federation of the International Masonic Mixed Order “Human
Right,” which also admits Christian believers in its midst; it ranks second largest liberal grand
lodge, behind the GOdF today. The second need for growth of the French liberal Freemasonry is
that the GOdF very often not to say always is called to play an active role in counterintelligence
missions; at least because a potent number of intelligence officers and executives of all French
intelligence agencies are members of this grand lodge.
The liberal masonic progression gave birth in its wake to a new Freemasonic structure that
remains implicit and informal in 2018. Its objective is to establish a coherent hierarchy of governing
bodies and sub-bodies in masonic affairs. Then the sub-bodies together must have a greater capacity
in influence and domestic monitoring in the middle and lower-upper classes of the French lay
society, to best enforce prerequisites in domestic active measures, social order, and the resuming of
the agenda of the ruling elite in political and economic affairs described in the chapter 13; and also
foreign affairs as the effectiveness of actives measures abroad depends on their application at home
beforehand. Actually, the potency and growth of the French liberal Freemasonry, especially abroad,
became fundamental in the effectiveness of the French active measures abroad because it is an
alternative to the Comintern and more informal leftist underground networks abroad of the Soviets.
While looking at the overall picture of this structure of masonic bodies and sub-bodies, and under
the angle of domestic intelligence and security of the interior, it appears as two concentric “circles
of trust”. There is the inner circle of the GOdF that is acting as “maker of the core French
republican values and guardian of the progressive faith” that, herein, is analogous to a “civilian
national guard,” whose dependability owes to the demanding requirements of its membership.
Orbiting around this hard core, we find all other liberal grand lodges whose activities and programs
reveal their allegiance to the rules, ideals, and stances of the GOdF. Remarkably, the reader notices,
the model is in all respects similar to that of the relations between the DGSE and the rest of the
French intelligence community. By analogy, the GOdF acts as the “Security Service” of the French
liberal Freemasonry; and even of the liberal Masonry worldwide, as the reader soon shall see.
Firsthand, I oft witnessed the unofficial authority of the GOdF over all other French liberal grand
lodges. As recent example, the creation and full funding and sheltering of a blue lodge (initiation
lodge) of the Grande Loge de France–GLF aka GLdF were all done by a mason of the GOdF who
was a regional executive of the DGSE.[311] On the official inauguration of this lodge, an event called
“allumage des feux” or “ignition of the fires” in French Masonic jargon, I was informally
introduced to Grand Master of the GLF Alain Pozarnik who came there to expresses his warm
thanks to the generous sponsor.
By the way, the GLF is of particular interest in the eyes of the DGSE because this old grand
lodge, created in 1894, posing as would-be-regular though not recognized as such by the World
regular Freemasonry, makes a point today with keeping good relations with the Roman Catholic
Church, and welcoming Christian believers in its midst, although its membership remains largely
agnostic. A minority among brothers of the GLF are military, police officers, members of the French
intelligence community, and even barbouzes who are Christian believers or make a pretense of it.
The latter particulars grant the easy monitoring of everyone in this grand lodge, and it truly stays
liberal anyway. The GLF is perceived as the remotest “planet” orbiting around the “sun” that the
GOdF metaphorically is, beyond which in the “outer space” we find the GNLF that now has close
relations with the GLF.
Since the Affair of the Cards of Denunciation in 1904, and more exactly in the aftermath of the
WWII, the military somehow revised their secret policy in human resources, and decided to make a
profit of military officers who are Christian believers, including those who attend mass in Catholic
churches. The joining of France to the U.S.-led NATO in 1949 made this new and annoying
provision unavoidable not only in the military, but also in the French Government. In passing, this
comes to explain why Catholicism and religious traditions in the French military continue to exist
today.[312]
With regard to intelligence activities specifically, the SDECE and then the DGSE for several
decades, and probably since the late 1950, made a profit of the GLF as an intelligence “hub” or
“recruitment pool” for spies expected to infiltrate middles where Christian believers are in majority
or unusually represented. From a “technical” standpoint, the GLF therefore is a Masonic society
where snitches, infiltration agents, and double agents are numerous. The priority targets of those
spies are the Roman Catholic Church, members of Protestant churches; and all countries where
Christian believers are in majority, in the other context of foreign intelligence. In order to provide
the reader with a good example about this, Régis Poubelle, one of my former colleagues in the
DGSE who worked—and still is working today as suggest some particular facts[313]—in
counterintelligence against Britain and the United States, introduces himself as a Christian
protestant, and is a member of the GLF. In sum, the real aims of the GLF are to establish secret and
informal connections between the French military and agents called to be in touch with the Roman
Catholic Church, the few Protestant churches in France and others abroad, foreign collaborators in
NATO, and by extension and whenever possible in Britain, the United States, and other English-
speaking countries; either through diplomatic channels or clandestinely in the latter instances.
Nonetheless, this does not change anything inside the DGSE, in which the rare Christian believers
did not have access to certain awareness degrees until the early 2000s, regardless of their ranks. I
can only assume a change is underway with respect to Christian religion in this agency, due to the
ongoing relationship between France and Russia.
The GOdF is similarly active in foreign intelligence and in serving the active measures. As the
reader cannot yet fathom the depth of the reaching power of the DGSE worldwide, which this
agency enjoys also thanks to this grand lodge because of its authority in liberal Freemasonry abroad.
Freemasonry is of invaluable help to the French intelligence community and to the DGSE in
particular in foreign countries where there are liberal grand lodges. In the first instance, liberal
masonic grand lodges and lodges abroad for long helps cultivate networks of French and indigenous
contacts, sources, and agents of influence. Additionally, those networks are of great usefulness in
providing various kinds of help and support to sources, contacts, agents, and even intelligence
officers having no masonic membership. The number of unquestionable evidences I report in this
chapter and in the chapter 28 on French intelligence activities in Switzerland in the 2010s
epitomizes this point. For the record, masons of the GOdF receive a pocket address book in which
are recorded the locations of all lodges, corresponding phones numbers, and names of their
representatives / worshipful masters; edited to help tripping freemasons, precisely.
Second, the DGSE resumed a grand strategy apparently devised much earlier in the aftermath of
the WWII, which, arrived in the 1990s, aims to foster the creation worldwide of as many liberal
grand lodges as possible. Additionally, the strategy plans to establish representations of French
grand lodges abroad whenever possible. The formal aims of this second provision are to offer to
French masons living and working abroad, or who are just vacationing, opportunities to remain in
touch with their brotherhood. Among the real aims, we find a will to initiating useful nationals
having positions of influence in those foreign countries with a focus on elected officials,
representatives of all political parties, and people working in the media. The latter objective must be
understood as a way to recruit “legally” indigenous sources, contacts, and agents who thus become
active under pretenses of independent liberal freemasonic membership and corresponding
commitment to humanistic and progressive values. To which come to add opportunely the pledges
during their initiations and monthly tenues (meetings / ceremonies) to commit indefectibly to
helping and assisting brother masons who are in distress; overriding all other considerations and
ascertained in higher masonic degrees.
Third, French liberal Masonic representations abroad can be assimilated to informal “consulates”
and “embassies” of a sort; the more so, since they serve as official communication channels between
the French liberal Freemasonry and foreign liberal grand lodges. In point of fact, the reader saw
earlier the importance given to Freemasonry in general and worldwide with the examples of the
affair of the GLNF in the 2000s. To which we must add a cultural dimension, as French liberal
lodges abroad purport to breed and to tout French liberal values through arts, culture, and even
politics. Why not diplomatic back channels, then?
For more than a century already, masonic lodges fill regularly the latter role. As historical
example, U.S. President William H. Taft, initiated Mason by the Body of Kilwinning Lodge N° 356,
Cincinnati, Ohio in 1909, met fraternally and officially with French and French-speaking Canadian
brothers in Northern America. Promises of good agreements and partnership between the three
countries were exchanged on this occasion. The Canadians brothers of the Province of Quebec even
printed a book in French language with pictures, entirely dedicated to the special event.[314]
Indeed, Freemasonry, international politics, economy, and cultural exchanges closely connect
each other. Yet the reader goes too far if he assumes that, thereof, the worldwide Masonic
conspiracy many talk about would be a reality, after all. For there is instead a real and fierce
ongoing Masonic cold war between two blocks of countries, which this time are the Anglo-Saxon
and regular Freemasonry on one side, and a French-inspired and liberal-spirited Freemasonry on
the other. The real aims hiding behind formal aims of “peace and harmony between brothers around
the World” are all about a true political battle between the tenets of capitalism on one side, and
progressivism on the other side. Yes, the reader must understand down-to-earth and hard realpolitik
in the context of a silent war for the conquest of economic and territorial interests, still officially
denied on both opposing factions. Once more, remember what happened to the GLNF, and see what
follows.
The resuming of the grand strategy for the spread of the French liberal Masonry in the World
seems to begin in 1947. As surprising as it may seem, the enterprise put the small Switzerland on a
pedestal for a while. Why this? Apparently, first, because of the immediate geographical proximity
of Switzerland with France. Second, because of the privileged location of this country on
continental Europe. Third, neutral Switzerland was the ideal place to settle the future hub of the
liberal Freemasonry for the World; thereof in Geneva still logically, in the immediate neighborhood
of all other international organizations and NGOs that settled their headquarters in this city. By
comparison, the choice of Lyon, France, to make it the home of the ICPO-Interpol in 1923, created
in the wake of the founding of the Society of Nations in 1920, ancestor of the UNO, had collected
an enthusiasm that quickly and definitively faded, for reasons I explained the chapter 11. It was
obviously out of question to attempt anything of that order in any English-speaking and
overwhelmingly Christian-believing country, where the regular Freemasonry poses as an
impregnable fortress. Unless I forget something, still today in 2018, France has even not a single
representation of any of her liberal grand lodges in London, although some present the capital of the
United Kingdom as “the 6th biggest French city on Earth,” with an amazing expatriate population of
250,000; to be compared with less than 300,000 in the whole United States.
I would be unable to say whether the SDECE was the hand that pulled the strings of the French
Freemasonry from above the stage in the aftermaths of the WWII, or if it rather was a faction of
former Resistant free fighters mixing military and politicians with membership in the GOdF. The
French ruling elite of that time was still struggling to organize itself through political rivalries,
intrigues, and even deadly feuds of the cloak-and-daggers sort opposing Moscow, Washington, and
French independent idealists.
The Soviet Union secured its advantage in France in 1958 with the return of De Gaulle into
power in France through a revolution of palace. In 1959, liberal Freemasonry in Switzerland was
represented by several grand lodges, and by a few lodges of the GOdF in Lausanne and Geneva.
Other liberal Masonic representations were the Swiss Grand Lodge Memphis-Misraim, with lodges
in Lausanne, Geneva, Bienne, and Zurich; and the Fédération Suisse du Droit Humain–FSDH
(Swiss Federation of the Human Right) with lodges in Zurich, Bern, Bellinzona, Geneva, and
Lausanne. As many other countries, Switzerland for long has a Freemasonry of her own, led by the
Grande Loge Suisse Alpina–GLSA (Grand Lodge Alpina of Switzerland) aka “Alpina”. It was
founded in 1844 with the creation of around 30 lodges, allegedly. Although Alpina linked with the
Continental Freemasonry of the Grand Orient de France until the first half of the 20th century, all its
lodges strengthened their ties with the UGLE after the Second World War. The why of the latter
evolution was the new division of the World into the West led by the United States, and the East of
the Soviet Union; so, the Cold War. Doubtless, Switzerland had to make a dramatic choice with this,
against her cherished neutrality. However, Switzerland largely is a Christian Nation with important
Protestant and Roman Catholic minorities. Last but not the least, Switzerland remains a proponent
of capitalism, and so she felt she shared more values with the Western World, as she still does today.
In the late 1950s, all politicians and diplomats in the World had taken notice that France did not
really align with the United States in spite of her NATO membership. Charismatic De Gaulle had
been the first to voice the latter position by claiming neutrality between the opposing United States
and Soviet Union. However, unlike peaceful Switzerland, France under the leadership of De Gaulle
also wanted her own nuclear force, and even to project her political and military power beyond the
seas, in Africa in particular, where she rules unofficially a number of territorial possessions
inherited from her colonialist era. At the turn of the 1950s, and even before possibly, several
countries including Switzerland had learned the other worrying reality of the Soviet penetration of
the French Government, including its military and intelligence apparatuses.
At the onset of the Cold War, the U.K. intelligence service had helped Switzerland constitute the
Projekt-26 aka P-26, a secret stay-behind army in Switzerland tasked with countering a possible
invasion of the country by the Soviets. In 1958, following the Suez Crisis and the crushing of the
Budapest insurrection by the Soviets, Swiss Major Hans von Dach published Der totale Widerstand,
Kleinkriegsanleitung für Jedermann (“The Total Resistance: Guerrilla Warfare for Everyone”), a
book of 180 pages about passive and active resistance to a foreign invasion, including detailed
instructions on sabotage, hiding, methods for dissimulating weapons, struggling against police
moles, and similar.
The first visible consequence of the aforesaid in Freemasonry in Switzerland occurred very early
in 1949, when the grand lodge Alpina moved on in the acceptance of English landmarks of the
UGLE by proclaiming the “5 points of Alpina (or Winterthur)”[315] at its meeting in Winterthur. As
logical consequence, but also on the request of the UGLE, in 1950, this event dissolved the liberal
Association Maçonnique Internationale–MAI (International Masonic Association) that brought
together most grand lodges of continental Europe including the GOdF and the Grand Orient de
Belgique–GOB (Grand Orient of Belgium). The MAI had been created in 1921 on an idea the
GOdF, proposed in 1889 already.
On the convent of Alpina of May 15, 1952 in Lausanne, the French visiting brothers were banned
from entering the Temple: they were just tolerated in the dining room for the banquet. Most Swiss
brothers of Alpina declared themselves sorry, but “the orders were the orders”. On May 15, 1954,
the Convention de Luxembourg (Luxembourg Convention), in which Alpina participated, developed
privileged links with several regular grand lodges. There and there in Europe, the hardening of
positions taken in Luxembourg raised renewed dissatisfaction among liberal Freemasons. Some
members of liberal lodge Le Progrès (The Progress) in Lausanne, dissatisfied with Alpina’s stance
for the UGLE, contacted Grand Master of the GOdF Francis Viaud in the hope to constitute a lodge
of this French Masonic power in this city. This is how liberal lodge Lumière et Travail (Light and
Work) was created on May 27, 1955. However, on June 11, 1955, less than one month after the
founding of the latter, Alpina reacted by breaking off relations with the GOdF. The event entailed
inevitable political consequences between Switzerland and France; or say, international politics was
accountable for it, actually.
In 1956, in Basel, Switzerland, was created the liberal Grande Loge Europe–GLE (Europe Grand
Lodge) on an initiative of Jan Onderdenwijngaard, Dutch President of the Universal Masonic
League. In 1957, Swiss national Paul-Émile Chapuis was appointed Grand Master of the GLE, and
the name of this grand lodge was changed for Grande Loge Unie Europe–GLUE (United Grand
Lodge of Europe). However, this first attempt to impose in Europe a liberal challenger to the Anglo-
Saxon UGLE transformed into a failure as it proved ephemeral.
Finally, on June 24, 1959, on a French discreet initiative was created the Grand Orient de Suisse–
GOS (Grand Orient of Switzerland), and Chapuis was elected its first grand master. This event was
the ultimate consequence of the upheaval of 1949, and so of the Cold War and of France’s political
edging away from the United States and Britain. The GOdF had been instrumental in the creation of
the GOS, but French agents of the Soviet MGB had largely penetrated the former and influenced it
from within; this fact will be cleared in this chapter and in others to come. The GOS was composed
of three lodges founded earlier: Évolution, and Anderson in Lausanne, and Zur Leuchtenden
Flamme in Zurich.
In any case, the idea to settling a French led World organization of the liberal Freemasonry in
Switzerland was going sour; but France still had the other ongoing ambition to lead a federation of
European countries. Therefore, on January 22, 1961, in spite of the fact that the creation of the
Grand Orient of Switzerland had been a success, the GOdF called for the founding of an
international organization of liberal Masonic grand lodges in Strasbourg, France. In the effect, it was
christened Centre de Liaison et d’Information des Puissances Maçonniques Signataires de l’Appel
de Strasbourg–CLIPSAS (Center for the Liaison and Information of the Masonic Powers
Signatories of the Strasbourg Appeal). With the concern not to reproduce the failure of the
Association Maçonnique Internationale–MAI and its downfall eleven years earlier in 1950, and the
defeat of the Grande Loge Europe–GLE in 1956, so scathing that even its name fell into complete
oblivion today, the GOdF in this endeavor had secured support from 11 other European grand
lodges.[316] Strasbourg by far had not the international prestige of Geneva, yet this other city gained
symbolical importance with the settling in it of a European Parliament in 1962. For wants of a
pretense of objective neutrality, the World liberal Freemasonry contented itself with another of
aggressive European identity.
Indeed, on the day of the founding of the CLIPSAS, the GOdF in its hollering address to the other
European liberal grand lodges was as warmongering as clear in its myth and narrative. In substance,
the French leading grand lodge found itself moved and upset by the abusive intransigence of a
stream of Anglo-Saxon and deist grand lodges introducing together as the sole regular and true
Freemasonry, represented by the United Grand Lodge of England. Therefore, it called “all
Freemasonries of the World” to unite liberal grand lodges that do not recognize themselves in what
they identify as “intransigent dogmatism,” in the respect of their sovereignties and of their rites and
symbols, and “in accordance with the principles of the speculative Freemasonry of the origins”.
Since this happening and in 2018, precisely, the CLIPSAS indeed is become the international
organization of liberal Masonic grand lodges, and its authority is acknowledged by no less than 104
grand lodges in the World[317] including 2 in Switzerland,[318] 4 in the United States of America;[319]
but still none in Britain. The CLIPSAS also has an official survey position in the ECOSOC, a sub-
body of the UNO in charge of economic and social affairs. The fundamental principles of the
CLIPSAS obviously differ of those of the regular and Anglo-Saxon Freemasonry on two
fundamental points in particular: the principle of a necessary faith in God replaced in liberal
Freemasonry by that of an “absolute freedom of conscience,” and the recognition of mixed and
female grand lodges.
The acting president of the CLIPSAS (from 2017 to 2020) is French national François Padovani,
otherwise Grand Master of the Grande Loge Mixte de France–GLMF (Mixed Grand Lodge of
France). Note in passing that Padovani began his career in the French military, and then became
executive in the French public service in, where he is born.
In 2015, fifty-six years after the GOdF had created the liberal GOS in Switzerland, this grand
lodge had 19 lodges in this country including the three earlier mentioned, and a claimed
membership of 392. The other liberal lodges having close connections with the French Freemasonry
were the Grande Loge Mixte de Suisse–GLMS with 8 lodges and 130 members; the Fédération
Suisse du Droit Humain–FSDH with 7 lodges and 170 members: and the Grande Loge Féminine de
Suisse–GLFS, exclusively female and the largest of all liberal grand lodges in Switzerland with 21
lodges and 400 members. All this made 1092 liberal men and women Masons exactly. Came to add
to this liberal Masonic presence, potent for a small country of 8.5 million souls already—the same
as the population of New York City—, but less than two millions for the concerned French-speaking
region, actually, the French imports of two lodges of the GOdF with an unknown membership (40
brothers in 2012, it is estimated). Still in 2015, the memberships of the GOS and of the GLFS were
growing rapidly with a yearly rate of about 10%, estimates said;[320] and in 2018, liberal lodges
were growing at the expense of regular Masonry.[321] By comparison, in January 2018, the regular
grand lodge Alpina had 84 lodges in the whole Switzerland for about 4,000 claimed members—all
masonic lodges in the World have between 15 to 50 members, be it said in passing.
With respect to political influence, this activity that some name “culture warfare,” the SDECE,
and the DGSE its successor has been helping the GOS to develop in the French-speaking part of
Switzerland. In 2018, this grand lodge was largely represented and particularly active in economic
intelligence and political influence in this region.
As I investigated a little on the Grand Orient de Suisse–GOS in particular, for the sole sake of an
intrigued curiosity, in the first instance, I noticed that a majority of its members and past grand
masters are French nationals; not Swiss citizens at all. In 2018, the Grand Master of the GOS was
French national Alexandre Rauzy. Previously from 1992 to 1993, Rauzy was a military in the
Aviation Légère de l’Armée de Terre–ALAT (French Army Light Aviation);[322] he is now professor
of philosophy. The previous Grand Master of the GOS from 2012 to 2014 was Philippe Lang, a
French national again, CEO of Rouvier Associés, a consulting company with a specialty in assets
management. Second, I found out that several members of the GOS among the most influential had
past activities in close connection with the French Ministry of Defense, and much likely with the
French intelligence community. Third, I noticed that most members of the GOS, if not all, largely
“felt concerned” about politics and public affairs in Switzerland, and that a number of them
interfered actively in Swiss politics with progressive and even far-leftist agendas.
The reader must figure, if ever the grand lodge Alpina did the same in France, everyone in the
DGSE would call it foreign interference and this agency would launch a smear campaign against
Switzerland in the media. Once only, the Swiss dared just uttering their discontent about the
ongoing and overt French Masonic interference in Swiss public and private affairs. On September 2,
2015, Le Nouvelliste Swiss newsmagazine leaked on its Facebook page a news saying a majority of
politicians of the canton of Valais led by the rightist parties UDC and PDC were toying with the
idea to oblige its representatives stating their membership in a Masonic lodge, when necessary. Not
only the liberal Masonry in Switzerland protested forthwith, but also the protest was supported from
Paris by the indignant voice of popular online newspaper Mediapart. In its stance for French-
imported liberal Freemasonry in Switzerland, Mediapart titled on its blog, “Un plouc chez les
bobos” (A Redneck among the Bobos )—the French slang word bobo is a contraction for pejorative
“bohemian bourgeois” or “wealthy leftist”.
On the web-journal version of Mediapart, the vindictive title was changed for the more chiseled,
“Contre la Franc-Maçonnerie: Une Gousse de vieux fascisme dans la fondue valaisanne” (Against
Freemasonry: A clove of old Fascism in the Valais Fondue). Below, are some excerpts of the press
article, I translated in English, as they are worthy to be quoted as samples of the French
aggressiveness in influence abroad.
“This is always like that in Switzerland. It is in the regions where foreigners are the least
numerous that we vote the most xenophobic. It is in cities without a mosque that the greatest fear is
the erection of minarets. And it is in a canton where there are few Freemasons, Valais, that one is
about to take against them discriminatory measures. Unbelievable, in a country, Switzerland, which
owes so much to Freemasonry in the creation of its democratic institutions!”
“[…] Personally, I never made a secret of my masonic membership, both in Switzerland and in
France. Such decision is everyone’s free will, however. To some, Freemasonry is so much a part of
their inner sphere that they do not intend to turn it into a subject of conversation. Are they unworthy
to exercise a political mandate for all this?
“[…] this approach of the office of the Grand Council of Valais was initiated—if one daresay—
by the UDC, and followed by Catholics and conservatives who, today, name themselves Christian
Democratic Party of Valais [PDC]. It is no coincidence if these two entities are leading the war
against Freemasonry. They are the political and cultural heirs of Fascism and [Catholic] Popist
fundamentalism of the past who always opposed freedom of conscience. Today, the UDC and the
PDC attack the Freemasonry from the angle of transparency. Absolute transparency—that which
seeks to delve into personal conscience and privacy—is what dictators always imposed upon their
subjects. This is totalitarianism, be it red, black, or brown. Stalin persecuted Freemasons in the
Gulag, Hitler sent them to extermination camps, Mussolini banished them from public life, and
Franco sentenced them to death. And, today, the Islamic terrorists of Hamas want to annihilate them
as in their charter they promise.
“[…] we start with registering Freemasons parliamentarians, and then we will go to magistrates,
police, and officials. And we always end up using them, those cards; otherwise, why would we do
them, I am asking to you? At best, to discriminate the Freemasons, at worst, to get rid of them.
“[…] since some Swiss politicians of today have a memory of amnesic diptera, it is advisable to
feature the Masonic Temple in Helvetic History. And remember that Jonas Furrer, the first president
of the Confederation and co-author of the Constitution that gave birth to modern Switzerland, was
Freemason and Worshipful Master of the Akazia Lodge in Winterthur.”
It would be too long to debunk biases in all excerpts, indeed, of this fiery and garrulous sermon
written by Swiss national Jean-Noël Cuénod, currently working (2018) for both French and Swiss
media. Notwithstanding, this single press article and its hyping on social networks was just good
enough to make the political majority of the canton of Valais backtrack in its attempt to expose
masonic French interference in Swiss public affairs. It should be said, in general, political
correctness and bullying easily inhibit the Swiss who collectively, in this respect, are the antithesis
of a Donald Trump. Besides, neutral Switzerland does not want bad relations with any country,
regardless how evil it may be—that is why North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un spent his childhood
studying in this country.
The reader has just seen how a journalist in a foreign country can be turned agent of influence by
luring him to believe he joined a group spirited by unselfish ideas that appealed to him. From the
viewpoint of the psychiatrists and experts of the DGSE, this method of recruitment and
indoctrination relies on the need for belonging or belongingness, itself originating in the herd
instinct. In the chapters to come, the reader will learn more about this, while considering the
manipulation of bodies of individuals on which the strategy for developing liberal Freemasonry in
foreign countries bases entirely. Elaborating on the narrative of liberal Freemasonry abroad would
reveal it is designed entirely to arouse passion. As a matter of fact, the discourse of Swiss journalist
Cuénod, above, marked with exaltation, borrowing to dramatic, irrelevant and even inexact
references, all by far exceeding the realities of the matter at hand, thoughtless in a word, formally
indicates an action that is not motivated by the calculations of an expert in information warfare.
Instead, it is the typical speech of the true believer that some circumstances brought to serve real
aims of which he is obviously ignorant; the latter precision being evidenced by what is known of the
French publication and interest he is working for. I just made a description among several possible
of what is an unconscious agent, exactly.
With the support of its most influential and bilingual members, the GOS established influence
networks in other Swiss political parties with moderate left-leaning stances[324] in the French and
German speaking regions of Switzerland. As evidence supporting this find, on the Internet I
stumbled upon the leaked scan of a letter, whose substance gives explicitly the pressing word to all
worshipful masters of this grand lodge to do their best to co-opt news brothers in the German-
speaking region of this country. The mail with header of the GOS was written in a way conveying
the implicit message to gain a foot as soon as possible over there—there is a hurry, seemingly—and
revealed implicitly that Germany does not necessarily follow France in her mingling in Swiss
affairs. For the record, there is a close and ongoing partnership in intelligence between France and
Germany, to be explained in the next chapters. Therefore, recruiting new brothers in the German-
speaking region of Switzerland should be a mission entrusted to a German grand lodge; yet
Germany and France each has stakes and agendas of her own they do not necessarily share. France,
always moved by passion, is ready to sacrifice everything for politics; Germany, always listening to
reason, stops short of putting her economy at stake.
Some brothers of the GOS hold political positions in Grand Councils of certain cantons in the
French-speaking Switzerland region, with a marked support to left-leaning Swiss green party
Vert’libéraux; as the Swiss Socialist Party seems to distance itself cautiously from its French
counterpart. It is noteworthy that a number of GOS’s members live and even have their professional
activities in France, near and all along the Swiss border, and that they truly serve the French
national interest above their allegiance to Swiss masonic values. Then, among GOS’ brothers living
and working in Switzerland, many are active in the import and promotion of French brands,
products, and culture in this country, books and media, most remarkably.[325]
With all this, the reader is now provided with some first evidences of the French tactic in
freemasonic affairs abroad, and he understands that the ill-named “Grand Orient of Switzerland”–
GOS by far does not breed patriotic values for the country its founders deceptively included in its
name. Yet, nobody in the GOS seems to have any compunction with this, and we have seen that the
very rare Swiss journalists who dare whistle the blower about the “blue-white-red brother in the
lodge” are promptly and loudly called to order from Paris.
This chapter is going to end on an historical account worthy to be kept in mind for later. It spans
the WWII to today, beginning with the event of Nazi Freemason-hunting and anti-Masonic
propaganda in the 1940s in France and in Belgium. In France, the event is officially associated with
the Nazi racial and ethnic cleansing with a focus on the Jews because, according to this version of
history, there would have been an important minority of Jews in the French Freemasonry in the
1930s. Not that so in reality, and even far from it, as the Dreyfus Affair epitomized French anti-
Semitism within the military a few decades earlier at that time. Actually, there was indeed a Jewish
minority in the GLNF, which still abode the rules of the regular Freemasonry and of the UGLE until
the war broke out; and the Nazis associated Freemasons and Jews to simplify their mass propaganda
and create one scapegoat instead of many. As example, circa 1942 and upon the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor of December 7, 1941, Nazi propaganda newly associated the Judeo-Masonic
conspiracy of their own with the United States of America by transforming then acting U.S.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Rockefeller family, between other prominent American
figures, into the kingpins of the conspiracy.
In the same year 1942, the Nazis asked French film director Jean Mamy[331] to make a black
propaganda film on the GOdF. Released in theaters on March 10, 1943, it was titled Forces occultes
(Occult Forces) and had a running time of 43 minutes. Mamy mastered his subject because he had
been Worshipful Master of the Renan lodge of the GOdF from 1931 to 1939 but had since parted
company with the Freemasonry. Altogether, Forces occultes is true in its depiction of the inner
workings of the GOdF in the 1930s; and still today, even. It features a detailed and accurate version
of an initiation rite to the first degree of apprentice in the GOdF, and the influence of this grand
lodge in the lower chamber of the French Parliament is the plot. However, this film stays as satirical
as any black propaganda of this kind can be; and the sheer anti-Semitism of Mamy biases it further.
As an amusing aside, due to its so detailed depiction of the GOdF more than anything else, Forces
Occultes was at once and strictly state-censored upon the Liberation of France; the measure lasted
until the early 2000s when it resurfaced on YouTube, unexpectedly.
Previously in 1975, a majority of French re-discovered or discovered, in most instances, the
existence of Forces occultes on the announcement of its broadcast to come on publicly owned
Channel 2 television. As the subject of Freemasonry stood shrouded in mystery and still fueled
rumors of conspiracy in France, a large majority waited feverishly for the exceptional broadcasting.
However, at the exact scheduled time, there was a special TV announcement by Jean Baylot, former
Deputy Great Master of the GOdF and former Prefect of Police of Paris. Baylot suavely stated that
Forces occultes could not be broadcast because it was a distasteful piece of Nazi propaganda.
Thereupon, a charming female TV presenter made cheesy apologies for the disturbance on behalf of
the French television and announced the broadcast instead of Tintin et les oranges bleus, a
completely unrelated film for children. The French public largely took the open censorship as a
punishment by frustration for their need to know the masonic mystery, at last; the more so, since
Tintin et les oranges bleus was known as a one of the most disastrous failure in the history of French
motion picture. Actually, the turkey had been picked up at the last minute for the sole reason of its
unusually long running time of more than three hours, as the broadcast of Forces Occultes would
have been followed by a televised debate on the Freemasonry in France; censored, too. The
extraordinary yet clumsy show of arrogant secret power and outright censorship did put much oil on
the fire of conspiracy theorists, obviously.
The black propaganda of the Nazis against the Freemasonry in France is worthy to be read, as
additional information to what I explain in this chapter. For it was based on facts that were so true
that the German propaganda staff did not even had to craft lies. They barely did more than to
associate their anti-Semitism rant with it. It is equally true, however, that the French and Belgian
far-rightist press of before the 1940s had largely spread the concept of a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy
already, at times encouraged in this collective effort by the Roman Catholic Church. The myth was
even as old as the Protocol of the Elders of Zion, fabricated in Russia in the late 19th century, as
many knows. In point of fact, after the war, the SDECE, and even its successor the DGSE from
1982 and the DST expressed great interest in the German propaganda. The latter point brings upon
the core of the matter I want to present as a short story, rich and amazing enough to inspire an
additional sequel to the Indiana Jones or Benjamin Gates series.
Underneath the Nazi black propaganda against the Freemasons, the truth was the German
intelligence agencies knew well that the liberal grand lodges in France actually served domestic
intelligence, influence, counterinfluence, and even counterespionage and intelligence abroad in
addition to secret diplomacy. As they knew this secret organization would transform in a fifth
column in wartime, sowing distrust, breeding unrest, and organizing sabotages and armed resistance
—in point of fact, that is exactly what did the French freemasons that the French militia and the
Gestapo failed to catch.
Therefore, on June 14, 1940, the Germans invested the headquarters of the GOdF upon their
conquest of France, and they did the same with all other grand lodges and lodges in existence in
France at that time; the German Army did it first, to be precise. A few days later, on June 26, 1940,
the Feldpolizei was entrusted the task to ransacking systematically all Masonic lodges in France.
Everything was masonic thus was pillaged and seized, and a sizeable part of it was sent to Vichy
eventually where a new French Government of façade had been settled under the presidency of old
WWI hero Marshal Philippe Pétain. In the case of the GOdF in particular, the Sicherheitsdienst,
intelligence service of the SS, occupied its headquarters located 16, Rue Cadet, in Paris.[332] There,
the Nazi spies studied thoroughly the archives they found in the place, with the help of French
translators. They were looking for the names of all Masons of this grand lodge to arrest them at
once; and they wanted to learn more on its organization they just had stripped of its power. Parts of
the archives were sent to the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst, in Berlin, along with some of the
other French grand lodges.
All archives of the other grand lodges thus were combed through either. The whole of it made up
for a huge found of very various documents that were recorded and classified by “orient”.[333] To
help the reader figure what those archives could tell to the Nazis, in details and pell-mell they were
livres d’architecture,[334] records of tenues (meetings) in lodges and of Assemblées Générales de
l’Obédience (General Assemblies of the Grand Lodge), Chambres d’Administration (Board of the
Council), Conseil de l’Ordre (Council of the Order), Agapes bisannuelles de l’Ordre (biannual
feasts of the Order), and Grand Collège des Rites (Grand Council of Rites). Then there were
bulletins of meeting programs,[335] reports of the works of the Council of the Order and of General
Assemblies, records of special commissions created to address such or such problem and accounting
questions, etc. There were also tableaux,[336] bureaux[337] patentes de loges;[338] masonic diplomas
of all degrees, correspondences between lodges, exchanges with lodges in French colonies in
Indochina and Africa, archives of the foreign relations of the GOdF until 1940, central archives of
the GOdF in the 1930s, national directories of the GOdF from 1918 to 1940 (120,000 names),
Annuaires annuels du GOdF (Annual Directories of the GOdF),[339] Bulletins du GOdF (Bulletins
of the GODF printed since 1844), a huge stack of lodges’ archives from the 18th century to 1940,
and another similar stack of original records of monthly meetings and “planks” sent by lodges to the
headquarters of the GOdF, in Paris. That is not yet all.
The details above tell the reader that French are wont to record everything and to card everyone;
the Freemasonry is no exception. This is the exact opposite of the British and American
Freemasonry, in which great respect is given to the oral tradition. In passing, it explains why written
documentation on masonic rites in Britain and in the United States are about inexistent. I can testify
that it took me about a year to read entirely a rich documentation, I once was offered the privilege to
access, about everything on the precise natures of Masonic ceremonies, secret signs, body postures,
and studies on masonic symbolism from as early as in the 18th century. Obviously, those books
were not of the kind one could find in a bookstore, even not on the Internet today.
Anyway, that is how the Germans put their hands on a masonic documentation rich enough not
only to identify Freemasons easily, but also to teach their snitches to pose as freemasons to trick
people they suspected to be one of them. Still at the onset of the occupation, French people in Vichy
who had spontaneously turned collaborators of the Germans undertook to demonstrate their loyalty
and zeal to their new masters, by competing with the Sicherheitsdienst and the Gestapo in the hunt
for Freemasons. In this endeavor, the French Government of Vichy tasked Bernard Fay, Director of
the Bibliothèque Nationale de France–BNF (French National Public Library), to collect as many
documents as he could on the Freemasonry.
In 1941, capturing all Freemasons was thought important enough to justify the creation of a
Service des Societés Secrètes (Service of Investigation on Secret Societies). A part of the masonic
archives of the late 19th and 20th centuries were used for police investigation, and another fed the
ongoing anti-Masonic propaganda. Enough matter was found to fill the pages of a periodical on
Freemasonry titled Les Documents maçonniques (Masonic Papers). A third part, very old and dating
back to 1737 for the oldest French Masonic document, was used for general documentation of
historical interest.
Certain Nazi dignitaries, Himmler and Rosenberg in particular, were convinced the Freemasons
were the keepers of a mystic secret that could help Germany create a “super-human” and make the
Third Reich lasts 1,000 years. It is said the latter oddity much weighed in the decision to send all
masonic archives to Berlin “for further studies”. The Hohe Schule der NSDAP (High School of the
Nazi Party) in Berlin was interested in the archives of the GOdF in particular, for they were
expected to be of great help in the trainings of future political executives with all pertinent
information on the Freemasonry, a secret organization thought as one among the greatest enemies of
the Third Reich. At an undermined time, the archives were moved to an isolated castle in
Wölfelsdorf, then in the German Silesia region that had to become part of Poland after the war and
be renamed Wilkanov.
In May 1945, as the Soviet troops were progressing on the Eastern front, they invested the castle
of Wölfelsdorf, and came across the French Masonic archives, with the surprise we can imagine.
They put all those papers and books in crates and sent the whole of it to Moscow. Upon their arrival
in the Soviet capital, the archives were taken care of by the NKGB, the foreign intelligence service
of the Soviet Union and ancestor of the MGB, KGB, and SVR RF successively. Exactly as the
Germans did, the Soviet spies understood the interest of those obscure papers; so, they translated
and analyzed them all thoroughly, and re-classified them their own way as material for foreign
intelligence use after the war.
Some years later, the resurrected GOdF and the French Government learned, I do not know how,
that “the Soviets had retrieved plenty of French Masonic archives left by the Germans”; by then
“stored somewhere in Moscow”. The French indeed had no idea of how numerous those archives
could be, and even not what they could be. The few surviving witnesses who could tell, were unable
themselves just to figure their bulk and precise natures, and which proportion of those papers the
Nazis had effectively seized; theretofore, it had been assumed they all had disappeared in a bombing
or fire. Thereof, the French claimed belatedly the return of the archives to France to which they
belonged by right; to no avail as the Soviets simply gave no answer. To no avail; the Soviets simply
gave no answer. By then, they were become property of the KGB, unbeknownst to everyone else,
and they had been classified secret, therefore. So, the GOdF and the French Government resigned to
give up against the Soviet Union, in spite of the friendly relations France had with this country since
1966.
In 1992, forty-seven years after the Soviet foreign intelligence service had taken exclusive
possession of the French masonic archives, France renewed her claim because the Soviet Union was
no longer. For the first time, Moscow acknowledged it had such archives in its possession; the
Special Central Archives of the State kept them, the Russians even specified. As for sending those
papers back to France, this was a matter to be discussed; restitution was not an impossible thing, yet
it would take time, certainly. So, negotiations began, but they went on slowly.
Finally, in May 2001, the GOdF and other French grand lodges received 750 cardboard boxes
from Russia, all containing the lost archives, or 225,000 distinct and referenced documents,
registries, records and reports, books, etc. It came as a surprise to the French who never figured so
large a number of documents. On each of the boxes was glued a large standardized piece of paper,
with obscure abbreviations in black stamped Russian Cyrillic characters and numbers indicating
cryptic archive codes. As the boxes, the stickers and characters style suggested several tenths of
years old: the 1970s or the 1980s, possibly. Fortunately, the Russians had sent along an inventory
allowing to knowing what kind of documents each box contained, exactly. Actually, the Russians
had classified everything by grand lodges and lodges, exactly as the Nazi did earlier. With all this,
the French at last realized, the Soviet Union and then the Russian Federation had known everything
on the French Freemasonry, including the names of all French Freemasons in 1940; even, they still
knew, since they had translated each document for their own needs.
 The additional interest the Russians certainly found in those archives is many of those French
Freemasons had successfully escaped the Germans and joined the Resistance. Upon the liberation of
France, the survivors had found again their respectable social positions in the French society; and
often much better as they were rewarded with positions of high responsibility for their loyalty to
France and bravery in wartime. That was not yet all because the Soviets had also found in Berlin
similarly enormous quantities of archives of the German police and intelligence service concerning
their activities in France, including the complete pedigrees of their French informants. That is how
the Soviet intelligence service knew which surviving French had secretly cooperated with the
Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst, either under threat to be shot dead or sent to a death camp, or by
mere opportunism. The latter specifics did not much matter to Soviet spies, of course; the typed
reports of the works of those agents and their photos were the evidences needed for their new
cooperation with the Soviet Union, under threat of their sending to the French justice. The last of all
those French, Freemasons or traitors or both, died between the 1990s and the early 2010s, after
many of them had held influential positions in political affairs and in the industry. In the chapter 23,
the reader will see how the agents of the Soviets in France made profits of this knowledge no one in
France but the first concerned could suspect for more than half a century.
 17. The Databases of the French
Intelligence Community.
France and French citizens are imbued with a police
mentality, indeed; they have been used to along centuries, it
should be said. This helps the reader understand why this
country for more than a century is among the best in the World
at catching criminals, if not the best. The savviest French
mobster knows the countryside is a place to avoid when police
are chasing them. They all flee abroad, or else melt in the
crowd of the big cities where nobody talks to nobody and
knows nobody. That is why the French police uses to conduct
random identity checks in those cities, and why video cameras
are flourishing in French streets for a few years, down to
hamlets; while the Gendarmerie is stopping vehicles randomly
on all roads and highway tolls, just for checking, as if they
were actively looking for some dangerous fugitive.
As the police and the Gendarmerie, French intelligence
agencies tend to rely on human surveillance rather than on
video surveillance, however, because they developed and
perfected the method centuries before the British put a video
surveillance camera at each street corner. Since the 1990s, they
count dearly on two other means to spy on whoever is of
interest to them, I name banking cards and cellphones. That is
why the State recently enacted a law forbidding payments in
cash in excess of 1000 euros,[340] and why, in 1990, it created
TracFin, an additional intelligence agency specialized in fiscal
investigations. The framed fraudsters are not
necessarilypunished, however. Instead, those believed of
further interest are offered to cooperate in exchange for their
impunity; thus, they become agents, snitches, sources, and
informants.
In the late 1990s, the DGSE could obtain the complete and
detailed records of all payments and withdrawals of any
French citizen within a few hours. The records had no heading
and were anonymous lists of payments and withdrawals
indicating the places, exact hours to the second, and
businesses’ names. They were anonymous blanks with no
“Secret” stamps nor any indication of confidentiality
whatsoever. Tracking and recording the metadata only of the
cellphone of a target and what he is doing with his banking
cards are good enough to draw an accurate profile of him,
already. The more so, since when an intelligence agency is
interested in someone, it can even access the detailed records
of everything he buys with his fidelity card in the leading
chain stores of the country—though not in all stores and
outlets. That is why French intelligence officers and flying
agents are instructed to use cash whenever possible, and
banking cards the least possible; and never to register for
fidelity cards, of course.
Today, cellphones and banking cards data collected on a
target can be treated by particular software automatically to
define the main traits of his character, habits, tastes, and
concerns; exactly as parsing does with his correspondence on
the Internet. Spying on his smartphone allows obtaining from
Google the tracks of all his moves, when he went to bed and
woke up, every day, several years back in time if needed, with
date and time recorded to the second; and to know who are his
relatives, acquaintances, and friends. Then, an analysis of the
frequency of his connections with those people allows
knowing who the dearest to him are and more; all this with
metadata analysis only and without any sound nor video
record. With this intelligence gathering only, it is even possible
to make accurate guesses on what the target is going to do
tomorrow. The DGSE and the DGSI need five months of daily
monitoring and background checking to establish an accurate
description of someone’s character, for recruiting,
manipulating, harassing, socially excluding him or whatever.
The DGSE uses Taiga its homemade multipurpose database
software also for treating this type of intelligence gathering.
In the late 1990s, the DGSE designed a highly detailed map
of Paris, whose computer file size at that time was enormous
with respect to the performances of the average desktop
computer. Ultimately, the goal was to create a tridimensional
national cadastral map providing instantly as many details as
possible on any house or building in the country, names of the
owners and tenants alike, and more. A large national
automated intelligence gathering for domestic purpose was
underway. The goal was to associate with the cadastral map
with records of payments, withdrawals, cellphone geolocation,
and a similarly detailed national automated record of
electricity uses and consumptions. EDF, the unique energy
provider of the country, publicly owned, obviously, enjoys a
highly detailed computer database of outlets, lights, and
heating systems in each home in the country.
Thanks to the computerized and real time records of energy
uses in each of those place, the DGSE can also make accurate
inferences about what a target is doing at home in real time,
and about how many people are living with him, and if he is
hosting guests or not. Decades before this capacity existed,
one of the first national databases the RG and the SDECE
were looking into to know more about someone and his
whereabouts was that of the Social Security. For the record,
Social Security in France is the State administration that helps
everybody to pay for healthcare and life recording. Therefore,
this database records all visits to physicians and diagnostics,
drugs prescriptions, purchases in pharmacies, dental care,
optometrist care, emergencies admissions, hospital
admissions, and detailed types of care in those places. Then
the monthly fee to be paid to the Social Security being indexed
on the exact income and extra working hours of each people
living in France, the database allows knowing details of this
other order either. This explains why the DGSE and other
domestic intelligence agencies favor the database of the Social
Security over that of the internal revenue administration, much
less detailed and accurate.
For a while, still in the 1990s, the computer software
engineers of the DGSE faced topographic glitches because the
two-dimensional French cadastral data did not fit perfectly the
curvature of the earth, perceptible at this scale, indeed. The
unforeseen impediment caused inconsistencies and mapping
overlaps, which problems were solved painstakingly. The
instant national cadastral geolocation of all French citizens,
their possessions, and what they are doing when at home is
effective today. This extraordinarily detailed and automated
domestic intelligence on everybody is called internally and
cryptically “structure fine” (“fine structure”).
Anecdotally, the first task given to freshly recruited DGSE
employees working at the headquarters often is filing cards
and archives and converting them into HTML files. Those
pieces of intelligence feed large databases run under Ubuntu
Linux operating system,[341] as these file format and operating
system are standards in the DGSE. Picture files are treated and
converted with Gimp graphics editor software, for example.
The HTML file format and its URL page link system offer the
advantage of smaller file sizes when one is expecting to gather
very large quantities of data, while the Linux open source
standard allows turning round the problem of French distrust
with U.S.-made computer software. In its principle, the whole
of it looks much as Wikipedia. In the mid-1990s, some of my
ex-colleagues were computer engineers on UNIX and were
talking about “AS / 400,” yet I would be unable to explain
what they did with it, as it was rocket science to me.
Now, the reader is going to see what the databases of the
French intelligence community are, taking into account that
many are created and fed by the Gendarmerie and the police
daily, second after second, as we have seen in the chapter 13,
and considering this list may have slightly changed since
2008.
First, there is the FAR database of the Gendarmerie, which
is the largest individual police cards database, whose name
was changed eventually, however. FAR stands for Fichier
Alphabétique de Renseignement (Alphabetical Intelligence
Database). In the early 2000s, FAR gathered about 60 million
individual cards, including deceased people, for a population
of 67.5 million. In it, one could find individual information as
odd as behaviors, neighborhood conflicts, possessions of
dangerous dogs, possessions of properties that do not seem to
match reported incomes, suspicions of drug consumption, etc.
The Gendarmerie uses FAR for knowing the pedigree of
anyone it may have to be dealing with. FAR individual cards
are also useful to some administrative police investigations,
such as investigating the moral of candidates to public service
competitions for a job, opening a café / bar, be granted the
right to sell tobaccos, authorization to own a gun, and others.
As the existence of FAR and the extent of its accuracy reached
public knowledge in early 2000, the government stated that
this database would be deleted by 2010. However, the
government added, information pertinent to administrative
matters in it would integrate Athen@, a new and more
practical database, whose size had to limit to a maximum of 5
million individual cards, officially.
Internally in the Ministry of Defense, getting rid of
information is out of question. I cannot but assume, therefore,
the largest part of FAR either had its name changed since or /
and was moved elsewhere. Still in 2008, the feeding of FAR
was manual; it was up to each gendarme to update individual
cards and to create new ones when establishing procedures or
interventions. Officially, the rule said, French who are
deceased or who are over 80 should not be subject to cards,
and people who moved to other places should no longer
appear in the local FAR database of the Gendarmerie stations
of their former dwellings.
As an aside, before presenting the list of all other databases,
it must be said that since the WWII, the Gendarmerie holds
and feeds other unofficial card databases, of which I can name
the Fichier de la batellerie (Water Transport File Database),
initiated by the German police in 1942. In the early 2000s, this
database counted more than 50,000 individual cards on French
sailors, the boat(s) they owned or just stirred, their employers
or employees, up to their relatives. In 2006, the Gendarmerie
created a new odd and unofficial database of individual cards
of seasonal workers picking tomato and grapes.
In the late 1990s, I was entrusted the right to peruse certain
physical files (called information solide in DGSE jargon, i.e.
“solid intelligence”) then in use in the DST and the DGSE.
Many were unclassified annual membership books on schools,
universities, professional corporations, associations such as
Lion’s Club, Kiwanis and the like, and Who’s Who-like other
registers on prominent personalities, including the original
Who’s Who itself. The most surprising were batches of
individual cards, files, and reports on important personalities
typed during the WWII by the German police and intelligence
service, on which the Nazi stamps of eagles and swastikas
were still there. I was further surprised to see on some the
names of French Nazi collaborators and regular informants
who yet remained famous people in France well after the end
of the war. Ironically, Jean, one of my ex-colleagues
intelligence officer we used to call “Mr. Bean,” due to the
vague resemblance, was grandson of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle,
one of the most infamous collaborationist during the German
occupation. There is obviously a national database of the
Freemasonry, with names and addresses of all Freemasons by
grand lodges and lodges, highly sensitive as the reader may
now imagine.
In the DGSE and the DST, now DGSI, there is a very
special database with highly detailed personal information and
photos of individual cards of sex workers in the specialties of
prostitution and pornography. This database, created a
longtime ago, is used occasionally and on a case-by-case basis
for hiring sex workers for sexual entrapments. With this
database, an intelligence officer can select a sex worker, whose
specialty, physical features, and other particulars match the
known tastes of a target he wants to drag into some setup of
the hotsy-totsy category.
Administrative files

• FPNE – Fichier des Personnes Nées à l’Étranger de la

Gendarmerie Nationale (Database of the National
Gendarmerie on People Born Abroad).
• Fichier de suivi des personnes faisant l’objet d’une
rétention administrative (Tracking Cards System of
Individuals Subject to Administrative Detention).
• FPA – Fichier des Passagers Aériens (Air Passengers
Database) allows to knowing in advance who is going to land
on the French soil, at which time, airport, and gate, so that a
targeted individual can be shadowed as soon as he crosses a
customs checkpoint.
• AGRIPPA – Application de Gestion du Répertoire
Informatisé des Propriétaires et Possesseurs d’Armes
(Directory of Owners and Holders of Firearms).
 • FNIS – Fichier National des Interdictions de Stade
(National Stadium Bans Database).
• FNT – Fichier National Transfrontières (Transborders
National Database).
JUDICIAL FILES

• FBS – Fichier des Brigades Spécialisées (Database for

Specialized Squads) is both a “goal and work database” for
specialized police services fighting serious crime and
organized criminality (criminality, terrorism, narcotics, works
of art and drugs trafficking, money counterfeiting, money
laundering, financial criminality, and illegal immigration). It
gathers intelligence on the environments, habits, and behaviors
of those offenders.
• FTPJ – Fichier de Travail de la Police Judiciaire (Work
Database of the Criminal [judicial] Police).
• FNFM – Fichier National du Faux Monnayage (National
Counterfeit Currency Database).
• FVV – Fichier des Véhicules Volés (Stolen Vehicles
Database).
• FOS – Fichier des Objets Signalés (Database of Reported
Items).
• SIS – Fichier d’Information Schengen (Schengen
Information Database) is a database maintained by the
European Commission. As in 2018, the SIS is used and shared
by twenty-six European countries, including some countries
that did not join the E.U., yet joined the Schengen Agreement.
On it, one may find information on individuals and entities for
the purposes of national security, border control, and law
enforcement. A second technical version of this system,
named SIS II, went live on April 9, 2013. The type of data
about people kept in the SIS includes requests for extradition,
undesirability of presence in particular territories, minor’s
ages, mental illnesses, missing person status, need for
protection, requests by judicial authorities, and people
suspected of crime. The SIS also keeps data referring to lost,
stolen, and misappropriated firearms, identity documents,
motor vehicles, and banknotes. Thanks to this database, along
with the S Card database or Wanted Persons Database–FPR,
the DGSE can ascertain its deserters cannot peacefully refugee
in any country of the European Union, including Switzerland,
albeit this country is not an E.U. member.
Domestic intelligence and counterIntelligence CARDS

• CRISTINA – Centralisation du Renseignement Intérieur

pour la Sécurité du territoire et les intérêts NAtionaux
(Centralization of Domestic Intelligence for Homeland
Security and the National Interest).
PASP – Prévention d’Atteinte à la Sécurité Publique
(Prevention of Harm Against Public Safety). This database
collects, gathers, and analyzes information concerning people
whose individual or collective activities suggest they might be
harmful to public safety, with a focus on those who are or
would be involved in collective violence in urban areas and
during sporting events.
• EDVRISP – Exploitation Documentaire et Valorisation
de l’Information Relative à la Sécurité Publique
(Documentary Exploitation and Enhancement of Public Safety
Information). Officially, this database does refer to the
following ethnic and racial criterion, with respect to political
correctness about this issue, in France: (1) Caucasian, (2)
Mediterranean, (3) Middle Eastern, (4) Maghrebi, (5) Asian
and Eurasian, (6) Amerindian, (7) Indi / Pakistani, (8) Metis /
Mulatto, (9) Black African / Caribbean, (10) Polynesian, (11)
Melanesian (including Canaque or people of French New
Caledonia), (12) Roms. Officially again, there is no
information in this database on religion and religious and
philosophical beliefs, political parties and commitments, labor
union commitments and memberships, association
membership, and similar.
• STARTRAC – is TracFin’s intelligence database on
domestic financial intelligence collection. This highly
classified database contains individual cards indicating
financial matters such as assets comprising real estate,
swimming pool (taxed in France), private planes, boats,
expensive vehicles, paintings, valuable collectibles, bank
savings, stock market assets and activities, and similar. Then
we find particular financial activities, noticed discrepancies
between official income and life standing, expensive leisure
and sporting activities, frequent travels in tax heavens
countries, acquaintances and / or relatives under suspicion of
tax dodging, and known or suspected illegal financial
activities, of course.
• FSPRT – Fichier des Signalements pour la Prévention et
la Radicalisation à caractère Terroriste (Database for the
Prevention of Terrorism and Radicalization). This database,
containing more than 20,000 individual files, is used in the
framework of the fight against terrorism, though not only. In
addition to the identity of the person, each card comprises his
address, criminal record, and his psychiatric situation, if ever.
It is fed by the EMOPT—formerly Counter-Terrorism
Coordination Unit–UCLAT—and by the reporting platform of
the National Center for Assistance and Prevention Against
Radicalization (CNAPR), which body also manages the
national telephone reporting center of the Gendarmerie and
police. The SCRT, the EMOPT, and the Gendarmerie, between
other agencies and services, are managing this database.
Individual deemed dangerous or potentially so are listed in it
as “S” (i.e. “S” card, or fiche S in French), in a sub-register of
the Wanted Persons Database (Fichier des Personnes
Recherchées–FPR).
• CAR – Data relating to the privacy and checking of
persons placed under the control of justice and intended to the
prevention of offenses against prison and public safety;
implemented by the DAP (Directorate of Prisons
Administration).
• GESTEREX – Gestion du Terrorisme et des Extrémismes
à Potentialité Violente (Management of Terrorism and
Extremism with Violent Potentiality). This database is
particular in the sense that it contains very various data on the
privacy of concerned individuals. It is highly sensitive because
many of its cards relate to individuals who are just deemed
“likely to be violent or dangerous one way or another”; so,
anyone.
 • BCR-DNRED – Database of the DNRED (Customs’
Intelligence Agency).
• ATHEN@ – Database of domestic intelligence and
counterintelligence gathering done by the Gendarmerie. The
Athén@ information system subsumes four modules: OPS,
Rens, FAR, and EVT, which are linked to a cartographic
platform allowing to geolocate the data and the means of
intervention. The Athén@ system includes all structured
documents such as office documents (fact sheets, summaries,
analysis and synthesis notes, etc.), multimedia files (images,
video and sound records, etc.), and documents from external
websites or specialized “windows”. It is also intended to
contain descriptive sheets supplying the knowledge of
networks (events, people, organizations, means, and sites).
The categories of data recorded on individuals are as follows:
information relating to civil status, physical addresses,
telephone numbers and email addresses, information relating
to professional activities, characteristics and registration of
vehicles, data relating to the social middle of the individual
whenever they are necessary to the pursuit of the investigation,
and motive for data recording. ATHEN@ has a dual purpose:
(1) to serve the ordinary needs of the Gendarmerie,
(2) domestic intelligence gathering, analysis, and investigation
in connection and cooperation with other intelligence
agencies.
• Dossier aka dossier secret – or “secret dossier” in
English, is at the same time a very old (early 19th century and
possibly earlier) and highly sensitive provision in domestic
intelligence and circulation of elite. It consists in the gathering
of as many information as possible on the privacy of
prominent persons, down to the level of a town. A dossier
secret is filled with much more information than any other
police individual card, sensitive and compromising essentially.
It is a cardboard file folder that may hold photos, copies of
original documents, sound and video records relating to
morally disputable and compromising facts with regard to the
privacy of the interested. All this is done in view to using
those pieces of intelligence as leverage and on a case-by-case
basis, but more especially to guarantee the loyalty and
allegiance of an individual with respect to the interest of state
affairs or else. This physical database belongs to the DGSE,
but gathers intelligence collected by the police, the
Gendarmerie, the Ministry for the Economy and Finance, and
all other intelligence agencies.
FILES OF JUDICIAL HISTORY

• TAJ – Traitement des Antécédents Judiciaires (Records

of Law Offenses). Gathering about 9.5 million individual
cards, this database replaces the older JUDEX and STIC aka
CANONGE databases. It contains individual cards of past
criminal activities and offenses common to the police and the
Gendarmerie. It is used in criminal investigations to track
offenders, and for administrative investigations and surveys
prior appointments to certain public or sensitive positions, and
co-optation in the Freemasonry. The TAJ also presents
changes in relation to JUDEX and STIC that it replaces, which
implies more categories of people concerned and new features
such as data analysis and computer “reconciliation
tools”allowing to look for common elements in different
justice investigations, or facial recognition from photos of
people. The Ministry of the Interior is responsible of this
database (DGPN), but also the Gendarmerie (DGGN).
• ARI@NE – This database grants any constable or police
officer access to all information relating to criminal
investigations, regardless of the police, Gendarmerie, service,
or unit that recorded them.
FILES OF JUDICIAL IDENTIFICATION

• FCJNI – Fichier du Casier Judiciaire National

Informatisé (National Criminal Records Database). This
database contains records of all criminal convictions,
penalties, and accompanying measures, including civil
records. Even witnesses are recorded in this database. With the
Gendarmerie’s TAJ, this database contains the richest
information on citizens.
• FIJAIS – Fichier Judiciaire National Automatisé des
Auteurs d’Infractions Sexuelles (Automated National Court
Database of Sex Offenders).
 • FIJAIT – Fichier Judiciaire National Automatisé des
Auteurs d’Infractions Terroristes (Automated National Court
Database of Terrorism Offenders). This database not only
includes terrorists, but also their relatives, acquaintances, and
anyone who may be considered as harmful to public safety,
including minors over 13. The EMOPT uses it.
• FAED – Fichier Automatisé des Empreintes Digitales
(Automated Fingerprint Database).
• FNAEG – Fichier National des Empreintes Génétiques
(National DNA Database). This database contained about 3
million individuals in 2015.
• FPR – Fichier des Personnes Recherchées (Wanted
Persons Database) is more a tool for intelligence than a real
individual cards database, which does not accumulate
information on people being monitored, therefore. It lists all
persons subject to a search or verification of their legal status.
The FPR eases investigations, tracking, and searches carried
on by the police and the Gendarmerie at the request of the
criminal, military, or other administrative authorities. A sub-
register of this database contains the cards of individuals listed
as “S” (i.e. “S” card, or fiche S in French), also used by the
EMOPT.
• OCTOPUS – Outil de Centralisation et de Traitement
Opérationnel des Procédures et des Utilisateurs de Signatures
(Tool for the Centralization and Operational Processing of
Procedures and Signatures’ Users).
SYSTEMS FOR THE TREATMENT OF JUDICIAL INTELLIGENCE

• SALVAC – Système d’Analyse et de Liens de la Violence

Associée au Crime (Computer Analysis System for Violence
Associated with Criminality).
• ANACRIM – is a criminal analysis software working
from temporary criminal investigation files, developed in the
framework of criminal investigation proceedings, exclusively.
CORAIL – Cellule de Rapprochement et d’Analyse des
Infractions Liées (Cell for Crosschecking and Analysis of
Related Offenses). This database disseminates “serial fact
sheets” to investigation services in the form of operational
statements based on previously recorded offenses, in order to
spot links and patterns between offenses.
• LUPIN – Standardization software allowing police and
gendarmes to establish links and patterns based on technical
and scientific police data relating to the proceedings noticed,
and on evidences collected on crime scenes.
ADMINISTRATIVE IDENTIFICATION FILES

• Delphine and TES – Fichier Relatif aux Passeports

(Identity Cards and Passports Database). About 60 million
individual cards.
• FSDRF – Fichier de Suivi des Titres de Circulation
Délivrés aux Personnes Sans Domicile ni Résidence Fixe
(Homeless Persons Database).
• FNPC – Fichier National des Permis de Conduire
(National Driver’s License Database).
• FOVES – Fichier des Objets et Véhicules Signalés
(Reported Suspicious Objects and Vehicles Database).
• STIVV – Système de Traitement des Images des
Véhicules Volés (Stolen Vehicle Image Processing System).
• LAPI – Lecture Automatisée des Plaques
d’Immatriculation (License Plates Automated Reading System
Database).
• RFEHF – Registre des Français Établis Hors de France
(Register of French Nationals Living outside France) is a
database of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs fed by all French
consulates in the World. Each individual card holds address,
landline and cell phone numbers, email addresses, professional
activities, and number and names of relatives also living in the
foreign country. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs specifies,
“Each adult [i.e. in a same family living abroad] must have his
own account [i.e. Consular Registration]”.
As an aside, the dossier secrets of the elite obviously hold
personal information of political nature, beginning with the
political opinion and stances of the concerned persons.
Intelligence of this sort is present in certain other domestic
intelligence databases, in which instances those details are
indicated as follow.
In France, politicians who claim they do not belong to any
political party are called sans etiquette, which roughly means
“independent-minded politician”. In the frame of domestic
intelligence when it comes to create a card on someone, no
intelligence agency believes such a claim is true. That is why
they investigate further on the real political opinion of the
person until the truth surfaces or an investigator makes up his
mind on the matter. Then the interested may be carded under
the following acronyms: “DVD,” standing for Divers Droite
(varied right); “DVG” for Divers Gauche (varied left); DVC
for Divers Centre (varied centrist); or AUG for Autres Général
(others miscellaneous) when things turn out exotic or
downright absurd. In 2008, in order to group unclassifiable
elected people, those who are exponents of exotic interests,
and mayors without declared political label, the former
“AUG” grade was substituted by “DIV,” for Divers
(miscellaneous) aka “LDIV,” for Liste Divers (miscellaneous
list), without change in the definition, and attributed by
default. People must be carded (fichés) under an opinion
category, anyway.
If ever the reader thinks the number of databases of the list
above is abnormally elevated and intrusive, yet he must know
I did not make mention in it of the EDVIGE database, whose
unofficial existence also is of public knowledge and has been
raising much controversy in France. The databases
CRISTINA, and EDVIGE, whose existences sometimes are
acknowledged officially, sometimes denied, depending which
official the media are asking to, were created in the 2000s in
order to record detailed cards on ordinary citizens from the age
of 11. Matters recorded range from behavior, political and
religious inclinations, sexual tastes, occupational activities,
leisure, acquaintances, friends, known income, and more.
In 1978, the French Government created the CNIL,[342] an
independent regulatory body, whose mission is to guarantee
that private companies and public services respect the law on
the protection of privacy of individuals with respects to data
collection, storage, and use. Officially, the CNIL was created
in part to responding to the public outrage against the so-called
SAFARI database, which was an attempt by the French
Government to create a centralized database allowing the
global recording of facts on the privacy of all French citizens.
Theoretically, and by law, the CNIL is granted the right to
investigate any French governmental agency, public service,
and private company, in order to determine whether an
individual cards database is legal or not. However, the French
Government enacted other decrees and special provisions to
deny the CNIL any enquiry over certain governmental
agencies, public services, and certain cards databases, i.e.
intelligence agencies’ databases. That is how the CNIL
actually became a tool of censorship by discrimination, aiming
foreign companies and ONGs having activities on the French
soil, since those remain the only bodies the latter provisions do
not shelter against such investigations.
I would not go as far as saying that the CNIL also is a
shadow service of the French intelligence community
however, for that is not the way this body works. From
firsthand knowledge, I just confirm that certain of its
employees are contacts or agents of the DGSE, and that the
intelligence community often lures it into investigating foreign
companies and ONGs having activities on the French soil. The
final objective being to provide the DGSE with intelligence
about those entities, or else to undermine their activities,
whenever necessary. Actually, the DGSE uses regularly the
CNIL as unwitting go-between for stealing private business
databases on the pretense of legal investigation pertinent to the
enforcement of the right to privacy.
Back to the individual cards databases listed earlier, the
reader must understand that these are not all accessible to
particular officials, police officers, or gendarmes
simultaneously. Actually, each has been created to fulfill
particular and daily needs and needs-to-knows, and the
accesses to each are restricted by the rule of the need-to-know,
precisely. The Gendarmerie has access to some of these
databases, whereas justice officials use others that may contain
identical information, possibly. The same rule applies to the
customs and other public bodies, in virtue of the enforcement
of the rule of the need-to-know, again. However, all those
officials are left free to share unofficially what their databases
teach them—knowing that each request is automatically
computer recorded, if not manually recorded, to prevent
abuses. In my case, as example, I did not have any direct
access to any of these databases, since my need-to-know did
not extend to investigations on people. As any ordinary
people, I used the Internet when I “needed to know”
something about somebody or some company, and many of
my ex-colleagues did the same. In the late 1990s, in the
DGSE, staffs carrying on such daily searches for open sources
on the Internet, between others, were recommended the use of
Apple desktop computers and the file and web search tool
Apple Sherlock, deemed the most performing in this respect at
that time. If ever I really needed to know more on someone or
something, then I asked for it to a colleague, whose specialty
granted him access to a relevant database. The colleague could
be a police officer, gendarme, or DGSE employee who had
access either to the records of any telephone and cell phone
number or to the records of any banking accounts. Beyond
this, I do not know how they could get this information
themselves from a technical standpoint, and they would not
tell me because of the rule of the need-to-know, again. Of late
in the 2010s, the new policy of intelligence pooling between
intelligence agencies is said to have changed all this.
Otherwise, not only the DGSE has its own computer
databases of which the CNIL knows nothing, but it also has a
large number of eclectic databases, each highly specialized,
which may connect each other for data crosschecking and
analysis, thanks to Taiga database-management software.
Small and highly specialized intelligence units and cells create
many of those databases first, but also private companies
before they were stolen, or even are illegally and regularly
updated online. That is why a number of those databases
actually are “mirror copies” of originals created and fed
continuously by certain ordinary and civilian bodies, private
companies, and various associations, to which must be added
computer databases stolen abroad. The latter practice justified
the creation of the acronym ROINF in the 2000s, standing for
Renseignement d’Origine INFormatique, or Intelligence of
Computer Origin.
As example, I once was in touch with a specialized DGSE
cell of less than ten staffers, which worked with “home-
improved” mirror copies of two databases originally created
by French leading organizations certifying the circulations of
newspapers and periodicals in France. The databases have
been originally created for providing advertisers with audience
measurement figures. For all I know, the databases came from
Nouvelles Messageries de la Presse Parisienne–NMPP (whose
name changed for Presstalis in 2009), and Messageries
Lyonnaises de Presse–MLP. This cell of the influence and
counterinfluence branch is responsible for monitoring the
circulation of all press publications in France, and for
providing estimates and forecasts on the relevance of
launching a newspaper or magazine. As example, it may
provide figures to monitor with accuracy the effects and
consequences of attacks (counterinfluence) against
publications in France that are owned by foreign media groups
and companies.
Overall, the DGSE is in capacity to access the databases of
all foreign Internet companies in France, since those must
submit willy-nilly to certain pressures of political and
diplomatic order. Here, I am talking about official and not so
official political bilateral and multilateral agreements and
treaties signed by political instances at the highest level about
mutual transnational agreements, whose purposes are to limit
foreign interference, and to grant access to any country to
information visible on the Internet from within its borders. Let
alone treaties between intelligence agencies, whose formal
aims relate mainly to the fight against terrorism and some
other criminal offenses, while the real aims are intelligence,
counterintelligence, and information warfare. Are especially
concerned by these agreements’ companies and their websites
such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Amazon, Twitter,
Instagram, online magazines, and else. For example, as in
2018, the American online newsmagazine Slate has a French
version edited in France, and French renowned journalists
Jean-Marie Colombani, Eric Leser, and Johan Hufnagel,
assisted by Jacques Attali, former personal adviser of French
President François Mitterrand, are operating this publication
for a French readership, specifically. The same applies to
Huffington Post aka HuffPost, operated in France by the
editorial staff of Le Monde newspaper. Such provisions aim
first to media content monitoring and censorship, and more
particularly to prevent any risk of leak by some whistleblower
that might embarrass in some respect the French Government,
the French intelligence community, and would thus be
hazardous to public order.
Anecdotally about Facebook in particular, in the 2010s, the
DGSE also had sources in the headquarters of this company in
the United States, including one who was working with a high-
ranking position at a desk located within feet of that of
chairman and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg.
Because of the aforesaid, not only it is easy to the French
Gendarmerie to know the true name and Internet IP address of
the author of a video anonymously published on YouTube from
France, but the French intelligence community can delete from
authority, and under a pretext of its own, any video published
from this country on this video-sharing website within the
hour following its upload. It can also tamper with its views
counter and keywords in order to push it down the list or to
make it difficult to find out, as a form of censure. It is equally
true, however, that the headquarters of those American
companies keep for themselves the privilege to intervene on
the content of its subsidiaries operated from abroad. In the
case of Amazon, as other example, this company is storing all
its files in highly secured facilities located on the U.S. soil in
the State of Virginia, and operators in France in the facts do
not have “physical” access to original copies, therefore. The
case of Amazon will be mentioned again in the next chapters,
as this company is a prime target of the DGSE for a number of
years and reasons.
 18. Manipulating Groups, Crowds, & Masses.
E very day, manipulations of groups, crowds and masses are carried on continuously in France
for serving a large range of short-term and long-term needs, essentially relevant to domestic policy
and public order. Earlier, I explained why no government would acknowledge officially the recourse
to influence and manipulation to lead the nation, and that the practice was overhauled when the
doctrine of active measures integrated and ruled it. Then the recourse to the latter doctrine implies
necessarily a collectivist domestic policy, which in the case of France fits a progressive policy and
economic planning that existed before, already. This explains why, still as a reminder, the French
intelligence community is carrying on this mission of manipulation of groups, crowds, and masses
under the leadership of the DGSE. Therefrom, it is mixed with the mission of domestic intelligence,
with a focus on domestic influence and counterinfluence, i.e. counter-interference. Before
explaining the differences in methods to manipulate people by bodies with doing so with a single
person, it is important to the reader to understand why I will make a difference between “groups,”
“crowds,” and “masses” all along this book, henceforward.
The approximate number of individuals beyond which a leader must emerge determines my
definition of a “group”; that is to say, when thoughtful interactions, consultations, and meetings
between individuals in a same group i.e. “thoughtful consensus” are no longer possible. As the
critical threshold may slightly vary, I must set it to a minimum of 10 individuals, and to an
optimistic maximum of 100, arbitrarily, as in the case of an assembly that is effectively supervised.
Well before 100 people reunite in an assembly, thoughtful exchanges do not last for long. Then we
consider that three individuals only is enough to make a group; for three is the number below which
we find the couple or pair who can share a same opinion easily and durably, and in which a
conspiracy is impossible. Two people are the minimum threshold beyond which they can influence
or manipulate a third person by relying on the psychological phenomenon of groupthink limiting to
small numbers of people.[343] Finally, three is the minimum number of people in which the
emergence of a group leader may occur, and it does occur in a large majority of instances, naturally.
The emergence of a hierarchic structure of dominance is a natural phenomenon common to all
species including Man because we are not all the same from birth. There is always a leader, even in
twins, and there would be one even in clones if such a thing were to exist tomorrow.
The “crowd” gathers up to 100 people at least to 150,000 at most. The choice of the latter number
corresponds to the capacity of the largest stadium in the World, beyond which an individual will no
longer be able to estimate the size of his crowd visually and without changing location.
We will call “mass” any number of people between 150,000 and several millions who never or
very rarely flock in a same spot according to the model of the crowd and its commonly accepted
definition. A mass may be the entire nation of a country, therefore. The use of the plural “masses”
may mean large and distinct aggregates or flocks, i.e. heterogeneous, of individuals in a same
country or even in the World, regardless. Thus, masses each can be ethnic, religious, cultural,
political, regional, linguistic or whatever. We can also call them “minorities” for a variety of reasons
and according to whatever criterion; it does not matter in the present context.
Now, I can define comprehensively the manipulation of “ bodies of individuals,” which latter
expression denotes any body of individuals from three people, or groups, to masses of several
millions.
Manipulating bodies of individuals is an expertise that bases again on the fundamentals in
behavioral biology, I explained in the chapter 9, because beyond a small group that makes for a
threshold, the innate drives of each individual are easier to stimulate. In other words, their number
forbids them to exchange with each other more than very few and simple arguments. By simple
arguments, I mean their natures are essentially emotional and call for passion, therefore, unlike
complex thoughtful arguments that call for reason, regardless of the degree of abstraction they
convey. The simple arguments cannot but call three basic answers only, which are approval,
disapproval, and neutral, or as stated in a vernacular way, “That’s OK with me,” “No way,” and “I
don’t know; I don’t care,” respectively.
My choice of the words “emotional” and “thoughtful” is only contextual because better
definitions of the cerebral processes that make them existing as such are passion and reason, again.
If the two latter notions remain simplistic as seen from a scientific standpoint, this is because I must
stop short of explanations that would go beyond the scope of this chapter and even of this book. The
reader understands perfectly what opposes passion to reason, I presume, and I expressed myself
extensively on the subject in an earlier chapter, already. Yet I still have to insist on another point,
which is that behavioral biology must not be confused with “mass psychology” when applied to the
manipulation of bodies of individuals, since this other expression also exists. We can tolerate the use
of the term mass psychology as a trivial way to mean “collective thinking” or “mass manipulation,”
as examples. However, it would be a gross error in the absolute because psychology addresses a
large range of cerebral processes mixing innate needs and drives with acquired behaviors and
thought. Inescapably, the latter compound results in a large variety of characters accountable for the
individuality of Man, unparalleled in other species, thus escaping the field of behavioral biology.
For the record, behavioral biology limits to the innate needs and drives existing in all individuals of
about all species, from birth, identical and invariable in their functioning; I largely explained why
and how in the chapter 9 on the manipulation of individuals either.
The larger field of psychology, in the strict sense of this word, cannot project onto masses of
people therefore. Otherwise, it would always produce random results, owing to this share of
individuality, unsuitable to the mission of shaping the public opinion. Manipulation based on
behavioral biology happens to fail with a single individual already; that is to say, each time the share
of acquired knowledge of this person is powerful enough to overstep his innate drives. This is a
phenomenon relevant to resilience, which psychology does not explain conclusively or satisfactorily
at this time. For the natural resilience I am talking about characterizes about 10% of people, without
it being possible to explain clearly its origin otherwise than by genetic discrepancies or
particularities, innate either. Be it said in passing, there is indeed a small share of individuality in
Man from birth, exemplified in twins.
Even if manipulating a body of individuals by relying on behavioral biology proves more
effective than when with a single individual in the absolute because, in this case, we are content
with a “majority” for wants of “everybody,” yet it fails to guarantee absolute certainties. “Free
electrons” are permanent fixtures to all societies; therefore, the association of behavioral biology
with an array of manipulating techniques does not make mass manipulation a science, but an
imperfect method. Otherwise, its infallibility would allow ruling elite to last for millennia as
defiance and revolutions would never happen. In point of fact, this book presents a few examples of
very elaborate plots in mass manipulations that yet failed or resulted in unintended consequences.
“Mass manipulation” is a dreadful word to everyone, but the share of uncertainty that exists in its
effects should redeem confidence in those it aims.
The French intelligence community rejects the word “manipulation” at the favor of “influence,”
each time there is no possibility to name explicitly this action otherwise, including when it concerns
a single individual. When I worked as full-time employee in a field encompassing influence and
disinformation for domestic purpose, we called it communication publique (public communication),
internally. Our actions were each alternatively called campagne (campaign) or dossier (file), and our
working vocabulary borrowed to the fields of advertising and marketing. For we touted feelings,
moods, and beliefs instead of brands, goods, and services, which is about the same with respect to
the means used. Therefore, we did not need to say nor to write bad or equivocal words such as
“propaganda,” “influence,” and “manipulation”. The real purpose of our activities was the only
thing that could arouse suspicion, since they all concerned the making of domestic policy and the
promotion of political doctrines at the same time, without exception.
Then the accounting of our cell was completely fabricated, with abstract and irrelevant figures for
the sole sake of justifying and preserving our cover activity. As example, in 1992, each “campaign”
/ “file” was officially billed to the French advertising firm JCDecaux, official owner of our cell, the
same amount of about 6,000 French francs ($1,156 current), regardless of the time spent, means
invested, and number of employees who had worked on it. Then JCDecaux re-billed to various
public bodies. Most of our campaigns aimed to sensibilisation (“awareness raising”) and to arousing
the love and praise of the masses for France, its regions, public servants, political parties, and
elected officials; and to influencing them in accordance with the political agenda. Our cell of
twenty-six staffers produced annually about two hundred campaigns / actions of influence. Then I
would be unable to say how many I did myself. I conceived actions of propaganda for all French
political parties, indiscriminately, as my duties requested it; with as result that in a same day, I could
meet representatives of the Parti Communiste Français–PCF (French Communist Party), and their
opponents of the Rassemblement Pour la République–RPR (Rally for the Republic), the rightist
party of former President Jacques Chirac. As an amusing aside, the perk of working with the French
Communist Party was the opportunity to buy top-quality Cuban cigars (Cohiba), sold in wood boxes
of 25 pieces each for the price of three packs of ordinary cigarettes—but I was offered Cuban cigars
(Montecristo) for free at the Senate!
As the reader may wonder about my stance, I never voted in my life, neither for a candidate nor
for any political party, of course. To begin, my mother, as widow of a senior executive of the RG
often told me when I still was a teenager, “Political parties in France exist only for distracting the
multitudes and busying their minds”. “C’est Clochemerle. Lis Clochemerle; c’est la même chose!”
(“It is Clochemerle. Read Clochemerle; it is the same thing!”), she added verbatim in jest to sum up
her point, borrowing to the title and plot of a 1925 French novel by Gabriel Chevallier.
Remarkably though, our campaigns for the far-rightist party, the National Front of Le Pen, were
regarded as the most sensitive task in our cell; they were all treated by an unique employee with a
high need-to-know who worked in an office located apart from the others.
Some scholars called to serve this general mission as occasional contractors further softens the
perception it conveys by calling it ingéniérie sociale (“social engineering”). Nonetheless, the
definition of the other bad word “propaganda” does not apply at all to the array of methods
presented in this chapter. Most of all, and strictly speaking, manipulating bodies of individuals
implies a mix of methods relevant to advertising and marketing, manipulation, and others relevant
to influence, about all explained from this chapter on. So much so that, in the end, the English
expression “domestic influence” best sums up what it is in France, even though its French
translation influence domestique is never used either. Some French specialists in the field call the
expected positive response of the masses to domestic influence, soumission librement consentie, or
“voluntary submission,” which is rather a good definition of “manipulation”. For the record, in a
successful manipulation, the person of group it aims must come toward you spontaneously, without
being in the least able to say it is exactly what you wanted. Basically, though not always, one can
succeed with it by arousing fear in the mind of the targeted people, which is the ingredient that
makes the person or group flee toward you, to seek your protection.
As the use of the word “influence” (the same in French) is largely acknowledged, understood, and
commonly used as such, so contre-influence (counterinfluence) is. However, the DGSE rather uses
contre-ingérence (counter interference) when alluding to the latter action. Then the definitions of the
words, “manipulation” and “influence,” and their difference I explained in the chapter 9 on the
manipulation of individuals, change greatly when talking about bodies of individuals. First, because
the aims and approaches do so; and second, for the three following reasons.

1. A collective body of individuals includes men and women of varied ages,

backgrounds, educations, intelligences, and cultures. It is therefore impossible to
plan the manipulation of a body of individuals based on an arbitrarily defined
“collective character,” be it a satisfying “average”. The method is not wrong however
when the expectations of this manipulation are suitably limited, i.e. basic, e.g.
arousing anger, hatred, love, approval, or disapproval to oversimplified statements.

2. A collective body of individuals, does not react at all collectively as a single

person of average intelligence,[344] even though everybody in this body may have
similar ways of thinking, and common and typical ways to reacts, kultur, and mores,

3. A collective body of individuals can be manipulated using oral, textual, and

visual messages only, and never direct, individual, and physical interaction explained
in the chapters 3 on recruitment and training, and 9 on the manipulation of
individuals, in general. Exceptions relate to direct marketing, a technique of
nominative communication and influence today made possible and even easy at a
large scale thanks to the coming of Internet “social networks”. However, the latter
exception remains limited by an artificial intelligence that by far does not yet equals
the intelligence of Man, and must be manually designed and monitored at some
point, therefore.
 As the presentation of the basics is not yet complete, I proceed with opinion publique, or “public
opinion”. This other expression must be defined correctly as the opinion of a majority of individuals
that has the size of a mass, at least, or of all masses making up together for the adult population of a
country. We do not talk about public opinion below the latter size of body of individuals. However,
the reader must keep in mind that public opinion does not necessarily denote what “the majority”
thinks or believes, but what we think “the majority” believes; which is entirely different of what the
term deceptively suggests. Herein public opinion actually may be a belief and not a truth. When
somebody on television states from authority that “the public opinion is unfavorable to this issue,”
most of the time, this is nothing but a vague statement supported by no sound premise, or even a
manipulation attempt, possibly, because this person knows that no viewer is going to jump on a
plane to go on poll everywhere in the country to checking whether this is true. We are forced to
believe this single person on his word, and his statement may be (1) true, (2) an honest belief or (3)
an attempt to influence the masses in the aim to make the false statement transform into a reality.
The option (3) is one simple among several more elaborate methods French specialists in domestic
influence use every day to shape the public opinion; that is to say what the majority believes or
think, although it is not necessarily true. So, the expression “public opinion” indeed has two
possible meanings that each is correct, and simply must be stressed in a sentence when the context
is not clear: (1) what the majority truly believes or thinks; (2) what people assume the majority
believes or thinks. I use both in this book, without stressing any condition in the case (1).
Then leader d’opinion, or “opinion leader,” denotes in the broadest sense “an individual that
people listen to and respect,” even when they do not follow him in his views. The number of people
taking into consideration what an opinion leader says is seldom specified, thus making the definition
of “opinion leader” unclear. Here again, “opinion leader” may have two possible interpretations.
The first, which is formally correct, is that an opinion leader has a capacity to influence masses of
people, or more than 150,000 people; since we have just seen that “public opinion” apply to masses
of people only. However, the second often is tolerated to allude to someone having a capacity to
influence people at the scale of a crowd or even a group i.e. between 3 and 150,000 people. In the
trades of intelligence, influence, and propaganda, the second interpretation is commonly and
informally used when talking, for example, about an activist in a town of 20,000 souls only; simply
because there is no other word or short expression to say “he has a capacity in influence in this
zone”. Moreover, in French intelligence, “opinion leader” also denotes an individual who is gifted
in convincing people, even when his talent has not yet been used to convince bodies of individuals
of anything. I use both interpretations in this book, made clear by their contexts.
An opinion leader may be a prominent professor, scientist, pastor, mayor, union delegate,
secretary of association, writer, or even a singer or performer of poor judgment, as this often
happens. It is agreed that an opinion leader is an individual having an innate or acquired ability /
capacity to influence a body of individuals at least in its choices and opinions in a number of things.
This does not mean that the whole group is going to approve and mimic this leader at once, but that
those who are not going to, yet will seriously consider his arguments. More than just noteworthy,
the latter detail is very important because people also use to stand on an opinion or taste for
something (1) based on the statement of an opinion leader they disapprove, or (2) even stand firmly
in opposition to his opinion because they already had a negative opinion of him. Nonetheless, in
both cases, they have been as successfully influenced as those who decided to approve the opinion
of this individual, yet without being aware in the least to have been actually suggested a stance
about an issue they did not know of before.
To exemplify my point, Adolf Hitler was a terrific opinion leader, regardless of his ideas, because
he convinced millions of people to stand by his opinions. Then no one could possibly question his
successful influencing all his enemies in standing against Nazism, since the issue of standing for or
against this ideological doctrine was completely unknown to everybody before Hitler coined it. Still
today, as Hitler for long is dead, yet he continues to influence masses of people in standing against
Nazism, but… The phenomenon can be turned in a stratagem that indeed is frequently used as
technique in mass manipulation today, called “reverse psychology,” and relevant to psychology this
time.
Reverse psychology is a phenomenon that most of the time happens accidentally, but that can be
counted on by recommending or even ordering to do or to believe something in order to elicit the
opposite action. For example, and at the simplest, everyone knows that telling to a preteen “There is
a cookie jar in this cupboard; do not touch it while I am just going for one hour” will much likely
result in the contrary expectation. Reverse psychology comes to explains why Nazism entices
numerous people still today, although the most convincing evidences of the absurdity of this
ideology are known to everyone. The same applies with even greater force to Communism,
although this other ideology caused the death of much more people than Nazism did. More
surprising: serial killers have fans, and the greater numbers of people they killed and even badly
tortured before so, the more numerous and fascinated those fans are. The opposite is true, and
explains why, in influence and mass manipulation, it often pays off to overhype, we say ad
nauseam, some people, a political doctrine, or anything else to actually elicit a reaction of aversion.
As example of the effect in its most extreme application, if I jailed the reader in a cell in which I
would play every day for several hours a same tune, at some point, and upon his release, he could
not stand hearing it … forever. Possibly, even, hearing this tune could trigger in him nausea and
actual vomiting. Of course, the effect would be that effective because there would be a close
association of the tune with the unpleasant ordeal of having been jailed, yet it would be about the
same after having been simply forced to hear it so everywhere.
In spite of the aforesaid, the potency and persistence of an action of influence still depend
precisely and largely on the repetition of a same message, exactly as in advertising, or in music
when the goal is to raise artificially the popularity of a tune through repeated plays for days and
weeks, until masses of people memorize it and love it sincerely. The latter effect can be called,
“induced / false peer pressure,” meaning “When people are lured into believing that ʻeverybody
love itʼ”. Therefore, in influence, propaganda, and disinformation, it is question of a balance
between “just fine” and “too much” that is reached through a careful “dosage” in the spread of a
message, which will arise several times in this book because there are several types of such dosage.
Of course, an opinion leader can influence a crowd, a mass, and even a majority in a country,
provided he is bestowed upon corresponding means of communication i.e. access to the mainstream
media or other types of potent media. If not, opinion leaders rather exceptionally influence bodies of
individuals larger than groups and crowds. Finally, there is a specific in the definition of “opinion
leader” that is, not all of them are omnipotent communicators, and by far. Some have a gift in
convincing masses of people by writing, yet they would instantly destroy their success by talking on
an interview of a few minutes; and the opposite is true, of course. Popular statesmen have
speechwriters for this good reason, and the books they publish often are ghostwriter’s works,
actually. Of late, the coming up and trivialization of the new word “influencer,” referring to an
individual who makes a vocation to himself to influence others on the Internet (YouTube, generally)
revived it; those are “speaking opinion leaders”. Opinion leaders who excel in both speaking and
writing are very rare birds. For the record, there are even “singing opinion leaders,” e.g. Joan Baez,
John Lennon, Iggy Pop, the Sex Pistols, John Denver, Lady Gaga, Bob Dylan; “acting opinion
leaders,” e.g. Charlie Chaplin, John Wayne, Eddie Murphy, Charlton Eston.
Henceforward, it will be easier to the reader to understand the followings, if he considers for a
moment, and in an abstract way, a group, crowd, or mass as a “collective being” having a behavior
of its own, as earlier stated in 1. Herein it is implied, not a human being of average intelligence, but
an imaginary species endowed with the capacity to understand abstract messages of a limited
complexity, and conveying essentially and even only the notion of passion, as described and put into
real situations in an earlier chapter. Owing to a large extent to what has been explained in 1., bodies
of individuals are much more receptive to the “call for passion” than to that of “reason”. According
to varied estimates from a number of scientists and experts in crowd behavior and information
warfare, the collective intellect of crowds and masses indeed is that of a preteen, i.e. about 7 to 9
years old. Therefrom, crowds and masses must be addressed according to the latter fact. I will have
other opportunities and examples of successful large-scale influence and manipulation operations to
tell, to confirm the validity of the premise.
Whoever ignores the latter fundamental will always be confused when attempting to
understanding public opinion, and the more so the making of it. Then it must be kept in mind that
there is an intimate connection between call for passion and formal aims in politics, and between
call for reason and real aims, reciprocally. Precisely, call for reason is very rarely used in domestic
influence and in influence in general, and never in manipulation. However, it often happens to be
called to the rescue in counterinfluence and in propaganda, as surprising as it may be. A counter-
argument to it says (rightly) that call for passion may easily override a message calling for reason
that has been earlier understood and memorized, as a means of counterinfluence in this case in
particular. As example, if a politician says the truth by resorting to call for reason, he will have
nonetheless to revert to call for passion at some point, and to bring upon false arguments to be
elected and / or to reach the real aims. Lies in politics do not necessarily hide sad realities, but often
realities that are too complex to understand to the large majority.
The reason for attributing a collective personality and intelligence to a group, crowd, or mass, is
easy to understand, and the reader has been explained why earlier; for the record, “Any consultation
between each individual of a group and for the whole group becomes difficult from a dozen of
people onward, and impossible well below a hundred”.[345] Then the following peculiarity may
surprise the reader.
Even when the majority in a crowd or mass has above-the-average intellectual capacities, this
does not improve in the slightest way its collective intelligence. In other words, a crowd of scientists
is no more intelligent nor more rational collectively than another one of unskilled workers.[346] This
phenomenon, disconcerting a priori, can be observed easily and frequently in stadiums on important
sports competitions, where all social categories are reunited in a crowd. There, the close-ups of the
cameras on spectators show many examples of behaviors and reactions that are exclusively
passionate; they do not proceed from any prior rational thinking and are outwardly childish. As a
matter of fact, we notice the same phenomenon in crowds of political and religious meetings, and
even in parliamentary assemblies.[347] Thereof, an analysis of the reactions of these crowds and their
causes makes possible to sort them out by broad behavioral patterns; and once those patterns and
their exact causes are identified and understood, it is possible to make them reproduce at will in
others crowds.
This is what the DGSE aims to when it recruits and manipulates individuals with outstanding
aptitudes in verbal communication and with charisma in particular. The more often, those people
were active as leaders before this agency recruited or discreetly helped them to make them agents of
influence and agitators serving subversion. In passing, this way to recruit agents unbeknownst to
their own understandings explains why some counterintelligence executives sometimes wrongly
assume that a protest group is a creation of a foreign and hostile intelligence agency, and its leader a
conscious agent. In a large number of instances, the truth is that such groups first materialize
spontaneously under the leadership of an independent and charismatic opinion leader, and that both
are eventually helped in discreet and subtle ways by a foreign and hostile intelligence agency. Any
counterintelligence investigation led on them would prove mind-bogglingly fruitless, therefore.
In May 1968, during the student riots and uprisings that affected simultaneously several countries
from France to Japan, the counterintelligence agencies and services of these countries—and others
—learned or understood that certain of their leaders indeed were agents ideologically indoctrinated,
trained by the East German and Soviet intelligence agencies.[348] Nonetheless, in all cases, those
riots and uprisings could not have been possible without the prior existence of natural social
conditions arousing discontent, favorable to the transformation of quiet dissatisfaction into dissent
and unrest, first. The gloominess of the masses we understand as a social context of endogenous
origin is a prerequisite to arouse popular unrest, motivated by no clear objective in reality. The
68ers, as the followers of the two Napoléon’s, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Giuseppe Mazzini, Lenin, the
Republicans of the Spanish Civil War of 1936, the Secessionists of the American Civil War of 1861,
and countless others, are all cases relevant to the latter explanation. Those masses of people brooded
over their frustrations and against their ruling elite they held as actively or passively responsible of
their worries regardless, until a third party identified, appraised, and then aroused the general mood
at its profit.
As long as a third party does not actively intervene or cannot intervene, the unrest will hardly
materialize or even never because Man has an innate capacity to resign to inhibition for very long
periods; until his death, actually. The disgruntled masses are just waiting unconsciously for an
encouragement or example showing them, with sufficient charisma / authority, a way to either flee
or fight, since each of its individuals has a central nervous system breeding naturally in him a
permanent urge for action. What they truly resent in actuality is frustration and boredom because
these feeling are caused by inaction. Until this new explanation, the reader understood that threat
and aggression arouse action. Now, he is learning that the brain of Man perceives inaction as a
threat first, and then as an ongoing aggression; simply because, contrary to plants, Man is a
thermodynamic being that cannot emancipate from its need for action, as soon as he awakens. We
notice, in monkeys, cousins of Man, inferior intelligence results in a greater restlessness that has the
same vital importance because the ratio innate drives / thoughtful process in their brains still relies a
great deal on the former at this stage of their evolution. In man, inhibition of action, as the absence
of motive for action, are the first culprits in all unrests, riots, revolutions, and wars. The second
culprits are people who know this biological characteristic and how to arouse it further, enough not
to let it resulting in prolonged inhibition behavior.
In the second half of the 1950s, riots of American teenagers that seemed to have been triggered
by unconscious would-be-activists, posing as provocative rock and roll singers, truly were nothing
but the natural consequence of a mix of boredom and of the excesses of the McCarthyism era of
1950-54 that were indeed a form of inhibition of action. The ingredient of violence was present, yet
it failed to transform into a forerunner of May 1968, just for want of a myth supported by a
consistent narrative designed and spread by some third party. Need for violence i.e. action, myth,
and a coherent narrative: these are the three necessary ingredients for a revolution to succeed.
In the late 1960s, still in the United States, the hippy movement was nothing but a social upheaval
sans doctrine, a consequence of mere boredom i.e. inaction again, vaguely fueled by the Vietnam
War for wants of more consistency this time. Today, when interviewed on occasions of the making
of historical documentaries, all dissenters and rioters of 1968 say the same thing: “We had so much
fun,” and barely anything else. Actually, very few among those people justify the attitudes they had
at that time with sound and elaborate political arguments, beyond they were “angry,” or “bored”.
The first to understand and to rationalize this fact, in the terms of his time, of course, was
theoretician of Communism Friedrich Engels, who was a genuine good strategist beyond an
ideologue. In a correspondence he addressed to Karl Marx, Engels wrote, “A continuing economic
depression could be used by astute revolutionary strategy as a useful weapon for a chronic pressure
… in order to warm up the people … just as a cavalry attack has a greater élan if its horses trot five
hundred paces before coming within charging distance of the enemy”.[349]
Then, the choice of students—when numerous enough to make up together for a visible and loud
minority appearing on TV screens—rather than representatives of the most disadvantaged masses,
owes to the fact that they are typically young and educated individuals. Why these two
characteristics in particular, while talking about popular unrest and revolutions? The first is, in Man
as in nearly all other species, the strength of the urge for action decreases with ageing; the younger,
the more active he is. The causes of this decrease are a biological ageing that impedes his physical
capacity to act, and a growing knowledge acquired through experience that gradually overrides his
innate drives; the two are “joining” at the age of 27 on average, a threshold beyond which the urge
for action decreases considerably and stabilizes. The second characteristic is the capacity of the
student in his late teens to understand a coherent doctrine, and to be subsequently receptive to well-
argued and sophisticated discourses made of abstract concepts; although, we notice, the substance of
the discourses calls for passion in reality, under the deceptive appearance of their rationality. Two or
three specialists in influence, backed by as many chief analysts who know well the targeted country,
together can easily pen all those discourses for them. Then a battalion of agents of influence, trolls,
and a cohort of journalists will give momentum to the urge for action in the students, since passion
only can make it materialize.
The student is highly credible because of his social status and higher education. That he be young
and still unable to grasp the realities of the general picture of a real-life situation is unimportant in
actuality. Or rather, this is important, indeed, because this inexperience makes him highly receptive
to altruist yet unrealistic arguments, which his higher intelligence will hone enough to arouse
passion in people who are older than him. Then the older pundits of the local opposition, as another
example of third party, are present to develop the arguments with the missing figures and references,
since those other people will consider in which way they can help them reach their own aims.
Thenceforth, the expected echo chamber is at play and a process, specialists in influence call
“influence minoritaire” (“minority influence”), is set in motion, as shown, below.
 The stage revelation above aims to influence the majority in favor of / against something
(social / political / economic / cultural issue). It is initiated by a small minority that spreads the
message of the cause. The majority is caught by surprise, but it listens to it because it wants to know
what the fuss is about, exactly.

In the stage question above, the majority listened to the message, and it reacts negatively to it
because the arguments are absurd, excessive, and clash with the dominant scale of values, therefore
conservative. Consequently, the majority takes some distances with the minority it now holds in
contempt. Yet the minority, encouraged at this point by some experienced third party that does not
identify itself, is unabashed and continues trying to rally more people to what it holds as the cause
(be it rational and justified or not, regardless, in the present explanation).
 In the stage incubation above, the minority rallied to its cause a few people only, yet endowed
with authority, in addition to others who are respected for their sole fame and notoriety; such as
film actors, columnists, recipients of prestigious prizes, etc. All those people are opinion leaders
therefore, whose motives range from sincere, selfish, to opportunistic because a need for greater
notoriety and other stakes truly motivate them. The latter detail is unimportant to the minority in the
absolute, since what matters to it is that its cause be heard. In sum, the voice of the minority now
has a potent echo chamber that validates its cause. At this stage, a psychological phenomenon
settles: the cause takes a new form that dismisses any further need to prove the validity of its
substance. Many in the majority think they can no longer ignore the minority, although its cause is
now reducing to a few crafted slogans that repeat.

The stage conversion marks the moment at which many in the majority begin to acknowledge
the rightfulness of the cause of the minority, even if not sincerely since the arguments supporting it
did not change, evolved and now are different, or even are no longer mentioned. In reality, the volte-
face is largely motivated by a misperception that is a belief in an already ongoing adjustment of
values in the majority, or peer pressure per proxy initiated by the few celebrities and the media. The
action of influence actually transforms into a manipulation at this stage.
 The last stage innovation is reached when the cause of the minority has been widely
acknowledged, to the point of being seen now as “a norm universally accepted in the country,” even
though this is untrue in the facts. The hardheaded people who stick to the old values become
together the new minority. Those who are embracing the cause believe sincerely they are not
straying nor are influenced; quite on the contrary because they ever stick to the scale of values of
their country, “which obviously change along the natural and normal evolution of the society,” they
think. Besides, they assume they are not granted any authority great enough to oppose the voices of
the many who together are the public opinion, nor have the nerve to question a cause that famous
and respected persons endorse. Moreover, the people of the former majority now see the remaining
dissenters as “excessively conservatives, hardheaded, or even reactionaries,” thus turning the issue
and its pro and con arguments upside down. The change does not lay on an understanding of the
cause and of the validity of its arguments, since that is not what brought the change of values to
happen, but truly and unconsciously on an innate and therefore hardly repressible need for
belonging / belongingness that originally was a herd instinct caused by a need for safety.
Note that the phenomenon that psychologists call peer pressure or bandwagon effect is counted
on, and then at play all along for the minority influence process to occur; for it is one among several
possible expressions of the need for belonging. Minority influence takes on largely to advertising
and marketing methods, but only in their principles because its process must never appear to be
supported artificially on magazine ads, posters, television and radio commercials, and the like on the
Internet. The opinion leaders claim objectivity and the media are largely perceived as objective, too
—together, they are the most effective publicity any business is looking for, be it said in passing.
More importantly—it is even one of the most if not the most important points of this chapter—
minority influence relies first on the call for passion, which in turn must result in action from the
majority it is addressing. Regardless whether a country and its government are politically right or
left leaning, together they are a majority advocating a conservative attitude. Consequently, this first
remark comes to relativize the sense generally given to the word “progressivism,” since it poses as
the opposite of conservatism in politics, strictly speaking. However, a long-lasting progressive
government thus become “conservative” either, in reason of this continuity as it is, this time as seen
from the more general angle of semantics, and truly and physically either. Any idea of change in the
latter situation is obviously perceived as “progress,” in the neutral sense of evolution or moving on
these noun and verb convey. Finally, the DGSE teaches its specialists in influence that “When you
succeed to make the majority believe it is a minority, then it resigns to adopt the opinion of the true
minority”. The point of this explanation is not to debating on the relative sense to be given to
“conservatism” and “progressivism” according to the circumstances and viewpoints, but to insist on
the perception that the unenlightened masses have of these two words; that is to say, a priori, when
putting them side by side with the other notions of inaction and action. Be it rightist or leftist, the
word “conservatism” conveys to everyone the notion of inaction or stillness, whereas progressivism
conveys the opposite notions of action or movement, without any real importance as for their
outcome. Truly, these perceptions are the translations of one unconscious and permanent drive for
action the reader learned about extensively in the chapter 9.
 To put all this otherwise in the new context of bodies of individuals, as Man is a thermodynamic
organism, and as his central nervous system is permanently calling for action, vital to the rest of the
body, the drive for action also stimulates the conscious parts of the brain, which react to it by
producing and ordering actions that are not necessary fruitful, a priori. That is what the reader saw
in the experiment 2. of Laborit, when the two rats fought each other for wants of escaping their
punishment. Then he also has seen that the latter behavior finds its usefulness in preventing the
central nervous system from triggering stress, and then psychosomatic illnesses. Actually, the
middle in which we live acts on us about as the electric shock did on the rats, with a varying
intensity to be understood as our social situation in this other context. When we are not sleeping, the
varying richness of everything we see, hear, smell, and touch, excepted what we taste because it
generally is voluntary, is stimulating our brain with a corresponding intensity asking to it for an
about reciprocal response, which is action. That is how the apparent stillness of the middle in which
we live is always lively enough to elicit from our brain a need for action; regardless whether the
permanently moving and changing environment around us is threatening or not. A very lively
middle in which we can do little however much frustrates our brain; that is to say, us. In this case,
we react about as the two rats did in the experiment 2. of Laborit, but in a more sophisticated
manner defined by the performance of our brain; that is to say, by claiming, striking, and protesting;
worse, if the action still does not pay off.
That is why Communists claim they are doing “the Revolution,” and add the Revolution must be
“permanent,” to move on endlessly toward ever more progress. Why this? Why the aims of
communism could never be reached once and for all? Actually, Communists say this because they
intuitively understood that inaction is hazardous to any political system, at a time when science
could not yet rationally explain to them the importance and fundamental cause of the urge for action
in Man.In any case, the latter question is unimportant; this is now a scientific reality any
government and its political system of though, whatever its supporting myth and narrative are, has
to face, consider, and integrate in its policy to challenge effectively any opposition relying on this
physiological need of Man. A ruling elite whose myth and narrative integrate the notion of
permanent evolution / change thus shelters itself with effectiveness against all its challengers,
regardless whether the principles draw on the left, center, or right of the political spectrum. Thus,
the myth and its narrative may even shift from left to right or the reverse, since what matter the most
are the notions of movement, change, and evolution; action, in a word.
Back to the student, he cannot but be largely ignorant of the human nature because he cannot
possibly claim a satisfying experience of interactions between adults in everyday life and in work,
economic, and social environments. Even the exceptionally gifted young individual is powerless
when confronted with the reality of his insufficient knowledge of real situations. He is left with the
resources of out-speaking and overplaying when he poses as a would-be political kingpin. This
makes him a dangerous naïve each time he indeed accesses influential position in politics—this
happens increasingly often today, by the way. However, in our contemporary and modern world,
those who are in this situation cannot but be stooges and front people at some point, whose all
words and moves truly are those of older and shrewd leaders and strategists acting from behind a
curtain. Of late, we notice, certainly sincere exponents of various causes, but also unquestionably
coached on influence and disinformation, are attempting to use young teenagers and even preteens
as speakers to voice their claims, arguing for this that the ingenuity of children would make them
more trustworthy than experienced adults, and that they are together “the generation of tomorrow
that will pay for our mistakes of today”. The sorry reality of this idea is that those children
obviously repeat formal aims that truly aim the entirely different real aims of those who coach them,
thus transforming the claims in an action of gross propaganda, in the facts, and those children as
their sole responsible. The practice is the more disputable as it is the same in its principle, exactly,
as to training children in third-world countries to make them soldiers. By the same occasion, it
shows to everyone how journalists can be compliant, and the reality of their relative objectivity and
decency. It should be said, they are easier to recruit than politicians are, less concerned by loyalty
and the consequences of betrayal, as they not to have to submit to any formal oath of secrecy with
respect to governmental matters they happen to know, and they last longer in their positions because
they are neither elected, nor have to please a majority.
From the viewpoint of the French specialists in influence, the student is still easier to manipulate
and to run as agent, and more especially as unconscious agent committed to some cause. His
additional interest in this respect is he just reached an age at which many consider his opinion as
that of a full-fledged adult, arbitrarily. The cause of the latter perception is not that the youth or our
advanced society would be more precocious than before; in all periods of history and in all
civilizations, there has always been a natural need to call people in the workforce and in the troops
as early as possible. When this happens, it comes as an obvious corollary to grant them all marks
and perks of adulthood: marrying and founding a household, driving a car, enlisting as military or
even as police, voting and even standing for election. The cause is, with all this, it is hardly possible
to dismiss the say of someone on the claim that he is not yet mature enough to decide of the future
of all the others, obviously.
The student in a college or university lives immersed in a middle in which everything he sees,
listens to, and does is abstraction. He cannot even mix with other people of his age who are already
active in the society, and whose occupations, even when abstract, have a purpose that is in no way
an abstraction. Those other young people who are playing an active role in the society and for the
society have a vital need to resume it because, to them, any attempt to go back to abstraction will be
at a cost not to say impossible. Therefore, the student, even when in his twenties, is naturally more
receptive to the abstract discourses and doctrines of political thinkers and philosophers than his likes
who are peasants and blue collars are. The peasant and the blue collar can only be manipulated and
rallied to a cause when they no longer enjoy all the advantages that the society “usually” offers to
every adults; that is to say, when their daily activities no longer fulfill their vital need to being. I
name employment, regular and sufficient income and satisfactory work conditions, all things
allowing them to lead quiet and peaceful existences conveying a feeling of safety. That is why the
peasant and the blue collar are down-to-earth thinkers, typically, not much receptive to political and
philosophical discourses; and why the peasant in particular, often perceived as simple-minded yet
proves much harder to influence than the smart and highly educated student is.
On one hand, university students make for a potent minority in all countries, yet they alone do not
have the power to influence the majority of active people, a priori. On the other hand, their
educational dailies train them to voice whatever claims they may have in an elaborate and even
convincing way, whereas the peasants and the blue collars do not have this capacity when they have
claims of their own to express. This provides students with an edge over the blue collars and the
peasants when attempting to find a receptive ear in the media. For people who are working in the
media, as teachers and professors in universities do, coincidentally have a particular activity that
consists in handling, studying, teaching, and reporting abstractions to the masses. No matter what,
journalists have a vital and daily need to find out those abstractions, immaterial in essence at their
level when they are not war correspondents, as they are no more real than speeches, testimonies,
reports, pictures, sound recordings and video recordings.
Additionally, students collectively are more imaginative and more receptive to ideas of complex
tactics and strategies, which are abstractions, again. With these two other advantages, the students
are more capable to collect the attention of the media, therefore. When they succeed with it, it gives
to their voices a capacity of influence incommensurate to the small and powerless minority they
truly are, incomparable to the real importance of their worries, once more abstract, since they do not
relate to their vital needs.
For all the reasons I just explained, the television broadcasting of a crowd of a few tens of
thousands of students may easily deceive a mass of millions into believing “the country went down
the streets to protest,” and the effect is the same when the crowd is older on average. The
mainstream media act exactly as a magnifying glass by analogy; with them, a crowd of 100,000
only may easily transforms into “the public opinion”. Therefrom, the bandwagon effect and the echo
chamber that other media of lesser importance make, take the relay together and give further
emphasis to an event that is nothing but a conjecture in an overwhelming majority of instances; a
straw fire, yet hot enough for the minority influence effect to occur.
It is no coincidence that, in France, the access to educational activities are discreetly yet strictly
filtered by progressive orthodoxy, even in private schools and universities. In this country, the
strengthening of the surveillance and manipulation of masses of French teenagers, starting with
tackling their first cultural and recreational concerns, was undertaken around 1975-1976, and then
gradually developed and perfected until today. “Cultural and recreational concerns” must not be
confused with education; in France, the political indoctrination of the youth in French schools began
formally and seriously between the 1880s and the 1890s on an idea of politician Gabriel Hanotaux.
We shall see this in the next chapter, in the more advanced context of the shaping of common
national identity, scale of values, and cultural trends.
Indeed, the students who took an active part in the uprisings of 1968 had much less arguments for
their claimed discontent, each individually, than the masses of unskilled agricultural workers and
immigrant minorities who then adopted a rather passive stance overall and remarkably, to exemplify
the previous explanations about them.[350] Exceptions limit to countries where labor unions were
influenced, and even financially helped by the Soviet Union since well before the Cold War. This
condition applied to France, as we shall see in the chapter 23, but even in those cases and since
1968, the most vindictive among protesters were students and scholars of the higher middle class
and upper class, with relatively high to high incomes. Third parties with a leftist agenda, when they
intervene, have a stake in the indoctrination of students of the former class because they will be the
driving forces of the Nation of tomorrow (long-term effort investment, and so, greater payoffs), and
of the latter class because they are natural opinion leaders.
In the 1960s, the KGB had understood that the previous popular revolts of the same kind, largely
initiated by older masses of unskilled workers and farmers, had failed because it was easier to anti-
riot police and even to the military sometimes to resort to violence against individuals who had fully
entered adulthood. Firearms had been used, and there had been casualties and even deaths, yet the
public opinion had remained moderately outraged. It would not have reacted with the same
leniency, had the strikers and rioters been individuals who could be said to be children. The same
remark applies to women of any age because the notions of vulnerability and innocence closely
associated with teenagers apply culturally and historically to their kind either. Note in this respect
that the mainstream media of all countries often add the emphasis “including women and children”
when reporting a tragedy of no accidental cause; though less and less as unintended consequence of
the trend of gender equality—I still have a hard time with thinking of women as road builders and
tank drivers.
Reciprocally, the DGSE will never hesitates about launching a black propaganda action against a
target country, whose narrative relies on harm done to teenagers, in order to acting on the lever of
passion with the majority aimed at; even though this agency internally considers that an individual
can be potentially dangerous from the age of eleven.[351] As example of our time, consider those
recurrent cases of juvenile delinquents who kill and commit acts of extreme violence and cruelty.
Notwithstanding, in France, police forces cannot resort to any form of violence against them, even
in self-defense under penalty of immediate sanction from the majority before that of their hierarchy
that thereupon feels forced to comply. Thus, a popular revolution aiming to the overthrow of the
ruling elite has greater chances to succeed, if its vanguard that is the most exposed to riposte rallies
teenagers and young adults. In general, and historically, the strategy of conquest of the Soviet
communists, as that of the Maoist communists, has always been to indoctrinate the young and the
intellectuals in priority.
As an aside, American filmmaker David Mamet touched upon the subject of student rhetoric and
abstract discourse in a similar asymmetrical balance of power when he made Oleanna (1994). I
would recommend this movie to any pupil in influence because it pinpoints some of the main
cultural vulnerabilities of about all advanced countries today and explains how to make a political
profit of it.
Despite the lessons the countries thus attacked can draw from this experience, their reaction
would not change at all today; for any attempt to oppose such an opponent by the recourse to lethal
violence would at once bring the mass of adults siding with the young rebels, regardless of the cause
and claims. The only acceptable option is the preventive action of indoctrinating citizens earlier in
their childhood—in the good sense of the word, I mean—; that is to say, when the process of
recording facts and events is indelible because it is still a physiological process of neuronal building
and connections. I mean education in one word and in its earlier sense, which formerly included all
those elementary notions of moral, decency, common sense, and logics that people otherwise
acquired from religious text and stories; from Æsop to History and else in secular societies. I
exemplify my point with the following anecdote happening today in a rather Christian country. In
certain regions of Southern Italy, the educational establishment implements in its programs a
narrative aiming to raise the awareness of the bad scale of values of local mafias, which begins as
early as in primary school. The initiative, if unusual, is in no way questionable because positive
effects follow it, indeed. Moreover, the strong Christian influence in Southern Italy is essentially
accountable for the fact that anyone can notice in this region that children are unexpectedly calm
and polite; more sociable than in some European countries more to the North, including France.
Another characteristic of crowds and masses is their surprising ability to forget past events,
experiences, and disappointments; “Those who do not know History are doomed to repeat it”.[352] In
France, it has been repeatedly seen that speakers, political leaders, and other public figures who
sometimes much disappoint their listeners and followers, yet can quickly regain their confidence, as
if all their wrongdoings and well-known vices no longer existed or that time alone absolved them.
The liar needs no more than three to five years of public disappearance, and then of little media
hype to be hallowed again. The irrational phenomenon is another characteristic of the “animal” that
crowds and masses are because it hardly reproduces with individual victims and those who tricked
them, at which lower number reason and thoughtful exchanges regain the upper hand. This explains
why for several decades in this country, and more particularly since the early 1980s, one of the main
missions of domestic influence is to recall very regularly to the masses the atrocities the Nazis
committed. The Jewish minority is happy with it but fails however to understand the real aims of the
initiative. For this ongoing action of domestic influence, overwhelming at times, truly is a
manipulation and a part of a tactic aiming to breed in the minds of the masses the idea of a close
association of the political right with fascism and National Socialism, amalgamated as “the far
right”. It actually is a method in influence called “diabolisation par association,” or “demonization
by association”.
However, the reader notices, the French National Front led by Le Pen father and then his daughter
never has been really discredited nor dismantled because of the practical usefulness the French
Government finds in its existence, precisely. The French National Front actually is not the would-
be-plague the mainstream media ever chastise, but the useful stooge of the other parties that all
claim standing by French Republicanism. Otherwise, the National Front would no longer be for a
long time, and its leading figures would have been socially eliminated. Or else, the disturbing party
would have been dealt with as the regular grand lodge GLNF was, as the reader has seen in the
chapter 16. IFrance needs also this party for evidencing permanently her claims of democracy,
freedom of speech, and political plurality. Lastly, with the recent rise of the far right in many
countries, France found in Le Pen’s party the new interest to also demonizing by association
European rightist parties by favoring alliances between the former and the latter. For the record, Le
Pen’s party is the sole rightist party in France, yet it distances itself explicitly from free capitalism,
the United States, and all capitalist countries in the World. Thus, it is questioning its own rightist
claim, and finds instead its inspiration in National Socialism, presented as rightist. Herein the
French tactic is to inhibit right-leaning masses reacting in opposition to progressivism, and to leave
them with a restricted choice excluding official representations and political bodies advocating
capitalism. This explanation calls for the following that highlights the great importance accorded to
semantics in French influence and manipulation of the masses, I earlier touched upon when
describing the feelings and moods the nouns “conservatism,” “progressivism,” and “progress,” may
arouse.
In this country, specialists in influence for long breed cleverly a confusion in the minds of the
French masses about the meaning of the other nouns “liberal,” and “liberalism”. The American
reader is going to be surprised to learn that any French ordinary people when asked what “liberal”
and “liberalism” mean, answers “the political right” and “free capitalism”; whereas they have
difficulties to explain what political stance “conservative” and “conservatism” denote exactly. They
“know” well about the former nouns, but they do not about the latter because since the mid-1990s,
the same experts in influence are implementing in France a contrivance aiming to eradicate the
conventional notions of political ideology. Lastly, the sudden coming up of Emanuel Macron and his
party the LREM marked the latest stage of this action. Indeed, acting President Macron and his
party dismiss all demands for clarifying their position on the political spectrum. They only state to
be “republicans,” and they always abstain from saying what the noun means in this respect. The
media never say whether the LREM rather is a rightist of leftist political party, and interviewees
answer instead that the notions of right and left are become irrelevant in France in the 21st century.
Meanwhile, the specialists in domestic influence arrange for the audiovisual media to broadcast
repeatedly the cameo appearance of the single noun égalité, or “equality,” in the background of
political interviewees, as if it summed up it all. To date, no one in this government ever found
opportune to elaborate on the media hype of the single word. On interviews of senior officials and
speeches of the President, journalist reporters and cameramen just manage to have the word present
on a poster in the background, as if complying with a precise instruction they must not comment
either. The word is explicit; the intent never is.
Before Macron was elected, the repeated cameo appearance on French television channels was a
stylized portrait of Che Guevara, which continues to appear yet less often since. In all cases, the
method bases on the idea of subliminal image; instead of filling the entire screen for 1/25th of a
second, the size of the picture is considerably reduced to appear for several seconds or even minutes
as a poster in the background, printed on a tee-shirt or fashion accessory, or even as a tattoo, as if
coincidentally in all cases. Of course, journalist cameramen and post production staffs could hardly
claim they do not pay attention to such details, since they see and blur all commercial brands that
may appear on pictures, even when very small, or crop them appropriately.
The attentive observer of French domestic politics certainly noticed the sudden and complete
disappearances from the French mainstream media of interviews of representatives of all political
parties since the election of Macron as President and the takeover of the government by the upstarts
of his party, the LREM (who all were never heard of before). Indeed, all political pundits the French
public used to see every day for the past thirty years disappeared overnight, to the remarkably
exceptions of far-rightist Marine Le Pen and far-leftist Jean Luc Mélanchon. Then the young
average age, visible inexperience, and complete absence of charisma of the unknown LREM
newcomers call for other questions that many foreign journalists asked before I did. In France and
abroad alike, nobody among the unenlightened public could explain how Macron and his thus unfit
staff won both the presidential and legislative election under a so vague political banner that was
created from scratch one year exactly before their campaign began; especially when knowing their
unprecedented unpopularity. End of aside.
Altogether, the methods in French domestic influence adopted since the mid-1990s, and even as
early as in the 1970s, completely altered the French popular understanding of the important nouns
“conservatism,” “progressivism,” “liberalism,” and “political right”. This action, which in passing
serves the doctrine of active measures, indeed put the French population in the incapacity to define
even the meanings of “politics” and “political affairs” as people of other Western countries
understand them. Consequently, they will be in the incapacity to understand the political stances of
the candidates at the next presidential elections of 2022.
I said earlier that influencing and manipulating the masses in France rely largely on methods and
processes that experts in marketing, advertising, and direct marketing invented. The pattern
reproduces the most frequently in missions of domestic influence called sensibilisation, or
“awareness raising,” with respect to ordinary concerns such as the enactment of new rules,
regulations.[353] In this country as in many others, the elite communicate with the masses through
television, radio, posters, and public relations; and for a few years, they also do it on the Internet
and social networks. However, I can say firsthand the words “marketing” and “advertising” always
make French politicians and officials ill at ease. These are English origin, to begin with; and then
they subsume a large array of notions, methods, and other technical words leaving the rulers with a
feeling of complete ignorance that unsettles them. Besides, some perceive advertising techniques
applied to politics as “propaganda,” a bad word none of them even wants to utter or even to hear. Sit
any of those pundits in company of experts in communication in a meeting room, and he will
behave as an elephant in a porcelain store or as an elderly incapacitated by Alzheimer disease. The
same remark applies to senior executives in intelligence, in spite of efforts some do to follow; those
just want the missions to be carried out flawlessly and are not interested at all in specifics of this
order. Actually, those politicians and senior public servants are not wrong when expressing this
discomfort because it is true that conventional methods of communication commonly used for
touting goods and services have the unwarranted and unexpected virtue to outline the ridicule and
absurdity of the formal aims in politics; and the real aims cannot be presented, anyway. How often I
happened to burst into laughing with my colleagues when I worked in the specialty because of this.
The problem often complicated our tasks and caused endless more serious discussions, and even
disagreements with the concerned politicians and officials at times. The making of a campaign of
secondary importance could thus drag on for months before our respective viewpoints attuned.
That is why the French Government uses conventional means of communication reluctantly, and
feels comfortable and is attentive again when the other option of controlling and using the media is
put forward. Political messages and governmental initiatives are “reported” as “news” instead of
being honestly introduced as official communication from the government; the method is thought as
“the right and only way” in French public communication. More to the method, any publicly
unstated political concern is artfully crafted instead, and presented as if in a concert effect by all
media on a same day under the pretense of a “breaking news” about a dramatic social, political, or
economic “rising phenomenon” of unclear origin. For example, when a new political party is
created or when it changes its name, all events that frequently happen in France to further confuse
the multitudes on political notions, this is not announced with flyers in mailboxes and large posters
in streets. Instead, it makes the front pages of all newspapers and news magazines, in chorus with
“special reports” and “exclusive interviews” on all television channels and radio stations. Then the
news is taken up countless times and commented in all possible ways by media of lesser importance
for the other phenomenon of echo chamber to follow.
 The same method applies to many other events, real or fabricated, whose broadcasts are craftily
designed and similarly orchestrated. The result is a media information overwhelmed by breaking
news of no significance in actuality or even imaginary, so that some expected new perception occurs
in the minds of the masses. This information compound also aims to sustain an ambient media noise
that must overwhelm the minds of the masses, to divert their attention from certain realities that
would quickly be spotted as worrying oddities otherwise. The experts in influence who think and
plan this media noise call it “brouillard informationel,” translating literally as “informational fog”.
The additional interests of informational fog are to leave the media space unavailable for reporting
the serious problems, and to channel in the country a global information conducive to the shaping of
social trends that must fit the political, cultural, and economic agenda of the government. The reader
notices, the method actually is the same in its principle as the filibustering of the liberal freemasons
at the lower chamber of the Parliament, in use since well before the arrival of television
broadcasting.
To thus manage media information without the masses ever noticing some odd pattern, the
specialists in influence rely on two other methods called “dosage du contenu,” or “content [or
substance] dosage,” aka dosage, and “filtrage mediatique,” or “media filtering”. The first consists
in mixing authentic and neutral news with messages of influence in defined proportions, i.e.
“dosage quantitatif,” or “quantitative dosage”; and by defining the emphasis and richness to be
added to each news, i.e. “dosage qualitatif,” or “qualitative dosage”. Then, in radio and television
broadcasting specifically, we find a “dosage temps,” or “duration dosage,” which is the lifespan
given to true news and messages of influence when they mix, e.g. “1 hour of neutral news and
entertainment for 5 minutes of influence on average”. The second method, media filtering, simply
consists in brushing aside unwarranted news and topics, or in minoring their importance (by
reducing their lifespan, as example), or in presenting them from a suitable viewpoint. The more
often, media filtering concerns news of foreign origin.
Additionally in the cases of television and radio news journals and of a weekly news programs, a
clever specific in content dosage is to mix certain news or topics that must result in an elaborate
form of demonization by association; especially when the goal is to make black propaganda. More
precisely, in the case of the programming of a television news journal, it consists in placing two
particular news one after the other in an apparently coincidental succession, whereas it truly aims to
create a striking contrast in substance, based on an analogy. As example that truly happened several
times, the broadcasting of a 20 seconds reportage on the commemoration of the end of the Berlin
Wall, followed by another with the same duration on the ongoing building of a wall section
separating Texas from Mexico. This is a black propaganda action against the United States, of
course, which thus made is impossible to denounce as such because the pretense of coincidence
comes implicitly as an easy denial of any deliberate intent. As second true example, still of black
propaganda against the United States, I remember of the broadcasting of a 20 seconds reportage on
a restaurant in New York City that served hamburgers sold $100 apiece, broadcast before or after
another one on children starving to death in an African country. In all such cases, the topics
presented as news are authentic, and the TV anchor and voiceover comment on them all objectively
and in a neutral tone to further stress the association indeed is unintentional, and owes only to the
randomness of the news. In reality, in the first example, only the commemoration of the end of the
Berlin Wall was a news that just happened; and in the second, the restaurant in New York City that
served hamburgers sold $100 apiece truly was consequent to a public relation operation done in the
United States, and the children starving to death in an African country was not a fact that just
happened.
In the end, a message of influence introduced as “a news” can be given as much media space,
strength, and duration as a true and neutral news of real importance such as a natural disaster or an
aerial catastrophe. Moreover, a true and neutral news can even be minored in order to put the
emphasis on the message of influence, even if the latter is much less important or completely
inconsequential in reality because very few viewers are insightful enough to spot elaborate kinds of
biases. Downplaying a true news to confer implicitly to another an importance it truly has not
belongs itself to a method in counterinfluence so-called “enterrer,” or “to bury” aka “mettre en-
dessous de la pile,” or “to put under the pile”; explained in the Lexicon of this book at the entry
“Bury (to)”.
This range of methods is also used in white propaganda and disinformation in domestic influence
as in information warfare abroad. Its potency varies according to principles otherwise applying to
ordinary advertising; that is to say, repetition and frequency; value, image, and audience of the
support / medium; and quality, strength, and credibility of the message. Influencing the masses in an
implicit manner and not by stating a message in plain words and pictures also belongs to a generic
type of communication called “meta-communication,” itself subsuming several sub-types. In all just
explained cases, the sub-type of meta-communication is called “subtext”. As other example, a
second-degree meaning in the plot of a movie also is a subtext, regardless whether it is about
influencing the viewers or just for sophistication in entertainment. Thenceforth, the reader must
remember what means the words meta-communication and subtext and what these nouns denote
because they will arise again.
When intending to launch a major campaign of influence or disinformation, the DGSE designs
and plans a global strategy involving a variety and number of information carriers, each called
medium, about as any advertising agency does. The latter explanation is not stating the obvious
because the definition this agency gives to medium actually is much larger than that of everyone.
The DGSE teaches its specialists in influence to reason according to principles that Canadian
philosopher Marshall McLuhan established, and it asks to them indeed to read his magnum opus
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). Therefrom, the word “medium” no longer limits to print, broadcast,
and Internet media, and extends to anything and everything can be used to carry a message,
explicitly or implicitly regardless. As examples, a medium can be a tee-shirt, of course, but also a
fruit or vegetable, an animal or a person, a field, a bridge, the sky, and so on. Then the definition of
the message a medium carries changes either, as McLuhan contended “The medium is the
message”. However, when influence, disinformation, and propaganda rely on these aggrandized
notions, it is more exact to say “The medium can be the message,” or “not always and necessarily,
but whenever the opportunity arise or fits the need”. Soon, the reader will discover true such
examples.
Information warfare largely relies on suggestion, much more than advertising does. What makes
the difference between the two is that the advertising agency and its customer want quick results;
whereas the DGSE and its experts in communication warfare are ready to wait a long time for this,
in exchange for never being identified as the authors of the message or campaign.
As first true example of the diversity and reversibility of the medium / message, I take the yellow
vest of the eponymous French protesters of 2018-2019. This is certainly not an invention of the
DGSE, of course, but it is recent enough to ring a bell to the reader, I assume. This garment was at
the same time a medium and a powerful message everyone understood easily in France. This is true
because the protesters who wore it did not need to write or to put on it any message or symbol. In
point of fact, the same remark applies to the umbrella of the Chinese demonstrators in Hong Kong
in the same year 2019; being obliged to use this unexpected accessory because of stringent video
surveillance, generalized facial recognition, and of the subsequent risk to be interned for a long time
just for voicing one’s claims. The umbrella, as a clever means to turn round the other interdiction to
hide one’s face in China, became a symbol of the struggle against oppression, impossible to censor.
Clever as the yellow vest was in France, as the purchase of this garment was compulsory to all
automobile and motorcycle drivers under threat to be fined; a measure whose excess exemplified
the despotism of the French state and its thirst for regulations and taxes of all sorts. How to censor
this other symbol, as the state itself obliges citizens to buy it?
The French Government and even the DGSE share the use of the Eiffel Tower as a medium that is
also a message long enough to fill a set of voluminous books; but the intents in this second example
are identity, cultural, and even political claims, and a recognition sign. A small Eiffel Tower that a
tourist can buy in Paris bear the same values and has the same usefulness; whereas it is equally true
that a poster is a medium only, whose Eiffel Tower printed on it is the message. At last, we find the
much recurrent case of the big marionette that a protest movement exhibits on streets: a medium
carrying in itself an implicit but clearly understandable message of accusation against a political
leader. At this time in 2019, in the United States, women who pose quietly as pro-abortion
demonstrators simply by wearing the red costumes of the TV show The Handmaid’s Tale make
themselves a medium that is also the message, without any need to add any statement or symbol to
it. In this other case, we notice, there is an “obvious ambiguity” in the intent of those who made The
Handmaid’s Tale, for it has a very visible subtext that cannot suggest anything but a caricature of the
“WASP,” itself a hasty generalization of all Americans having in common to be Caucasian, strongly
committed to protestant ethics, and standing by conservative values, already. In short, those who
designed the symbol and the other who recycle it so are spirited by the same cause, actually.
The preliminary to the manipulation of bodies of individuals is now done, and the reader now
understands why this discipline relies very often on the use of a simple collection of words and
expressions having no connection with the intent, a priori; or on signs, symbols, or pictures
especially designed for the circumstance. Both uses imply abstract notions and messages of an
elaborate sort because each must carry the formal aims of the action and its real aims
simultaneously. The formal aim may be sociological, historical, philosophical, cultural, of the
entertainment sort, or several of these; but not political, social, or economical because these are
argument pertaining to the real aims that are the subtext. Either the formal aims or the real aims can
be the medium, indifferently, depending on the opportunities available and on talent of the specialist
in influence; but the more often there is a medium that is distinct from the real and formal aims, as
in the case of a film. Very exceptionally, the three elements are one, with the formal and real aims
making together a double message in a “medium-message,” and thus the action may gain
considerable strength and last for a very long time, enough to become in itself a strong unifying
symbol, whose promotion is easy therefrom.
Sometimes, in a major action / campaign, the real aims of a “medium-message” must be correctly
understood by an already conquered minority only. This is the case for The Handmaid’s Tale, as all
people of the majority who did not watch a single episode of this television series cannot understand
the message and are left perplexed when they see a group of women wearing the same bizarre red
outfits. As I am going to present one among the best true examples in history of this kind of
campaign, I must make myself more specific on a point I only mentioned until now, beforehand.
The choice of the words, signs, and concepts in influence, disinformation, and manipulation of
bodies of individuals may depend on a number of particular factors, among which one or several
often is accidental at the inception. That is to say, an accident, a natural and logical social or
economic event, or anything else; exactly as I explained earlier in the cases of popular unrest. This
is always preferable because thus, the accident comes to camouflage the origin of the action of
influence or manipulation. Obviously, in an instance of this kind, the specialist in influence does not
have much time for transforming the accident into this action before the masses forgets it, and
before the former can hardly be seen as the cause of the latter; it often happens so in information
warfare. Detailing the chronology, first, the event makes a news in the media, naturally. Second, the
intelligence agency pays attention to the event, due to its particular nature, and then to its natural
and normal media coverage. Third, a strategist of the intelligence agency sees the event and its
media coverage as an opportunity that can be transformed into an action. Fourth, the intelligence
agency decides to give an additional meaning to the event that must serve its own agenda, and its
experts in information warfare are given this mission. Fifth, the event is transformed forthwith into
the “detonator” of the action, which either will be a “one shot” or evolve to a long campaign lasting
for years in case of success. In the most optimistic case-scenario, the goal is to transform the
accidental event into a unifying myth with its own narrative. The true story, below, epitomizes how
far and how long may go and last the latter expectation.
The reader with a background in counterinfluence probably knows that Communists activists
intensively and relentlessly used for decades the simple letter “Z” as a secret recognition, rallying,
and conspiracy sign; I tell the specifics to the other reader who never heard of this. This happened
unbeknownst to a large majority, although the use of the letter was conspicuous. As I said in the
earlier chapters and with entirely different examples, the DGSE teaches its people that putting a
secret in prominent display often proves the best way to protect it; it is integral to the culture of this
agency and to active measures, as a matter of fact. In the case I am presenting, it was also a matter
of opportunity and of particular aims on a particular and complex context that became historical at
some point.
On May 22, 1963, Greek communist Parliamentary Grigóris Lambrákis was assassinated by a far-
rightist activist in Thessaloniki, Greece. Five days later, a political demonstration was organized at
his funeral. There, the angry participants proclaimed Lambrákis “Immortal” and shouted in chorus
Athanatos! for the same meaning in Greek. Shortly after, appeared painted on the walls of
Thessaloniki and even in the whole country the letter “Z,” standing as an abbreviation of the Greek
Zei, meaning “He is alive”. Thereupon, far away in Moscow, the then recently created Directorate D
of the KGB, whose specialty still was disinformation at that time, did a discreet but clever
promotion of the letter around the World, whose media first were a rumor among communist grass
rooters and a few press articles.
Five years later in 1968, in Japan, the letter “Z” was seen again painted on helmets worn by
Japanese students who protested against the American military presence in the country because of
the Vietnam War. This time, the letter “Z” meant the CIA would have been the sponsor of the
murder of Lambrákis, and now the Americans would all be assassins again in Vietnam, by
extension. Thus, was made a first association of ideas, irrelevant to each other yet united by a
concept the Directorate D thought for the circumstance and for others to come. Regardless whether
the former argument is true or not, the latter hasty generalization is a method in influence the DGSE
names “extremisation,” for which I take the liberty to suggest “extremization” as its translation,
since the French word does not exist in any dictionary.
One more year later, in 1969, communist Greek-French filmmaker Costa Gavras made a political
thriller film on the murder of Lambrákis he simply titled Z. At this point, the reader can be left
drawing his own inference from the fact that the French military co-opted Gavras previously. More
precisely, the military of the Établissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la
Défense–ECPAD (Center for Communication and Audiovisual Production of the Ministry of
Defense) had trained Gavras in filmmaking in the 1950; that is to say, at a time the French military
pretended hunting Soviet spies and be wary of Communists.
On the year of its release, Z was exported to the United States, as 1969 indeed was timely for this.
The Directorate D by then freshly renamed Service A for “Active measures,” and newly headed by
Yuri Modin, former handler of the Cambridge’s Five, was more aggressive than ever against the
United States. The same year in the latter country, Z became the 12d grossing film, quite ironically,
since the cryptic meaning of the letter had evolved further to become an anti-American rallying
sign. Nonetheless, Z and its makers harvested several prestigious awards and prizes in America![354]
Indeed, the simple letter “Z” is historically accountable for the launch in the latter country of the
vanguard of a trend in films loaded with messages of influence serving a Russian-French agenda,
which today is become a sub-genre integral to the film industry in Hollywood and in the Western
World. For the past thirty years, it rallied a considerable number of actors, directors, scenarists, and
producers. In the chapters 24, 26, and 27, relevant facts and figures will show to the reader the
importance of this action of influence, he does not even suspect, probably.
However, back to 1963, when Lambrákis died, the Directorate D of the KGB had thought about
another uses for the letter “Z,” which was to spread in the Western World a myth that was not yet
named “ecology,” nor even “green activism”. For “Z” had the interesting particularity to be the last
letter of the alphabet, and the first letter of the arithmetical sign “0” or “zero” in its written form,
meaning “nothing”. The double serendipitous discovery made it an obvious symbol of the blue
collar in the capitalistic society; “the nothing down to the bottom,” or the perfect antithesis of the
number “1”. “One,” capital letter added, was a trendy symbol in the United States, already, and it
could be logically associated with the letter “A” of the Western alphabet; that is to say, “the
something or someone at the top,” and the first letter of the noun “American”. How to sum up the
class struggle better than by posing the letter “Z” and the corresponding sign “0” as the antithesis of
the “A” and the “1” of the Americans! It would seem, the wonderful find made its path up to the
higher circles in the Soviet Union because it reached Georgy Arbatov, top strategist and specialist in
North-American affairs.
Forth to 1968, the same year Gavras was making Z, Arbatov launched the “Zero growth”
movement. According to Wikipedia, the Club of Rome would have launched the Zero growth
movement that year in Winthertur, Switzerland. I acknowledge, the online encyclopedia could
hardly say that several influential members of the Club of Rome were agents of the Soviet KGB.
This was the case in particular of Sicco Leendert Mansholt,[355] who would have been indoctrinated
during a study trip on agriculture he did in India, while he was not yet a known figure.
At that time, although the Club of Rome was a European think-tank, its members asked to the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a report on practical solutions to problems of global
concern. The report, published in 1972 under the title The Limits to Growth, became the first study
that later was used as basis supporting the launch of the leftist ecologist green movement; but it was
not yet question of “saving the planet” from a global warming of anthropogenic nature. Instead, the
narrative was overpopulation in respect to what the Earth had to offer in natural resources, only.
Nonetheless, the fact that the report was authored in the United States, and by a prestigious
institution in addition, served wonderfully the plausible denial of a Soviet authorship. Note that the
DGSE, the Russian KGB, and eventually its successor the SVR RF alike consider that giving an
American origin or identity to the lie or culprit makes up for a “thumb one’s nose” boosting the
psychological effect of the action of influence; in these words exactly, as the reader will see again
with other examples and further technical explanations along his reading.
The American establishment was in no way involved in the making of the report of the MIT, and
even the U.S. Rand Corporation staunchly opposed a counter argument to it, following its large
promotion in the media at that time, saying that the Earth had enough resources to support around
twenty billion souls. The Club of Rome had just said “eight billion only”. In the United States, the
leading opponents against the disinformation campaign that Arbatov and the Service A of the KGB
had designed together were scientist and polymath Hermann Kahn, and a few other experts. That is
how a battle of ideas and conjectures around the question of growth ensued, first between the Club
of Rome discreetly supported by the Soviets on one side, and the Rand Corporation—and the CIA
probably at this point—on the other side. Thenceforth, more and more scientists, theoreticians, and
politicians joined both sides, and so on, and on until today, after the publishing of several hundreds
of thousands of press articles and speeches, and hundreds of television programs and books if not
thousands.
Arbatov even intervened personally to help spread the concept of Zero growth with Dutch Soviet
agent Willem Oltman, made renowned investigative journalist for the circumstance.[356] That is how
in 1974, Oltman authored On Growth: The Crisis of Exploding Population and Resource Depletion,
which book and his author collected media hype thanks to the efforts and agents of the Service A of
the KGB. Until the idea of “zero growth” and its supporting narrative came up, the goal of the
Soviets had ever been to rally the masses around the communist ideas of sharing and life in
collectivities. The Zero growth movement brought new formal aims, scientific and no longer
ideological only this time. It was a call for reason therefore, regardless whether the premises
supporting the reason were sound or not, since they were impossible to prove or to disprove; a myth
supported by an unprecedented style of narrative. Oltman’s book was the detonator in the launch of
the byword “Zero growth” aka “Degrowth”.
Circa the same year 1974, the concept of Zero growth was reduced symbolically to the letter “Z,”
again, for new reasons, aims, and an overhauled narrative. Zero growth made doctrine and its
symbol the letter “Z” was refined by Austrian social philosopher and journalist André Gorz; Anglo-
French environmentalist, writer and philosopher Edward Goldsmith; and Croatian-Austrian
philosopher Ivan Illich. Among these thinkers, most remarkably, was French sociologist Jean
Baudrillard, specialist in media and influence, committed anti-American, and consultant of the
French intelligence service SDECE, in information warfare; whose works are still authoritative
among experts in influence of the DGSE today.
From the 1980s, the meaning of the letter “Z” had also evolved toward the more general idea of
anti-capitalism, while still conveying the notion of anti-Americanism. As “Z” was a letter above all,
a new idea to promote it, launched from nowhere apparently if not by the Service A of the KGB,
was to substituting the letter “S” with it whenever possible, as an astute way to further promoting it
and to claiming one’s stance against capitalism and the United States, still implicitly. The use began
to spread slowly first, and then rapidly with the popularization of the Internet and the possibilities
that the HTML language offered. That is how it surged up on the World Wide Web in names and
titles including the possessive “’s,” and in the plural form of nouns in particular, such as, “starz,”
“guyz,” “star’z,” “guy’z,” John’z Cafe, etc.
In France, the use appeared at the same time in final consonant “s” immediately preceding a
vowel sound. Les z’enfants for les enfants, or “the children,” implicitly meaning “The children of
the labor class” to those who understood the odd use; the ignorant others took it as an amusing
whim. In this country, numerous words and names conspicuously insisting on the letter “Z”
appeared everywhere. Thus, Jazz was slightly changed for JaZZ, and more and more French people
even went as far as to christen their children with names and surnames including the last letter of the
alphabet, Zoé, Zazzi, Zaza, Zazou. Using twice the letter “Z” in a single name or even thrice to
adding to the performance was regarded as a must. Theretofore, “Z” had always been the lame duck
of the alphabet, after all, at the image of the blue collar, in effect. Therefore, it called for a little
“revolution” also for this reason and jokingly.
Passing references flourished in the media and books, such as in the early 2000s, “Zound! I have
a Nissan 280-Z with Pirelli Z tires”; a true example by a French journalist working in the United
States for an automobile magazine. Some changed the first words of the French national anthem
under the pretense to insist on the final consonant “s” of Allons enfants, to make Allon’z enfants or
Allons zenfants. It was even alluded that the fictional hero Zorro and the American band ZZ Top
would be passing references to the far-leftist meaning; the DGSE indeed launched the latter idea in
the late 1990s with the expectation to create a confusion. Zorro embodied so well the idea of social
justice that “Z” also meant to convey. In the early 1990s, when I created a small company of music
production with a specialty in advertising upon instruction of the DGSE, the agency imposed for it
the name Zazzou Production. What was the goal in all this? It was to spreading the belief that the
underground movement was gaining strength and rallied much more people than it did in reality, in
the aim to nourishing the myth and to galvanizing the morale of grass rooters. Remember what
specialists in influence of the DGSE say: “When you succeed to make the majority believe it is a
minority, then it resigns to adopt the opinion of the true minority”.
In 2005, The Coca-Cola Company launched Coca-Cola Zero. The event that was not supposed to
have any relevance with politics yet instantly created a stir on the Internet. For many far-leftist, anti-
American activists, and proponents of Zero growth saw in it a deliberate provocation and the cynical
hijacking of one of their exclusive symbols by a hallowed feature of American capitalism. That
Coca-Cola Zero was printed on a black background came to add to their belief that it could not be
pure coincidence because black had also become the color of anti-capitalist establishment in the
meantime. However, none of the disgruntled ever stated explicitly their fury, which made their
complaints bizarre to the innumerable others who could not know what the fuss was all about,
exactly. The media that conspicuously declined to allude to the underground uproar would not help
with that. The thing with the letter “Z” ever remained the same as to the Greek communists in 1963.
The plausible denial of the true meaning had transformed since in a way tantamount to a thumb
one’s nose to the United States, meaning, wholesome, “You, Yankees, you cannot demonize and still
less censor a letter of the alphabet by saying it is the symbol of our conspiracy against you; unless at
the risk to pass for a bunch of paranoids because we will always deny it”.
In 2012, French automaker Renault launched into production a “green” down-the-range
electrically powered car, which it christened Zoe. Renault thought and designed the car not only to
address the lower class, but also with the idea that it had to be used collectively, in accordance with
the notions of sharing and renouncement to private ownership promoted by the government. The
choice of the name “Zoe” could hardly be purely coincidental. The passing reference to leftist and
green activist values must be obvious to all concerned parties that are in the known, yet deniable at
any time to the others who would dare denounce it openly. Indeed, it caught at once the attention to
many in France, who found that the name associated with the concept suitably. However, not all the
concerned parties saw things that way, as a number of committed far-leftists and anti-Americans
indeed went as far as to sue Renault for the choice of the name Zoé, unexpectedly. Among those
who still perceived the leading automaker as an all-capitalistic company truly looking for profit at
the expense of the less favored, some had given the name Zoé to their daughters, and claimed that
their children “would be ridiculed for having the same name as a car”. They refused to acknowledge
Renault as a proponent of their values, and did not want “to let go scot-free another large industrial
company that hijacked their beloved symbol, as Coca Cola did some years earlier”. Yet those
parents all lost their cases against the carmaker, which however was forced to justify itself for the
reason of the name it gave to the car. At last, Renault explained in plain words that it did not choose
Zoe as a name, actually, but due to its Greek meaning, “life”. Thus, the automaker brought
everybody back to the origin of the particular use of the letter “Z” in 1963.
In case the reader is already wondering about, “What about the word ʻzombie,ʼ then?”
First, poet Robert Southey coined the word “zombie” in this exact form much earlier in his
History of Brazil, published in 1819. Second, since then, the huge popularity of zombies in the
American culture in particular happens to be ambiguous, or even unambiguous when used as a
passing reference to “dangerous invaders who lost their selves at some point, and act together as a
collective obsessed with converting all those who are not yet as them”. The metaphor is convincing
enough yet never explicit either, in the vein of the well-done TV series The Invaders, written and
made in 1967 in the heights of the Cold War.
Today, “Z” goes much beyond a rallying and recognition sign between people “who are in the
know”. Those who promote it continue to “go by the rule” never to tell the true meaning explicitly
because “it is part of a game” that some just find exciting; integral to an underground conspiracy in
which nothing must ever be stated in plain words to the others. The use seems to be on its way
toward extinction, however. Some famous people or businesses happen to revive it once in a while.
Of late, the popularization of computer animation is bringing “Z” under new forms; such as rotating
it 90° counterclockwise to make it looking as an “N” in the end, as a wink of sort to deny the intent
at any time and to do the ritual thumb one’s nose. Then some activist movements hide the true
meaning by crossing two Z, thus making the more cryptic sign , sometimes in a circle: .
The Zero growth movement still exists nearly half a century after its launch, and it recently
evolved again to draws on the values of humanism, enlightenment, anthropology and human rights;
particular views being associated with the notions, each serving a progressive agenda and the more
sophisticated theory of the global warming of anthropogenic origin. As far as I could see by the
grace of some clues and particular patterns, the DGSE and Russia are still interested in its
promotion in the Western World in 2018. The arguments supporting the overhauled narrative have
greatly multiplied and have become very scientific and far-reaching, enough to overwhelm their
staunchest opponents, but their silent exponents alike. Lastly, I found the patience to spend more
than one hour on the discourse of a French agent of influence who poses as a leading figure and
evangelist of the Zero growth movement. He appears indeed to be a gifted man who certainly did
much effort to learn by heart an impressive number of names, figures, and historical facts of all sorts
he reunited to process the whole with pseudo-sciences named “trans-humanism” and “trans-
culture”. Coincidentally, in the 1990s, I was informed of the idea to promote trans-humanism and
trans-culture, and the DGSE even asked to me to partake in the enterprise. I vividly remember the
hard time I had listening for about one hour to their inventor, a man then in his thirties who heartily
mixed thermodynamics with quantum mechanics, Greek philosophy, music, and many more to
arrive to a new branch of his own in philosophy. What I understood of the hodge-podge is that
nobody could challenge the arguments of trans-humanism and trans-culture, since confusing the
mind with elaborate nonsense was the tactic, precisely. Actually, the new trick in disinformation
drew on the then recent affair of the brilliant hoax of American scientist Alan Sokal in 1996.
The formal aims in the example of the letter “Z” should not be seen in complete opposition or
irrelevance to its real aims; unusually secret in that case. Very commonly today, and on the Internet
in particular, the ordinary meanings of signs, pictures, and texts that are not of a conspiracy nature
are misappropriated to serve objectives in information warfare ranging from influence to black
propaganda, disinformation, manipulation, or just hoax. Depreciating humor is often called upon,
too, because turning a target into ridicule, be it a leader or some body of individuals, is one of the
most effective weapons in propaganda. This is the truer when the action is carefully done by a
talented specialist assisted by other experts in graphic design, computer animation, motion picture,
special effects, and sound design software; not just one of those typical, inconsequential, and
untouched original pictures with an amusing caption in outlined capital letters added. Messages of
this superior quality propagate quickly and largely from person to person through a culture. They
can easily reach the million views within a week or even less, starting with close to 100k views or
so on YouTube within the first 24 hours, “viral” in a now trendy word.
In France as in the United States, agents whose duties include spotting actions of influence and
propaganda “press the red alert button” each time they stumble across an advanced work of this
kind; called “video-bomb” in the DGSE, along with authentic disturbing video footages. The news
reaches instantly the highest levels of the hierarchy, indeed. Counterinfluence specialists make a
clear difference between amateur jobs and those of professional quality. They assimilate the latter to
offensive actions to be taken very seriously, which always elicit either diplomatic recrimination or a
riposte of similar impact to be understood as the promise of an escalation. YouTube is asked to
delete such files or to lock their views on a low number to stop the associated suggestion of “interest
and popularity” and their rises on the online platform, on the grounds either of “copyright
infringement,” “inappropriate content,” “hazardous to children,” or slander. YouTube does not
always comply with such demands as promptly as expected, on a case-by-case basis; thus forcing
the agent of counterinfluence to resort with petitioning to have the last word.
The latest publicly known and best example in the genre has been The Interview (2014), an action
/ comedy film mocking openly North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Perhaps, the reader remembers
the threats of terrorist attacks as retaliation for it; North Korea indeed thus warned Sony Pictures,
Columbia Pictures, and even the U.S. Government. The North Korean threat was taken very
seriously, and the release of The Interview was delayed just long enough to re-edit it and to cut the
funniest sequences in emergency; that is to say, the most devastating to the image of the North
Korean leader.
All intelligence agencies take humor in black propaganda the most seriously because they dread
dangerous escalations in its reckless use. The concepts of deterrence and mutual deterrence indeed
exist in information warfare, still unbeknownst to the public at this time, and all parties
acknowledge the risk, real, of mutually assured “mass disruption,” to that effect.
In the United States, the number “911” is known universally as the police emergency number, and
it is the most frequently used telephone number in this country for this reason; thus reaching the
value of a symbol. However, since September 9, 2001, it is also a short way to refer to the
destruction of the World Trade Center that occurred that day; thus reaching the value of a symbol
either. Whether the terrorists chose the date for the latter reason or for the sake of an additional
thumb one’s nose does not preclude that the number “911” today may have two meanings that can
be “help,” “disaster,” or “death,” quite singularly. The American mainstream media and not the
terrorists initiated the adoption of the number “911” to refer to the attack, though written “9/11”. In
any case, the number when spoken “nine-one-one” or “nine-eleven” regardless may have an
ambiguous meaning as soon its context is not clearly stated; especially from the viewpoint of
semantics that serious information warfare never neglects. Besides, all specialists in counter-
terrorism know that dates matter to terrorists. Only a subtlety in pronunciation comes to stress the
difference that everyone understands, yet the suggestion remains present and strikes the
unconscious; ask to any psychoanalyst or even psychiatrist how far a symbol can fetch, and he will
answer “a symbol indeed is operative in its effects”.
It just remains to be known who coined “9/11” first, actually, and what the reason for the
initiative was, since the link with the police call number is obvious to everyone in the country. To
sustain this remark that is mine only, I must say, I contend that Americans do not say “12/7,” but
“Pearl Harbor” or “September 1941”; not “7/4,” but “Independence Day”; not “4/15,” but “the
Sinking of the Titanic,” etc. While Americans people seem to treat such details with unconcern, I
can tell that French people never would. If French strategists and counterinfluence experts,
including myself, had been in the shoes of their American colleagues, the word would have been
given in all editorial rooms not to use the expression “9/11” anymore, but “September 11” only. This
should even not be censorship, but a call to common sense, intelligence, and professional
responsibility.
Now, I present another example of a more subtle form of influence relying on semantics
exclusively, whose effectiveness has been demonstrated regularly. My imaginary example, below, is
inspired by authentic cases occurring then and now in a variety of countries, including in France and
in the United States, purely accidentally at times. Certainly, the reader remembers of some I do not
cite because I would be unable to say whether they were truly accidental.
Suppose the leader of a political party decides to use a word that his experts in communication
invented for him, regardless of the goal. The word is unique, and one could not find it in a
dictionary, although it sounds familiar enough for its meaning to be understood by anyone. Say,
something as “unbamboozlable,” to serve my imaginary example. In the first stage, such an
adjective will strike on whoever hears it for the first time. In the second, it will provoke a short
reflection, inescapably. In the third, “unbamboozlable” will be memorized because of the latter
thoughtful process. Very possibly, the word will be the subject of jokes, once a quick look in the
dictionary will prove that “unbamboozlable” indeed does not exist. Therefore, everybody will take it
as a misspelling, yet coined by an individual expected never to misspell any word, still less to be
confused to that point because of his influential position and notoriety.
Then suppose again that numerous people repeat “unbamboozlable” numerous times, journalists
in particular because the misspelling is worthy of a humorous paper. Thenceforth, some pundits and
other famous people will dart a little smile when repeating it on evenings, typically. Thus,
“unbamboozlable” will span a running joke in the country at the expense of its famous coiner. Some
will understand or interpret it their own way, as in the case of the letter “Z,” inescapably.
Nonetheless, all those people together will act as a loud echo chamber throughout the country, and
even abroad, possibly, without ever being in the least aware that the repetition, lasting for days and
perhaps weeks, will result in a profit in notoriety and in popularity for the coiner, inescapably. This
trick in semantics is not enough on its own to make a rising career to a politician, of course.
Moreover, its success is not guaranteed because it depends entirely on the unwitting complicity of
the mainstream media. However, it happens to be integral to a global strategy to promote a
personality, a political party, or an action of political or cultural influence.
What must be remembered in the odd example above is that, from the viewpoint of the DGSE
and of the French intelligence community in general, “Making a reputation for someone is a benefit
of notoriety to him, regardless whether the reputation is good or bad”. The point is, “Is it in our
interest that this person be popularly known?” For one can always count with full confidence on
innumerable people for loving and praising a bad person, as I explained earlier. Therefore, when
dealing with a foe, “If this person will remain notorious anyway, make a bad reputation for him; if
not, instruct everybody in the mainstream media never to say anything about him nor even utter his
name, never ever”.
In counterinfluence, French dread new words of English origin i.e. American because they
perceive them together as a means of cultural influence, and even they take them as “foreign forms
of cultural infection,” exactly as if they were viruses or harbingers of an impending “new American
landing”. Each time the use of an English word in France appears to spread and gain in popularity, a
new French corresponding word is created forthwith, very officially. Its use is largely promoted by
public services first, and then by the mainstream media. As surprising as it may, the latter initiative
often is launched from the French-speaking Canadian State of Quebec; one of the regions of the
World where French intelligence is the most active for more than a century, not coincidentally.
Thus, France can plausibly deny she would feel culturally at war against the Anglo-Saxon World,
and retort that French-speaking Canadians may have some good reasons to defend their linguistic
identity and historical heritage, due to an overwhelming English-speaking presence around their
region.
See some unfortunate examples of those English words with their French “counter-words,” which
French themselves found ridiculous and rejected because of their self-deprecating spellings and
extreme jingoism. The examples I remember of are mercatique for marketing, imel and courriel for
email, mel for mail, oueb and even ouèbe for Web. In all instances, the intent was to eradicate the
implicit obligation to spell vowels the English way, and to replace them with others obliging to a
Gallic accent. This also is counter-interference with a focus on a perceived “toxic Anglo-Saxon
cultural interference” deemed likely to precede “a takeover of the mind,” indeed; some say
“Winning hearts and souls”. To exemplify the concern, in the 1990s, in France, the import and
successful popularization of Halloween, recent at that time, was the subject of serious debates
among experts in counterinfluence. We talked about it in the DGSE, indeed, and the decided
response against it was to spread a news through the media, radio in particular, saying that the origin
of Halloween located in Southern France before the eighteen century, and self-exported to the
United States eventually. Thus, Halloween became “a French invention”. I see today that the French
Government is newly gone in crusade against Black Friday, launched in France circa 2014, by
Amazon, for worse. Some French politicians are seriously debating about whether enacting a decree
banning Black Friday or not!
French fries; French pie, anyone? Fried potatoes would be of Belgian origin in actuality, and
French pies just do not exist in France.
As I explained earlier, DGSE experts in influence stick to the theories of Marshall McLuhan, and
they strongly rely on them because their applications validate their postulates repeatedly. From
personal experience and on discussions with some of my ex-colleagues, I was forced at some point
to admit—rather through logical deduction than thanks to explicit testimonies, I confess—that the
active measures service of the Soviet KGB had adopted Marshall McLuhan theories well before the
DGSE did. The latter assumption, but not only, would come to explain why French specialists in
influence deemed strategically opportune to attempt a takeover of the luxury-goods industry in the
World. Large French companies, financial groups and their CEOs deceptively claim that France is
as capitalist as the United States can be. All French CEOs are patriots or seem to be because of their
careful shortlisting. They are aware to serve a nationalistic pride and the French national interest,
above all. That is why, for example, the French industry is very active in the production of luxury
and exclusive goods and in wining market shares in this sector; all things unquestionably made for
rich, individualistic, hedonist, and capitalist people. However, in the eyes of those who create and
manufacture those goods, they must connect closely to the name and ideas of the country that
conceives, designs, and manufacture them. They all are dearly expected to tout the name “France”
and the image, notoriety, and culture of this country; and, if possible, the art de vivre à la française
(French way of life).
As seen from this particular standpoint, manufacturing exclusive products for highly
individualistic people is a way of working for a collective and not solely for financial profit. Then,
as seen from the viewpoint of the French expert in intelligence, it is also an astute way to stay close
to the enemy and to decision-makers everywhere in the World because they all or almost buy such
goods. To help the reader figure the latter point, he must understand that people who buy a Harley
Davidson adopt at the same time a share of the American way of life and values of the United
States, indeed; keep the real value and potency of symbols in mind. Those consumers thus “become
a little American” or still more than they are, already, more or less consciously; the effect is sought,
from the angle of marketing at least, but it is much harder to obtain than it seems. As example
demonstrating the difficulty, people who buy a Ferrari are not looking at the same time for
experiencing the Italian way of life, but those who buy a Vespa scooter do. People who buy a
Porsche seldom have a fancy for Germany, but they may possibly do when they buy a BMW
motorbike. For long, but no longer for a few years, many British goods were potent such mediums,
as Harley Davidson is; they were Rolls Royce, Jaguar, Austin, Morris, Burberry, and others. In a
sense, one could trivially say that such goods “have a soul” communicating a spirit or mindset, even
to those who can only afford to crave them. Governments have a stake in caring for such brands
because their interest actually goes beyond economic concerns.
That is not yet all because I know firsthand that the DGSE learned many secrets on the privacy of
leaders thanks to exclusive goods France manufactures and sells around the World; quite damaging
to their image in case of public exposure, in some instance of the peculiar sort.[357]
All the previously mentioned helps the reader understand what those French entrepreneurs are
working for, ultimately. Therefrom, the much capitalistic disciplines of marketing, advertising,
fancy merchandising, and public relations do not clash with the French collectivist principles.
Subsequently, there is no political incorrectness at all with studying and even perfecting methods in
the latter fields and in others, as testify for the additional explanations, below.
France has a marketing tactic she erected as a doctrine serving a political goal, which holds that
each time a famous or influential foreigner buys a Made in France exclusive good, it engenders at
the same time an emotional bond between this person and France. This assumption proves to be
correct in the facts, also because from the viewpoint of French spies, businessmen, politicians, and
diplomats alike, it often constitutes a valuable and natural introduction likely to lead to expectations
greater than a mere financial profit. A prominent foreign figure seen using or wearing a notoriously
French product thus is doing good publicity to France, but still better can be done.
Manufacturing and selling luxury goods are only part of a tactic encompassing other notions and
needs. From a general standpoint and when the size of a company makes it relevant to the French
notion of economic heritage, the French way in business is always about the French national interest
first. Then it extends to greater political expectations abroad, always and again under pretenses of
purely opportunistic business ventures. I am not implying herein that all French CEOs and moguls
would be “super-agents” in reality; some indeed are consciously doing business with this idea in
the back of their mind, but this does not necessarily put them in the category of super-agents. I
would find hard to define a category for them myself, if ever there is one indeed. Call them “super-
patriots” rather, about as Russian ultra-rich oligarchs are, although they did not make their debuts in
the SDECE or the DGSE; they were shortlisted anyway, often unbeknownst to their being aware of
it. Yet I know that a number of them trained as super-agents, first. Regardless, in all cases the
DGSE and the French Government together see all of them as “agents” acting in the service of the
French national interest, values, and image because their capacities in influence abroad that their
positions endow them with are potent. These notions are relevant to cultural diplomacy in the
absolute.
In passing, this explains why the illegal practices they all indulge in are rarely sanctioned,
although they are well known in the DGSE and in some other agencies with a specialty in financial
affairs. Filling their dossier secrets and handling them firmly is more advisable than stopping them
in the middle of the race. Besides, their businesses provide cover activities and salaries to spies in
nearly all cases if not all.. Only foreign police and justice courts catch them when they can.
Now, I am going to present a potent method in mass manipulation invented in the late 1980s,
which the DGSE experimented with success in Belgium, first, and is using in Switzerland for a few
years. At first glance, it seems to be rather relevant to influence, yet it should be excluded from this
category, due to the effects expected on the long term, as we are going to see. Its goal is to unite as
many people as possible around an idea or a way of life, and a common cultural identity; or else to
unite a group for some particular reason when applied at a small scale. It may be seen as a
communication action relying exclusively on implicit messages and on emulation. From the
standpoint of neuroscience, it proceeds from the phenomenon of collective empathy, I earlier called
need for belonging or belongingness. I learned it in the mid-1980s as a notion called in French
“stimulation du besoin d’appartenance,” which I never heard of nor read elsewhere since then.
Therefore, I can only assume its English translation should be “belongingness stimulation,”
although saying herd instinct would be satisfying.
The need for belonging is a psychological mechanism common to all human beings; integral to
the need to being, I explained extensively in the chapter 9 on manipulating and handling individuals.
It originally expressed in the remotest ancestors of Man as a drive to flock with individuals of the
same species, in order to seek better protection by the number against predators. Still earlier, it
spurred cells to flock together, thus giving birth to the first multicellular organisms on Earth. This
characteristic of human behavior, also found in a large majority of other species, but not in all as
each evolves its own way since, is often trivialized and even mocked by comparing people to
“sheep”. In France, the herd instinct is popularly known as the syndrome de Panurge (Panurge
syndrome), after a tale that François Rabelais wrote in a series of five novels titled Gargantua and
Pantagruel first published in 1552. In the fourth of these novels, titled Le Quart Livre, Panurge, one
of the two main characters, buys a sheep from the merchant Dindenault, while they are sailing
aboard a boat. As Panurge understands at some point Dindenault overcharged him, he throws the
animal overboard into the sea. At first, Dindenault does not understand why Panurge thus
relinquishes his purchase he paid much for. Not for long though because the other sheep, seeing one
of their likes going away in the water, all jump overboard into the sea to follow it. Dindenault does
his best to hold his sheep back onboard, with the effect to drag him into the sea, too. This amusing
story gave birth to the French byword and passing reference “Mouton de Panurge” (Panurge’s
sheep), known to every French today. Yet they all fail to see its effects in every circumstances.
In animals, the need for belonging is always expressed physically because they do not have a
neocortex sufficiently developed to form associations of ideas and to be satisfied with abstractions.
Man has a far superior intelligence allowing him to understand abstraction, and even to conceive
abstractions. Thanks to this faculty, he can feel safer and stronger simply by clinging to his likes in
thought only. This closeness to others in thought enabled countless prisoners of war, more resilient
than others, to resist the ideological indoctrination attempts of their guards, even though they were
physically isolated and thus particularly vulnerable. An analogous yet not similar system of defense
is to believe in God because this supernatural entity is still stronger than anyone and anything else.
In Man as in monkeys his cousins, it is this need for belonging that pushes him irrepressibly to
mimic about everything the members of his social group do and say; unconsciously mostly, and
consciously when he wants to belong to a group. In passing, that is why the DGSE counts much on
this psychological phenomenon in its recruiting processes, by playing hard to get in its expectation
that the recruit submits to all its whims and mimics the mores of his recruiters. Most other
intelligence agencies if not all, secret societies, sororities, reputed companies, and countless
exclusive clubs do the same. To many, the feeling to belong to a group is the same as food; they
crave it and are ready to do anything for it. The pressure of the group aka peer pressure aka fashion
effect aka bandwagon effect is effective only because it stems from the need for belonging.
Although the reader probably knows what peer pressure and bandwagon effect mean—contrary
to a large majority of French—I found pertinent to draw the schema, below, because, thus, he will
better notice the similarity in its principle with the minority influence method.
 On it, the circle must be seen as the intellectual effort the influenced person has to make to
change his opinion and to be accepted by the group, should the latter challenge arise. The highly
influential power of television and cinema on our modern society—which Internet and the
smartphone failed to overtake, be it said in passing—owes entirely to the bandwagon effect. Thanks
to a scholarly use of the media, to be explained in the next chapter, it is possible to the State to
shape at will the opinions, beliefs, tastes, and preferences in everything in the masses.
Since the early 1990s, the DGSE extended its mastery in stimulating the need for belonging to
changing somebody’s accent as a means to change his character. As surprising as the reader may
find it, not only the method is simple in its principle, but it also proves as effective as fast; for there
is indeed a close cause-to-effect relation between the way we speak and our character. More exactly,
we may develop a particular cultural identity almost solely based on our accent.
Accent in language is also a meta-communication element, the same way as prosody or utterance
in one’s speech can communicate one’s emotional state. If metacommunication may focus on
“kinesics,” i.e. body language and nonverbal language[358] already studied by scholars, the social
influence of the accent does not seem to have been investigated as thoroughly as the DGSE did still
at this moment (2018), unless I missed to know it. I continue explaining it, therefore.
When we are talking, not only the accent we caught unconsciously in our region of origin and / or
in our social middle determines the perception others have of us, but it also exerts an overwhelming
influence on our own character and demeanor, as on the behavior and attitude of those we are
talking to, reciprocally. More than that, it may go as far as to compel those we are talking to to
mirror our character and demeanor, depending two possible causes or both at the same time. I
explain the causes, below.
To exemplify the first cause, and by taking two extremes to highlight it, we do not behave and
express ourselves the same fashion when we are talking and listening to a factory worker as we do
with the dean of a university. No matter what, if I may say so, we do our best to mirror the character
of the dean to adapt to his intellectual and social levels, whereas we do not at all with the factory
worker. Reciprocally, these two people thus are implicitly reminded their ranks in the society,
simply by noticing how we behave with them. In other words, we do the effort to communicate our
respect to the dean of university in all possible ways, whereas we do not with the factory worker.
Why this, in the absolute, since it is not at all just a matter of social conventions? Actually, we
would love to enjoy a reciprocal respect from the dean of university because this would satisfy our
need to belong to his higher middle, or close to, at least, implicitly. Thus, we would “rise” socially,
in thought. We all crave for better, including about ourselves. Therefore, not to do any effort in this
sense with the factory worker does not mean we hold him in contempt just for who he is, socially.
Instead, unconsciously, we do not want to feel we belong to the social middle of the factory worker.
This marked difference in our behavior, depending on whom we are talking to, must be understood
as a very visible expression of our innate need for safety, integral to our basic and fundamental need
to being. In crude words, we are afraid to go down, and that is why we want to go up permanently;
that is all. Not yet convinced? See now the second cause.
When we join a new social or cultural middle much different of ours with is no one around who
belongs to our own social or cultural middle, we feel isolated and vulnerable to a more or less
extent, depending our character. In the depth of our mind, where our reptilian brain is—or our id, it
does not matter—angst arises because we do not really feel safe. So, this part of our brain
commands to the two others to find a solution to solve the problem. Actually, there is only one
solution to it: to adapt, in order to be accepted by the new social or cultural middle. Thenceforth, we
begin to observe attentively how the people of the new middle behave, what are their uses, customs,
mores, and rules, and we comply with them willy-nilly. We will not be accepted if we do not do this,
and this will do little to stop the message of angst our reptilian brain sends to the conscious parts of
our brain. We will feel ill at ease permanently. So, we adapt anyway, even if we think that the new
middle is inferior to ours because it is a matter of social survival, and even just survival, possibly.
Then if the people of the new middle have a very distinct accent when they talk, great are the
chances for us to catch it either, to a more or less extent and past a longer or shorter period, still
more or less consciously.
Actually, the phenomenon I just described reproduces in milder situations, invariably either,
which interested the DGSE and spurred its curiosity to trigger it on purpose in the contexts of
influence and manipulation. Replicating it at a small and experimental scale first, involves
immersing an individual in a small group or “micro social middle,” whose members all have the
accent and demeanor we want the individual to catch in the end. After a few months or even a few
weeks, the human guinea-pig will catch a little of the same accent or he will begin to,
unconsciously, along his conscious catching of behavioral traits and habits of his immersion group.
Of course, success with this method greatly depends on the vulnerability to influence of those on
whom it is tried. Now, I can present the method of influence that actually is a manipulation, since
nothing is explicit in it.
Observations have evidenced a link between the indoctrination of someone and the accent of the
persons who carried out the task. Indeed, catching an accent, and also a speech-style and vocabulary
associated with the indoctrination improve its strength and persistence because it acts as an
unconscious reminder of the doctrine. Additionally, it demonstrates that the otherwise well-known
psychological effect called groupthink extends well beyond just convincing someone that a fallacy
is a reality. In plants of the Paris’ region, French labor-unionized workers used empirically yet with
the same success this extended application of groupthink an innumerable number of times to
convert young workers ideologically. More interestingly, it was noticed that those among those
converted workers who came from the countryside also caught the accent of the Parisian lower class
along their indoctrination. When they moved in other regions of France, not only they kept their
new accent, but also, they never lost it until their last day. Those who lost gradually the accent
through the same conditions also renounced to their ideological commitment at about the same pace,
until both disappeared completely at about the same time. Finally, those who simply remained in
touch with the workers who indoctrinated them kept both their accent and commitment in an
overwhelming majority of cases, without it being necessary to resume the indoctrination.
The discovery was made in empirical situations therefore, and not through experiments and data
analysis, before it was reproduced under the guidance of scientists and psychiatrists of the DGSE. It
evolved to a method and was perfected in the latter conditions first and was eventually
experimented on masses of people with encouraging succes. At some point in the 1980s, the method
when applied to masses of people became sophisticated and all scientific in its planning.
Nonetheless, it always remained in use at small scales to indoctrinate individuals.
As real example, I vividly remember a woman trainee that the DGSE sent to learn English in a
blue-collar London quarter. The goal was this recruit be fluent in Cockney instead of good English;
she was not told this detail and believed she simply went to Britain to learn English. Before her
study trip, Valérie, to name her, was a witty, educated, and polite person with a good position in a
reputed visual identity agency. She was not the same person anymore when she came back to Paris.
Her demeanor and humor style she favored upon her return were these of an under-educated person,
and she could easily pass for a blue-collar worker. Most surprisingly, she quickly caught the accent
of the Parisian blue-collar workers, too—called accent faubourien[359]—, by herself this time. Her
demeanor never went back to what it was before, as if the change was definitive and irreversible.
Her ideological indoctrination in Britain actually was the cause of her accent in English, and later of
her change of accent in French; not the reverse, as factory workers who indoctrinated others
believed. There is a reversibility of effects in the combination indoctrination plus accent, therefore.
Today, the method is subsumed in the larger fields of social-culture conditioning, culture
influence, and cultural warfare. When the method is applied to masses of people, the groupthink
effect cannot be counted on, of course; but it was discovered that the peer pressure effect takes the
relay and results in a same success. In fact, the method is used in a manner analogous to the spread
of rumors first, and then the contagion spreads by itself through peer pressure. People mimic
spontaneously the accent; exactly as others who are similarly vulnerable to influence or are not yet
mature enough decide to have tattoos and piercings or to wear blue jeans with holes in the knees,
owing to the mere fashion effect.
There is no rationally explainable cause for it, a priori, except belongingness stimulation, which
in the latter case is also a need for individuality, as we shall see later in another context, because
another alternative with two possible options may stimulate the need for belonging. The first is a
stake one may find in mirroring the cultural traits of the group perceived as an overwhelming
majority, i.e. need to being / survival / herd instinct. The second, not much different in the absolute,
is a need for individuality; paradoxical since it formally consists in mirroring the cultural traits of a
minority, consciously perceived as an appealing example this time.
In those other cases, this method of mass manipulation largely relies on the use of audiovisual
media, and in particular on new TV celebrities and anchors “hired” for influencing and trained to
have the expected accent or who had it naturally, exactly as certain performers such as humorists do.
Those individuals may be called, “examples” or “influencers”. Each of them has a particular accent
closely associated with a specific demeanor, which places them implicitly in a distinct social
category any French can easily identify; or else, when needed, in an entirely new “social” or
“cultural” category fitting a particular expectation. Therefrom, the sought-after psychological effect
is an induced mirroring by social category affinity; that is to say, the well-known behavior of
someone who mimics unconsciously the gestures, speech patterns, and demeanor of another person
artificially endowed with fame or naturally gifted with charisma—equivalent to the dean of
university of my previous explanation, the reader notices.
Knowing the aforesaid, the perceptive reader who is familiar with French culture will notice that
an overwhelming majority of French affiliated to leftist labor unions have a particular and same
accent, regardless of the place where they are born and where they live now. To be more specific, it
is the “accent of the streets” explained in the ft. 20 of this chapter. Then, for a reason I do not know,
all French-speaking famous sailors who partake in major sailing races have also this accent,
including Yvan Bourgon, a Swiss citizen born and raised in La Chaux-de-Fonds! In 2019, in all
French suburbs, one could not find a single youngster who has not another typical accent and
prosody “from nowhere,” but sung and thus promoted by all French rap music singers. Additionally,
they all have the identical demeanor and use the same words, expressions, body language, and dress
exactly the same way, as “expected” in their middle when talking with this accent.
Accents act as “social markers” by clearly defining not only the social middle of nearly all French
today, but even their political stance. For they less and less are those of particular regions, with the
remarkable exception of the strong accent of Southern France that remains impervious to new trends
in this respect to date. The reader must learn from the latter explanations that accent also acts as
information carrier i.e. medium, while it often is the message, additionally; that is to say, the same
way the simple letter “Z” alone carries a political message rich enough to fill a book.
This technical explanation on accents and stimulation of the need for belonging concerns
domestic influence at this point. However, as I previously said, the DGSE uses also the method in
foreign French-speaking countries, integral in those instances to actions of influence serving a
political objective in fine. The goal is to undermine the collective cultural identity of the target
country or linguistic region, in order to replace it with a new one that is this of the conqueror or
“new majority”. When the latter stage of conversion is reached or about to be, it becomes possible
to add emphasis on the expected political ideology by relying on peer pressure, essentially. For this
change of values to occur, the new accent must be distinct enough from all others to strike the minds
of those who did not yet caught it. The new accent is used as medium carrying the values, so that
they be made implicit only and not explicitly suggested, or “go without saying”.
Eventually, when the number of people who have caught the accent is thought “large enough,”
the groups or crowds can instantly recognize each other thanks to this distinctive and still implicit
form of communication only, which at this stage is rich enough to become a component of meta-
communication called “paralanguage”. Obviously, the strength of the action of influence relying on
paralanguage can be greatly reinforced with an additional promotion of other cultural mores and
forms of meta-communication; such as particular gestures, body languages, and ranges of
stereotyped attitudes called “kinesics”. Specific dress codes can be added, and they generally are.
For paralanguage is very effective when associated with tailored kinesics and particular words,
bywords, and idioms, according to the method of the unique word that does not exist in the
dictionary, I explained earlier. At this point, the method is a tactic that can be summed up as a subtle
and insidious “cultural siege,” still relying on peer pressure, essentially. Its main interest is to
challenge the excepted action of counterinfluence in the target country, with great effectiveness
because it relies entirely on an implicit form of communication that can be denied at any time,
exactly as in the case of the letter “Z,” again.
In fact, the effectiveness of the method lays about entirely on its insidiousness. To best sum it up
to the American reader by using an imaginary example, it is as consciously adopting the accent of
the U.S. State where people voting democrat are the most numerous in the expectation to claims and
to promote this political stance implicitly only, instead of wearing a promotional tee-shirt, cap, or
pin, i.e. explicitly. Of course, such a fashion to promote a political idea would no longer be political
proselytism, but conspiracy in its principle.
Not all individuals conform to the group by taking its dominant accent with a same rapidity, as I
previously alluded to. A minority, generally small, naturally resists peer pressure without even
doing it consciously. Either people of this minority do it as an unconscious and natural form of
cultural resilience against what they possibly perceive as an attack to their individuality or kultur, or
to another social middle they proudly belong to already, or else to the other natural need for self-
fulfillment originating in the need to being and present in everyone’s mind. Notwithstanding, people
exposed to it often adapt and convert as shortly as in a few days, children especially, and that is
where the danger lies on the long term to the thus attacked country.
Anecdotally, once in the 1990s, Belgian actor Jean-Claude Van Damme surprised his French
audience by answering in his interview in French, but with an unexpected strong American accent.
This exemplified a strong and sincere desire to integrate into the host country and to claim this new
identity, more or less consciously. I doubt it would be instead a form of “stupid snobbery,” as it was
commented in the French media at that time and largely rumored in the public to the point of
spanning a running joke at the expense of Van Damme. Similarly, and notoriously, virtually all
French political pundits retain a strong French accent when they must express in English, even
when they master the latter language. Here again, it is the expression of a strong French identity
claim; and of a fear of possible ostracism on the part of their fellow-citizens, it should be added.
Indeed, this can go as far as possible accusation of weakness by cultural conformity to the adverse
group. French President Emmanuel Macron speaking English with a good accent is a striking
novelty in the middle of French politics, which as a matter of fact numerous journalists underscored.
Since the early 1990s, the DGSE did a large and successful use of influence through accent in
Wallonia, French-speaking part of Belgium, by associating it with a rumor, whose message simply
was “The Belgian accent is ridiculous”. Since 2008-2010, this agency is reproducing the method in
the French-speaking part of Switzerland. However, some Swiss scientists and scholars identified
and publicly commented this action of influence and its effects, quoted in the chapter 28.
In point of fact, in the 1990s, I often heard talks in the DGSE about the Texan accent in the
United States, which this agency culturally associates with Republican Conservatism and
individualism, and perceives as one among several “cultural barriers” to the spread of leftist values
and narrative in this country. That is why this agency has been sowing a particular black propaganda
in the United States aiming to belittle Americans who have this particular accent. On those talks, the
subject of rural Americans and farmers was brought upon because the DGSE perceives their masses
together as a social category poorly receptive to abstract leftist arguments. As an aside, the large and
decades-long-lasting black propaganda that the DGSE has been orchestrating against the American
company Monsanto—closely associated with American unbridled capitalism and consumerism, in
this context—aimed the latter social category in particular, though not only in the United States, but
also in many other countries. As German group Bayer finally acquired Monsanto in 2018, then there
is little doubt this particularly aggressive action against this company will stops; if it did not,
already.
Specifically, for a very long time, France has been waging a cultural war in French Canada
(Quebec), and French intelligence activities have always been intensive in this region. There, France
has been using means and methods of influence identical in all respects to others, I explained in this
chapter. However, the debasing of the particular Quebecois collective identity by the imposition of
the French (Parisian) accent is about impossible in this other country, at least because it is not
geographically close enough to France for this. Canadian television channels and radio stations
speaking French with the so typical Quebecois accent together act as a natural and highly effective
counter-interference measure; not to mention the local popularity of numerous English-speaking TV
channels and radio stations, and the immediate proximity with English-speaking Canada and United
States.
 19. Social & Cultural Trends Shaping.
T oday, in France, control over the mainstream media remains the most effective, versatile, and
fastest means to spread propaganda, influence, disinformation, and to counter noxious influence.
With several thousands of print and online periodicals, radio stations, and television channels this
country has, they come together as relay and support to the spread of culture; that is to say, books,
music, films, sports, leisure, theater, performance, poetry, painting, architecture, and assimilated.
The intelligentsia uses willingly the term “fourth power” to name the media. Thereof, it uses the
term “fifth power” to specify where culture locates, as the State monitors officially this other field
since 1958. The roles the political apparatus gives to culture are to shaping the public opinion and to
breeding national pride among the masses first and foremost. This neither is new nor even a French
invention, however. In all times and civilizations, ruling elite discovered the virtues of arts and
architecture to impress upon the masses and to deter their foes, and they remained the best means
they had in hand to do so until the coming of the printing press first, and of the spread of literacy
and knowledge that followed.
The French intelligence community and the political apparatus consider that control over
literature is crucial because all books that French writers and scholars write must constitute together
a coherent educational body supporting the agenda of the State, actively or passively regardless.
Therefore, as a medium, books must never carry information challenging the popular beliefs that the
State designs painstakingly and preserves.
Four types of exceptions to this rule exist however, and if they apply to books and to the press in
particular, they may be found again in everything can carry information, education, arts, and
entertainment. Holding to the example of literature, the first type can be called, “false criticism” or
“non-hazardous criticism”. It purports chiefly to create an appearance of freedom of speech; or
rather a “contained freedom of speech,” to be precise, aiming to let the masses vent a catharsis to
appease and tame them, as as “mood regulatory mechanism”. In other words, the public exposure of
selected wrongdoings of a few members of the elite purges the minds of the masses of their
inescapable frustrations and discontent, and thus brings about release from this natural tension.[360]
In addition, the provision aims to eschewing the ever-possible accusations of state censorship that
some other countries could launch. Often, the exposed wrongdoing is minor by comparison with
those that could be indeed hazardous to public order, if publicly revealed. The latter are kept secret,
of course, and they are promptly denied, disputed, and censored by whatever means when some
would-be-whistleblowers manage to leak some.[361] Wrongdoings the State thus leaks deliberately,
and even spreads largely, therefore, may be either authentic or fabricated by occasional and
unconscious agents of influence, lured into believing they “got their hands on a scoop by
happenstance”; the reader will see some true examples in this book. In some other instances, regular
and conscious agents of influence “leak” them, as we shall see in the chapter 21 on the use and
monitoring of the media in France. The contrivance is far from new and it is not a French
exclusivity; we may find it in ancient times, today historically commented in a few essays on libel
and sedition.
The second type is the true or fabricated wrongdoing revealed to the public for the sake of a
deception. The case is not rare, and coincidence makes that it often relates to the French intelligence
community and its activities. Often, this type of leak is an offshoot of active measures.
The third type is the wrongdoing the State or the DGSE leaks intentionally to get rid of a
politician, businessmen, famous author, artist, scientist, or anyone else, to sanction him for another
wrongdoing the public must not know.
Finally, the fourth type is the rare but inevitable case of wrongdoing, true and grave, whose
accidental exposure catches the DGSE by surprise because it could not possibly be prevented. I will
present some.
Today, books and films, though being themselves major media of influence, will not be widely
read and watched and they will fall quickly into oblivion, if no literary critic writes a word or two
about them. The same applies to all other forms of culture and arts, also used commonly as media
carrying propaganda, messages of influence and disinformation, as we shall see. Pending that
moment, the reader must read the following five or six pages of historical facts because they
describe the connection between the State and those who teach the French national culture and pride
to the masses; for the methods never much changed for several centuries.
 The French Government and more especially the influential military attach great care and
importance not only to a tight control over the news and the media, but also to literature and culture
since the birth of the Third Republic in 1871. This was no novelty at that time, however. Before the
Revolution of 1789 and under the Ancient Regime, all books printed in France had to be approved
by a legal provision called Privilège du Roi, meaning “Privilege of the King” we could also translate
as “Courtesy by the King”. The formal aim of it was to protect their authors and printers against
counterfeiting; the real aim was to enforce state censorship, of course. A book without the line
“Avec privilege du Roy” (With privilege of the King)—the letter “y” substituted “i” in the noun roi
at that time—printed on its first page was tolerated since 1709 though, as long as its substance could
not trouble public order. The Censeurs royaux (Royal Censors) delivered authorization to print a
book upon reading of its entire manuscript. This explains why the historians of today would hardly
find any striking revelation in a book printed in France from the early 16th century to the end of the
Ancient Regime in 1789. From this year on, state censorship resumed through other provisions
alternatively official and unofficial.
Since the second half of the 19th century, France co-opts a body of clerks and historiographers
shortlisted after criteria of competency, of course, but their political orthodoxy comes first because
self-censorship is always better that censorship. Until the former period, facts of domestic and
foreign policies were hand-recorded on paper sheets; not printed. From 1808, the records are
piously preserved in the National Archives of Paris, archived by dates; historical secrets are all there
or almost. Because parts of those writings remain State secrets, this warehouse where those no
posterior to 1958 are kept has ever been well guarded by officials whose elite guarantees their
loyalties. Then the ruling elite has ever instructed a small committee of archival experts to grant a
limited access to the archives to the historiographers, so that they can build and write the history of
the country setting its cultural roots and values therefore. More precisely, when the committee of
archival experts judges that political and diplomatic secrets are old enough not to be so any longer,
and that their public release can no longer offend an allied country or upset the masses, it puts them
at the disposal of the historiographers.
Since 1998, a special council reunites periodically at the Conseil constitutionnel (Constitutional
Council)[362] in Paris to declassify some of those archives that might be of historical interest.
Alternatively, it does it at the request of concerned parties, justice courts, judges, and attorneys
included. This special council is called Commission du secret de la Défense nationale (National
Defense Committee on Secrecy). It consists of five members appointed by the President upon
discreet recommendation by the Ministry of Defense for a non-renewable term of six years. These
most-trusted people must be a member of the Council of State, a magistrate of the Court of
Cassation, a magistrate of the Court of Auditors, a Representative of the lower Chamber of the
Parliament, and a Senator.[363] All are old men very experienced in French secret affairs and in the
handling of documents of the most sensitive sort. They know probably more on the secret side of
French politics than any active minister and the President himself.
Then the historiographers present those secrets of the past as striking realities and breaking news
no one would question, since the ruling elite acknowledges them implicitly and consecrates
regularly their lucky publishers who also are selected after their political orthodoxy either. It is
thanks to the orthodoxy and outstanding historical and literary knowledge of the former, presented
to the masses as the best historians of their time, that a synthesis of the political and diplomatic
archives is written in the most flattering fashion. The demeaning realities of political power they
may reveal are suitably simplified, exposed in veiled terms, craftily disguised, or downright
ignored; that is to say, censored. Once all this is done, the press fills its pages with well-chosen
excerpts and incenses their authors, with the expected consequence to arouse and stimulate the
natural curiosity of the people. The latter stage provides further fame reputation and unquestionable
authority to the historiographers and their publishers. Everything they would say, and print, is
considered an evangelical truth until long after their intrusion, and this is how the history of France
is made.
With this core knowledge richly illustrated with old paintings, engravings, photos, tables and
diagrams stressing its reality, French history schoolbooks, encyclopedias and essays, press articles,
audiovisual educational programs, public events and exhibitions, conferences and passionate
debates, and even novels, plays, films, and videogames are written, published, performed,
broadcast, told, and made intelligible to the multitudes. The roots of French patriotism locate in this
gathering of actions.
 There lies the need to preserve the writings of the ruling elite, and to release to the public a
greater or lesser part of it, according to the political agenda and events of the moment. Otherwise,
the masses would gradually lose the feeling of their Gallic collective identity. Its individuals would
detach affectively from the flock. It would be no longer possible to convince them of the virtues of
today’s political power, nor to breed in the mind of each the pride, scale of moral values, and
cultural references that together shape what German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder once and
for all called “the Nation”. “A poet is a creator of the Nation around himself; he gives to them a
world to see, and has their souls in his hand to lead them there,” wrote Herder while alluding to,
pell-mell, Shakespeare, the Bible, the Torah, the Quran, and the Norse Sagas.[364]
In the 19th century, documents thus published by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs aka the
“Quai d’Orsay” after the name of its location in Paris, however were sometimes incomplete or even
downright falsified—they still are today, for reasons soon to be explained. Henceforth, diplomatic
cables were deliberately drafted in terms destining them naturally to their public releases; those who
did this had in mind to influencing parliamentarians and the public opinion, already. That is why
they also made selections of articles and documents for the purport of domestic influence and
propaganda in wartime. Foreign ministers and ambassadors acted accordingly in order to justifying
the conduct of their missions and to crafting arguments against or in favor of foreign parties.
In 1873, Émile Boutmy, director of the newly created Free School of Political Science, had
declared that a “nationalistic and frivolous press” had too easily distracted the French public in the
summer 1870, when the war between France and Prussia was raging. Therefore, French historians
had a duty to inculcating in citizens a minimum knowledge on international affairs, so that such
calamities would not happen again in the future. Bonapartism had definitively disillusioned France,
and the rising new generation of Jacobin republicans and progressive intellectuals thought that
France had to separate emotionally from its immediate past, if she wanted to regain her power.
However, rewriting the history of France to present it under a new light was something that could
not be done without new documents or without greater access to the “the old ones”. It was largely
thanks to this intervention of Hanotaux that, in 1874, a Commission of Diplomatic Archives[365]
was created at the Quai d’Orsay. Élie Decazes, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, founded its
committee. Decazes asked to his members to recommend for publication documents that would
enable their readers to acquire a true and healthy diplomatic education; for he wanted to offer to
French diplomatic correspondents the means and procedures of the past policy that had given to
France her grandeur.
In 1880, newly appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs Charles de Freycinet considered the idea to
publishing the French diplomatic archives in entire volumes, as annual reports.[366] It was not his
idea, but that of the Prussians who were doing it, already. The Committee reunited archivists,
distinguished historians, active diplomats, and even booksellers; together, they had in mind to
reproducing the Prussian objectives with such books, adapted to the needs of France. The formal
aim was to educating the masses; the real aims were to disseminate misleading information to the
attention of foreign powers, and to defend progressive points of view aiming the French public,
simultaneously. For there still was a partisan need to discredit definitively Louis-Napoléon
Bonaparte the Third, and the many in France who kept standing by Bonapartist imperialism and
values. The diplomats who worked closely with few scholars and intellectuals about domestic
influence did the disinformation part of this publishing, essentially. The latter, we can hold as the
ancestors of the current French orthodox historians, were particularly interested in the events of
1870-1871 because they followed Émile Boutmy in his idea that the defeat against the Prussians
was partly due to the poor quality of education in the schools of the country.
However, the first publishing project actually was that of the instructions given to French envoys
between 1648 and 1789; that is to say, between the end of the Thirty Years War and the drafting of
the Treaty of Westphalia, and the first French Revolution.[367] The following collections of writings
gave rise to feverish discussions because some of their events yet were delicate to expose frankly, or
else they questioned the ideological sense the elite had given to them at that time; although the
periods they spoke of were sometimes quite old. In some instances, they could even call to question
the myths on which the Constitution had been founded; I am alluding to the delicate question of the
British freemasonic interference in France in the second half of the 18th century, which had led to
the Revolution of 1789, ultimately.
The first publishing of documents relating to the War of 1870 was finally launched in 1907,
shortly after the formation of the government of President George Clemenceau. The new and
voluminous series was titled The Diplomatic Origins of the War of 1870-1871,[368] and heavily
biased in favor of socialist ideals; for it purported essentially to “reveal to the masses the recent
history of their country,” and to draw their attention to the weaknesses of Bonapartism and
economic liberalism in general. The monumental and craftily done work of influence was rewarded
with success. Historians who partook in the meetings of the Commission readily believed their
publication’s work had altered the course of French history, not without some good reasons. They
even attributed to themselves the renewal of French nationalism that helped Raymond Poincaré,
himself a member of the Commission, to be elected President in 1913, on the eve of the Great War.
Gabriel Hanotaux, member of the Académie Française who had been Minister of Foreign Affairs
until 1898, and the architect of the rapprochement of France with Russia, proclaimed that “A new
era called for a new History [of France]”.
Possible dire consequences following the publishing of history books by the Committee of the
Commission of Diplomatic Archives made their writing very delicate. As example following the
release of The Diplomatic Origins of the War of 1870-1871, in 1911, French geographer and
historian Bertrand Auerbach presented for examination to the Committee his manuscript for another
history book on the instructions given to the representatives of the Imperial Prussian Diet in
Regensburg, aka the Colloquy of Ratisbon of 1541. There, he found himself embarrassed when he
had to comment on his diplomatic documents, for they suggested that German nationalism
developed itself in reaction to persistent French interference in the internal affairs of Prussia. This
was not what French diplomats wanted to see published and read by everyone, obviously. So,
Auerbach’s comments were rewritten, and some documents supporting them were deleted before
publication, purely and simply.
During the Great War, the craze for publishing the diplomatic archives to teach the masses their
history was general in Western Europe. Naturally, the French Government had needed popular
support to engage with confidence in the war, and its leaders had to do their best to show they had
not taken any part in its conflagration. That is how and why the Quai d’Orsay had published its
Livre Jaune (Yellow Book) on March 17, 1913. Upon the end of the war, Hanotaux applauded his
colleagues in the Commission for giving to the French people the spirit of continuity favorable to
their best interests in the country, and for making them aware of the opportunities that were awaiting
everybody. Seemingly, a profound knowledge of history had helped France regain her superiority
over Germany.
Today, the Ministry of National Education is considered a sensitive public body, and the
progressive political stance of all its employees is an unofficial prerequisite, therefore.[369] The
reader now understands that before doing domestic influence and even counterinfluence, France is
concerned first with shaping the culture and core values of the Nation, exactly as I just explained
with some historical facts. Therefore, they also include notions fabricated on purpose until decades
of relentless repetitions make them unquestionable truths. The compound can be compared to a grab
bag of values, symbols and irrational beliefs mixed with no-nonsensical assumptions, dates, names,
platitudes, and facts true and false, yet all deemed important. The thus packed amalgam makes up in
some sort for a “buoy” to which each French citizen must hold firmly in the ocean filled with
dangers and whims that the World is. My American reader would rather call all those things
“bearings,” I assume. Nonetheless, we all need to attach ourselves to something in which we believe
—myself included, in spite of my disillusions—beyond a religious belief too universalist to help us
find ourselves at home somewhere. Man is unable to live completely alone and not to attach to
something and to someone; he hardly resists the need for belonging because he is born with.
When we say, “my country,” we do not mentally see first a geographic map;[370] we see in
thoughts some of those things that are in the grab bag of my comparison. At the same time, we
derive from it a warm feeling of safety; though not always consciously. Even if we rather “think
about” some relatives and friends first, we actually relive gatherings of short sequences of our past,
partly or even largely blurred: indoor and outdoor settings in which those people evolve, almost as
when we are watching a film trailer. I say “partly blurred” because we do not store in our mind a
“photographic” memory of everything we see and experience each second of our life, actually, but
few things only, comparable to computer metadata for most, which struck us for one reason or
another. From those “metadata,” we rebuild pictures mentally and fill the blanks the best we can,
thanks to deductive reasoning, essentially. Those reasons actually are strong feelings of happiness,
pain, surprise, wonderment, and mystery because we could not record them in our mind otherwise
than by associating them with their causes.
 Those recollections are also made of sounds, flavors, atmospheres, and tastes; that is to say, as
much as the reasons of our past interactions with relatives and friends mostly belong to the cultural
environment in which we grew up and lived eventually, one way or another yet closely rather than
loosely. To name some among the most common, they are Christmas days, birthdays, weddings,
births and deaths, promotions and demises, rewards and punishments, successes, failures, accidents,
regrettable mistakes and strokes of luck, gains and losses, moment of love and sexual intercourses.
No event of this sort can be dissociated from the cultural contexts that surrounded them on the
moment. The latter are particular places such as bars and night clubs, churches, living rooms and
bedrooms, schools and universities, gardens, beaches, streets, landscapes, and so on. They also
associate with particular sounds, tunes, dishes and smells, toys and other gifts, cars and motorbikes,
boats and planes, sad and happy breaking news seen on television, and what not.
Political decisions indeed made all those things as they were, much more than it may seem at first
glance; I present some examples of it to make myself clear. In France, less than a hundred years ago,
many of those sad and joyful events happened in churches. Not anymore, since the political elite did
everything it could to promote secularism, while it undermined Christian religion, successfully.
Now, they happen in public buildings and in presence of elected people and officials, and there is a
picture of the acting president of the Republic hanging somewhere in the hall; you would not miss
it. Countless French remember vividly with whom and where they were when such or such sport
team won the World Soccer Cup. Then who decided first that soccer is the most important sport in
the country? Ordinary citizens did not do that someday on the spur of the moment; and if ever this
were true, how did they convince the millions others that soccer is damn more exciting than Sumo,
hockey on ice, car racing, and American football? Countless French people remember well which
tune was playing when they had their first dance with their future partner for life. However, when
the same event was happening at the same time to countless German and Italians, none of them
could hear the same song or even any other by the same singer, very probably. This should surprise
everyone because, if a singer or band is “very good,” how it comes that no one listens to them past a
border checkpoint guarded by some customs officers, then?
In France, politics and the State, and they only, are accountable for the fact that soccer is the
national sport that a huge majority of French loves sincerely. The same applies to the most favored
leisure activities, up to the dishes, garments, and fashion accessories that most French say “they”
prefer. We shall see soon how is that possible, technically, and by which means and tricks the State
can convince a majority to like a same thing and reject the others; but there are still some
fundamentals the reader must learn to really understand their proceedings.
During our entire life, our brain records things and events according to three main processes, each
different from the two others. First, comes the “recording process” that remains available to us only
from the day of our birth to the end of our teenage years; we may locate the latter in the
surroundings of seventeen to twenty-one years old. I explained this in detail in the chapter 9 on
manipulating and handling individuals, already. However, this does not mean we can recollect
everything we have experienced in our childhood; for our brain selects in its short-term memory of
less than 10 seconds experiences that are “worthy to be stored” in its long-term memory. We would
be crazy, if ever our brain memorized absolutely everything second after second.
Second, we find a “virtual memory” or “immaterial memory” that is not associated with the
physical building of neurons. Otherwise, our brain would continue growing and our skull would
have to adapt to it, too, until our last day; only our ears and nose tend to slightly grow with age, and
they are no places where memory goes. This virtual memory concerns everything we memorized
and are still memorizing right now—I hope so—after the physical growth process of our brain
grinded to a definitive halt. Those recollections can be altered, forgotten, definitively lost, possibly.
All things we want to remember consciously “forever” once in adulthood make this memory exists.
They are phone numbers, banking cards code numbers, Social Security number, addresses, names of
people, new things we learn at work and must keep in mind, and countless more. Then there are the
things that strike us for one reason or another, bad and good moments, whose “recording quality”
decreases over time according to their intensities.
Overall, the capacities of our brain to remember things easily are determined by two factors only:
how our brain has been trained to learn until the end of our teenage years; and genes sometimes well
inherited, sometimes not really. I brush aside the exceptional cases of gifted autistic people because
it would make us wander from the subject of this book. Actually, I have been driving gently the
reader for a while already to the very German concept of kultur, which names the social, artistic,
and ethical heritage we each have in our mind, and which determines our character. An American, a
French, and a Swiss have characters very different of each other because of this kultur, although the
innate share of their minds, I largely explained earlier is identical in all three, of course. These
people react and respond exactly the same way to dilemmas because they all have three available
options, only. The homophone term kultur, translating as “culture” in French and in English alike, is
akin to the other words, “mores” and “civilization”. It has been amalgamated gradually with the
initial meaning of the French word culture (same orthography in English) through an exchange of
ideas and concepts between France and Germany for the past two centuries.
I am not yet finished with Germany though, as this country coined the other important word
heimat, very relevant to what I am presently explaining. It, too, has no real equivalent in English
and even not in French either this time. The closest English translation of heimat could be “home”
or “homeland,” but it would not convey a feeling that the reader however knows well, ironically.
Heimat denotes all at the same time the country where we are born, the hamlet, town, or city where
we grew up, and the house where we spent our childhood or the place where “we feel at home”.
This feeling grows in our mind from our early childhood and stabilizes as early as in our pre-teen
years; and it is indelible because it therefore is a physically built memory. From this first stage on,
heimat enriches and strengthens continuously with forgettable specifics. In passing, heimat is a
subject psychiatrists of the DGSE are concerned with while they supervise recruitments because a
recruit who in his childhood has been raised by an itinerant worker who never stood for more than a
few years in a same place or country has no strong heimat, or even not at all. In other words, such
recruit has no real attachment to any place, nor even to the country that issued to him a passport.
That is why this candidate is much likely to be recruited as field agent, whose need-to-know will be
cautiously restricted. In German, “home” translates as heim, which thereof makes the meaning of
heimat easier to understand. Now, the reader will definitively assimilate the word heimat, if I tell
him that the other feeling he also knows well, and calls “homesickness,” happens when his heimat is
aroused. That is why it is no coincidence that “homesickness” translates as heimveh, in German.
As an overwhelming majority of citizens have these heimat and kultur in their minds, the mission
of shaping social and cultural trends in the Nation is to help breeding and feeding continuously
these two feelings in a way intending to arouse further the need for belonging that must fit both
patriotism and the political agenda. Heimat is responsible for building and maintaining this bond
through the sharing of a common kultur with others fellow citizens, which we could also name and
understand as “common national identity”. Heimat explains why innumerable immigrants who are
happy to find a safer home, a job, and many perks in a host country nonetheless often put proudly in
display a flag of their native countries hooked on their balconies and on the parcel shelves of their
cars. They are happier there, yet they cannot help themselves with homesickness / heimveh, quite
irrationally from the standpoint of reason, since this is all about passion.
As I will have to use a different definition of the word “culture” in my next explanations—the
noun “art” may have very different meanings in English—, I must also stress this other point
beforehand either. The noun “culture,” in French, has three possible definitions.
1. The “grab bag of values” of my earlier explanation that all people “store” in their minds
and that intimately connects to their ethnic identities, as I just explained with the word kultur.
2. A gathering of abstract knowledge generally acquired in schools and universities,
defining the educational level of an individual. In French, it is frequently named baggage
intellectual; or “knowledge,” in English.

3. A very large whole subsuming arts in the artistic sense and recent as ancient, connecting
to the field of archeology, including folk and primitive forms of abstract expressions. This
translates perfectly as “culture,” in English, and to “cultural heritage” when applying to a
country in particular, I guess. If not, French say la culture, meaning in this tongue “the arts”;
although it is generally not supposed to subsume all less serious matters, I cited.
Thenceforward, I will write “culture” when using the definition 3., and “cultural heritage” to
specify that of a country in particular. I will make obvious the sense of the definition 1. by writing it
the German way and in italic kultur. As for the less frequently used definition 2., I will write it
“knowledge”. Otherwise, differences between French and English in the exact definition of the
word “culture” is a cause of a misunderstanding with the expression “culture warfare,” whose
meaning is quite different in French intelligence jargon (see Lexicon: “Culture warfare” for an exact
definition of this term). This explains why I happen to talk about “cultural warfare,” which denotes
influencing, deceiving and misinforming masses of people about their perception and understanding
of their own cultural values. This will be explained again and in detail in the chapter 26 on
influence.
Now, see how French specialists in influence, counterinfluence, and certain other officials with a
relevant occupation perceive the national cultural heritage from a political standpoint. First, I must
define the aggrandized scope of what culture is from this other French and particular point of view.
There is in France a Ministry of Culture, the reader could call “Ministry of the National Heritage” to
figure out what it does, exactly. It will be question of this public body later because the DGSE has a
hidden service of cultural influence and counterinfluence at home as abroad, i.e. information
warfare, whose cover activity is an entire department of this ministry.
Cultural heritage in this precise context also includes the history of France, its origins, and its
political, economic, social, ideological, scientific, technological, and artistic, contributions of this
country to the World. Comes to add to it, everything can promote the national identity and the image
of France abroad. Everything in the country is perceived as positive and flattering is the object of
constant reminders, while what is not is dismissed, excused, disputed, or even flatly denied. In short,
cultural heritage is “the varnish of the country,” and everything must be done to make it as thick and
shiny as possible, and resistant to “scratches”. End of definition.
The State must devote great efforts and considerable expenditures to the conservation of the
French cultural heritage because it is the foundation of the kultur / identity of each citizen, without
which any patriotism is impossible. The more beautiful and / or rich the cultural heritage is, the
easier it is for the masses to identify themselves with it and to love it. Cultural heritage is
maintained to be enticing; it must arouse the need for belonging of the French people and entice
abroad, if possible. To be a patriot, one must be it for some good reasons, and the first objective of
this action of domestic influence is to produce as many arguments as possible to support this
feeling. The Eiffel Tower, the Louvre Museum, the Chateau de Versailles, the Champs Élysées,
Montmartre, and the Côte d’Azur are the first and most featured of those innumerable arguments.
The definition of cultural heritage still includes another cultural category subsuming things such as
and chiefly, Champagne, Bordeaux and Bourgogne wines, foie gras and (recently) macarons,
cheeses, famous couturiers and exclusive fashion accessories, jewelers, watchmakers; and French
cooking and restaurants, of course. Then there are the categories of French writers, philosophers
(highly politically loaded), filmmakers and actors, festivals, scientific and industrial feats, and more.
The whole of it is integral to the French heimat and can be metaphorically compared to the mental
“home” of the French. Therefore, it must be a “large and beautiful house” in a sunny setting, in
which the French citizen must feel delighted.
In sum, this house is never ugly. Its rooms are decorated with portraits of illustrious personalities
of the past, the library is filled with classics, and there is a shelf for popular records. The diversity in
styles of those rooms, and their furniture and decorative items are there to recall the great periods of
the history of the house, its past and present tenants, and owners. The location where it was built is
obviously of great historical significance, and its landscapes, beaches, and mountains are all the
most beautiful in the World. There is a large kitchen, whose cupboards and refrigerator are filled
with typical and appetizing food, and a cellar with drinks and alcohols that are “the best in the
World,” obviously.
From an international and detached standpoint now, as it is only possible to build the house one
can afford, depending on the country, it is more or less large, more or less well designed, built, and
agreeable to live in. Then, is it well protected and guarded against “bad weather and intruders”; and
by the way, “how is the weather like, outside”? This house must always seem to be “more beautiful”
than those of the neighbors because one should persuade oneself of it, even when it is not quite true
for jingoism to also exist. The style of the exterior of the house is a matter of taste, but it can always
be revived by resorting to propaganda in which all tour operators zealously involve. A large chalet
in the mountains, a gaudy mansion, a medieval-style castle, a house by the sea, a contemporary-
style house made of glass and steel; it is the history and the geography of the country that made so.
The metaphor is still working when one says that the State is the guardian of the house, as it must
hire servants to maintain it, and other “do-it-yourselfers” and “plumbers,” of course.[371] If the State
neglects those staffers or ceases to pay them, then the house will soon decay, then; its inhabitants
will flee to sit “at the neighbor’s table”.
National cultural genres diversity and the care the State takes for it are of paramount importance,
and citizens we would possibly hold as “the least tasteful schmucks” must not be dismissed.
Citizens each have the preferences, tastes, intelligences, and cultures of their kultur; therefore, a
perception of their own of the national cultural heritage. The latest cultural developments, mostly
popular, always are the most readily and widely available on one’s smartphone; but this should not
frustrate those who prefer the folk music of yesteryear and down-the-range cars of the 1960s, even
when they represent only a small minority that is even not an elite. At first glance, this permanent
availability of a national cultural heritage truly owes nothing to domestic influence, but to the
simple law of supply and demand that fully applies to culture and arts, too.
There is in France a specific action of domestic intelligence that is the monitoring of what is
called flux culturels, or “cultural flows,” rather called “social trends and patterns” in English-
speaking countries,[372] meaning “Inevitable natural exchanges of cultural trends and patterns
between countries”. As examples among the most obvious, there is no way to France to shelter her
population from the cultural imports and influences of the Rolling Stones, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola,
Marlboro and Camel cigarettes, Levi’s blue-jeans, Harley Davidson motorbikes and related fashion
accessories and paraphernalia, Apple and Microsoft, the TV series Westworld and NCIS, and many
others things. All the latter brands are heavily loaded culturally and sell well abroad not solely
because they are attractive goods of consumption, but more largely and truly because of the scale of
cultural values and way of life they carry as media. French politicians see in this fact a permanent
threat of foreign assimilation culturelle (“cultural assimilation”) of the French citizens who
consume regularly those brands. In the words, I used in the previous chapter, it is about
belongingness stimulation benefiting to the United States, while at the same time, the DGSE is
struggling, indeed, to spread anti-Americanism in the country.
The latter French action is internally perceived as counterinfluence, and even the stronger word
“counter-interference” is employed; yet its effects are mixed. For a number of years and until today
in 2019, all famous people the media interview or guest regularly claim their antagonism to the
United States without any ambiguity each time the name of this country arise or even when not,
from politicians of all parties, to experts, scholars, journalists, and artists; with the exception of less
than half a dozen of well-known agent provocateurs for the freedom of thought to exist, at least.
The latter fact suggests an overwhelming majority in the country that is not that so. Actually, a large
minority in the French multitudes, I could not estimate even roughly, remains about indifferent to
the would-be-trendy jingoist stance. In three proportions only, we find the larger minority of people
who agree passively, but still continue to consume and to appreciate American goods, unconcerned
by the contradiction that very possibly is not. Then we find a much smaller minority of would-be-
anti-American hardliners, often represented by people who commit to some cause ranging from
mutual aid to green activism. Finally, we find the tiny minority of the rare people who, on the
contrary, dare openly state they like the United States.
That is why French politicians and influence specialists together perceive those U.S. imports as
expressions of an ongoing vicious cultural warfare, and even as a war of cultural attrition at times.
They feel forced to accept the situation resume for the moment, lest they fall under the accusation
saying France is not a free country.[373] Diplomacy, political correctness, and friendly economic
exchanges are double-edged weapons. If there is little that French specialists in counterinfluence
can do against this fact they accept with a sorry resignation, this does not imply that they question
the ethics of the means, and by far.
People in France who are in charge of monitoring and channeling cultural flows from all
countries, and who are supervising domestic influence in general, learned all notions pertaining to
the specialty empirically first; as the reader has seen, while reading the historical anecdotes of this
chapter. This learning changed for rational and scientific teachings not so long ago, about as I am
explaining them in this book; that is to say, from the first discoveries and theories of scholars and
scientists such as Gustave Le Bon, sociologist and criminologist Gabriel Tarde, psychoanalyst
Sigmund Freud, behaviorist Ivan Pavlov, and sociologist Frédéric Le Play. As this knowledge had to
be updated without ever edging away from a clear political line, we also find the more
contemporary scholars and thinkers Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, Marshall
McLuhan, Bruno Lussato, and Umberto Eco. The military-minded French intelligence community
has a particular fondness for Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, they hold as a founding father in the
important art of deception. Very few ever heard of Eric Hoffer, and still less of Edward Bernays and
Burrhus F. Skinner.
Today more than ever, it has become notorious that people identify easily with actual and
fictional heroes, sport champions, and singers, enough sometimes to mimicking them. This other
psychological phenomenon owes to an unconscious desire—conscious sometimes—to be a person
deemed “better” than we are in a number of respects. The actual or fictional personage thus loved
embodies frequently the idea of justice, yet the real motive often remains to be loved through praise
or some old trauma; mere frustration the more often. We could put this behavior on the account of
mere immaturity, at first glance. It turns out to be more interesting as soon as we dig a bit deeper on
the matter because it concerns a large and invisible majority, in all times, cultures, and countries; did
the reader ever hear of the “cult of personality”? Wikipedia has a rich and pertinent page on the
subject that tells exactly what I would. Therefore, what I am going to explain relates only to a softer
exploitation of the phenomenon in cultural influence, which topics the online encyclopedia does not
yet treat, unless I am mistaken.
More often than not, news show us cases of individuals, extreme, but fortunately rare, who
identify completely with their heroes, dress as them, take their attitudes, prosody, etc. The American
reader knows well this, due to the innumerable look-alikes of Elvis Presley who live in his country.
[374] The surprising phenomenon of deliberate change of self corresponds generally to an already
vanishing self-esteem or even to a complete rejection of the self before it happened. We could say,
those impersonators were in a situation of “unconscious waiting for another self,” already. This
should not be surprising because we all have self-esteem that we strive to reward in proportion to
the significance we accord to it, ranging from haplessness to narcissism. That is why many of us
spend much more for a car than we can truly afford, to begin with—do not despair; I would spend
still more for several cars than I could truly afford myself. Among the few possible reasons for these
unreasonable expenses, the most frequent has a true cause we ignore completely; or rather a cascade
of causes whose source locates deep in our brain. Breaking down the cascade, we begin with the
need to being that translates as a need to survive, thus evolving to our need to flock with our likes in
our quest for greater safety because loneliness is hazardous. Therefrom, there is a logical need to be
accepted by the flock, which implies an effort; wherefrom, the purchase of the nicest possible car to
be warmly welcomed by the best members of the flock to fulfill a need for the best safety. Voila!
However, the phenomenon I just explained is about appearances only, to look richer and socially
higher than we are in reality, and that is why we need the real thing. So, we can afford the vital
status by succeeding in life; but few of us do succeed in life because it is another safety we cannot
just buy on credit. That is why we spend much more than we can afford for a car, instead. So, we are
left with the other option to identifying to someone who succeeded in life or to anybody else we
want, even a fictional character; which altogether makes a very large choice of possible “other
selves” at no cost and readily available, and why not several selves, in that case. In most instances,
we do not really identify to this other self, but we still love it. That is why we try to follow his
example as best as we can each time we need to; that is to say, each time we feel our real self is too
weak. Actually, we have seen this phenomenon of change of self in previous chapters, but under
another angle when I explained how is it possible to push a balanced individual to relinquish
simultaneously his self and his free will to identify to a collective instead; just as the cell of a
multicellular organism does, not coincidentally. It is not really about a cult of personality, as all
things are being considered now. In the context that interests us, the difference is that the
insufficient self-esteem occurred on its own, without anyone being accountable for it; unless the
person concerned has been mistreated and repeatedly humiliated in his childhood. When such
individuals are questioned about the reasons for this irrepressible need to be “someone else,” they
all respond that they “feel better that way”; to that effect because they do not know the real cause,
deep in their minds.
The presentation and explanation of these extreme cases of identification to another person
deemed “better,” aim to sum up what is happening in our mind when we fancy being the hero of a
film or a pop music star for a little while.[375] Sometimes, while arguing with someone or in
whatever particular situation, of distress for example, we need to identify with one of those heroes
who live in our minds, or even with a more ordinary person such as our professor when we still
were a student, or our father, of course, who once struck us because of the effective way he handled
a difficult situation. This is normal as long as we do not indulge in excesses because we built our
own character painstakingly along years and from countless people, we hold as “the right
examples”. This knowledge we acquired through others fictitious or real persons, per proxy, helps
us regain self-confidence when a situation seems hopeless, and it redeems the courage we are no
longer ourselves capable of. When this happens, however, we do not usually ask to ourselves “why
our mind called upon this hero and not another, actually”. We did not have the time to choose him in
our “mental photo album”; it is he who burst into our mind in a fraction of a second. Being aware of
this other way our mind works, a useful and healthy exercise called metacognition, tells us much on
what we do not know of ourselves when we pause to think a little about it. It helps us ponder our
decisions, and avoid taking thoughtless and costly actions. This other way our brain works applies
to everybody, including those who succeed in life, if that may be a relief, from the greatest CEOs,
moguls, richest people, presidents, kings, up to people with acute narcissistic personality disorder,
indeed.
As practical example everyone knows, this normal psychological phenomenon is humorously
reproduced throughout the plots of Toy Story animated films series, in which toys have human
characters yet identify to the fictional ones their creators embodied them with. This is an impossible
reversal of situation, of course, however accurate and clever enough to remind us what we often did
when we were in the pre-adolescent period: holding as good examples to follow the popular heroes
of our time. So, mimicking real and fictitious heroes is a normal behavior in us, humans, as
psychology explains it is all about the quest for our own identity in the early years of our lives; so
far, so good. However, this discipline in behavioral sciences does not give satisfactory answers
beyond “an innate need for individuality”.
Relying on behavioral biology, I guess I answered the question for the reader. I add, the innate
quest for our identity actually prolongs past our teenage years in a more or less discreet fashion,
whose stringency is determined by our acquired need for the minimum self-assertiveness
conditioning our access in the realm of adults; with a position as advantageous as possible,
additionally. Notwithstanding, as I just explained either, the latter stems again from the same innate
need to being and subsequent herd instinct, regardless how acquired it seems. At the simplest, both
needs express themselves together as an overwhelming urge in us to appear to others as strong as we
possibly can, to survive; there is not much place for the weak in Mankind, as in all other species. As
about women, they also struggle to win as much assertiveness as they can over their male partners,
unfairly advantaged by their superior physical strength; sometimes they do it through bold authority,
sometimes through wit. Women access maturity faster than men do, essentially because of a
question of chemistry in their brain and of the innate consciousness of their natural incapacity to
challenge the physical strength of men; they survive by other means.
The unbalanced relation between men and women is the most visible on photos of couples, on
which the reader can see the male standing straight and facing proudly the camera, and the body of
his female turning either slightly or frankly toward her partner in an unequivocal attitude of need for
protection. Those in whom the very old drive is the most cogent go as far as to cling to their still
manlier partners, while giving a defiant look at the camera that seems to further assert her safety.
The thing is so innate that, I am afraid, today’s craze for gender equality is going to have a hard time
with overcoming it.
For long, in France, it has been a use in far-leftist trade unionists to have a beard, a mark of
unconscious worship for Karl Marx. Many right-leaning French wear American-style clothes and
fashion accessories to identify to what the average American is, according to their own assumptions
on the mores and tastes of the latter, be it a cliché. Or else, they set more subtly their appearance to
this need for claiming the belongingness in spirit. In all occidental countries, most Conservatives
dress strictly as other Conservatives do; and most Liberals casually dress as other Liberals do.
Activists seem to be actively concerned about their hairs first, and give to themselves whatever
appearance may stigmatize them as the outcasts they want to be, since they do not want to be
associated with the majority they oppose. All the latter examples rather translate an externalization
of the need for belonging to a body of individuals, of course; yet it may change at any time for
identification to a single hero. As I am teaching the reader about all this, I must honestly confess I
happen to let be caught in the trap myself. A few years ago, I ordered on Amazon exactly the same
brown Carhartt jacket film actor Matthew McConaughey wears as the hero “Cooper” in the film
Interstellar (2014). My formal aim about it is that I love this jacket for the real service it renders to
me and for its robustness since then, but the real aim is my happening to think a little of Cooper
when I am about to take it; the more so, since I listen then and now to the mesmerizing Hand
Zimmer’s score of the film. See, we all are vulnerable to influence, even when we claim expertise in
this odd specialty.
I am teaching the reader about all this, yet, me too, I let myself be caught in the trap. A few years
ago, I ordered on Amazon exactly the same brown Carhartt jacket film actor Matthew
McConaughey wears as the hero “Cooper” in the film Interstellar (2014). I love this jacket for the
real service it renders to me and for its robustness since then, but I must honestly admit I happen to
think of Cooper when I am about to take it; the more so, since I listen to the score of the film then
and now. See, we all are vulnerable to influence, even when we claim expertise in this odd specialty.
Other relevant psychological phenomena, yet very different from the one I have just been
lingering on, express in disordered gestures, irrepressible feelings alternating with sadness and
euphoria when we are watching a football game, are near the stage of a rock music concert. Once
again, we would like to be this other, the individual we regret not to be yet without being in the least
jealous of him / her, remarkably, because we feel sincerely in love with him / her. Even upon our
leaving the stadium or concert, our secret heroes continue to influence us, regardless of what they
may reveal about themselves. Those great football players and music and movies stars, “They’re
probably right, since they’ve been able to get where they are,” we believe; no matter how reckless,
stupid, and bad people they may be when they are indeed. But, why?
Because those stars and heroes—nowadays joined by the “people,” spiritual heirs in a way of the
fictitious Rosie the Riveter, but who do nothing of remarkable, since they have no talent in anything
beyond showing up on screen—can free themselves from about all the restrictions that frustrate the
multitudes. They seem to be “really free,” and so they embody the real freedom everybody craves.
Therefrom, they no longer are individuals, but collectively a secular and real representation of
heaven proving its existence, or rather of the pagan Mount Olympus where all gods and goddesses
live and thus prove that anyone can access it before death. If stars, heroes, and people did not exist,
secular heaven would not either. Who would not respect, worship, and preserve such a thing? In the
opinion of the ruling elite, this category of famous people must be bred and cared for, therefore;
they are indispensable to give hope to the masses and to make them daydream. State’s lotteries lay
on this principle in governance either.
Those individuals who are unhappy with their selves however seldom fancy statesmen, we notice,
although heroes indeed exist in this other category. Did the reader ever see look-alikes of John F.
Kennedy, Winston Churchill, or even Ronald Reagan although he also was a film actor? Exceptions
are humorists who generally dislike politicians they temporarily embody. Why this?
Simply because politics never makes people dream. French politicians, their communication
advisers, and the DGSE in particular are all well aware of this reality. The former even envy singers
and film actors for this enormous power by the image and fame that is haplessly beyond their reach.
Even when rulers elsewhere yield to the temptation of dictatorship, enforced mass indoctrination,
and cult of personality, nobody fancies being them, however. The strange phenomenon goes so far
that each time a popular singer or actor ventures to state he will run to the next presidential election,
opinion polls give to him a percentage of voting intention exceeding that of a number of minority
parties.
This happened in France in 1980, but ended tragically for famous humorist Michel Colucci, best
known as Coluche. Coluche ran seriously for the French presidency against Socialist candidate
François Mitterrand and incumbent Valéry Giscard-d’Estaing, and he was credited officially with
the amazing figure of 16% of followers even before he delivered a first political speech. Mitterrand
and the powerful leftist factions that backed him worried Coluche might steal to them the majority
against President Giscard-d’Estaing. First, Coluche was repeatedly sent death threats and was
submitted to social elimination, indeed. Two prominent members of the Socialist Party paid visit to
him to convince him to renounce his candidacy. Second, all French media were ordered to boycott
Coluche, and they all complied at once. Third, the RG was tasked to sort out anything in his dossier
secret that could discredit him. However, Coluche’s dossier, number 817 706, to be precise, only
contained records of minor offenses he committed when he was a draftee, for which he did a
military prison term of fifty-three days. The incriminating facts, though insignificant to the point of
ridicule, yet were leaked dutifully to Minute far-rightist newspaper owned by Le Pen father and to
L’Express major newsmagazine, in order to eschew any possible accusation against the Socialist
Party and the Communist Party. Indeed, the latter media obediently published the minor offense at
once; I told you so, the Le Pen family is a useful stooge that should not be socially eliminated.
Fourth and finally, on November 27, 1980, Coluche’s stage manager René Gorlin was found shot
dead twice in the back of the neck; never the murderer was found, since there was no criminal
investigation. On March 16, 1981, at last, the beleaguered humorist announced officially the
cancellation of his candidacy. More than that, he recommended to his followers to give their voices
to his challenger Mitterrand. Coluche died five years later in 1986, then aged 41, from a motorbike
accident whose circumstances remain suspicious to date.
If Coluche presented an unexpected and real danger to the election of Mitterrand as France’s
President, what worried the most those who watchdog the elite and the political system was that the
humorist and iconoclast was discrediting, and ridiculing for worse, not only the entire French
political class, but also the institutions of France, important parts of the cultural heritage. With
Coluche, a simple comedian and humorist with no credentials nor degree in anything, the French
national myth and its narrative that the State had painstakingly built for the masses, since the early
20th century, were collapsing as houses of cards.
Coluche had no political program to submit to his followers, at all. Moreover, everybody knew he
was a complete ignorant about politics, economy, foreign affairs, and defense. His voice, self-
depreciating speech-style, and limited vocabulary were these of a drunk bar mainstay. All he had for
himself were his arguments, often pertinent in their questioning of the French political system,
though simplistic because above all chiseled to make people of all classes laughing aloud, the lower
class first.
In 2009, Giuseppe Piero aka “Beppe Grillo,” Italian comedian, iconoclast, and look-alike of
Coluche took up the formula of his French hero to launch the anti-establishment movement
Movimento 5 Stelle–M5S (Five Star Movement) in Italy. Only armed with his funny looking,
troublemaker style and a narrative similar to that of his French muse, Piero met the same huge
success in his country. In Italy, there was no barbouze to bar him from making his way. Four years
later only, Piero’s movement indeed won the most votes of all parties for the lower house of the
Italian Senate. In the 2018 general election, Movimento 5 Stelle became the largest individual party
in the Italian Parliament and entered the government.
Many French experts in political science today acknowledge, Coluche was to win the first round
of the French presidential election of 1981, and even possibly the second, had the media not
boycotted him. Let alone the assassination of his stage manager and friend the media barely
mentioned. Today, the case of Giuseppe Piero in Italy proves the French censors right, but sadly.
Indeed, the other case of Donald Trump in the United States is analogous to these of Coluche and
Piero. For Trump deliberately took the opposite way to introducing oneself classically, to presenting
one’s political program, and posed as a troublemaker instead. Trump questioned several decades of
U.S. politics, thus renegading himself even in the eyes of the pundits of his own party. He dared
make himself at odd with the mainstream media that all his challengers courted. He dismissed
overtly and even ridiculed years of political correctness and reserve. He never shown any self-
restraint nor inhibition whatsoever about any issue. He addressed the masses the simplest way, often
via social networks with short sentences filled with repetitions and typos. He too, used to make
people laugh on television on a popular show. With all this, not only Trump won, but also he stood
indeed by his yet poorly supported promise to get his country back on its feet, and, ironically, he
revived the interest to the public in reading the media. Because of all this, his challengers hate him
more than any other Republican including Richard Nixon in the history of American politics, and
now they are struggling to make him disappear from the political stage for wants of barbouzes to
expedite the matter.
The three examples above teach two things to the reader. The first is that running for France’s
presidency is not a right granted to every citizens, but to people shortlisted by the power, I present in
this book, and with a dossier secret thick enough to guarantee their interest in the pursuit of a
century-long permanent progressive revolution. The second, coming to exemplify the explanations
of the previous chapter, is that when Man is intellectually flocking to his likes to form masses, he no
longer acts and reacts with reason, but simply stampedes ahead under the sole spur of passion.
From the early 1970s, the SDECE set up a particular mission in domestic intelligence consisting
in a more stringent monitoring of the middle of popular music and celebrities in entertainment, with
a focus on the discreet shortlisting of the future stars. In fact, this control over the access to the
media, more precisely and from the strict viewpoint of concerned specialists in counterinfluence,
already existed at that time, but there was little or no control at all past the shortlisting process.
Below, I explain the circumstances that defined and set the secret additional measure of safety.
Until the early 1970s, in the United States just about anywhere in the World at that time, an
ordinary individual with a little follow-up in ideas and a bit of perseverance could easily meet music
stars in particular. It was sufficient to those strangers, generally unknown persons called “groupies,”
to be equally endowed with enough persuasion to influence famous singers and musicians, and even
to trick them. For the latter often were quite simple-minded people, easy to talk to, and
psychologically too vulnerable to assume the responsibilities that their huge fames entailed. That is
why, from the years 1971-72, in France, it was no longer possible to anyone to be in touch with
music stars, as the effects of their enormous power of influence had been at last acknowledged and
considered potentially harmful to public order. Their managers, in regular and discreet contact with
the military via the SDECE, had received word to invest in the safety of their artists by hiring
bodyguards instructed to limit visits to them to carefully selected intimates. In order not to socially
“lock up” the artists, certain exclusive places of meetings and pleasures were set especially for
them, with tightly controlled accesses and security guaranteeing their privacies. In those exclusive
spots, they could find just about everything they usually wanted, starting with handsome girls and
prostitutes also carefully shortlisted and reciprocally happy with the unexpected opportunity. Two
such places in particular were created in Paris: the nightclubs Les Bains Douches, and Chez Régine.
Additionally, there was Chez Michou, with a specialty in homosexuality.[376] Everything was done
so that music stars and other popular celebrities could meet together and befriend durably and
safely. Thenceforth, strangers could no longer approach them, and the celebrities who were not yet
called “people” thus found themselves literally stuck in a virtual very exclusive social bubble that
complicit journalists nicknamed the milieu du show business (show-business middle) eventually
shortened into showbiz, with happiness for many of them, it should be said.
The new measures of safety and control proved not yet sufficient though, as it happened that
some stars took reckless initiatives, harmful to the myth and narrative of the image and prestige of
the country; some declared themselves dissatisfied with France’s tax system, and a few indeed
immigrated to Switzerland and to the United States. The case of recently deceased famous French
singer Johnny Halliday, who even lived alternatively in the two latter countries, epitomizes the
problem that worries the political elite for decades. Others, much aware of their status of highly
influential opinion leaders, criticized publicly the highest political authorities on stage, on live, and
on prime time on major television channels. One of the most striking and gravest cases of this kind
is French singer Daniel Balavoine. On March 19, 1980, on a debate in the noon news journal on
Antenne 2 television channel, Balavoine berated on live François Mitterrand who by then still was
First Secretary of the Socialist Party and about to compete for the presidency. In a monologue that
remains famous since, Balavoine sharply accused the pundit of ignoring the problems of the youth,
and he chastised the mainstream media and journalists present on stage. Thus, the singer became a
would-be-spokesman for the French youth overnight, which event panicked the ruling elite. Six
years later, Balavoine died in a helicopter crash in the middle of the desert in Northern Africa, then
aged 33, five months before Coluche did, and ten months before other humorist Thierry Le Luron
did either, then aged 34, who, him too, had braved and ridiculed the political class. There were
rumors of serial state assassinations, obviously, as all three had criticized or ridiculed in public
Mitterrand personally, and as an abnormally elevated number of politicians and public servants died
in suspicious circumstances during his mandate, in addition.
The fondness of famous French singer Claude François for American pop music that the ruling
elite judged “extreme,” and his ambition to establish in his home a satellite connection with
American television channels in the 1970s, were perceived as “concerning”. In addition to this,
François was a highly professional and no-nonsensical person who did not see music as a form of
art, as all his colleagues did, but as pure business that had to be done in accordance with marketing
rules. This was quite unusual in a French singer, and for worse, François was very hard to rein in in
his professional expectations. He composed My Way, a song that Franck Sinatra made famous in the
United States as in the World, thus securing for himself a reputation of authentic talent. Finally, on
March 11, 1978, François died then aged 39 in his bathroom in unclear circumstances that many still
today deem very suspicious.
Years later in the early 2000s, the affair of actor Gerard Depardieu’s “exile” in Russia is not
representative, as the odd discrepancy actually owed to a close proximity of many members of the
French cultural elite with the new Russian political elite of after 1991. There had been a number of
evenings parties that Vladimir Putin and some oligarchs organized in St. Petersburg, and of hot
parties on the French Riviera with a number of Russian billionaires who settled there since then; and
more than that, actually. For once, the French political elite little complained about Depardieu’s
exile, and no more than vague protestations of form were heard. The DGSE for long has knowledge
of facts that were embarrassing to Depardieu, whose threat of public exposure would have easily
discouraged him from leaving France, yet the agency did not make a move, seemingly.
In 1981, when the Socialist Party won the presidential and legislative elections on a row, new
secret regulations for a greater control of popular celebrities and their access to the mainstream
media were defined. They concerned singers in particular because this category of famous people is
more frequently in contact with crowds and masses through live radio and television broadcasting
than film actors are. The idea was to limit the careers of singers and musicians to a period defined
by a threshold in success, beyond which they might access this dangerous degree of popular
worship akin to apotheosis. Therefore, as soon as the fatidic threshold would be about to be reached,
or when success coupled with high popularity bring out in masses the phenomenon of identification
earlier described, special and discreet provisions would be taken to undermine the career of a singer,
a musician, or a band, to the immediate benefit of shortlisted upstarts, and so on, and on. Thus, a
singer, as example, would never become popular enough to influence the masses in a significant and
lasting manner anymore. In other words, I borrow to an executive in domestic intelligence of that
time, “one cannot be and have been [a star]”. The good news was that suspicious deaths of stars
never happened again.
At times, I went to places less popularly known than the Bains Douches, such as the Studios of
Bry-sur-Marne, in the far Eastern suburb of Paris; professionally, I mean. With a covered area of
more than 215,000 square feet sheltering eight television stages, the Studios of Bry-sur-Marne is the
largest French television studio. Most television programs are recorded and broadcast on live from
there. I also used at some point to go to the Studios de Boulogne, by then named Studios 92 and
formerly known as Studios SFP, where most of the music that French television channels broadcast
in their programs is recorded. Many French singers and music groups record their songs in this
place, too, which makes it a privileged spot where few are allowed to go. That is how I could see
and know firsthand what I explain, below.
The thus secluded French show business middle is a strange one, indeed. Its people typically get
out from bed in the surroundings of 5 to 6 p.m. and go back to sleep when the sun begins to show
up. They all seem to know each other as old buddies even when not, despite permanent rivalries,
jealousies, and corridor gossips. Anyone is admitted in this very exclusive circle quickly learns
everything on everybody, all things surprising, unbelievable, and shocking that the public never
reads in people’s magazines. The latter publications are for public relations and promotion, actually.
There is no such a thing as privacy in this micro-society because indiscretion extends far. It is made
up of the inner circle of the people the French multitudes know well and adulate, and of their agents
and producers they know much less or not at all. Then we find the completely unknown outer circle
of musicians, sound engineers, lyricist, composers, and arrangers, acting collectively as the
watchdog of all, and informing spies about anything is deemed worrying or suspicious.
The best talented lyricists, composers, and arrangers who are not popularly known, yet intimates
of the celebrities, hover on the fringe of the inner circle; some with uncertainty, a few with a daring
self-confidence that make them the true stars in the eyes of those of the outer circle. An informal
hierarchy of implicit privileges thus establishes by itself in this untold setting. A large majority of
the music stars of the inner circle seem to live in a permanent state of unexplainable anxiety that
would challenge all popular beliefs. As they are aware of the denial to their privacies, they do not
see any reason for concealing themselves in front of everybody in the two circles, and they even
perceive the whole as a large family of a sort. Those of the outer circle respond to this attitude with
a silent understanding that is not necessarily sincere. Quick rises and falls, all-political or unclear
graces and disgraces are the true beats that drain and renew the blood of the heavenly body.
Those in charge to shortlisting and monitoring music stars do not like bands, actually, because a
singer is alone and thus easier to handle and to rein in. This explains why French bands are an
extremely rare commodity, except in the jazz genre because their popularity addresses a small
minority circumscribed in the middle and upper classes. Jazzmen cannot be hazardous to public
order; notwithstanding, it claims particular needs to France to promote jazz music. Classic music is
the safest, simply because it interests in the surroundings of 1% of the masses. Overall, popular
music follows the economic and social trends of all societies, at least to adapt to the criterion of the
demand of the moment. For the last sixty years, in France in particular, the steady rise of political
and economic concerns, I explained in the chapter 13, has been justifying exceptional surveillance
and influence in entertainment. I guess it will be easier to the American reader to understand the
following explanations journalists never bring to light; even in media specialized in music, as far as
I can see.
I start with the easy-to-understand nonetheless directly relevant example of blues music;
American, therefore. The birth and popularization of this musical genre happened in the South of
the United States and in the Mississippi delta of the early 20th century in particular, where poverty
was severe at that time, especially among the Black population. Subsequently, Black American
people, a few Caucasians, and still fewer Native Americans of this region had a natural need for a
little entertainment to alleviate a rampant mood of despair. The trend rubbed off on musical
creativeness, and the songs and tunes of the region and time well express claims of frustrations and
sorrow that brought about psychological compensation, certainly. The situation thus gave birth to
chords and lyrics that invariably communicate feelings of sadness, despair, and doom in all songs of
a genre that was not yet one. That is certainly why it was called “blues,” with its typical three
recurrent chords repeating at length, played on a guitar when financially possible because all other
musical instruments were too expensive. The particular sound of the early blues of the Delta is what
specialists in meta-communication would call its paralanguage, i.e. the variety of messages and
subsequent moods it communicates through specific arrangements and patterns, only.
Eventually, this music of the have-nots of the American South moved up to the rich north,
brought there by some who were hoping for better days. It happened to entertain people in bars and
brothels of the highly industrialized Chicago of the 1920-1930s. The ambient optimism of the ante-
Crash of Wall Street claimed to play and to sing the blues on a faster beat, and there was money to
buy the expensive pianos and brass, at last. Thus reviewed, the blues aroused an opposite mood of
rest after work, relaxation, and even joy and optimism. That is how it became a popular genre with
even two sub-genres of its own, each with an associated distinct region that still exists today: the
slow and sad “Delta blues” of the South, and the enthralling and musically richer “Chicago blues”
of the North.
I make a jump in time to ten years after the WWII, in the early 1950s, when general boredom
coupled with worrisome McCarthyism in the United States was succeeding a previous period of
euphoria, especially in the new generation of teenagers who had not experienced the war. In the
meantime, blues music had evolved again, and its faster beat had given birth to a new style logically
christened “rhythm and blues”. Besides, Rickenbacker had invented the electric guitar in the 1930s,
and there had been a need to play and to sing louder to be heard by growing attendances. That is
how people began to develop a taste for loud music. A few of those young bored white Caucasian
Americans in particular, attracted by the rhythm and blues of their Black fellow citizens, took it up
their own way and gave to it still more energy, this time to bring about psychological compensation
to boredom; in other words, to satisfy a urge for movement and action. This evolution of the rhythm
and blues was even so fast, so loud, so tonic, and so uninhibited that it was logical to call it “rock
and roll”.
Music is a very influential form of communication and a potent stimulant to passion, largely used
in all times of Mankind and everywhere in the World to arouse courage in the minds of soldiers sent
on battlefields. With all its characteristics, the rock and roll aroused restlessness reciprocally, and
even recklessness and certain violence in those bored teenagers and young adults. From that period
of the mid-1950, popular music in Western societies communicated ever-rising moods of violence
overall, now echoing the economic and social trends I alluded to in the chapter 13. I mean things
such as less gold in the U.S. reserves, and then the oil crises of the early 1970s, the Cold War, the
War in Vietnam, unemployment; varying from country to country, since rock and roll naturally
exported everywhere.
The rock and roll first appealed to the urge to fighting in those who listened to this music;
wherefrom, another evolution to “hard rock” from the 1970s to satisfy a visible and rising demand
for louder sounds and still faster beats. Then the United Kingdom took up the rock and roll its own
way to make it “punk”; louder, faster, and sustaining open anti-establishment lyrics even more
violent than those written in the United States. Thereupon, the street gangs of the poor American
quarters overbid with ultra-violence when they launched the “rap” genre, with an emphasis on voice
and lyrics that left about no room to instruments and melody; not very far from the Delta blues of
the origins, after all, and for about the same economic reasons.
The explanations above take us back again to the three basic urges of Man: fighting, fleeing, and
inhibition. If the urge to fighting is called first, it exteriorizes in this context as tunes marked with
fast beats, high volume, and aggressive lyrics calling for violence. The pleasure of the melody is
relegated to the background until it disappears to supply an entirely different demand.
Now, suppose that tunes conveying a mood of violence be quietly censored by some implicit
means, which is easy to do when the ruling elite exerts tight control over the media, as it happened
indeed in Soviet Union. Therefore, the masses are left with the second option to fleeing, given the
earlier mentioned economic and social decay. Fleeing in thought expresses musically with the other
corresponding genres “progressive rock,” “new wave,” “reggae,” “techno,” and “new age”. The new
wave genre and its typical lyrics came to express the ineluctability of some technocratic and
dehumanized world of the Orwellian sort to be fled, if ever this is still possible. The reggae and
techno too, because of their close associations with drugs allowing to fleeing the real World.
Additionally, the very fast beat of the techno genre played very loudly, as usually requested, has the
virtue to suppress thought, which is one more way to flee the reality, again; and reggae provided a
narrative to identity withdrawal. The sophisticated and musically rich progressive rock sustained
lyrics describing in all possible ways the decay of the World, an intellectual way to fleeing the
World through the denying of its existence.
Therefore, the moods that the progressive rock, new wave, reggae, techno, and new age aroused
proved as hazardous to the domestic economy as the rock and roll, hard rock, punk, and rap genre
were to public order. Those who listened to the former felt dispirited and lacked energy at work or
even did not want to work. They showed indifference or frank distrust toward public institutions,
and disinterest in the society of the majority and its mores.
If ever all the genres above are discreetly censored, the stage is left free to whatever other music
the State wants to impose to the masses, to spread meta-communication messages serving its needs,
agenda, and public order; that is to say, inhibition behavior, since people can no longer fight nor flee
in thought with music. Therefrom, the masses are left with the musical offer that the mainstream
media are instructed to tout for them. Here I imply old “classic music” with no lyrics at all; and
“pop music” composed to suit a variety of aims by social category and age groups, with plenty of
meaningless lyrics arousing inhibition. In that case, the messages the lyrics convey are actually
unimportant because the mood is all that matters; and biased lyrics would be pointed out as gross
propaganda. The implicit and the untold that meta-communication offers leave no evidence of the
intent, as they limit to beat, prosody, pitch, volume, intonation, and crafted arrangements of chords
supporting empty romance songs that together communicate nothing, precisely. The reader guesses
it, France does this, of course; and as it is relevant to domestic influence, spies with corresponding
specialties are tasked to handle the so special mission, therefore. That is why pop music in France
overwhelms all other genres to the point of making them inexistent.
Wholesome, influencing the masses with music, regardless of the lyrics, lies on the same
principles as described in my explanations on the influence of accent, in the previous chapter. In
point of fact, particular accents are often introduced in those lyrics.
That is why, when monitoring imported cultural flows in music, French counterinfluence
specialists look out constantly for anything could possibly arouse the two first and undesirable urges
to fleeing and fighting. Subsequently, it explains why American-style music is not welcomed in
France, and limits to American pop music; not only for the latter reason though, and even rather
because of a need to promote very specific French styles in popular music, to be soon explained.
In the 1970s, French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu invested much of himself on
the question of music and society, in the goal to propose a new definition of aesthetics to a France
that was heading toward stringent leftism. That is to say, in keeping with my explanations on the
economics and social evolutions of France since the end of the Bretton Wood system, and the first
oil crisis in the early 1970s. With this concern in mind, Bourdieu defined social patterns by musical
genres, up to artists and even tunes.[377] However, his approach and suggestions, much politically
biased with a left-leaning stance, were intellectually elitist to a point of absurdity. Bourdieu’s views
were very remote to the realities of the French society of that time and even to those of any society,
not to say utopian. As example, Bourdieu ventured in comparisons between French composers
Maurice Ravel and Karlheinz Stockhausen, each he located at the two end of a spectrum opposing
“bad taste” to “good taste” and according to his perception rejecting the notion of entertainment. He
did the same in the other realm of painting with Bernard Buffet and Piet Mondrian, the latter he
defined as the absolute reference in good taste. Therefore, he never moved beyond the said-to-be-
classic genres in arts from authority, at the expense of a vast and complex reality that is constantly
changing and evolving according to economic and corresponding social variations. Indeed, in 672
pages printed in characters as small as those of this book, Bourdieu’s A Social Critique of the
Judgment of Taste said much less interesting things than C. S. Lewis did on the same subject in 150
only in his An Experiment in Criticism, 28 years earlier.
In spite of this, many at that time found Bourdieu’s study grandiose, largely due in reality to a
turgid prose enriched with new words of his invention no one could find in any dictionary—so that I
am still asking to myself how it was possible to translate it in English. Later in the late 1990s,
Bourdieu and his theories were finally dismissed following his disillusions about the way media-
censorship in France was evolving, ironically; he passed away soon after, beleaguered by those who
had enthroned him. Actually, Bourdieu failed to follow in the steps of semanticist Roland Barthes,
whose analyses stay realistic notwithstanding the same political bias.
At least, it remains true that patterns and associations of chords arouse the same moods in
everybody with a remarkable regularity. No one denies that melodies alone tell things as a universal
language everyone understands beyond borders. However, things quickly turn completely abstract
and intuitive when attempting analyses and classifications of “messages” by musical patterns,
precisely because the way music communicates moods cannot be translated in an alphanumerical
language or in mathematic equations. Still at this time, there is no real scientific way to explain the
relation between music and mood beyond a collection of effects that invariably reproduce in
experiments. There are relevancies between mathematics and many tunes composed by Jean
Sebastian Bach and in some composed by Mozart,[378] but they are exceptions serving no practical
application in behavioral sciences. The problem with composing popular music to shape the mood
of the masses was about solved the way I just explained; that is to say, “wholesome”. The price to
pay for it was a bureaucratization of the French music industry that brought a general decline in
quality, striking when compared to what musical creativity was until the early 1970s, when artists
were still left free to compose the way they wanted. The latter remark explains entirely the
apparently unalterable success of what the masses today calls “the good old hits of the 60s and 70s”.
Even the youth of the present decade 2010 discovers with pleasure “pop-and-mom old tunes” and
revives their genres.
The reader knowledgeable enough in music to identify chords associations, and arrangements
communicating moods and feelings would certainly spot the particular patterns of French popular
songs, which actually go over normal cultural differences. For a number of decades, they often
repeat the same way in a large majority of instances. Advanced technology and trends in
arrangements, sound recording, and music instruments, only produce differences in form that few
among the public are able to separate from the substance. The moods that French popular music
communicates are particularly rare in Anglo-Saxon popular music, simply because the subgenre
does not please and is not enforced by censors in this other society, to begin with. The striking
exception is Canadian singer Celine Dion who indeed caught the style. As a matter of fact, this
singer has always been warmly welcomed in France, to the point of overhype between the late
1990s and the early 2000s. This did not happen to Dion’s direct challengers in the United States,
Mariah Carrey and Whitney Houston, first because they do not speak French, of course, and then
and above all because patterns in the melodies they sing do not match at all those that Dion favors
and masters.
Singer Edith Piaf launched the so particular French patterns in pop-music in the immediate
aftermaths of the WWII; in 1946 to be precise.[379] Wholesome, they are a particular voice pitch
associated with a musical mood of sadness alternating with another communicating a resilience and
a combativeness that dominate the line, regardless of what the lyrics may say. Piaf’s first success La
Vie en rose (Life in Pink) was a positive love song, yet the musical formula comes to contradict the
message by suggesting instead a happiness that seems more of a dream than a present reality. Piaf’s
songs all express a particular mood that seems to mean in words “Yes, I am an underdog, but my
pride is in my unparalleled capacity to cope with it”. Piaf was in all respects the singer of the French
working class and of the “have-nots,” which fact should help the reader understand my
explanations. Among all Piaf’s songs, the one that best exemplifies this is Non, je ne regrette rien
(No, I do not Regret anything), first broadcast on screens in 1960. The title alone speaks for himself,
already, by suggesting that “something went wrong at some point”. This song was Piaf’s greatest
hit, thanks to much media hype, it should be said; for long, it was even sung in French military elite
units and in the Foreign Legion in particular, which fact tells much either.
Unsurprisingly, if I may say so, Piaf was a known masochist in love and expected her lovers to
beat her. I presume she was demanding with it as she found the best love of her life with World box
middleweight champion (1948) Marcel Cerdan, who however died in a plane accident in 1949, one
year only after she met him, as if extending the patterns of her songs in real life. From and because
the latter event, Piaf fell into depression, became addict to morphine and never recovered from both
ills until her death in 1963, then aged 47. The media and her biographer told Piaf’s life as an
uninterrupted but extolled spate of tragedies—many were even invented—starting on the very day
of her birth; thus, making her a secular saint or rather martyr of French popular music. Nevertheless,
Piaf had had the time to launch a number of young would-be-singers who all knew fame for decades
because she taught, trained, or inspired them her own way. In the 1960-1970s, Jacques Brel and Leo
Ferret in particular best took up Piaf’s style to represent French male singers. The patterns of
endless bereavement and resilience to some sad fate or curse, masochistic one could readily say,
since then have become the French reference in popular music, and are much sought-after in would-
be-singers in France still today.
It is no coincidence, possibly, that we may easily find exactly similar musical patterns as in Piaf’s
style music and style in Russian popular songs. The typical moods they communicate seem to have
borrowed to classic Russian literature and more particularly to the works of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky,
or even Chekhov. On the French side, the cultural inspiration is obviously The Human Comedy of
Honoré de Balzac, more than Les Misérables of Victor Hugo, although the Ministry of Culture is
insisting on the promotion of the later work abroad because of the much politically loaded content
of its musical adaptations—Hugo must turn in his grave!
Anecdotally, DGSE influence specialists highly regard American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis for
his ability to reproduce the French musical mood without lyrics; he has been promoted in France
more than any other American jazzman for this exact reason. This is noteworthy because France
does not use to promote American artists for free, nor English-speaking artists in general. Neither
Elvis Presley, nor the Beatles, nor the Rolling Stones enjoyed the same honor in France as Miles
Davis did, in spite of high public demands for the three formers. However, France does not hesitate
with interfering in her own cultural heritage for the sakes of diplomacy, and economic and military
exchanges with foreign countries, in a way that surprises foreigners, certainly. See the three
following examples.
From 1954 to 1973, Israel bought to French Dassault aircraft-builder large numbers of military
fighter-bombers. Consequently, in 1960, the French public discovered “new successful singer” Rika
Zaraï, who actually was an Israeli singer having the real name Rika Gozman. Zaraï had made her
debut in Jerusalem, while she was in the military. At the beginning of her French career, she had to
learn her songs in phonetics because she spoke Hebrew and English, only. Her career as French
singer knew an end in the early 1970s, although her tunes sold well still in 1973. She retrained in
non-conventional medicine and authored several books on this subject from 1980, following a
serious car accident from which she survived miraculously.
In 1970, the French public discovered a new singer named Mike Brandt. Again, few could know
his real name was Moshe Brandt, that he came directly from Israel, and that he, too, had to learn all
his songs phonetically because he spoke Hebrew, only. Brandt thus met with real huge success in
France, singing songs he could not understand himself; until on April 25, 1975, when he jumped to
his death from the balcony of his apartment in Paris, the same day his new album was released, but
two years after French-Israeli cooperation in aircraft military industry ended.[380]
The scheme reproduced with female British singers Petula Clark, who made a successful French
career all along the 1960s; that is to say, while France and Britain were cooperating on the designing
of supersonic airliner Concorde.
For a number of years and until the 1980s, other such foreign exceptions were Canadian-French
singers this time in the context of the cultural policy of francophonie, and for purely political and
diplomatic reasons.
I would be dishonest not to mention Daft Punk, a band additionally, that composes and performs
tunes with musical patterns in complete opposition to everything I just explained. The style of Daft
Punk in the genre “house music” indeed features joy, openness, and confidence, all characteristics
that contributed to its international success, certainly. However, with respect to my other
explanations about the problem of “too much success,” the reader can make his own idea about why
the team of Daft Punk always wears helmets, why no picture of their faces has been released to date,
and why its members rarely grant interviews and appear on television. The two stars indeed are
anonymous, unable to access fame personally and to make themselves opinion leaders, therefore.
There is a second set of French musical patterns, not very different of Piaf’s because it is
complementary, actually. The mood those they suggest, still independently of the lyrics, could be
described in words as “heroic sacrifice” and emotionally loaded “resilience against tragedy” sans
the suggestion of sorrow. That is why the whole is tainted with dynamism and combativeness, in
opposition to the feeling of helplessness the first communicates. So, there is a mood of hope in it at
least and at last. Many such tunes sound as revolutionary or war marches, and so they imply
choruses and instrumental richness to make their peaking point grandiose, somewhere between the
Symphony Eroica N°3 by Beethoven and the Great Mass in C minor by Mozart, to name references
easy to find on YouTube.
However, the forerunner of this mix of patterns appeared in the United States first as the rock
musical Hair in 1967; though tainted with too much American optimism to the taste of French
specialists in cultural influence. The question of the origin of Hair might be of interest to the reader,
possibly, because it was a hardly mistakable action of agitprop against the United States from
within. Indeed, the aims of this musical show were to promoting the hippie counterculture
movement and the sexual revolution, in striking opposition to an American conservative and
Christian-spirited establishment presented as bourgeois, suppressive, and warmongering. Several
songs of Hair became anthems of the anti-Vietnam War movement; and their profanity, depiction of
the use of illegal drugs, treatment of sexuality, and irreverence for the American flag, the whole
being associated with nude scenes, caused much controversy at the time.
According to two of my ex-colleagues, the combative alternative in French musical patterns
would have been first experimented in Greece between 1964 and 1968, there by France and the
Soviet Union in a partnership against the United States, and in the same context of anti-Vietnam
War protests. The medium used in the experiment was Greek music band Aphrodite’s Child, and the
messages were certain songs of their album titled 666 released in June 1972, and recorded from late
1970 to early 1971 in the Studio Europa Sonor, Paris. Aphrodite’s Child’s 666 begins with a tune
titled The System, which fades in with a choir chanting “We got the system, to fuck the system!”;
lyrics inspired by Abbie Hoffman’s pamphlet Fuck the System. The jacket of this double album
opens on a large dramatic picture heavily loaded in political symbols, of a French popular car
Citroën 2 Chevaux that quits the road and disintegrates in the air as apparent consequence of a
minor collision with a large American coupe barely dented. The American car and his driver are
getting away from the accident, apparently, or even did not notice anything. The message of this
picture, therefore, locates in the narrative of “the-haves vs. the-have-nots”; it was used again the
same year for the cover of the other album Break, by the same band. Although the allusion to a
political struggle between France (the much proletarian Citroën 2 Chevaux) and the United States
(the big American coupe) is unmistakable, it must not be given more value than an isolated element
I picked up among countless others in a much larger campaign of agitprop that began in the late
1960s; at the same period the Directorate D of the KGB promoted the letter “Z”. The interest in it
does not much extend beyond this origin of musical patterns, in addition to the fact that one of the
founders of the band Aphrodite’s Child was Vangelis Papathanassiou aka Vangelis, who eventually
made a successful career as composer of music for films including Blade Runner in 1982.
The musical style of Hair remarkably inspired La Révolution Française (The French Revolution),
a French patriotic rock opera created two years later in 1973; and again in 1980 with the other
musical Les Misérables, equally politically loaded, and both not coincidentally created by record
producer Claude-Michel Schönberg. The idea to launch a trend in popular pop-rock opera, very
enticing to propagandists, was not yet abandoned.
French influence and counterinfluence specialists happened to be interested in electronic music in
the 1960s, on the coming of the first electronic synthesizers;[381] but the enthusiasm quickly evolved
toward defiance. Since the 1990s, and the decreasing popularity of musician Jean-Michel Jarre[382]
after his live concert in Houston, Texas, there have been consistent censorship and attacks against
electronic music when it transformed in the techno genre. The reason for this was the dilemma
“Who will lead the market of electronics music instruments that began to be computerized in the
1980s, will also define sounds, styles, and trends in electronic music for the World in the future”.
The problem was, the emerging leaders in this sector clearly were the United States and Japan, with
no likely challenger elsewhere. So …
One specialty among others of a young of my subordinates in influence and counterinfluence in
the 1990s was the study and monitoring of techno music; he was good at enlightening me on its sub-
genres, history, and influences. Nonetheless, from this period on, agents and the police monitored
systematically techno music concerts in France, and not solely because synthetic drugs widely
circulate on those occasions. In the early 2000s, the State wanted the techno music to disappear
definitively from France. When I had talks with my colleagues about this, several times I heard an
argument I found unexpected, which was “Techno music is produced essentially by pre-programmed
electronic boxes, luring their users in believing they are talented artists”. So far, it is true, as I had
found the same pattern with certain synthesis imaging computer software in the 1990s, already. The
argument became a premise supporting the idea saying, “In a would-be-struggle, machines vs.
humans, we had to commit in favor of the latter”. This was fantasy and self-delusion, in my opinion,
certainly more inspired by Terminator—whose sequel Terminator II also was French produced, by
the way—than by Karl Marx, although the two names were not mentioned. It was no more than a
formal aim supporting the real aim not to import American and Japanese music instruments and
cultures in France, if possible. Yet it proved impossible to revive acoustic musical instruments in
French popular music, in spite of attempts from the 2000s with a focus on the “Manouche-jazz”
genre featuring a particular type of acoustic guitar.
Anecdotally, and in an entirely different realm, exactly the same problem with U.S.-imported
electronics had happened in the 1980s with the craze in France of installing CB radios 27 MHz
aboard cars and trucks; all manufactured in the United States, and spelled the English way “ceebee”
by everyone in the country, for worse. This market was huge at that time, with 3 million French CB
radio users still in the 1990s. The solution to this other problem with the United States had been to
make exact French copies of those CBs. However, the intent had to transform into the following
affair no one in France ever heard about to date.
From the 1970s to 1995, buying and using a CB radio was permitted, but submitted by law to a
declaration of purchase and use to the Gendarmerie, about as guns are. As there was a registration
tax to pay for this, the Ministry for the Economy and Finance had found the idea to integrate its
amount in the retail price of each CB radios sold on the French territory. Because the three leaders
on the French CB radio market were the American brands Midland, President, and RadioShack,
some privileged Frenchman was given an exclusivity of a sort to manufacture and to sell made-in-
France CB radios. I do not remember the name of the thus launched brand, except it was the name
of the man in question with the suffix “-land” added to sound deceptively American, as the leading
American brand Midland.
Arrived in the mid-1990s, the lucky entrepreneur had made a colossal fortune with his CB radios
“Johndoland,” yet it was discovered he never re-paid to the Ministry for the Economy and Finance
the tax included in the price of all units he had manufactured and sold. Instead, he simply had put
the money in his pocket! As the head of “Johndoesland” was a brother of the GOdF with a high
degree, the incident transformed into an internal and sensitive affair in the leading French masonic
grand lodge. It was decided to get the patriot brother-entrepreneur out of this embezzlement of
public funds as discreetly as possible. In 1994, the fraud amounted 75 million French francs, or 11
million dollars of that time. As it was out of question the media report the matter, that is how the
case made its way up to the DGSE … and fell on my desk, I do not know for which reason.
Therefore, I asked for advice to my director who was Charles-Henri de Pardieu.[383] De Pardieu was
baffled by the colossal sum, and he said the fraud was too big and the fraudster too bold to negotiate
anything with the Ministry for the Economy and Finance. He added that “Johndoland” had to cope
with it by himself with a good lawyer, therefore. I transmitted the negative answer to the GOdF,
which eventually told me that “Johndoland” took lawyer Jacques Vergès to defend his case, and that
the media would shut their mouth about the matter.[384] Perhaps De Pardieu did something
unbeknownst to me, I suspect. End of the story.
Contrary to what happened with techno music, the “rap” and “hip-hop” genres were welcomed
and taken care of at the beginning, even though they were U.S. cultural imports, again. Eventually,
the French media were asked to dismiss the too American hip-hop to the benefit of rap. On one
hand, rap music was perceived positively as an expression of young proletarian revolt. On the other
hand, there were concerns over the mood of violence the genre arouses. That is why, a few years
later, someone found the idea to promote a French soft form of rap music named “slam,” in the hope
this all-new genre would become trendy in the poor suburbs and thus would make rap music
disappear.[385] In a nutshell, the slam is introduced in France as “street poetry,” with no instrument
and even no melody, since the genre is lyrics with no instrument at all. The slam never made its way
in France in spite of much hype for it, largely because it was too soft and too visibly promoted and
supervised by the State and by the Ministry of Education in particular. Besides, it did not even fill
the criteria of music and its entertaining value was nil, much closer to Tibetan prayer.
In the early 1990s, I was called to take an active yet short-lived part in the promotion of certain
exotic singers and bands, which included the then recently formed rap band NTM. I do not
remember the names of all, and some disappeared, apparently, except NTM, I guess, and Ugandan
musician Geoffrey Oryema who is still performing today. At that time, Oryema made his debut and
he had just recorded a first album titled Exile. Oryema and the band NTM were launched and
supported by the French Communist Party–PCF in their debuts. Communist politician Jean-Pierre
Brard actively involved in the promotion. As an aside, at that time, Brard was aggressively active
against Christian religion in France, and was in permanent touch with counterespionage officers
with specialties on the United States and its allies. Then there was Pierre Dolfi, also member of the
Communist Party with a position of Director of Communication, who moved eventually to Corsica
to smuggle arms with a financial support from an employee in France of Caixa Spanish bank. That
is why JCDecaux the advertising company that officially employed me as Art Director put me in
touch with the French Communist Party in 1992.[386] For the record, the same year, I was in charge
of several communication campaigns for the French rightist party RPR of Jacques Chirac, main and
official challenger of the Communist Party. The problem with rap music band NTM was its
members, reckless and violent much beyond all expectations of the Communist Party. There were
talks and worries about this point, and NTM lost support from the media, and was finally censored
by all media in the country.
Anecdotally, in the late 1990s, DGSE specialists in influence had a particular interest in the
British band Massive Attack for reasons I could not explain because I was overwhelmed with
several demanding tasks no longer relevant to music, I will explain in the chapter 27, due to their
interest to the American reader in particular.
Popular music as the Ministry of Culture wants it is all about existentialism, to sum it up.
Precisely, it happens that the would-be-branch of modern philosophy inspires the culture of French
military units and intelligence agencies. The reader should not let himself be fooled by the claim
that existentialism is about individual liberty; it truly locates down to a Nietzschean abyss instead.
Existentialism characterizes post-WWII war novels by Jean Lartéguy, which never met with success
in the United States, in spite of attempts to translate in English and export this literature to this
country; the intent was not just about business. For this reason, the French Ministry of Culture
revived the fallen flying soldier, poet, and writer Albert Camus in the 2000s. Earlier in the 1990s, it
all had been for poet Arthur Rimbaud in another literary genre. As an aside, the odd mix of poetry
and of antisocial behavior in the personality of Rimbaud defines the field agent as the DGSE loves
him.
In truth, popular Anglo-American music much appeals to French people since the birth of rock
and roll in the 1950s, and that is why those who are responsible for monitoring culture for a while
struggled to find out and to train made-in-France look-alike and sound-alike British and American
rock and pop stars. As an exception however, France has never been interested in exporting her
music in the World, nor really in recruiting American singers and musicians as agents of influence.
A few French bands in the pop and rock genres were created from the early 1960s to the 1990s, and
half a dozen met with true success during this period and in their country only, with the same
musicians, composers, and lyricists, hired by the State to watchdog them in some instances.[387]
First, there was the struggling but never authentically successful classic rock and roll Les Chats
sauvages in the early 1960s, for wants of talent. In the mid-1960s, the Communist Party had
imposed the band Triangle, though without success. In 1969, the then-inchoate green activism trend
promoted the progressive rock band Magma, led by singer and outstanding drummer Christian
Vander. Although Magma was authentically talented, its activity has always been monitored from
within and its promotion was carefully limited,[388] by a restricted access to the mainstream media.
The problem was, Magma had all it took to become successful beyond the French borders in a genre
hovering between progressive rock and jazz. In 1971, at last the pop band Martin Circus made a real
hit in the country with its tune Je m’éclate au Sénégal yet disappeared thereupon. From 1981, the
Socialists and the Communists launched three bands and called the media to give consistent
promotion to them; all became authentically popular in the country. They were the new wave band
Indochine, singing soft lyrics not loaded with strong political claims. The second, more aggressive
and with explicit political lyrics was the French-style rock band Telephone. The third was the very
aggressive hard-rock band Trust, whose lyrics promoted unambiguous leftist anarchism and
encouraged violence against the bourgeois establishment. The band Trust was very successful in the
lower-class youth, yet its members proved impossible to rein in and the band was quickly barred
from access to the media. These bands had an unmistakable English-American style suitably
reworked to give birth to a French touch that was instantly recognizable, save for Magma, whose
leader Vander was not interested in making hits appealing to the largest masses.
As I said, the focus was on singers and on an existentialist perception of music honed to strike in
opposition to the American notion of entertainment. The two most successful French singers ever
were Claude François and Johnny Halliday, I earlier named, both in a much American style. Too
much independent-minded François opposed his fondness for American style entertainment against
existentialism unabashedly. Easy to influence Hallyday yielded without any difficulty to the
suggestions of the experts in domestic influence, and thus became the French singer with both the
longest and most successful career ever. To say, Claude François made hits on hits until he died
abruptly, essentially by purchasing copyrights to the American female pop band The Four Tops,
unbeknownst to the French public, as the latter was not broadcast and unknown in France. Johnny
Halliday was launched in 1960 as a French avatar of Elvis Presley. While ageing and changing
voice pitch accordingly, he evolved from the 1970s as a sound-alike of John Foggerty and Bob
Seger, even buying copyrights to these two American singers. Hallyday’s French translated versions
of John Foggerty’s Fortunate Son and Bob Seger’s Old Time Rock and Roll became enduring hits in
France either. Yet Fortunate Son reworked by Hallyday under the title Fils de personne (Nobody’s
Son) became a much proletarian anthem, and Piaf’s melancholia and despair overwhelm the
repertoire of this singer.
Variety shows are designed to promote French national and popular musical culture and to ensure
its ongoing renewal. Therefore, foreign singers, musicians, and bands are never broadcast in France
or very rarely, even when they are obviously more popular and talented than their French
challengers, and despite their willingness to promote themselves in this country. There have been
exceptions, such as the British band Pink Floyd, but those are necessarily filtered by diplomatic
officials responsible for cultural exchanges and the Ministry of Culture in particular. Music is not
just a hobby as any other in this country; it is a means to stimulating national identity and a
generator of domestic economy. Music creates jobs, a market economy, and financial resources for
the State; all reasons that come as many arguments justifying filtrage médiatique (media filtering).
The expression media filtering truly is a soft way to say “censorship,” but its definition is larger
because it means more precisely “limiting quantitatively the import of foreign culture and media, so
that the French ruling elite be in capacity to exert permanent control over 100% of information,
entertainment, and arts in French language within the French borders”.
In France, the consecration of all artists has always been a political decision, although Paris is
ever full of exceptionally talented artists who will remain penniless and unknown for their lifetimes.
[389] The Privilege du Roi and the Royal Censors still exists in the facts, but this is a secret no one
prints anymore. To succeed in French entertainment and arts, the candidate must have certain
qualities irrelevant to talent, since the media alone are in capacity to state on behalf of everyone
who has talent and who has not. As example, I cannot but remember vividly how music was
composed and arranged for musical television programs on the publicly owned channels France 2,
and France 3 between the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The first draft of a tune or song that
French professionals name “maquette” (I translate as “model” or “draft”) was truly good and
entertaining at times, but this was seen as a problem, precisely. Therefore, it was arranged, or even
redone entirely, if necessary, so that all things that made it original and a little too lively be leveled
or deleted; “sanitized” in a word. Remarkably, no censor and no specialist in influence intervened in
the meantime because musicians themselves, paid by France Television, had been used for years to
the trade. Thus, they self-censored without any apparent frustration—as music lover, I found this
frustrating and even annoying. For the state granted them a regular and decent income, and they
dearly counted on their retirement plan; all guarantees few independent-minded artists may expect,
of course.
As for the shortlisting of talents in arts and entertainment, being a relative of the elite to venture
in these activities is a good start, though not a determining because political commitment is a
prerequisite of paramount importance. Indeed, leftist stance is mandatory and applies to everyone.
Therefore, inclination for Anglo-Saxon culture, especially American, is a point of contention; yet
the hurdle can be leveled through particular provisions very few will ever know about, as it
happened with singer Johnny Hallyday. Then serendipity may favor the candidate who happens to
distinguish himself in a way that fits some agenda or mission of the moment. Finally, talent when
true will be a chance to last longer under the limelight, on condition not to stray in the meantime, of
course. The specifics apply to literature; any would-be-author looking for a publisher must be
courteously introduced by an “honorable benefactor” endowed with some obscure influence.[390] So
much so that in the 19th century, books the State and its secret police did not want to see published
and sold in the country were printed abroad before their being smuggled and sold under the counter.
[391] The invention of eBook and the advent of self-publishing and print-on-demand staggered the
provision in safety; notwithstanding, the unapproved author cannot expect any public relations and
benevolence from journalist critics, which stay the exclusive privileges of the major publishing
houses.
Since the 1950s, patterns of existentialism reproduce in French motion picture, translated abroad
as “the French touch,” and the military for long have a hand in the shortlisting of French film
directors and actors, to the point it is not a so big secret. In France, the recurrence of existentialist
patterns in art and entertainment appeared in the aftermaths of the WWII. The masses were
expected to find the trend natural, as they believe artists are free to perform as they please and
according to their sole talent. This popular assumption is not ill founded up to a certain extent, for
what French artists wanted in the poor France of the early 1950s was sincere and did fit what the
Ministry of Defense was looking for, precisely. Otherwise, all those who thus accessed fame would
be unknown today.
 However, the promotion of existentialism that overwhelmed French music, movies, literature, and
arts and entertainment in general actually was a muffled expression of a new resistance against
capitalism, American inspired consumerism, and individualism. While the Cold War had begun, but
as France was a major member of the NATO however, the recently created CIA knew all this, as
well as what the real aims of France’s ruling elite were. That is why this agency mingled in arts and
entertainment in France and in Belgium, out of concerns about a Soviet influence that already
pregnant. The CIA recruited a number of French artists and opinion leaders with a favorable stance
toward Western culture and against hard communism. French philosopher and journalist Raymond
Aron, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, were such American agents of influence until the
two latter turned their coats.[392] With singer Boris Vian and others, Sartre and De Beauvoir
launched the informal political movement “la nouvelle gauche” that eventually exported to the
United States as the “New Left”. The New Left was clever communist agitprop because it was soft,
insidious, and essentially based on sophisms that green activism and other offshoots took up about
as they were eventually. In the United States, Russian-American writer Ayn Rand attempted to
debunk the underground trend in ways that did not always prove successful; for Rand had the flaw
to be atheist, anti-Catholic, and to preach other values that could hardly please American
conservatives she yet rallied. America was still suffering the trauma that the excesses of
McCarthyism had left, which the French and the Soviets took as a fulcrum to raise a potent narrative
pointing out “who the Devil really was”.
The narrative of existentialism at the time was an idea saying there was a French “meaning of
life” posing as secular, authentic, “100% human,” unselfish, and ingenuous in essence; though anti-
establishment. It was inspired in some respects by the non-violence of Henri David Thoreau and his
follower Gandhi, and eventually, in the 1960s, by the Indian way of life because the Directorate D
of the KGB began to use India as a remote yet effective proxy / relay to spread influence and
disinformation in Western countries. Indeed, existentialism was crafted on purpose to clash point by
point with an American way of life presented as bigoted, artificial, inhuman, selfish, shallow, and
essentially based on “unconcerned consumerism”.
The success of existentialism and of the New Left encouraged the Soviets to proceed by recycling
philosophy at their benefit because they had found the academic discipline offered the huge
advantage to be largely taken seriously, while exempting itself from all scientific exigencies and
religious biases. As a matter of fact, any political idea newly presented as a philosophical thought
and formulated in its specific terms and syntax becomes instantly objective, politically neutral, and
religiously unbiased; a pure product of unselfish logic that only highly minded scholars can afford
to challenge. Anyone can easily oppose any political doctrine; very few people questioning a
philosophical argument can be taken seriously. So, all along the 1950s and 1960s, and even until the
late-1970s, the Soviets shortlisted in Western countries highly brained and graduated true believers,
and teachers in universities with a left leaning stance, and made for them a bespoke légende of
“professional secular philosophers”. In France, those agents of influence remained consecrated by
the ruling elite and the media until the early 1990s, about the same way the historiographers had
been hitherto. Their role was to teach the middle and upper classes on what they had to think about
everything or so. For this, they were regularly invited on television stages on primetime to deliver
their shattering discoveries and remarks on the Western contemporary society and its ills, and to
comment the news and events in the World under a thoughtful approach they presented as common
sense; without ever uttering the words “socialism,” “communism,” and “Marxism-Leninism,” since
the Soviet system of Stalin and the Chinese Great Leap Forward had just disenchanted the World .
Shortly earlier in 1950, American psychoanalyst Martha Wolfenstein, and sociologist and
political scientist Nathan Leites together authored an interesting comparative study of American,
British, and French movies. This essay, though outdated and little known today, pinpoints difference
better than I could, and remains of actuality in a number of patterns in French motion picture it
describes; especially since they are revived today. The finds of Wolfenstein and Leites match in a
striking fashion the moods I earlier described, while talking about music.
“In looking at a French film, one is apt to feel that it is pervaded with a distinctive atmosphere.
[…]
“In a French film, the falsely accused may attempt suicide or allow himself to be captured
without a struggle. Ironically, the real murderer may attempt in vain to convince the authorities of
his guilt. A feeling of disappointment and reproach seems to be expressed against the authorities;
how little they understand or care to understand. There is also implicitly the opposite of the
American feeling that it is possible to clear oneself completely: who can say that he is altogether
innocent? Again, a recurrent situation in both French and American films is that of missing an
opportunity for lovemaking. In French films, this situation tends to be fraught with regret; the
opportunity once lost does not come again. In American films, such a missed opportunity usually
occurs in a comic setting. It is almost invariably a happy portent for the couple, who will have the
same opportunity again when they are ready to take advantage of it.”[393]
Not in French films, go on explaining the two scholars in analyzing a number of them. Indeed,
until the 2000s, how often I heard colleagues complaining about the recurrence of happy endings in
American movies. The French spy culture often seems to pervade the country, but one has to be a
spy to notice it. This direct influence should not come as a surprise though, since spies in France are
also in charge of the monitoring, control, and even shaping of cultural flows, as this chapter is
explaining. The reader should not be so surprised, as the Japanese intelligence agency Naisho is also
in charge to surveying telluric activities and of earthquakes warning, and as the U.S. Secret Service
is also tasked the fight against money counterfighting.
A new generation of actors and filmmakers appeared in France in the 1950s however, with an
entirely different style indeed pervaded with American-style humor, action, and optimism.[394]
There were a number of U.S. military bases in France, the Marshall Plan was ongoing, and the
United States was helping the French troops in Indochina and in Algeria; plus everything I
explained about the Bretton Wood system in the chapter 13. With all this, the French Government
could hardly say “No” to the Americans. That is why leftist propaganda and anti-Americanism in
France stood as an “underground” activity until the 1960s, as the conspirators had adopted
exceptionally the English word because it summed up perfectly a culture in subversion, with its
silent winks and nods, quizzing smiles, allusion and passing references, cryptic symbols and double
entendre. The subterranean mores had come to fruition in the resistance movement against the
Germans in occupied France, and it concerned the same people after the war, as we shall see in the
chapter 23.
The American superior quality in pictures, settings, and lighting in those French films of the
1950-1960s era followed the Western trend, and it paralleled the real professionalism of their actors
to the point of striking French people who watch them again today. They are unquestionably better
in all respects than those produced from the late 1970s onward and those of the earlier existentialist
trend. By comparison, the French films of the 1950-60s that are devoid of American influence look
amateurish and are often boring in the vein of A Bout de souffle (Breathless) in 1960, to name a
good example that many know. Yet, from the late 1950s, the underground left and the Ministry of
Defense itself were struggling to convince the masses that there was an outstanding quality to be
found in French existentialist films, of a “less frivolous” genre. The word “entertainment” itself was
accused to be American and not French, superficial, unserious, and pointless. The French leftist
narrative stressed that filmmakers and actors had a duty to drive the masses to more “authentic and
realistic values” because motion picture ought not to be all about wanton fun. However, as in the
United States of that time, there was in France a sincere and logical need to see the bright side of
things; the end of the war was a few years behind, let alone the French famine and extreme poverty
that had reached its climax with the terrible winter 1954.
This period of pure American-style entertainment and optimism that clashed so much with the
views of the French ruling elite when in private finally ended between the years 1973 and 1977.
From the latter year on, a new generation of would-be-actors and filmmakers came out of the blue,
all of them upstarts of the Left. They claimed they wanted to free the French society, and the World
if possible, from its goalless existence.[395] The overall quality in French cinema knew a sudden and
sharp decrease, and humor, action, and optimism in it took an entirely different style. The film Le
Père Noël est une ordure (Santa Claus is a Stinker) released in 1982, nine months after the Socialist
Party took the power officially, since then is become a cornerstone in the history of French motion
picture. Not only Santa Claus is a Stinker buried everything had been done before, but it opened the
door to an unbridled socialist cinema that now could openly claim itself as such, at last. All actors in
Santa Claus is a Stinker became movie stars overnight and remained so for the following decades,
essentially because they had tackled fearlessly on stage the retrograde French bourgeois values.
Thenceforth, about all French films if not all were politically loaded with passing references,
crudeness, and pointless nudity. Humorous sequences were of the bittersweet sort addressing the
masses supposedly freed from the yoke of individual property and consumerism. To give the reader
an easy reference point, the humor to be found in an American film such as Airplane! (1980) is
chiseled for an intellectual elite, by comparison. Actually, Santa Claus is a Stinker followed a huge
campaign of would-be-trendy crude language and anti-establishment ranting that leftist free radio
stations had launched in the pre-election period of 1980-1981. Vulgarity, unbridled sex, below-the
belt humor, and wanton disrespect for everything, were tackling the French values of the previous
decades. Now, the most serious news and subjects were supposed to be treated lightly, with the clear
intent to arouse a catharsis of a sort in the country. On those new radio stations, the point was to
laugh about everything, laughing aloud, and laughing again. France had just freed of a tyranny no
one had ever seen or heard in actuality; a positive change indeed had just happened in the country,
but it truly limited to the few who had been granted access to the media.
That is why an entirely new and overwhelming form of expression had taken place on those
media. Everything had been taken as normal, usual, customary, beautiful, comfortable, useful, or
praiseworthy before May 1981 was no longer after that precise moment in French contemporary
history. The masses welcomed the change with feelings ranging from despondence, disbelief, to
euphoria for the majority that had voted for socialism because they thought they had freed from
something. The makers and proponents of the shattering new wave were the new rulers of France
now, and no one and nothing could oppose them, especially since they imposed their will and might
in an unprecedented way relying on the implicit and no longer on enacted rules and regulations
printed on paper. The changes were presented as elementary humanist notions that were understood;
even no premise had to support them because the notion of premise itself was one more of the
ridiculously retrograde values of the old bourgeois elite. Disagreeing was qualified with the
adjectives “indecent” and “nauseating,” made trendy for the circumstance.
In the lodges of the GOdF, brothers who had been the most supportive to candidate François
Mitterrand were rewarded with aggrandized social and economic responsibilities and were entrusted
the role of watchdogs of the new doctrine. Those I knew at that time had been indoctrinated with a
narrative saying that “Nothing is absolute; everything is questionable”; how many times I heard it
from the mouth of my brother and countless Freemasons of this grand lodge, this I could not say. I
vividly remember the most intellectuals of those liberal Freemasons saying and even teaching me
sometimes, I quote them in substance, “We human beings are nothing in reality; just appearances of
a reality that exists in our minds only. For we are made of atoms, truly and fundamentally, and
atoms are made of particles themselves that are not matter actually, but weightless quanta of energy.
Whereby, the deceptive notion of solid matter actually is a mere feeling engendered by four proven
fundamental forces”.
From the fundamental in quantum mechanics that prefigured the tricks of “trans-culture” and
“trans-humanism” of the mid-1990s, those thinkers coined a new thought, hardly questionable for
once. It posited “Science at last proved that the value the previous civilizations attributed to
Mankind along with their cultures, beliefs, gods, and divinities had been false for thousands of
years. The leaders of those civilizations of the past had derived their power from beliefs that were
hoaxes in the facts”.
Similarly, the new doctrine introduced as “the truth,” as it was based on sound scientific
premises, demonstrated that “everything else around us is nothing but illusion either. Our five
senses are constantly deceiving us by communicating to our minds data that are just feelings. There
are no more realities than those surging in our minds, themselves immaterial. Wherefrom,
individualism, materialism, and consumerism are absurd notions or the nefarious corollaries of the
complexity of the human brain, and it is our noble duty to assimilate this new paradigm and to tame
our feelings accordingly. Otherwise, this vulnerability of the mind would serve our own doom at the
image of what History teaches us. As to those who persist standing by the old beliefs and who thus
bar the path to the philosophical quest of Man, we are going to make them perish by their own sin:
selling to them fancy goods and services for exorbitant prices and fees until they will hang out in
streets penniless with the lumpenproletariat”.
Perhaps, the reader noticed in passing the latter narrative actually is none other than Lenin’s
saying, “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them”. That was not yet all
because the new vision of matter and reality also extended to the Earth itself. “When we are
intelligent and intellectually able to consider things with suitable detachment, we can see that the
Earth is only a planet among billions of billions of others in the universe. Our use of the words ʻthe
Earthʼ and ʻthe Worldʼ is again an expression of our immature self-centered tendencies. At worst,
we can still tolerate the article ʻtheʼ before ʻplanetʼ as a practical means to name precisely what we
pompously called ʻthe Earthʼ or ʻthe Worldʼ before”.
The new name “planet” thus chosen for the Earth and the World should surprise because
Socialists traditionally like to call it “the globe”. In the last two centuries, there have been a number
of French socialist newspapers and magazines whose names were either Le Globe or simply Globe.
The sect of the Saint-Simonianists, founders of French socialism of whom it was often question at
that time, created the first revue with the same name Le Globe (The Globe), edited from 1824 to
1832. A magazine that addressed a rather intellectual readership, titled Globe, indeed was founded
in the wake of the socialist takeover in the 1981’s France and lasted until 1992.
There was more to the theory; enough to bore the reader, I presume. That is why I will limit my
explanations to say that its author was French nuclear physicist and philosopher Jean-Émile Charon,
coiner and proponent of the “theory of the complex relativity” and of the “eon hypothesis”. My
citations in substance above were the new fundamentals supporting the French version of socialism
that Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon only hinted two centuries ago. For Saint-Simon also raised a cult
of a sort to scientists and to Isaac Newton in particular. According to Saint-Simon, God is in a way
replaced by universal gravitation, which idea is felt from the beginning of his works. In his Lettres
d’un habitant de Genève à ses contemporains (Letters from a Geneva Resident to his
Contemporaries) he published in 1803, Saint-Simon wrote the following—my translation from the
original text in French.
“The meeting of the twenty-one elected to rule the humanity will take the name of Council of
Newton;… The inhabitants of any part of the globe, regardless of the situation and size, will be able
at any time to declare themselves, collectively, section of one of the divisions, and to elect a
particular Council of Newton…. Each council will build a temple that will contain a mausoleum in
honor of Newton. The temple will be divided into two parts. One, which will contain the
mausoleum, will be embellished by all the means that artists can invent. The other will be
constructed and decorated in such a way as to give to men an idea of the sojourn destined for an
eternity to those who will hinder the progress of sciences and arts…. In the vicinity of the temple
will be built laboratories, workshops, and a college. All the luxury will be reserved to the temple,
laboratories, workshops, college, and council housing will be built and decorated in a simple
fashion”.
As example of the new creed of the implicit that replaced written rules, eventually and in my
debut in domestic influence, I was hired for a little while as speaker with Fun Radio, which at that
time was a national network of local FM radio broadcasting stations that French media group
Hersant had just purchased (1987). On occasions of local elections campaigns, the word was given
in my radio station to help candidates of the left, including those of the Communist Party, as much
as we could and by all means. I must specify that Hersant press group for long hires agents of the
DGSE with specialties in influence, counterinfluence, and even counterespionage, remarkably.
Those agents are very active in France and more especially in French overseas territories, and in
foreign countries where this press group owns subsidiaries, as we shall see in the last chapter of this
book. Additionally, agents who are working under a cover activity in the Hersant Group are
unusually aggressive, and of the barbouze category, typically. I could name some of them who, in
the early 2000s and in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia, carried out social
eliminations and dirty tricks, death threats, and blackmails. They even attempted to assassinate
French prominent politician and acting member of the French Parliament Jacques Lafleur because
this man was suspected of collusion with “the Americans,” following his opening of a McDonald’s
fast food.
I conclude my explanations about the events of before and after May 1981, saying the latter date
marked a change of tremendous importance in France, similar in substance and effects to a popular
revolution, but not in its form. This was an important step, the third after May 1958 and Mai 1968,
to be precise, of a conspiracy that actually began upon the retreat of the Germans from France in
1944. The reader will find additional details about it in the next chapters similarly presented in their
corresponding contexts, and in other books and sources of information, if ever he is curious to know
more. In this book, I only deliver key points, dates, and names, which will help him in this
hypothetic quest, since the French intelligence community has always been anxious to preserve an
appearance of smoothness and quiet normalcy in the evolution of French governmental affairs, with
suitable effectiveness.
The ruling elite and the specialists tasked to carry on domestic influence see sports games as a
means to stimulate national identity and the need for belonging of the masses because the masses
can involve themselves per proxy in them. They feel they do participate in in a broadcast sport
competition, indeed, although in thought only. Thanks to his intellectual superiority over all other
species, Man is endowed with a capacity to thus satisfy the urge for action his reptilian brain
commands. From a scientific standpoint, the process unfolds as an exchange of data between the
two other parts of his brain, the mammalian brain and the neocortex. Little of it is thoughtful
though, as Man has no consciousness of this happening beyond a certain degree, I explain now.
The exchange and feedback effect between the three parts of Man’s brain are automatically
processed beneath consciousness. Actually, the consciousness that locates in the neocortex treats the
data coming from the eyes and ears, while the sport competition is unfolding on the television
screen. At the same time, the mammalian brain catches automatically a part of this data, from which
certain parts of it that constitute the limbic system produces chemically the emotion that the reptilian
brain needs to fulfill its need for action. These parts actually are the striatum, and an area called
insula, both belonging to the reward system. Moreover, another area of the back of the neocortex
called occipital lobe is stimulated when Man is watching something that please him. Only a passion
previously recorded in the neocortex can activate these areas. That is why a part of the thus
processed data is sent back to the neocortex for “collection,” and for asking to it to “keep on going”.
Indeed, if the latter data could translate in words, it would say something as “It feel very good; keep
on going, please!” The part of this data the neocortex records is meant to remind to Man to watch
the next sport game to repeat the pleasurable experience. As an aside, in the other case of the fan of
a singer or band who learned the lyrics by heart, the process also activates the lower fontal lobe of
the neocortex, responsible for language.
The sole consciousness Man has of the processing I just simplified is “a pleasurable moment”. No
wonder why the reptilian brain is so thirsty for action, since it is the first part of the brain to which
the nervous system connects. Indeed, the reptilian brain “feels” very concerned with everything
relates to the body via the nervous system; that is to say, “things that move” physically. Differently,
the mammalian brain that comes next, and finally the neocortex, together are concerned with
processing complex data and with things we could name “abstractions”.
Trivializing my point further, sometimes, the mammalian brain tricks the reptilian brain and the
neocortex with passionate things, even though the latter is very smart. Some other times, the three
may do crazy things; as everybody does, actually. Yet the three are partners for life, and they get
along very well in spite of their entirely different characters and interests. That is how the reptilian
brain agrees to be satisfied with other’s moves, on condition however that this does not last for too
long because with the nervous system, its other direct partner, they are always busy with taking care
of the body that guarantees the survival of the whole by processing oxygen and nutriments. That is
why the reptilian brain seems to be a weird and restless guy of an impulsive nature.
Films, and video games even better, produce the same effect on the brain of Man, exactly, be it
said in passing. Yet video games imply real actions of the body, even if those limit to not much.
Beyond this, stimulating so the urge for action or the reptilian brain and of the reward system
consequently depend of the way the brain has been trained and of the character of the individual
resulting from it.
I vividly remember of the position of the DGSE about sport games and competitions because this
agency once provided me with a clear and even written synthesis note about it, whose content I sum
up from recollection as the short paragraph, below.
“Every time a French athlete or a sport team wins a gold medal whose radiance is international,
this stimulates the need for belonging of the masses, and a proud claim of national identity arises
among them. Additionally, it has been noticed a side effect from it that invariably expresses as
greater ardor at work, willingness for initiative and entrepreneurship, combativeness, and courage”.
Just as the dog of Pavlov stampedes when it hears the bell ring, the French masses do it on the
first major sporting event announcement; even when the discipline concerned was the last of their
worries the day earlier; the previous explanation presented the specifics for the phenomenon to
occur. People have been trained for this when they were young, by their parent, at school, or both.
The case of the Tour de France is striking and cited by the DGSE as best example. Motorists must
pay attention to the many French people cycling on French roads all along the competition, dressed
the same as the racing cyclists they saw on television. They nearly all disappear from traffic on the
very day the race ends, thus demonstrating the extraordinary potency of the influence of sport
games. It is timely to the reader to remember my earlier explanations on our inclination to look for
other selves than ours in our endless quest to be still better than we already are.
Sports games and competitions experienced per proxy on television and in stadiums are superior
in their effects on the masses than music is; for if music mobilizes their intellects, sports do it better
with suppressing their every day’s worries by replacing them with entirely different thoughts of the
simplest sort. That is why sporting disciplines on television actually are more imposed on the
masses than they demand them; nevertheless, they are unable to figure the real aims hiding behind
the offer. Totalitarian countries favor athletic games, usually. The French Government promotes
soccer and road bicycle racing for the lower and middle class, and tennis for the middle and upper
classes. In fact, as the middle class craves belonging to the upper class, it truly mimics this interest
in tennis, driven by the same need to buying cars it truly cannot afford. Below, I tell a true anecdote
that epitomizes the enormous importance the French State accords to soccer.
After the unexpected and disastrous defeat of France at the 2006 FIFA World Cup—following a
heated debate about drastically reducing the salaries of national soccer players—, the specialists in
domestic influence instructed the mainstream media to impose a strong media presence of rugby
football to the masses. For rugby football had to be taken as a “temporary substitute sport” to arouse
again national pride and combativeness the French masses thus had lost. All French TV channels
instantly complied, and they made a hype for Sébastien Chabal in particular, a player of the French
rugby football national team. Overnight, Chabal was omnipresent in the media, and his name was in
all mouths consequently. Chabal, a very Gallic, bearded, and longhaired sportsman, was even
featured in commercials paid for by some private companies. Yet no one, nor even Chabal himself
could know he owed his sudden and unexpected fame to a plan B in domestic influence. Less than a
couple of years after that, rugby football and Chabal dwindled back to the usual little fame they had
before the disaster of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. In France, rugby football is usually relegated to the
rank of violent British sport. Yet no one among the French multitudes seemed to notice the odd
change from back to forth to back again with it. In the light of this, the reader now understands why
French experts in domestic influence call colloquially the masses les somnanbules (“the
sleepwalkers”).
In the early 1970s, specialists in domestic influence found a new way to control cultural flows in
France, whose cleverness remains unprecedented and will certainly surprise the reader, again. This
is a relatively complex method proceeding in closely associating two discoveries in economics and
social studies both made in the 1920s. The first asserts it is possible to turn upside down the law of
supply and demand by guiding the consumption habits of an entire country, and by imposing
astutely the offer to the masses, provided they find it viable or reasonably acceptable. By
generalizing the use of the method actually relevant to economic planning, is was found that it
greatly helped prevent industrial flops, and allowed to shape at will the collective habits in
consumption of the masses, unbeknownst to them, of course, since this ignorance is a prerequisite
conditioning its success. In short, the national industry should not create and manufacture to meet
the demand of the masses, but shape their demand instead, according to the economic plan defined
by the State.
The second discovery, known as “self-fulfilling prophecy,” is “a prediction that directly or
indirectly causes itself to become true by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive
feedback between belief and behavior”.[396] Though attributed to sociologist Robert K. Merton, the
self-fulfilling prophecy is a direct consequence of the Thomas theorem in sociology, formulated by
American sociologists William Isaac Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas.[397] It states that, “If
men define situations as real, then they are real in their consequencesʼ. In other words, ʻThe
interpretation of a situation causes the actionʼ. This interpretation is not objective. Actions are
affected by subjective perceptions of situations. Whether there is even an objectively correct
interpretation is not important for the purposes of helping guide individuals’ behavior”.[398]
However, unlike the Thomas Theorem, the goal in the method to be explained is not about making
the consequences of a belief come true, but to transform the belief into a reality, as a myth does.
Three years after the strikes of 1968, circa 1971, the goals with associating the two theories were
to offer to the State the possibility to create social and cultural trends for the masses, in order to
oppose unwarranted foreign cultural interference, and to implement planned economy and industry
in a more effective manner; earlier experimented by French politician Étienne Clémentel.[399]
In 1972, was discreetly created a special committee reuniting sociologists, marketing experts, and
other researchers such as semioticians and the indispensable psychoanalysts. The group was
introduced as a think tank christened Centre de Communication Avancée–CCA (Advanced
Communication Center). Thus, this small specialized influence cell was made highly credible and
enticing when it proposed to advertising agencies “to predict for them the social evolutions and
trends in France in the future”. Bernard Cathelat, the mysterious and would-be-founder of the CCA,
is known to no one in the public, yet referred to as “the Pope of communication” in all French major
advertising groups. Since then, the CCA publishes yearly forecast reports and studies predicting
what will be the collective behavior of the French people for the year to come. Then, every ten
years, the think tank publishes a voluminous report in which one learns what the main social trends
will be in France for the next decade. To everyone’s amazement, the reports prove invariably correct
in their forecasts, and they never misled their recipients to date.
The reader may assume those reports are highly sensitive material that must not fall in the hands
of unauthorized persons. This is correct. However, since they are not authored by the Ministry of
Defense, nor by any other French public body, then they are not classified officially. Neither their
covers nor their first pages bear any mention stating expressly they are sensitive material. The
nature of those documents is unofficial from a formal standpoint, but the think tank, its publisher,
sells them at a steep price to a small minority of carefully shortlisted individuals in the private
sector. The recipients are all senior executives and shareholders of the leading fifty or so French
advertising and communication groups and agencies, and they are expressly instructed to keep the
reports they are thus entrusted in safe places, as the rule says for otherwise highly classified
documents. They are told with insistence they must remain available “for their eyes only,” under
penalty not to enjoy any longer the purchase of the next issue to come. Since it is thus meant an
exceptional privilege to be privy of “what will happen in France in the future,” there is no reason to
utter a word about it. This explains why none of those reports, nor even a few of their pages, ever
leaked to the media or on the Internet to date.
On an analogous circumstance I was once given temporary access to the 1989 issue of the report
forecasting how would the masses behave all along the 1990s. Indeed, everything I read in the thick
document of about three hundred pages proved flawlessly correct eventually, and so I describe its
form and substance.
The thick decennial forecasts of the CCA begin with a summary about how and why the French
society thus behaved in the previous decade, and why the masses favored such and such activities
rather than others, between other mores. The laser printed book elaborates on dress codes and
fashion, trendy food, cars, colors, leisure activities, beliefs, ideologies, recurring expectations in life,
and so on, and on. Thereupon, the book presents as a sure thing and in similar details what those
choices will be for the decade to come. The exposé is treated with a specific terminology tailored for
people with a professional background in marketing rather than social studies. Never any specific
word and notion pertaining to the field of psychology are employed. The CCA coins a particular
jargon of its own, remarkably, which somehow reminds of that of philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, I
named earlier in this chapter. Overall, the report focuses on the social and economic evolution of the
three classes of the French society for the decade to come, however without really presenting sound
premises, arguments, and references in footnotes as sociologists do. Nothing is said as about why
things are going to happen that way beyond statements from authority saying, in substance and
style, “The masses are fed off with the former trend; therefore, they will…” Some authentic
statistics sprinkle the narrative at times.
Thanks to this knowledge, managers in leading advertising agencies and groups are further
empowered to instruct their creative teams of art directors and copywriters, and above all the
business and industrial companies and groups, their customers. The marketing managers and
product managers of the latter can be advised accurately on how they must communicate, and on
how they must tout their goods and services they are about to launch on the French market. In
passing, that is why the marketing managers of the French leading companies and groups enjoy the
reports of the CCA either.
Thenceforth, the psychological phenomena of the bandwagon effect and of the memes are at
work. Smaller mid-sized advertising and communication agencies strive to follow the examples the
leading ones give to them implicitly, since the latter are the privileged holders of the know-how in
communication. The managers of those SMEs know nothing on the true causes of the acumen of
those yearly awarded creative directors, art directors, and copywriters who work with behemoths
advertising groups such as Publicis and Havas. That is how all French advertising agencies tailor
their ads, according to the same trends and patterns, as in a concert effect in the end.
For example, even before the early 1990s, all French leading advertising and communication
groups recommended to their customers to focus on what the CCA called “valeurs vraies” (“true
values”) in its reports. The new social trend, thus expected to be actually launched by the leading
communication groups, and not arising from a natural social evolution in the country, was said to
oppose “the already fading values of the ʻannées yuppiesʼ [ʻyuppies yearsʼ] of the 1980s, marked
with careless consumerism and the egotistic pursuit of personal success”. The CCA formally
described those “true values” together as a “comeback to earth and to one’s human roots,” “caring
for nature and concern for ecology [i.e. green activism],” “focusing on goods of consumption
manufactured with raw materials of natural origin,” “eating more fruits and vegetables grown
without fertilizers and pesticides,” and “doing healthier outdoor activities such as walking in woods,
trekking, bicycling, and gardening”. Once reunited, all these notions were also presented under the
generic expressions “the essentials,” and “the fundamentals sustaining the true purpose of life”.
While exposing the real aims of the contrivance, the guiding principles presented as trends to
come “naturally and spontaneously,” actually were the agenda in domestic policy and economy
planned by the State. The goals were to reducing imports significantly to rebalancing a trade
balance dangerously deficient, and to fighting foreign cultural interference—i.e. American—by the
same occasion; never told in such explicit terms, of course. To make the forecast come true, French
social creeds of before the socialist takeover of May 1981 had to be definitively eradicated, and
replaced with progressive beliefs, mores, and values, with an additional emphasis on nature and
green activism. Therefore, from the early 1990s, all large advertising campaigns for goods of
consumption and services based their selling arguments on the “true values” the think tank had
literally enacted. Creative directors and copywriters of the French advertising groups had been all
enlightened in advance on what the masses “wanted”. However, people in those creative teams
ignored totally they were influencing the whole population according to the expectations of the
government, using for this with countless television and radio commercials, posters, ads in
newspapers and magazines, merchandising, and so on. Then the masses could not but adapt to what
they took as a new social trend, whose sole possible origin was themselves aka “the public opinion,”
obviously. They could hardly find any contradictory message, since the media, too, in turn analyzed
and reported the trend; let alone the instructions the State gave to the latter via agents of influence.
Thus, the French advertising industry is acting collectively and unwittingly as an enormous
propaganda machine in the service of the State; and thus, the supply shapes the demand, indeed. The
ultimate cleverness in the method is that the massive propaganda, broadcast and printed along years,
is integrally financed by the French industrial sector, unbeknownst to itself either.
As seen from a wider angle, we see at last the amazing paradox in the method and its effects. On
one hand, the reports are hoaxes for manipulating the masses, those tasked to carry out the
manipulation included, even. On the other hand, the reports become honest forecasts, as the advices
and all associated details transform into realities along years, indeed. One could say, in this sense,
the mindset of those who invented the method is the same as Charles Ponzi’s in the other field of
banking. Any French advertising agency or company that would take the decision not to follow
anymore the advices of the CCA would edge away from the overwhelming social and cultural
“realities” its main challengers created unintentionally together. In other words, the unruly
advertising agency would thus question its own future and sanction itself.
Since its creation 48 years ago, the CCA evolved enough to make for itself a reputation of
reliability and high seriousness by also providing social data and “enlightened” advices in pre-
election periods. The government supplies a sizeable part of those data, social-geographical in
particular, called “geotypes,” via a few private businesses.[400] Below, I provide the reader with
some specifics showing the unique way the CCA describes the French social fabric in its reports.
Since the early 1980s, the French population would be separated in “sociostyles” (same
orthography in French), renamed “lifestyles” (styles de vie) in the 2000s. Each sociostyle / lifestyle
identifies social and character patterns among the French population, largely established from a mix
of social class, typical behaviors, and the alternative urban vs. rural categories, the whole being
described in a manner analogous to that of the founding fathers of sociology.[401] Nevertheless, the
CCA resorts to a terminology of its own, unique in the end. In the early 2000s, it divided the French
population into 14 lifestyles associated with “geo-social classes,” subsumed in four broad groups
focusing on social trends it calls “tendencies”. Then the lifestyles and tendencies are defined
according to a specific approach / method called Attitudes, Intérêts et Opinions–AIO, or “Attitudes,
Interest, and Opinions” aka valeurs / croyances, or “core values / beliefs”. I present them, below, as
translated from French, with the untranslatable words in French between parentheses because I
could not find them in any dictionary.
FIRST GROUP
“Pirates: in a frustrating jungle society, bypass normal channels of small and mediocre
integrations, and seek to become dominant animals in a race for wealth and violence.
Typical profile: young people aged 15 to 34, single, urban, small, and large cities. Study levels:
CAP / BEP.[402] Usually employees and workers, some are still students. Independent or living with
their parents. Modest income.
Self-centered (egotrip): in an anonymous mass society, outbidding others by showing false
appearances of wellness and deceptive signs of power suggesting higher social status, which aim to
imposing respect upon others.
Typical profile: rather men, single, urban. Young people aged 15-24, students … Thirties (25-
34). Some with high incomes, others more modest. Students, employees, workers, or intermediate
professions.
Pretenders: in a lottery society, managing one’s chance to get the expected miracle … Distrust
the conventional training / educational system.
Typical profile: young people, 15-24 especially, and 25-34 from large families with modest
incomes, living in Paris area. Short studies. Blue collar. Still with their parents, or tenants.
SECOND GROUP
Switchers: in a crumbling world, not to assert a monolithic personality and valuing an
interactive flexibility instead.
Typical profile: 15-24 students, and young households with a child, living in Paris area. Senior
managers, liberal professions, scientific professions, tradesmen. Higher studies. Average and
affluent income.
Restart: in a demotivating world, giving back to life with radical innovation.
Typical profile: single young people aged 15 to 24, high-school students, students in higher
education. 25-49 executives, senior managers, SME’s bosses, small homes with children … The most
Parisian … High income … Rather tenants.
Alterners (alternautes): in a world in check, abandoned to capitalism and to the new orthodoxy
in politics driven by the principles of the free market, mobilize energy to reboot an alternative
civilization.
Typical profile: young people and especially 35-49 years old, single or couples with or without
children … Higher education. Senior managers, intellectual and liberal professions, tradesmen,
students. Major cities of the countryside and Paris. Higher income.
Yin Yang: in a world that accentuates contrasts, to enrich one’s life by picking in all cultures and
era’s, fearless of contradictions, which their personality ensures the pacifying synthesis.
Typical profile: couples 25-49 with 2-3 children … Large cities and Paris area … Independant
professions, senior executives, teachers and intermediate professions. High incomes.
THIRD GROUP
Entrenched: in a society that is threatening to our acquired advantages and our existence, to
prepare with one’s peers in order to defend one’s territory and lifestyle.
Typical profile: senior couples aged 65 and over, sometimes 50-64, with another young adult at
home, living in small towns. Retired, a few farmers, they have not studied, have modest incomes and
own their homes.
Resourceful: in a society increasingly unequal, to show up smarter even at the cost of
transgressing rules.
Typical profile: 50-64 and 35-49, large families, with 3-4 children at home. Little educated, they
often are blue collars, their incomes are average and modest. They live in medium-sized cities.
Outcast (apartés): in a world that threatens our quality of life, getting out of the masses by
focusing on intimate privacy (family, friends) and on one’s small daily pleasures.
Typical profile: couples of seniors and young seniors, sometimes still a teenager or a young
adult at home, often retired … Medium-sized cities, are little graduates. Average and lower incomes.
They own their home.
FOURTH GROUP
Formatted: in the face of entropy, trying to master by adopting ready-to-consume models of
thought and behavior.
 Typical profile: families with children. Living in large cities of the countryside. Baccalaureate
standard. Intermediate professions … Average incomes … Owners of their homes.
Synchronous (synchrones): in a chaotic world, sticking to a collective project by promoting
team spirit and a sense of compromise in order to find happiness in mutualism.
Typical profile: 50s with teenagers. Rural towns … Middle and higher education level…
Intermediate professions, managers, liberal professions. Average and higher incomes.
Dogmatic: facing the loss of moral and ethical references, vigorously resist to modernity.
Typical profile: seniors, but also middle aged, without children or with a young adult at home …
Rural or medium-sized towns, especially in the Paris’ area … Owner of their bungalow … Low
level of education, lower average income.
Virtuous: in a world that no longer believes in its institutions and lacks guidelines, find
happiness by spreading the example for themselves and others.
Typical profile: seniors, without children, middle-aged … Living in Paris or its near suburbs …
Retired with past high responsibilities … Graduate level … Average and higher incomes.”
Circa 2010, the CCA changed for 19 lifestyles divided into 3 main categories it named
“Confidents” (41% of the French population), “Corsairs” (25%), and “Marco Polo” (34%).
The reader can assume that advertising, together with the media, make up for the most effective
and fastest carrier of domestic influence in France, superior in this sense to motion picture. In the
late 1980s, I was taught the average French living in a large city was daily exposed to the amazing
number of 600 ads on average, already. As seen from this new angle, advertising and the media
together are a same thing serving a domestic need of the State.
As I was entrusted the management of an advertising agency between 1986 and 1990, I was asked
to advise all my customers to slip a reference to “the Europe of 1992” in their ads and
communication campaigns. The supporting argument to be given to them was as trivial as “talking
about Europe is trendy and good for image”. I just repeated the formulas, verbatim, “jump in the
already rolling train before it is too late because bright opportunities for exporting to the whole
continent are awaiting you, due to the opening of the European borders”. Not a single CEO ever
said “No” to this, of course. Actually, the real and obviously untold aims were to take advantage of
the thus made free opportunity of those ads and media space, paid by those private companies and
groups, to make them media carrying the pro-European Union influence aiming the masses. The
second advantage was, as private companies thus make a promotion of the formal and official
creation of the European Union to come on February 7, 1992, then no one would say it is all about
pro-E.U. propaganda actually done by the French Government. The joining of France in the E.U.
had to be approved by national referendum, and the ruling elite counted on the masses for voting
“Yes,” obviously.
However, in spite of those extraordinary efforts in dupery, 55% of the French population said
“No” at the referendum of 2005. So, on November 13, 2007, upon the election of Nicolas Sarkozy
as President earlier in May, the French Parliament voted a new European Treaty without popular
referendum, against the will of the people.
The instruction to influencing the masses in favor of the joining of France into the E.U. did not
come from the CCA however, but by the voice of my ex-associate who was instructed so by his
hierarchical superior he cryptically named “the brother of Hervé de Charette,” without elaborating. I
do not know which “brother” my associate was alluding to, since prominent politician Hervé de
Charette has several. At least, it is clear that this former Minister of Foreign Affairs has a brother
who was holding an executive position in the DGSE with a specialty in domestic influence at that
time.
I was not entrusted forecast reports of the CCA before 1991, and no longer from 1994 when the
DGSE began to shift me from domestic influence to intelligence operations against the United
States. Notwithstanding, I could notice that all other French advertising agencies continued to
promote the European Union in the ads they created for their customers. Eventually, I learned the
CCA had an equivalent in Germany, created in the late 1970s, whose primary task in the early 1980s
was to promote the notions of recycling and green activism. Mercedes-Benz would have been one
among the first German brands to spread the latter message of influence in its ads outside of
Germany from 1979 onward.
 From the mid-1990s, new “forecasts” began to spread in the French mainstream media, saying
“the French population was about to focus on new values”. The new action of domestic influence
succeeded more or less directly to the “true values,” I earlier described, which indeed had become
trendy since then. The additional values were called “valeurs humaines” (“human values”),
describing as encompassing the notions of partage (sharing) and “être activement citoyen” (“to be
proactively citizen”). This implied to each French people to improvise himself as “benevolent
caretaker of the Nation” in all possible respects deemed serviceable to the French society as a
whole; that is to say, a social vigilante. For the latter reason, everybody were expected to call
“bénévole” (“benevolent people”) or “humain” (adj. humane), and “citoyen responable”
(“concerned citizen”) any individual behaving in conformity with the new trend. People acting
contrariwise were called “personne malveillante” (“malevolent people”) or “sans-cœur” (“heartless
people”) or “égoïste” (“selfish people”). Most remarkably, the word, “citizen” (citoyen) that
hitherto had always been used as a noun in French language was to have a new use as adjective.
Journalists were instructed to replace the adjectives “innovative” and “breakthrough” by
“revolutionary” whenever possible.
Had to be equally promoted the words engagé (committed) as adjective, and rebel (rebel) either
as noun or adjective. In the two latter cases, “committed” and “rebel” were to be given a positive
meaning aiming to qualify people standing by progressivism and who are actively supporting all
values the latter word conveys. Therefrom, began to arise in the talks of a majority of French
speaking on television an unusual frequency of the word “citizen,” newly and exclusively used as
adjective and no longer as noun. The same rule applied to the noun “humane,” newly used as
adjective either. For the record, in French, “human” and “humane” share the same orthography
humain.
Then there was the verb “sharing,” which newly and more largely was to extend to immaterial
and abstract concepts. As for the adjective “committed,” it began to denote left-leaning artists in
particular, such as film directors, actors, writers, and painters. As for the noun and adjective “rebel,”
it was newly denoting flatteringly anyone was standing against consumerism and capitalist values.
All this is still of actuality in 2018, as far as I can see on the Internet and hear on audiovisual
programs.
Some examples of the new uses in the French vocabulary presented above are necessary to gauge
comprehensively the range of this major action of domestic influence that began in the early 2000s,
crossing the threshold of plain and intensive domestic propaganda. Today, working for free is
regarded as a noble and praiseworthy “human quality,” whose new definition is “un comportement
citoyen” (“a citizen behavior”). Then when someone is thus acting occasionally yet in a way
remarkable in some respects, the appropriate qualifier is “faire un geste citoyen” or “un acte
citoyen,” both expressions translating as “doing a citizen act”. More precisely, to have “a citizen
behavior / attitude” or to do “a citizen act” is to be perceived as an exemplary demonstration of high
moral deserving praise. Equally, to do a “citizen act” applies to the case of someone who sells his
possessions to create a voluntary association, and “to be citizen” may mean the same. Then, “to be
citizen” and “sharing” (something with others) are said “to be humane”.
When interviewed by journalists, artists and performers are expected to say at one point or
another they “share a personal feeling or experience with others” rather than they “make a living
with their activities,” which latter perception now is negatively connoted. Overall, the reader would
notice, it is become rare that a French writer, singer, painter, or actor does not use at least once the
verb “share” or “sharing” on his interview. Leftist singers and writers, as other example, are now
called “committed singers or writers,” without it being necessary to specify to which political
current / values they are standing for, as everyone is supposed to understand it. Generally, the uses
of the explicit adjectives, “socialist” and “communist” must be avoided, which explains all bizarre
changes in semantics above.
 20. Domestic Influence & Counterinfluence.
F rom a general standpoint, the most reliable indicator of the importance of domestic influence
in a country considered as “about stable”—which notion is not subject of any reliable index made
public—is its social survey followed by a synthesis of the opinions and preferences of its
population. By “opinion and preferences,” the reader must understand the variety of political and
ideological opinions, state of the religious beliefs and their diversity, and opinions of the population
about foreign countries, or “Who the scapegoat is,” since all ruling elite in the World designate one
to the people at least. Then there are what people think of their politicians, officials, and the police;
what their cultural preferences are (musical, literary, etc.), dress codes, typical hobbies, and what
say and show the media, of course.
A solid background in sociology or anthropology is required to assess correctly what this
gathering of facts tells, to sort out what is locally logical, normal or expected, and what is not. The
observer must be insightful and wary of his natural tendency to see and to judge things not only
from his own scale of values and social middle i.e. kultur, but also from that of judging facts from
the same passionate standpoint that most of us have. Analyzing a country and its society is not about
what we find morally, politically, or religiously wrong and good in them; it is about what is logical,
inevitable, doable yet undone, from a completely dispassionate viewpoint. Why is the population
globally happy or unhappy? Why things that should be self-evident are not, while considering
determining factors that are geography, topography, climate, irrigation, natural resources, population
per square mile? We must also consider which are the neighboring countries, state of the foreign
affairs, rivalries, and current feuds. Among the most important things that most of us generally
forget or dismiss, we find the conspicuous and odd “absences” that the following questions
underscore. “Why this subject, that is regularly discussed in other countries, is never hinted in that
one?” “Why such good or service commonly available in all similar countries do not exist there?” A
few missing things may reveal much: important details the media never report about because
journalists are instructed to shut it up about it. Why, then? The reader must be aware that, generally
not to say always, the media report poorly on other countries beyond disasters, accidents, and
battlefields. They never report about the real causes of the facts and much about their effects;
although they know or understand it all, of course.
Full access to foreign media helps greatly, which implies to be fluent in English. Knowing one
tongue only may be a cultural prison. Watching alternatively television channels broadcast by three
different countries allows to spot absences and odd discrepancies, regional concerns and priorities.
When doing this survey for a few weeks, we realize that certain countries fail conspicuously to
report on certain major news and events that the others feature, and the reverse is true, of course.
Taking my own example, I spent much time in public libraries when I tripped to the United States,
and baffled by the richness of the literary offer in this country, which includes English translations
of foreign reference books, I realized how ignorant French people are by comparison.
A breaking news is so to everyone, in principle. Therefore, we must ask to ourselves “Why is this
foreign television channel so insisting on an upheaval that is happening in another country, while
the others treat it on an equal stand with all others news? That is the kind of question we must ask to
ourselves, and the correct answer often is, “Because this country and its media do not want to
accord too much importance to this breaking news”. Very frequently, the logical explanation to the
latter conundrum is more interesting than the breaking news itself; and there are no more than two
or three possible explanations for the conspicuous absence to exist.
Then we must pay attention to the fact that, wholesome, there are three classes of sources of
information, and of sources in intelligence, consequently, each being attributed a corresponding
value i.e. reliability: “primary,” “secondary,” and “tertiary” sources. The first denotes someone who
witnessed or caused the event; the second is someone who interviewed the first on the event; the
third is someone who quote the second. Most of what the media report is secondary or tertiary
source. As Wikipedia refuses to publish primary sources, lest of propaganda, disinformation, and
self-promotion, and demands that facts be supported by third party references whose reliability is
established on their renown instead, then most of what the free online encyclopedia publishes
actually is tertiary source; secondary source at best. Indeed, the scientist who wants to publish his
finds on Wikipedia is always dismissed, regardless of how serious and known he is and of the
unquestionability of his testimony; he must wait for anyone other than himself to publish about it,
and on condition that the finds be already reported by some major periodical. Thus, Wikipedia
unwillingly censors about all political realities of the World, since the media censor most of them. In
other words, the truth is not that easy to know.
The reader must take notice of the paradox that, in a number of countries, an abnormally elevated
domestic influence or propaganda saves their populations from a richer information that indeed
would do more wrong than good to them. Domestic state propaganda is not a disputable practice in
all cases, actually; for it happens to unite people peacefully more often than not, exactly as religion
did for millennia and still does in some countries today. A large access to the media of the country
next door is not necessarily a good thing, as we shall see in detail in the chapter 28 on French
influence activities in Switzerland. The reader should put himself for a minute in the shoes of a
statesman, and mull over the thorny dilemma, “If I don’t do any domestic propaganda or influence
in my country, then another country is going to take it as an opportunity to do it in the service of its
own interests and agenda, inescapably”. Thus, domestic influence and propaganda becomes
counterinfluence in actuality.
War in the Northern hemisphere in the 21st century is a question of troops not anymore, but of
economy and information. Leaders and governments of this global region no longer invade and take
over countries in full view of everyone, using tanks, canons, planes, rockets, and all those noisy
things. Instead, they do it quietly, stealthily, and insidiously, unbeknownst to the concerned
populations themselves; and they do it with money, using the media, corrupt journalist and others
who are just fooled or true believers, super-agents, and trolls. The sorry consequence of this new
paradigm is that the populations of the thus conquered countries are unable to see that their leaders
are puppets, that their political elections are rigged, and that the mission of their intelligence
agencies is to make sure that things thus last. The even more sorry causes of such happenings are
diplomacy and economic concerns that preceded the definitive takeover, all along. The overthrown
ruling elite and its intelligence agencies were too weak to inform the population on what was truly
happening; they kept the facts secret only because they dreaded the reaction of the population and
the loss of some percent of GDP and points on the stock market. In the end, the latter and the people
they claimed to protect lost everything, and their freedom with it. When this happens, propaganda,
domestic influence, and counterinfluence were abnormally stringent—or weak, precisely—shortly
before one’s country has been taken over secretly through some revolution of palace that submissive
media present to the masses as “a necessary reform”; the difference between before and after being
a sudden and striking change of substance in the messages that the propaganda and influence
convey.
Nonetheless, in all cases and in all countries, popular beliefs and assumptions seldom lay on
sound, rational, and verified premises, for politicians and governments have no other option than to
rely on the call for passion when they address, teach, and rule the masses, owing to all the things I
explained on human vulnerabilities at this point. Therefore, a broad diversity of public opinions and
preferences among a population, is a first reliable indicator of “minimum” or “normal” domestic
influence and counterinfluence. Additionally, as long as a majority is satisfied with its lot, then the
ruling elite not only can resume these discreet and sensitive activities, but it may even raise them to
an elevated degree without running the risk to arouse popular discontent. More to the point, the
masses may be ready to cooperate zealously to the effort themselves. When the prerequisites above
are not met, then we are talking about an authoritarian regime that enforces mass-indoctrination.
Overall, a population agrees to be spied on by its own government in proportion to the quality of
life the political authority guarantees. This observation is not mine; American sociologist Howard
Becker first made it decades ago and defined from it what he calls “concept of commitment” when
he tried to understand the causes of criminality.Becker’s finds and remarks struck me indeed when I
read them by happenstance a few decades ago. From the explanations of this insightful scholar, I
understood instantly they applied alike in the other contexts of domestic politics and domestic
intelligence. For the record, because I am unsure everyone knows Becker’s concept of commitment,
he explains very rationally and logically that the individual who is socially integrated in his country,
and who is enjoying most of the rights and perks that the majority enjoys, has no reason not to
submit to the social mores, rules, laws, and regulations of the society. Otherwise, he would be a
psychopath. Becker further stresses that, reciprocally, the individual who does not enjoy these
benefits has no rationale in abiding these obligations, therefore. Otherwise, he would be an
abnormally inhibited person. Challenging this crystal-clear logic would be obvious irrationality, or
an evidence pointing out a particularly harsh police crackdown ordered by a despotic regime
collectively imbued with a paranoid mentality.
 The French political elite and the intelligence community of France together dread the
spontaneous appearance of determined and fearless activist groups led by would-be-sly, skilled, and
unknown citizens who have an axe to grind, and who would act independently of the parties that are
already under control. We are going to review some additional methods and preventive measures
that the French intelligence community currently relies on to avert the latter eventuality.
In France, as in a number of other countries including some claiming to be democratic and free,
most voluntary informants and contacts who are acting as first sensors in domestic intelligence
actually are unaware to be so. They are not subject to the conditions of recruitment and existence of
conscious agents, as described earlier, which explains in part the paradox. On one hand, they will
never know they are spies, to the point that some among them dream to be spies according to their
romantic perception of this activity. On the other hand, it is true that their profiles fill all the criteria
of social vigilante. Where is the line between spy in domestic intelligence and social vigilante, then?
The social vigilante leads an about normal life simply because he does not need to know any
sensitive information and never he will be told any, beginning with who and which aims he is
serving in reality; that is all. The French literal translation of “social vigilante,” easy to do, is
justicier social. However, the latter term is very rarely heard in France because it denotes rather
pejoratively someone who locates somewhere between the individual obsessed with absolute justice
and who has no qualms with mingling in other’s business and privacy, and the frank crackpot. There
is another translation of “social vigilante” in France today, frequently used in the media yet rarely
by the public, but it implies a political perception of the role that overwhelms the notion of Western
impartial justice to the point of substituting it. I presented and explained in detail this term and its
associated vocabulary in the last pages of the previous chapter, which for the record is, “committed
citizen”. So, the exact name of this new category of spies I just presented is “committed citizen”.
Then, with respect to this particular context, “to work in intelligence” changes for “to do a citizen
act” or “to have a citizen behavior”. Until a few decades, we notice, the SDECE and then the DGSE
named the spy of the same category “honorable correspondant,” translating literally as “honorable
correspondent”. Therefore the evolution in semantics from “honorable correspondant” to
“committed citizen” is obviously of a political nature when applying to domestic spying.
Most such committed citizens are true believers co-existing with a minority of opportunists who
understand or believe their commitment will be rewarded in some way one day. Then they all have
in common to commit to some cause or to an extreme form of patriotism, true or pretended, but
which overwhelms their privacy, and many among them behave much as police on duty do. Their
passionate talks at times exalted about abstract concerns, disconnected from their dailies and true
needs, often betray their secret activities because they have not been trained in spycraft. However,
as they see about everything through the prism of their commitments from which they draw a
meaning to their lives, this mindset makes them resemble actual employees of some intelligence
agency or public body, yet too impetuous to be so and too zealous to be French police who, in a
more weighted way, tend to see things with suitable hindsight. They just act, and they derive from
this action a feeling of superiority over all other people of their social class who are fleeing or
yielding to inhibition. Legit officials concerned with similar questions, paid by the State for, love
those social vigilantes and praise their zeal, which attitude come as a first reward and very possibly
the only one the latter will ever have. Those committed citizens have become increasingly numerous
in France in the last two decades. Remarkably, they did not exist at all in the 1970s and until the
early 1980s; they would have been taken with concern as agitated individuals and in these earlier
times. Actually, my American reader knows well the psychological profile I just described, already,
but in his country it is that of the activist gone in crusade to impose his ideas on everyone because
they are of a crucial importance and self-evident in his view.
The mesh of domestic intelligence I described in the chapter 13 happens to frame those
committed citizens as readily serviceable and zealous assistants, either physically in the field or
virtually on the Internet, or both. From that moment on, someone in the police, the Gendarmerie, or
an intelligence agency, does a bit of monitoring on them to assess their potential usefulness in
something. In passing, this is also how, exactly, an activist abroad is targeted in view to give to him
a hand in his endeavors, unbeknownst to his own understanding, so that it will be impossible to
prove eventually he is indeed an agent of influence or a troll in the service of a foreign power.
However, the citizen behavior of those true believers and opportunists may not necessarily be
thoughtful enough to be useful the way they figure. The latter remark means some happen to be of
interest in reason of their irresponsibility, precisely, in the conditions I explained in the chapter 3,
while presenting the trick of role-playing games in intelligence. In any case, the “chosen ones” serve
well domestic intelligence or influence; unwittingly since they alone must bear the full
responsibility of their actions to make that of the intelligence agency inexistent, which is still better
than deniable.
Below is a fictional yet typical scheme inspired by countless true others, as they happen regularly
not to say frequently. It relates to one of those committed citizens, expected in this instance to create
a group of influence entirely by his own. I insist on saying that what is going to be explained
applies about the same way in the case of the spotted would-be-activist in a foreign country; I will
come back on this other application in the chapter 25 for this good reason. When so, the action
expected from this type of unconscious agent is about agitprop, disinformation, or black
propaganda, in view to make a profit of the minority influence phenomenon, I described earlier. I
start from the stage at which the committed citizen, and the activities of the small group he leads
together are already being monitored discreetly by a team with a specialty in domestic influence; or
by a single legit agent, possibly. Therefrom, the concerned intelligence agency may opt for one of
the three following options.

1. To keep the activities of the group under monitoring in order to see if it will go
out quickly as a straw fire (most frequently) or if its leader has enough charisma and
determination to make it last, and grow eventually.

2. To help discreetly the group unbeknownst to all its members, leader included, if
the cause they are voicing matches a concern relevant to the current agenda in
domestic influence or counter-influence. In the affirmative, this will be seized as an
opportunity to make the group passes for the sole initiator and responsible of the
action of influence intended.

3. To interfere discreetly with the group in order to discredit it, in case it is rather
likely to undermine current concerns and objectives in domestic intelligence, an
ongoing policy of the government, or the public order. As example, the group is
armed with convincing arguments, and it is acting aggressively on the Internet
against some party for which a domestic intelligence agency or its team has planned
another type of hostile action or a manipulation that must yield greater gains on the
long term.

Then a domestic influence team may be tasked to help discreetly the group for the two possible
reasons, below.

1. The aims / cause of the group are considered interesting and positive, and in line
with the current and general mission in domestic influence and agenda, or else, at a
greater scale, the aims / cause are just integral to the current political agenda of the
State. Additionally, the group can be supported, influenced, or manipulated accordingly
and with all suitable discretion, in order to make it appear in the eyes of the public as a
minority, influential and determined, and sole responsible of the action of white
propaganda to come.

2. The objectives of the group are considered noxious, yet they can serve an already
planned mission relevant to black propaganda aiming to discredit / demonize a
particular ideology or a stream of similar ideas that is on the rise in the country.
Additionally, the group can be collectively used as a lure for attracting, identifying, and
then manipulating other toxic individuals who for now are still isolated and
unidentified. The latter case, frequent in France nowadays, can otherwise be described
as that of the group / minority whose opinions are politically unorthodox, yet likely to
collect interest and to spread in certain existing minorities of dissenters that remain
passive and difficult to identify for now. Typically, those toxic individuals are Muslim
 fundamentalists, far-rightists, libertarians, proponents of American-style values and
capitalism, and other political dissenters who are highly literate, charismatic, and smart
enough to collect the interest of numerous people in the country and to proselyte them.

Below, is a possible action corresponding to the option 2a (inspired by an authentic mission of

domestic counterinfluence).
The group is one of teenager students, and its leader is the father of one of them. Together, they
endeavor to raise the awareness of other students about the problem of students who resort to
prostitution to pay for their studies and housing expenses. The action of the group has been
consistent and persistent over time, largely due to the determination of the leader who has the
profile of a grown-up committed citizen in his forties. Coincidence makes that the claim of the group
matches a current concern of the government. Therefore, the action of the group could be suitably
supported by giving access to the mainstream media to it. This action must lure the masses to
assuming the group is representing a large consensus in the country: “the visible part of an iceberg”
asking for a new regulation “to make the scandal stops”. This type of mission of white propaganda,
very common, is called “campagne de sensibilisation,” or “awareness raising campaign”. This
method in domestic influence, generally effective, is to warm up the public opinion before the
passing of a forthcoming bill. It also aims to suggest to the masses that they, alone, asked for this
kind of initiative from the government, which by the same occasion provides the latter with an
opportunity to enhance its popularity.
Many if not anyone would find the chosen example above laudable or even just normal and no
nonsensical. However, the reader must know that the government enacted countless much less
popular laws and regulation by resorting to the same method, sometimes with the intelligence
agency creating the group, organizing popular rallies, or even demonstrations truly led by conscious
agents of influence. Alternatively, fake incidents and staged events involving agents posing as
troublemakers are suitably covered by journalists, in the aim to arouse the indignation of the masses
about a particular issue no one complained about until that key moment. When this happens, often
the real aim of the government is to justify the passing of a new regulation or law in emergency, in
anticipation of the happening of a real identical trouble that cannot be controlled so, therefore. In
other words, the goal of this type of mission is to fix a legal loophole that some official or someone
else spotted at some point, without the public being indignant about the measure taken, since it is
justified by the media hype of an abuse that is staged in reality. Of course, the alternative is to seize
the opportunity of an authentic but minor similar incident, and to exaggerate its harmfulness to
public order.
An overwhelming majority of legal restrictions in France has been enacted and enforced by using
the method and its variants above; that is to say, each time by eliciting the silent or enthusiastic
approval of the public thusly.
The intelligence agency will help the group unbeknownst to it and to its leader, by asking to some
contacts or agents who are journalists to interview their members, and then to devote large media
coverage to their action. Previously, the team of this agency has been looking for one teenager in the
group who would have enough charisma to take over the leadership of the adult committed citizen.
This detail in the mission is justified, first, by the fact that using a teenager to defend the cause will
best soften up the public. Second, it is easier and faster to influence and to manipulate a teenager
than an adult who, in addition, may possibly seize the opportunity of his popularization for other
sakes eventually or at the same time. Third, the public would never even dare think a teenager could
be an agent of influence acting in the service of an intelligence agency; regardless of what the cause
may be and generally.
Therefore, the existence of the group is reported nationally on a major television channel and thus
made a news of importance, and the echo chamber phenomenon follows naturally. The expected
effect of the hype is that other people in the country come to swell the tiny minority and transform it
into an influential minority. The possible importance of the latter effect must be relativized however
because it all depends of the type of cause. In addition, true or fabricated news often collect an
interest among the public that is not potent enough to give rise to a cause, regardless of the hype.
The latter impediment comes as one additional reason to the French intelligence community to have
contacts in various non-governmental bodies, agents of influence, and other committed citizens who,
in such cases, are asked to woo small minorities and ordinary people around them to join
demonstrations on planned dates. Therefrom, a single but well media covered demonstration of
3,000 people minimum may suffice to transform a cause into an issue at a national scale. Then the
mainstream media alone have the power to suggest to the masses the existence of a national
consensus that does not exist in reality. Again, nobody ever goes on polling people to check whether
the media or a polling agency are telling the truth.
Thereupon, a group of representatives in the Parliament formally declares “to be deeply touched
and concerned by the demand of “the public” for the government to react against this incitement to
prostitution among young students in the country”; and it “promise to legislate forthwith and
appropriately”. Then the representatives submit a bill, which actually was drafted earlier already for
a vote at the Parliament—very possibly by the GOdF, since it is one of its true tasks to suggest new
laws and regulations, wherefrom its strong representation in the lower chamber of the Parliament.
Below is a second example corresponding to the option 2b (this time drawn from a series of
authentic missions of counterinfluence with the same cause).
A group of older students posing as exponents of libertarianism is proselytizing in a university. At
this point, the action of the group proved consistent and persistent over time, largely due to the
resolve of its charismatic leader, a student himself. Therefore, a counterinfluence team backed by
one or more specialists in counterintelligence is tasked to monitor the group. In addition, the team
studies the profiles, pedigrees, and Internet communications of certain members of the group who
collected particular attention for various reasons. The first objective of the team is to determine
whether those students might be run or manipulated by a hostile foreign country. Additionally, the
physical surveillance of the leader and of the most aggressive members is completed with photos
and video records, assuming they must be “carded S” because of the potential harmfulness of their
political claims to public order.[403] The objective of the intelligence agency is either to lure
members of the group into rallying an official rightist party, or else to demonize them by association
with another minority preaching a far-rightist ideology.
The second option is chosen, and the corresponding mission is to set a smear campaign, possibly
supported by a major television channel because a group of this kind is generally pleased to catch
the attention of a potent medium and displays enthusiasm on such an opportunity. Thereupon, their
interviews are sabotaged before their broadcasting, at the post-production stage. In a nutshell, this
type of contrivance consists in adding to the video-reportage a voiceover sounding dramatic and
with a touch of cynicism (i.e. paralanguage) and commenting truncated video segments selected for
their depreciatory nature. The segments are insisting on details, speeches, and moments of
awkwardness that poorly serve the image and credibility of the interviewees. All this is easy to do,
indeed, first because those people are inexperienced in expressing themselves in the media,
typically, and they have not been taught on the methods that journalists use to trick experienced
politicians. Additionally, a scholar or police officer posing as specialist of the study of extremist
movements is interviewed to comment on the group of libertarian students, in order to draw the
attention of the audience on “a concerning rise of extremist movements in the country”. This type of
video-reportage is generally broadcast on prime time on France 2 or M6 television channels,
popular in the country and the most frequently used in missions of domestic influence and
awareness raising.
Below is a third and last example corresponding to an alternate version of the option 2b (also
inspired by an authentic mission of counterinfluence).
We start with the same libertarian group, as in the previous case. This time, the intelligence team
has been instructed to organize a neutral media report on the group. The goals of the mission are to
infiltrate the group in the expectation to control it, and then to make it a permanent lure for
attracting, identifying, and then influencing / manipulating other people having a favorable opinion
on libertarian ideas. The choice of the objectives is justified by an estimate in domestic intelligence
saying that libertarianism is gaining a foot in the country in reaction to an increase of restrictions on
civil liberties, coupled with a dwindling purchase power in households (this is a true concern in
France that motives a number of current protests in 2019).
In any case, snitches and agents infiltrate all unwarranted political or religious groups in France,
or / and certain of their members are recruited as sources under varied types of threats, of the kind I
described in the chapter 3 on recruiting and training. Of course, the Internet activities of those
groups are closely monitored, first by relevant specialized cells of the Gendarmerie, due to the
potentially hazardousness of their political / religious stances to public order. Then the goal is either
to shattering their group or, on the contrary, to make their existence publicly known in order to
occupy a place[404] that should not be left free to a foreign party or to sincere, smart, and
hardheaded activists.
 All influence and counterinfluence missions presented above are subsumed in a generic
intelligence mission called “noyautage,” or “infiltration and sabotage from within”.[405] The reader
discovered a true example of a major mission of noyautage when he read the affair of the regular
Freemasonic lodge GLNF in the 2000s, in the chapter 16 on intelligence and Freemasonry.
Dissenters and extremists who prove skilled enough to defend themselves effectively against their
monitoring and noyautage must face increasing opposition and force until they renounce and
separate, or else cooperate. For the skills and cleverness that they display in their resistance gives
rise to further concerns about their harmfulness and capacities to rally more sympathizers,
inescapably. So much so that on the long run, they must face ever-rising human and technical
capacities that, at some point, are the same as those ordinarily used to catch dangerous criminal
gangs, terrorists cells, and foreign spies; incommensurate to their real harmfulness in a number of
instances. Reading the three true anecdotes of the chapter 14, the reader has seen the readiness of
the French intelligence community to resort to extraordinarily aggressive measures to reach its aims,
regardless of the harmfulness of its targets. To “let it go” is never an option, and the word given to
everyone in French counter-intelligence is “Time is on our side”.
The latter explanation offer to me the opportunity to explain the perception the French
intelligence community has of rightist politics and capitalism in France, and to present some of its
most striking actions against it. To begin, the French Government indeed places indifferently
American-capitalism and libertarianism, about indifferently, on a same class of threats as
Anarchism, far-rightism, Nazism, and Muslim fundamentalism. The degree of potential lethal
harmfulness of each of these ideologies and belief cited above varies greatly, of course, to a point
that makes them further irrelevant to each other, a priori. However, the reader must take into
account the important distinction between Muslim fundamentalism that does not necessarily connect
to terrorism; and Muslim extremism that does closely connect to terrorism. Then the particulars of
each ideologies and belief matter less in the absolute than the likelihood of their spread in the
French society, if nothing is done against it. To exemplify the latter point, the possible spread of the
Muslim religion in France poses a problem of cultural nature, essentially, harmful to the French
scale of values connecting to the notion of French national identity; whereas the possible spread of
American-inspired capitalism is harmful to an ongoing political agenda. The types of the two threats
are different either, but they point to a same concern as national identity and politics in France
makes one today. Therefore, the two threats claim identical efforts in monitoring and
counterinfluence with respect to the numbers of committed people and believers. Now, the reader is
going the see the facts exemplifying my explanations, beyond his belief, doubtless.
Still in 2017, and for more than a decade at that time, there was a fake French rightist political
party by the name of Liberté Chérie (Dear Liberty), which was standing by values taking up on
those of the hardliners of the U.S. Republican Party mixed with libertarianism. For a while, the
leader of this very small party was a relatively young woman, and the spouse of an intelligence
officer of the DGSE; which fact was not told to the followers of this party, obviously- Dear Liberty
had the originality to pose as an association and not really as a political party, simply because its
mission was not to evolve toward an objective that should have been normal and logical in ordinary
circumstances. Two reasons justified the creation of this body. The first was to make it acting as a
lure for attracting and then diverting French sympathizers to actions that are pointless in the facts, in
order to make them idling harmlessly. Of course, Dear Liberty never received any worthy media
coverage, beyond posts on Internet blogs and forums under control of a same team tasked to
monitor American-inspired rightist activism. The second was to cut the grass under the foot of a
foreign country, i.e. the United States, in case it might be interested in the creation of a similar but
real and serious party in France. Additionally, there are three fake French libertarian Internet forums
named Libéraux.org, ExtremeCentre.org, and Contrepoints.org, each connecting to Facebook pages
and other Internet URLs. All three connect simultaneously to the French intelligence community
and to Russian influence activities in France; that is to say, “state trolls” as they are popularly
known today.
The main objectives of these fake American rightist and libertarian online hubs are the same as
these of Dear Liberty: to lure sympathizers into joining either a moderate right-wing political party
that truly is liberal or the official far-rightist party of Marine Le Pen. Anecdotally, the most popular
of these three blogs, Libéraux.org, has been co-supervised for a number of years by an agent of
influence and specialist in computer hacking, currently columnist for Atlantico.fr news webzine.
The latter publication poses as a French-speaking media specialized on U.S. political news as seen
with a would-be-favorable stance that truly is not either. Additionally, this agent is currently (2019)
working on a discreet promotion of the far-leftist YouTube TV channel Thinkerview, a Russian-
French propaganda mill, whose rising success in France since 2018 and close connections with the
DGSE, simultaneously, makes it worthy to be presented at the end of the next chapter.
Still in 2017, ExtremeCentre.org French libertarian blog was apparently run from either
Switzerland or the French département of Haute-Savoie, near the Swiss border.[406] Then there are
two other phony libertarian-leaning Internet forums, both posing as specialized in sci-fi literature.
The particular purport of these forums, run by the same team as the fake libertarian forums, I just
presented, is to monitor the new releases of French-language sci-fi and fantasy books because these
genres are often used as media carrying political messages. Additionally, the members of these
literary forums are physically monitoring French, Belgian, and Swiss book fairs and exhibitions on
the sci-fi and fantasy genres, including video games.
Then there are a small number of French libertarian-leaning and pro-American conservative
Facebook pages, created again to cut the grass under the foot of any sincere activist. Overall, the
primary objective of all online media named and alluded to above is to occupy durably the places of
libertarianism and American-style capitalism in France, as in the French-speaking regions of
Belgium and Switzerland. Nearly all and possibly all those forums, blogs, and pages / accounts on
social networks actually are maintained and daily fed by a same counterinfluence team, whose busy
members numbering a dozen of men and women in 2010 also act physically in the context of
domestic espionage missions on right-leaning independent groups, rallies, and demonstrations in
France. Deductive reasoning suggests, the staff of this team has been steadily growing since 2010,
though not in an important measure.
Recurrent characteristics found on about all those fake online media are the Statue of Liberty, the
U.S. Marines symbol and motto “Don’t Tread on Me,” the statue of Atlas in front of Rockefeller
Center in New York City as passing reference to Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, and pictures and
quotes of U.S. libertarian and conservative leading figures. Then some of those media feature
pictures, quotes, and references relating to economists and thinkers Murray Rothbard and Friedrich
Hayek. Remarkably, the insistence on the two latter personages actually aims to avoid as much as
possible to present Ayn Rand because this author is the central and truly influential figure of
American Libertarianism; indeed, Ayn Rand is a bête noire of the French and Russian
counterinfluence teams in French-speaking countries. Then we find references to Roman Catholic
thinkers Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, featured to present a misleading introduction to
American Christian religion.
Actually, this deliberate and insisting amalgam of U.S. Conservative principles with
libertarianism aims to precipitate the demonization of the former, and to distort its perception to
French-speaking people who are not fluent enough in English to inquire on the subject by
themselves. This particular explains why there are no other similar online media presenting in
French language more representative figures of the American rightist thought and capitalism, such
as Adam Smith, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, and
others.
For a while at least, between the late 2000s and the early 2010s, the same group of
counterinfluence agents associated with Philippe Silberzahn, a DGSE offensive counterintelligence
officer with a specialty on the United States. Philippe Silberzahn is son of former Director of the
DGSE Claude Silberzahn, it is useful to specify. Anecdotally, but interestingly to the American
reader, possibly, from the 2010s at least, Philippe Silberzahn associated with U.S. Marines Corps
officer and PhD. Milo Jones in a way suggesting a defection of the latter, as he currently “lives in
Europe” in an unspecified location.[407]
Actually, in France as in French-speaking countries and regions, all people and body of
individuals posing openly as activists or just exponents of American capitalism can be considered
by default as French and Russian provocations, simply because all those who are sincere and
authentic can hardly resist very consistent attacks of all sorts until they renounce or are recruited
and handled as lures, following some entrapment.
The French-Russian relentlessness against all American rightist politics in French language on
the Internet looms large in preventive counterinfluence. The DGSE, backed by the Russian SVR
RF, together went as far as to purchase and to create small publishing houses with specialties in
politics and religions, serving the same mission as above. This action is much costlier than trolling
online, obviously, even if less expensive than before nowadays because of a significant drop of the
costs of publishing books in recent years. However, since the year 2000, the French intelligence
community, and Russia to an extent that I am unable to size up, invested money repeatedly with
amounts sometimes in excess of $100,000, only for preventing or sabotaging the French translation
and release in France of a single book! The latter fact testifies of the importance France and Russia
accord to the concern, knowing that the goal does not extend beyond exerting surveillance and
control over cultural trends that the two countries perceive as hazardous to the current French leftist
orthodoxy.
Thus, the DGSE, very possibly in cooperation with the SVR RF, acquired the control of a small
but well-known publishing house in Paris for the sole motive to holding an informal exclusivity
over the publishing in French language of libertarian novels and essays, and the works of certain
economists and thinkers. People in France who attempt by their own to publish books of these
categories must face all sort of disagreements and smear campaigns, which may go as far as stalking
and social elimination. These offensive missions are executed by teams mixing agents of the DGSE
having specialties in static surveillance and shadowing, and immigrants of Serbia with unclear
qualities, but who act as henchmen, typically. At best, the beleaguered would-be-publishers are
demonized by association and are approached for this by agent provocateurs, and agents of
influence posing deceptively as exponents of the American-style right wing and capitalism.
Notwithstanding, all such books, including those that the DGSE and the SVR RF publish via
front businesses, are made difficult to find out in the shelves of French bookstores, and the
mainstream media never report their releases. On one hand, the remaining difficulty to the censors is
to justify the unavailability of rightist political literature on the merchant website Amazon. On the
other hand, the DGSE in particular has a stake in selling those books online via these front
publishing houses because thus, it is in capacity to identify all their purchasers, including their
postal addresses, email address, and even phone numbers, as we shall see later.
I have no difficulty understanding the reader may find my explanations above unexpected or even
difficult to believe, but I guess he will be able to check by himself on the Internet the authenticity of
the no less surprising facts that follow.
French-speaking readers did wait for fifty-four years before they could read a French translation
of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s famous novel and decade-long bestseller in the United States,
otherwise translated for long in numerous countries. This French-Russian censorship even impacted
the French speaking regions of Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland. All attempts to translate Atlas
Shrugged in French were successfully sabotaged, first by the SDECE, and eventually by the DGSE,
since the first attempt to translate and publish this book in 1957 by Jean-Henri Jeheber aka J.H.
Jeheber, a small Swiss publishing house in Geneva, defunct since then. France’s fierce censorship of
Atlas Shrugged in French language thus lasted until 2009, when a pirate translation came out of the
blue as a .pdf file, made freely downloadable on the Internet under its original title in English. As
countless French-speaking people illiterate in English craved a French translation of Ayn Rand’s
best-known novel, the pirate version was downloaded an innumerable number of times around the
World, thus making it an unofficial bestseller. Yet no French media or even a blog ever reported the
latter event, except one in French-speaking Canada.
The same year 2009, the DGSE, in its eagerness to do something against the catastrophe of this
clandestine publishing, cooperated with Russia via a woman agent living in Paris, and an American
citizen, contact of the Russian intelligence community in the United States. Together, indeed they
bought at once the rights to translate, print, and publish Atlas Shrugged in French in emergency. To
say, the deal was stricken within the month following the release of the pirate version, certainly not
at a good bargain, therefore. However, Atlas Shrugged is one of the longest novels in the World, for
the record, and so its translation in French, officially ordered by the publishing house in Paris, I
alluded to earlier, took two years. The second French translation and publishing were suitably
softened for a French public supposedly left leaning. Upon its effective release in 2011, the
publishing house presented it, verbatim, as “the official and correct French translation of Atlas
Shrugged,” under the new title La Grêve (The Strike). Overall, Atlas Shrugged was the thorniest and
most expensive novel to censor in France to date, for a total cost amounting to several hundreds of
thousands of dollars, in my estimate, which France shared with Russia, apparently.
The reader will certainly find other evidences of the similar affair of the French translation of The
Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a Robert A. Heinlein’s sci-fi novel first published in the United States in
1966. Why France attempted to censor a novel by Heinlein, knowing that this American author is
not a political thinker?
 The plot of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a lunar colony revolting against rule from Earth.
However, the French intelligence community and some members of the French Communist Party
saw in it a promotion of individualism written by an American pamphleteer. Actually, what worried
them the most with this novel was the single epigram in it, “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free
Lunch”. Moreover, the formula repeats several times in the plot as the rallying cry of the lunar
rebels, reduced to the cryptic acronym “TANSTAAFL”. Therefore, the French intelligence
community—the SDECE, certainly—instructed the French editor[408] of The Moon is a Harsh
Mistress to no less than changing entirely the substance of its plot in its French translation.
Translator Jacques de Tersac was asked to change in particular the disputable epigram for the exact
opposite “Un Repas Gratuit est Supérieur à Tout,” re-translating in English as “A Free Meal Is
Greater Than Anything”. The corresponding acronym was changed accordingly for “URGESAT”.
It did not take long before the boldest sabotage in the French history of censorship created a stir
in the literary middle of the time, reaching the United States, too, inescapably. Yet undisturbed, the
brazen French censors stood firm on their impossible translation for several years, until The Moon is
a Harsh Mistress was translated again, faithfully this time. Nonetheless, the wrong was done,
already, and it had been so clumsy enough to be denounced as the work of a totalitarian country, on
a same stand in the performance as the Soviet Union and China; quite far from France’s claims of
democracy and freedom of speech.
Until the second half of the 19th century, censorship in France was open and official, as it was in
many other countries. Works deemed seditious or of bad moral simply were not printed any longer
by law, and their authors were sentenced in courtrooms, heavily fined, and discredited enough to
force some of them into exile in Belgium or in England.[409] This happened to famous French writer
Gustave Flaubert upon his publishing of Madame Bovary, and to Charles Baudelaire for his book of
licentious poetry Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). Note in passing that neither of these two
writers was a foreign agent of influence. Still today, Flaubert and his works are remembered very
rarely in the mainstream media due to his rightist ideas, only; whereas the popularity of Baudelaire
was revived for his lustful prose, and not for his exquisite French translations of Edgar Poe that
truly made him famous. Victor Hugo had emigrated to Belgium, then in Jersey, and finally in
Guernsey for political reasons against France, yet French and Russian agents of influence since then
recycled his Les Misérables countless times as an ode to the class struggle.
Official censorship has two major drawbacks. People hardly tolerate it because they see it as an
expression of despotic authority, and state censorship has only produced the opposite of its expected
effect to date, highly effective publicity. That the State comes to be publicly indignant about a book
or a song, this will be all benefit to its author because he will see his work selling tenfold better than
if nobody had said anything. This phenomenon, I presented summarily in a previous chapter under
the name reverse psychology,[410] denotes the recurrent tendency in Man to flout conventions and
taboos, for the record.. If everything is done to make a book disappear, then a large number of
people will want to find it out and to read it entirely, at least to know what the wrong done is
exactly. The French Government and the intelligence community learned this at their own expense
more than once. Censorship since has been renamed “political correctness,” and it is still relatively
effective for the moment. In the chapter 9, I explained its true cause and origin, and how well it
drives people to inhibition instead of fighting. French spies delight of political correctness and even
laugh about it, I can tell the reader.
In passing, reverse psychology did not apply to enforced political correctness until very recently
when U.S. President Donald Trump broke the taboo, and repeatedly thereafter. We could call it the
“Trump Effect,” since it has indeed the virtue to be effective against political and ideological
influence relying on peer pressure. Many since approved and followed Trump, as people just need
the example of a credible person to express their true feelings and opinions, for once. As an aside, as
my wife is Asian, together we yielded to the Trump Effect long before it appeared for the first time,
and laughed more than once with, it each time she called me, “White beak” and “Colonialist,” and I
“Lemon face” and “the Yellow scare,” reciprocally. I heartily recommend the exercise as a good
therapy against political correctness, inhibition, thought suppression, and censorship, of course.
Now, I describe a remarkable French method of manipulation aiming to get rid for good of
undesirable intellectuals, scholars, and others seeking to publish their unwarranted thoughts and
opinions. It simply consists, first, in having them signing a 70 years term literary exclusivity
contract with a respectable publishing house used as attractive bait for the circumstance. Thereupon,
a first thousand copies of the book is printed, yet the work is not presented nor reviewed in any
newspaper by any literary critic, and its copies are made difficult to find out in bookstores.
Following the arranged failure, the publishing house tells the author there will be no second
printing, owing to disastrous sales, and adds it has no intent in publishing any other book he might
write anytime soon; that is to say, never ever. Yet, the literary contract between the author and the
publishing house remains legitimate and active, thus barring by law the fooled author from trying
his luck with another publishing house. As for the 70 years term of the contract, it is the legal length
of time before a book falls into the public domain in France; to cap it all with a cynicism suitable to
the circumstance.
In France, one would not expect to publish a book without the tacit approval of the French
intelligence community, and more especially of its specialists in counterinfluence, lest of the
intrusion of a foreign spy acting under the cover activity of writer. Therefrom, the reader can figure
easily no French publisher would publish this book, he is presently reading. As I know firsthand by
which contrivances the French intelligence community “nips a book in the bud,” I describe in detail,
below, how the process unfolds, taking myself as exampleI describe in detail, below, how the
process unfolds, taking myself as example; if I were an unenlightened would-be-author.
First, I would send a synopsis and a copy of the table of contents to a publishing house, regardless
which one because I guarantee the same result would reproduce in all cases. Today as for the past
century, a large majority of people having membership in the French liberal freemasonry, the GOdF
in particular, runs the major French publishing houses, it should be said beforehand. My initiative
would earn me the immediate interest of the publishing house, considering the subject and the sole
acronym “DGSE”. Therefore, it would reply by asking to me to send one chapter, as a sample,
because someone would have given a phone call to “his buddy John” who happens to be concerned
with barbouze stories, espionage, funny diplomacy, realpolitik, and all those hush-hush things. In
substance, the conversation at telephone would have unfolded thusly. “Hi, Bob. How’d’ you doing?
I’m calling you because a guy coming out of the blue wants to publish a book on the DGSE. It looks
serious … yeah, at first glance, I mean. But, uh, I wish I had a few guarantees because I’d be unable
to say whether what the guy wrote indeed is publishable or not. You follow me?”
Bob the good buddy has membership in a masonic lodge, most probably, and beyond this he can
be several possible persons: a police officer of the SCRC, DR-PP, DGSI, or any another intelligence
agency. Of course, Bob would give a hand to a brother publisher, on condition he would obtain a
copy of the synopsis, table of content, and of my letter with my name and address on it. Upon
reception of the material, John would ask for more because it would “sounds interesting”.
Shortly after my sending of a chapter, I would receive a new answer marked with the same warm
enthusiasm and eagerness, asking for more chapters “because what I am telling in my manuscript is
promising”; and thus, I would have to send the entire manuscript in the end. In the meantime, its
complete facsimile would have landed on the desk of some commissioned officer of the DRSD
because John would have been advised friendly at some point “not to involve in the affairs of the
DGSE anymore”.
Finally, I would be called by telephone to set an appointment with the manager of the publishing
house at his office. This would sound quite promising to me, of course, and I would easily picture
myself as the author of a bestseller to come. On the scheduled day while talking in person about my
book with the head of the publishing house in his office, he would call at some point one of his
employees in charge of proofreading, to ask to him to partake in our meeting in view to define a
timeline for the publishing to come. I would not possibly know this employee actually would be an
officer of the DGSI in plain clothes; and he would have two colleagues waiting for his call in
another office nearby. They all would be officers of the DGSI and not of the DRSD because it has
not the right to carry arrests and to interrogate civilians, still less to order my custody pending my
trial before a justice court. If I were a full-time employee of the DGSE under military status, then
the DRSD would have requested the assistance of the Gendarmerie to proceed the same way. My
prison term would not be long in any case, since my book would not be published and its content
thus remaining a secret, but I would be socially eliminated upon this first official sanction.
I did not do any of the above, of course. Instead, I self-published my book, and Amazon did not
call me for a meeting. The process went on smoothly, as if for a cookbook, and I left France for
years, anyway. All I must bemoan are no professional proofreading for my English that is certainly
not spotless, and the little media hype a decent publishing house would certainly handle for me.
The reader understands that the boom of self-publishing launched in the World from the United
States is a thorny problem to specialists in charge of watchdogging the book market in France, and
to the intelligence community of this country in general. Still at this time in 2019, the issue cannot
be solved by any legal provision, since it is about state censorship in truth. Therefore, for wants of
discreet and friendly arrangement between the United States and France on literary censorship,
Amazon is a prime target of the latter country and of the DGSE in particular. I explain the specifics
of the unofficial feud, as I know a little about.
The CNIL, a body I presented in a previous chapter, is continuously investigating Amazon in
France (i.e. Amazon.fr) for the sole and true motive of hassle. The DGSE has its own sources inside
the bureau of Amazon in France, already; and even one occupying a leading position at the regional
headquarters of Amazon Europe. The latter provisions in monitoring, usual in France with all U.S.
companies having activities on the French soil, grants this agency the privilege to be informed at
once of the releases of “undesirable books” that any French would-be-author may self-publish with
Amazon KDP. Amazon KDP is the branch of Amazon in charge to publish Kindle eBooks and self-
published printed book such as the one the author is reading, for the record. Additionally, this
provision in domestic spying allows the DGSE to access data on Amazon customers and partners in
France, including on the money they earn with this company and the true names and addresses of
the self-published authors, thus denying them the option to remain anonymous under a pen name.
On one hand, I assume with confidence, people working at the Amazon headquarters in the
United States know well all the latter facts. On the other hand, this company knows certainly it can
do nothing against this unpleasant fixture either; exactly as the U.S. Embassy in France cannot do
anything to prevent its infiltration by informants of the DGSE and the DGSI in its premises, as
earlier explained in the chapter 14. As a matter of fact, on October 6, 2011, when Amazon launched
Kindle in France, this company resigned to poach a manager of Fnac to head this branch. Fnac is a
French book retail chain, and the main competitor of Amazon in this country, for the record.[411]
Thus, Amazon knows well, implicitly, this person cooperates as agent in place in the service of the
French intelligence community; the DGSE in a case as this one, as I know firsthand. Therefore,
Amazon equally presumes, I believe, its head for Kindle France provides all intelligence on its
activities in France not only to the French intelligence community, but also to Fnac its competitor,
most certainly.
While putting myself in the shoes of Amazon in the United States for a minute, I understand what
the reason is for hiring knowingly a snitch at a managerial and sensitive position in my company.
For any specialist in counterintelligence who would find himself in a similar position would say “It
is always better to know who the submarine is than living in a state of permanent doubt”. Amazon
was right to opt for this option therefore. Otherwise, the loyal executive this company would have
hired would be permanently harassed in various ways, including his relatives, until he would resign
to “cooperate”. Additionally, the harassment would extend to the entire staff of Amazon France
under the form of continuous and petty annoyances of all kinds; I mean with greater aggressiveness
than the DGSE and the French Government are displaying against this American company, already.
For a number of years, Amazon France is indeed harassed collectively by various French public
bodies, and is penetrated by other snitches at varied levels of its hierarchy, down to its storage and
shipping facilities, for the three main reasons that follow.
First, comes the aggressive commercial policy of Amazon about retail and shipping prices, which
indeed annoys the French Government. Second, there is the question of free access to self-
publishing. this company currently offers to French people; that is to say, in all French-speaking
countries by extension, where the DGSE is also struggling to make disappear every books this
agency finds annoying—as previously exemplified by the documented case of the Swiss politicians
who wanted representatives to declare, if necessary, their membership in a Masonic lodge. Third,
there is the huge books’ choice Amazon offers on the French soil, which no French company could
ever challenge. Besides, France is a staunch proponent of domestic protectionism, and she hardly
tolerates that foreign companies do business on her territory when they compete successfully against
their local rivals.
The French Government sanctions and fines regularly Amazon in France through administrative
bodies including the CNIL, with amounts at times in excess of two hundred million dollars. Amazon
France is under a permanent investigation carried on by several public bodies simultaneously with
regard to income tax, social security fees, protection of the privacy of French citizens, and the work
conditions of its employees. To which come to add repeated labor union claims, strikes, sabotage
attempts in its facilities, and an ongoing campaign of black propaganda that is officially carried on
by front non-governmental associations. In truth, it does not matter whether Amazon is providing a
living to numerous people in France and is paying much money to the French Government. The
latter would largely prefer “this Yankee company gets the hell outta of here, and shuts down for
good its fucking French regional selling platform to leave Fnac handling the French online book
market alone,” to that effect and in spirit. I am not yet finished about French dirty tricks against
Amazon, as I am familiar with the subject for several reasons including a personal one.
Agents and officers with a specialty in counter-interference resort commonly to an array of tricks
and methods on Amazon.fr to disparage and to make disappear from public view novels and essays
they find undesirable. They do this because of the contents of those books, or lest their already
beleaguered authors could possibly access some notoriety in France or abroad; and they are ready to
go to lengths with this that might surprise the reader, once more.
For some years, Amazon did not seriously check its customer’s accounts; this allowed the team of
specialists and trolls in counterinfluence, I presented earlier, to create dozens of bogus Amazon
customer accounts with as many nicknames, under a few real identities. Using those accounts, they
posted negative comments to books and authors they targeted. Amazon had not yet implemented a
routine computer program in its system allowing to adding automatically to a reader’s comment the
mention “Verified purchase”. The loophole was taken as an “exploit” offering to the team of trolls
the additional opportunity not to have to buy a book before commenting on it.
At some point, Amazon spotted the abnormal recurrence of the latter malpractices, and it reacted
to it by enforcing stringent rules limiting one Amazon account per customer only, verified with a
corresponding credit card number. Amazon also created the sentence “Verified purchase,” thus
allowing other customers to spot dubious reviews. The team of counterinfluence agents coped with
the latter adjustments by resigning to buy as many copies of books as negative comments it wanted
to publish. The method is still of actuality in 2019, but it has the disadvantage to them to having to
request the cooperation of agents, contacts, and even relatives and friends to give real names to
Amazon, a U.S. company, which thus knows who the French trolls are, where they live, and even
who their accomplices are. The impediment to the DGSE obliges it to limit drastically the number
of its agents and trolls tasked to tamper with the customers and sales rank system of Amazon,
therefore. Moreover, Amazon struck back against the nuisance by surveying the comments its
customers publish, and by un-publishing from authority all those that appear to be patently
dishonest or suspicious; and even sometimes by simply cancelling the accounts of their authors.
Still at this time, the team of counterinfluence agents and trolls is left with the last option to click
anonymously a number of times on the button “Found this helpful” normally associated with
comments, in order to make the most negative ones going up in the popularity ranking system of
comments. For the trolls know that ordinary customers tend to trust comments that have the greater
number of “Found this helpful” approvals.
Now, as I have been personally concerned by all those troll’s attacks as a target myself, I can give
the enlightening example, below.
In 2014, I self-published a short book in French language, I titled Manuel de Contre-manipulation
(Counter-Manipulation Handbook), whose subject was how to spot manipulations and to dodge
them whenever possible. I signed the book under the pen name, “Emilien Hulot,” but the team of
counterinfluence agents identified me thanks to the snitches the DGSE runs in Amazon France. As a
result, the trolls published a first one star harsh review on this book, and then no less than 12
“anonymous customers” clicked “Found this helpful” within the following weeks; whereas my
Amazon publisher account informed me that Amazon.fr had sold eight copies only of this book in
actuality.
Today, and for a few years, the team of counterinfluence agents enjoys greater power and
enlarged possibilities, which allow them to resort to new aggressive methods for disparaging and
thus censoring certain books sold on Amazon. When they spot an undesirable book ranking in good
position in sales as #1 in a subgenre, typically, they manage to find out a would-be author and help
him write and publish a “me-too” version of this book in emergency, each time with and oddly
similar title and jacket’s design. Then the hired author and his book are hyped on radio stations,
television programs, and other online media. Not coincidentally, but somehow clumsily, the
biographies of the authors of the me-too books reveal in a majority of instances they are ex-police,
ex-gendarmes, ex-military in the special forces, and even ex-spies, simply because they assume
these qualities endow them with greater credit!
In all cases, and as a rule, not only the mainstream media never cite and name undesirable books
and their beleaguered authors, but also these references prove impossible to find out on any French
website, blog, forum, up to Facebook pages. This novelty pinpoints for the reader the power of the
French intelligence apparatus and of censorship on the Internet in France; owing largely to
HUMINT alone, as the French surveillance of the Internet relies essentially on an effective control
of public and private Internet access providers and on hacking techniques.
I tell a second and last example about book publishing, French censorship, and Amazon, in which
I was the target again.
In 2013, I published under another pen name an essay on intelligence in French language. This
book presents its subject from a generalist viewpoint, and not with a focus on the DGSE. To say, in
its 276 pages I name the DGSE 14 times only among other intelligence agencies. This book became
an instant success in France; six years after its release, its sales rank on Amazon.fr is still hovering
between #1 and #14 in the “Services secrets” (intelligence services) sub-genre. About 10,000 copies
sold since, although no medium ever just cited its title on the French-speaking Internet to date, and
despite all others on the same subject, the French mainstream media presented at least once. Along
years, I understood the media blacklisting of my essay extended as far as to small Internet websites
and blogs ran by independent individuals, down to Facebook pages. In five years, two or three
people for once debated about it on blogs and on one Facebook page, yet all these posts and their
few comments disappeared from the Internet in a few days. The same phenomenon happened with a
YouTube video, whose author presented the book and went as far as to read aloud an entire chapter,
thus making a 55 minutes video. However, one month later, as the video was reaching 1,400 views
and more than a hundred of comments and thumbs up, the account was shut down without any
warning “upon request of the holder,” YouTube specified. An intelligence agency, I identified as the
DGSI, published its own video on this book on YoutTube either, presented anonymously by an
individual speaking with a strong Arabian accent and doing his best to pose as a disturbed person; in
the expectation to demonize it by association, therefore.
The reader would possibly ask, “What the DGSE might do against the publishing of the present
book and its author?”
First, according to the French law, the people and organizations I name in this book have three
months only to sue me for libel or defamation following the date of its public release. If nobody
does anything during this legal period, then the DGSE, the Ministry of Defense, and the French
Government have several other options. The first is to press Amazon or the U.S. Government or
both to withdraw the book from publication under whatever pretense. Then, all the other
possibilities are relevant to counterinfluence and dirty tricks. Attacking me by challenging and
questioning openly and publicly the content of this book is a tricky option because it is highly likely
to result in publicity for me, instead, as I explained earlier. Besides, a large part of my explanations
is hardly deniable, and can be crosschecked and confirmed true with a number of supporting clues
and evidences, publicly available. Then publishing negative criticism on it on Amazon, even just on
the quality of my English and style is risky either because it may rise suspicions of slander from
readers knowledgeable in intelligence and French spycraft.
Actually, the DGSE is left with the resource to publish books on itself and in English, too, via its
ex-agents and executives, since it never did this seriously to date; or else this agency may translate
in this tongue some among the numerous it already published in French. Emphasis would be placed
on cases of cooperation between the American and French intelligence communities, as an attempt
to implicitly dismiss the truths I reveal in mine. The edge the DGSE has over me is its capacity to
find out a cooperative publishing house in the United States, plenty of people who would post
praiseful comments and even journalists and media that would do so. With all those credentials I
cannot enjoy, those other books would discredit mine implicitly over time and by the sole force of
their number, as most people favor appearances at the expense of facts. Therefore, the latter option
is going to happen with a chance percentage higher than 50%, in my own estimate and from
firsthand knowledge of the mindset this agency collectively has, and of the policy in active
measures.
I enjoy the privilege to have been on both sides of “the fence,” if I may put it that way, which
allows me to tell the following anecdote backing in time when I was on the “safe side”. Its interest
lays on its revealing of the method used to blacklist a book and its author on conventional media.
Circa the years 1997-98, I worked under the cover of Chief Editor for a professional monthly
magazine on computer graphic design. Guido Gualandi,[412] the official Publication Manager and
my ex-manager in intelligence activities once popped in my office as if for an emergency, and told
me in a low voice, “Dominique, a guy, whose name is Daniel Ichbiah, will probably call you on the
phone today or in the days to come. Decline everything he might ask you. Okay?” That was all, but
in the DGSE, people quickly use not to ask questions such as “Why?” I had never heard of Daniel
Ichbiah before,[413] and so, thrilled by personal curiosity, I “googled” his name. Thus, I learned
Ichbiah is a French author and journalist who at that time had just published a biography of Bill
Gates then CEO of Microsoft. I would not tell more to the reader about the why of this obvious
blacklisting; the more so because this man never called me, actually; and I had “no need-to-know”
more, regardless of the sensitivity of the matter. However, I can specify, many other chief editors in
France were asked to act the same as me on that day. Since then, I know in which words all those
agents, trolls, and committed citizens are instructed to blacklist and to stalk their targets.
As last anecdote on Amazon, since 2011, the DGSE or another agency, possibly, trained several
agents in book publishing and typography for the sole sake to exert control over the very specific
market of French books whose copyrights expired. The ultimate goals of the odd mission is not to
leave any opportunity to a foreign company to win an exclusivity over French classic literature; and
more especially to thus protect the interests of certain French publishing houses that make one of
their specialties to republish those works, Gallimard publishing house first. The provision even
justified the creation of a small business by the name of Arvensa, located in the 15th arrondissement
in Paris. As the latter company was not alone to republish those free-of-copyright books in Kindle
eBook format in particular, French trolls published devastating comments on all books the
competitors of this company published, thus leaving it with a monopoly over the specialty in the
end.
In the late 19th century, when official and legally enforced censorship disappeared in France,
media and book publishers became de facto agents of the State and unofficial collaborators of the
domestic influence and counterinfluence apparatus. One century later, in the DGSE, the perception
of this form of cooperation and interaction between the population of ordinary people, intelligence
activities, secrecy, need-to-know, and proceedings is sternly summed up and justified with the Latin
formula “It is sui generis,” meaning “It goes without saying”. Many odd and sometimes concerning
things are thus justified in this agency, putting into complete ignorance many of its people on many
issues and oddities for years, forever in a number of instances.
Since the 20th century, that is how authors of texts deemed licentious, contrary to morality or to
the political agenda of the moment, prejudicial to good diplomatic relations, subversive or presented
as hazardous to public order, cannot be edited anymore and meet closed doors, unexplainable
silences, and other quizzing smiles supposedly understood, as it frequently happen in instances of
the sort. Even some previously published books that justice had not officially censored were not
printed again, in spite of their good sales in some instances.[414] The fear of exclusion from “the
inner circle of the establishment” entailing economic consequences evolved toward zeal in political
orthodoxy, and to hopes for reaping additional benefits with the publishing of biographies of
prominent personalities in return. A behaviorist system of “punishment / reward” thus settled and
addressed people who could know no more than what the dog of Pavlov did beyond the cryptic
formula “It’s sui generis”.
Nonetheless, ever-faster means of information dissemination across borders is easing the
globalization of cultural exchanges, and influence and propaganda naturally follow. For a few years
now, the mass-digitalization of books and the coming of self-publishing backed by social networks
and cross-platform messaging on smartphones together have seriously dented the power of states to
enforcing control over information and arts and entertainment. Since then, France can barely do
more than to divert the attention of the public from works and their authors she can no longer make
disappear. That is how it works for the moment, but for how long, still? The next counter-measure a
number of governments have in mind is to split the Internet into different national and regional
Intranets. Actually, this project is already underway in the E.U. and in Russia, and it is operational
in China, forcing people who want to know what is happening beyond the borders of their countries
to use hackers’ tools and tricks, sometimes banned by law, in this endeavor. Internet search engines
such as Google struggle to drive their users back to the countries of their IP addresses, no matter
what. For how long parrying state censorship with Virtual Private Network–VPN will work? These
restrictions over information are eerily reminiscent of an earlier time, when the German occupying
forces in France jammed the BBC and harshly sanctioned those who attempted to listen to it.
Domestic influence and counterinfluence in motion picture are trickier because of their high costs
challenging even the capacities of major World powers. The DGSE organizes one-to-one courses on
influence and propaganda in motion picture, whose teachers are psychoanalysts specialized in these
branches. Most of those sessions focus on certain cultures, countries, political ideologies, and even
religions; for no “pupil” would have a culture large enough to spot influence messages and cultural
references of all countries and systems of beliefs in the World. The thoroughbred agent with a
specialty in political influence in Western countries may easily fail to spot and to understand a
subtle but devastating allusion in an Indonesian movie, while many Muslims unenlightened in
influence catch it instantly.
Thanks to the learning of fundamentals I present in this book, specialists in counterinfluence can
execute their missions, yet they must be intellectually able to spot second degrees sentences,
metaphors, satyrs, symbolism, negative or positive allusions, criticisms, double entendre, and
second readings / subtexts. Let alone innumerable historical and religious facts, personalities, and
their easy distortions. At best, apparent discrepancies may awaken the attention of the specialist
when they seem irrelevant to the formal meanings of plots and stories. When this difficulty arises,
they must refer the matter to knowledgeable specialists, analysts, and chief analysts in intelligence
who thus make themselves dependable in an additional fashion. Would a film critic do this; and can
he count on this kind of assistance, anyway? That is why those specialists are individuals typically
endowed with a vast general culture, polymaths oriented toward social sciences rather than hard
sciences. A majority studied psychology and psychoanalysis in universities and / or in the DGSE.
Additional training courses in advertising and marketing are greatly helpful to those who do not
have any experience in these fields. Most read Freud and often refer to this pioneer of the study of
symbolism. This culture, therefore, is not the same as that of a film critic who rather needs to master
the history of cinema and to know by heart everything about film directors, actors, score composers,
etc. As far as I can see, film critics remain mediocre at spotting influence and hidden messages in
films—or? I note, people who work in the motion picture industry, including specialists in film
music, very often prove savvy and say enlightening things when they deliver their takes about their
trade and on films.
Contrary to the film-critic, the expert in counterinfluence knowledgeable in motion picture, and in
about all genres in culture in general, consequently, must focus his interest on the substance and
certainly not on the form. In case of doubt about a possible hidden meaning / subtext, he inquires on
who did it, which company produced it, distributed it, broadcast it, the personal life of the scenarist,
his known political stance, and so on. Propagandists do not make propaganda exclusively, and
honest artists sometimes introduce propaganda in their works. Knowing everything about classics
films, Casablanca, Ben-Hur and the many others is good for people who write papers on motion
picture, but of little help when trying to identify influence in films. Doubtless, these first facts make
the reader wondering about “How influence in motion picture is possible, then, if few specialists
only are able to identify and to understand it?”
The answer is, there is a big difference between to be seeing underlying messages or subtext in
motion picture, and understanding how and why it was done, exactly. Consider the followings
among basics in advertising. A cardinal rule in advertising says, the name of the product in a
television or radio commercial must be repeated threefold at least for the viewer to memorize it; or
else written once and said twice when on screen is about the same. The unenlightened viewer hears
it three times each time he watches a same commercial, and then he hears it many times over weeks.
Yet he does not have the required knowledge to pay attention to the exact number of repetitions, and
so to explain it unless he is particularly perceptive. Considering the viewer remains receptive to the
influence of a commercial, even though he does know it is all about influencing him in his choices
and tastes, then how could he not be influenced by a propaganda message in a television report or
documentary; especially if he holds as a tenet that these other kinds of motion picture “are true and
free of influence, obviously”?
Before embarking on research and analysis on a possible influence action hidden in a film or its
second degree when there might be some, one must have a solid culture to spot and to explain its
real aims, in addition to a good knowledge on current realpolitik. As good and simple example, if I
slip in this book, as right now, a passing reference about Tom Sawyer and the story of the fence,
without taking the trouble to explain it, implicitly therefore, that is because I know in advance the
reader is American or English. I would not do this, if ever I wrote a French version of this book, and
so for a French public because I know that a minority only of French people would grasp the
passing reference, culturally foreign to a large majority of them. That is why I would allude instead
to the fable of The Fox and the Crow by Æsop for the same effect to occur; knowing that, in France,
a majority of people credits the latter epigrammatic tale to 17th century’s poet Jean de La Fontaine.
So, although most French never heard of Æsop, yet they would understand I am alluding to a
particular way to be fooled by the sin of pride.
My point with the cultural comparison above is to explain that large masses of people can see and
understand effortlessly what others in other countries may completely fail to do so. What’s more,
they don’t even pay attention to what they don’t understand; they simply see it as an unimportant
fantasy of the filmmaker and thus completely fail to understand important notions. The interesting
conclusion to all this is, a message of influence slipped in a film or television program can influence
people in certain countries selectively, and not at all those who are born and live in the others.
Therefore, influence and propaganda can be about culture sometimes, but influence and propaganda
are all about culture, and about kultur. I exemplify this otherwise by using references in movies
everyone knows.
The film 2001: A Space Odyssey is a prowess in motion picture, very difficult to parallel in its
making still more than half a century after filmmaker Stanley Kubrick made it. It has known a huge
and enduring success, and it is a reference that inspired numerous filmmakers, and even advertisers.
However, a tiny minority only stays unable to understand the meaning of more than thirty percent of
its sequences and passing references addressing a minority of polymaths in truth. Most people who
enjoyed watching 2001: A Space Odyssey say typically, “I did not understand everything in it, but I
loved it”. The remark applies to Star War, this time with an entirely different genre of subtext that is
completely irrelevant to the context of the plot everyone understands. It is still worse with the TV
series The Prisoner, in which the subtext connects closely again to the “first reading” of the plot. A
tiny minority of people who enjoyed watching The Prisoner—ten percent and less, most certainly—
can see and understands correctly its subtext, stuffed with enough cryptic references to write a book
on them.
Back to the example of the fence of Tom Sawyer, if I make a movie whose scenario takes up the
guidelines of this short story in an entirely different and modern setting, in which the naïve boys are
adults in a particular social middle I choose on purpose, or else who stand for a political opinion in
particular, then I have in mind a real aim that is discrediting this minority by mockery. As a would-
be-filmmaker thus making propaganda, I would dishonestly present this film under the false
pretense of “a comedy I made for the sake of entertainment and financial profit, only”. For I know,
of course, that my passing reference would make a suitably enlightened audience laugh heartily at
the expense of this social middle, minority, race or whatever. Yet this film would make nobody
laugh in France and in a number of other countries, doubtless, and it would be an amateurish piece
of propaganda, therefore, whose real aim would not be reached anywhere else than in English-
speaking countries.
The story of Robin Hood in particular was taken up countless times in literature and cinema, as
formal aim serving a real political aim that, I guess, the reader knows as everybody in the Western
World and in all classes of the society. However, the reader possibly ignores that making a profit of
the guidelines of the story of Robin Hood is much older than leftist activism, and that it inversely
served rightist activism! Actually, there is no original story or book of Robin Hood because he is a
legendary character, a myth indeed, whose first appearance in English folklore remains unclear to
date. Its oldest surviving text is a ballad titled Robin Hood and the Monk, written in the 15th
century. Quite remarkably, it is even the same in its moral meaning as in the other story of Swiss
archer William Tell. William Tell actually is not exclusively Swiss because we can also find his
story, identical, in the much earlier Norse mythology, and later in England again. Notwithstanding,
in Switzerland, the meaning of the story of William Tell, though oddly similar to that of Robin
Hood, inspired individual freedom and the abuses of centralized political power in this country.
I do not present real examples of political influence in motion picture as I did with book
publishing because the reader will find them exemplifying the themes of some next chapters.
Counterinfluence in France largely means “counter-American influence,” since French politicians
and the French intelligence community perceive negatively American culture, capitalism, set of
values, and “the American way of life”; they bemoan “they are overwhelming” in this country,
already. However, I present, below, some other particular provisions, methods, and tricks that will
surprise the American reader, again.
The DGSI and the DGSE commonly encourage their most zealous contacts and informants in
domestic intelligence to use American flags and cultural symbols as baits for deceiving and
identifying American sympathizers, but first and foremost in order to occupy the place and not to let
it free to the latter, just in case. Thus, it would not be excessive to say that about all French shops,
whose owners make a conspicuous use of American flags as decorative items, are much likely to be
regular informants and contacts of the French intelligence community. Otherwise, I can assure the
reader that any sincere American sympathizers in France who expects to found a club, association,
or any business activity that directly or indirectly make the promotion of American values and
culture exposes himself to countless forms of petty harassment until he resigns to “cooperate
spontaneously” with the “local authorities”. That is for the “stick” or “punishment”; the “carrot” or
“reward” being spontaneous and enthusiastic local media-hype to the concerned activity and its
owner. That is how those people become informants, as they are not necessarily extremist far-leftists
and anti-Americans who decided overnight to make a vocation of thus deceiving exponents of the
American way of life and capitalism. Domestic influence transforms so into “enforced political
orthodoxy” because, from the standpoint of specialists in influence, the French masses can hardly
resist the appeal of American culture and the freedom of thought and speech the United States
advocate, of course. Anti-Americanism in this country is far from to be as widely spread as it is in
neighboring Germany. To the reader who may possibly express his disbelief about the latter
observation, I remind to him the chronic distrust of French toward their ruling elite for the past
thirty years, largely accountable for their favorable perception of the United States, further
supported by the collective remembrance of the American landing of June 6, 1944, still yearly
celebrated in great pumps in these 2010s. I even go as far as saying, if ever “the Americans” landed
again in France today, the civilian population would oppose very little resistance if any. Indeed, I
doubt a single shot would be fired against an American soldier. Quite on the contrary, a majority
among the French population would welcome them with great expectations, and a few thousands of
committed far-leftists with no popular support, only, would turn themselves into terrorists against
“the American invaders”.
The impossible hypothesis above is not a conceit of mine, but a question I heard several times
indeed on a couple of major French television channels in this year 2019. Implicitly, this means a
quiet minority and even possibly a majority in France are hoping to be freed of something or
someone. However, the euphoria would not last because French feel culturally ill at ease with
freedom and capitalism, and they use for too long to serfdom, absolute monarchy, enforced Roman
Catholicism, enlightened despotism, imperialism, socialist economic planning, and synarchy of late.
If ever “the Russians” occupied France officially tomorrow morning instead, no one would fire a
single shot against any of them either. The masses would simply resign to the situation as they use
to, and a large majority would even cope well with it, as the period of the German occupation
epitomized the attitude.
Today, the old dual-purpose method in deception Chief Police Fouché designed in the early 19th
century applies the more so and in particular to American sports, leisure, clubs, and associations in
France. See the following authentic and recent anecdote exemplifying this point to varying degrees
and in a form the reader will find dumfounding.
For decades, a father and his daughter who both were domestic spies of the DST, and then of the
DGSI have been heading an American country dance club, first as a bait for attracting and taming
American sympathizers living in a large French region located South of Paris; the districts of Yonne
and Seine-et-Marne to be precise. Second, lest an authentic American immigrant launch this kind of
activity independently and out of any control in domestic intelligence and progressive political
orthodoxy. In addition, the DST made for the father—recently deceased—a peculiar reputation and
an incredible légende, thanks to the active cooperation of the local media. Major regional newspaper
L’Yonne Républicaine in particular reported repeatedly, this man was “Major John Guint of the U.S.
Army who had settled in France for good in the aftermath of the WWII”. This was untrue; real “fake
news,” we should say today. More to the hoax, the same newspaper went on publishing that “the
Major” was no less than “local Military Attaché to the U.S. Embassy in France,” fake news alike. In
reality, “Major John Guint” was the son of a French woman married to an American expatriate who
had settled in France for good before the WWII. Eventually, circa 1944-1945, John Guint, then a
young teenager, attempted to enlist in the American armed forces that had just landed in France. For
this he argued, since his father was still an American citizen, then the U.S. Army had to grant him
this right. However, the U.S. Army did not, simply because Guint had not yet reached sixteen at the
time; besides, the war was over. The rebuttal disappointed and frustrated the boy, yet he never
resigned in his endeavor, sincere, to become an American soldier when he grew up.
As Guint was obsessed with this idea, years later he began to tell around that he was a “WWII
American veteran with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel of the U.S. Army”. Some more years later,
he retracted to propose a more elaborate version of his légende by self-awarding the rank of “Major
in the 2d Squadron, 6th Cavalry Regiment,” exactly. In addition, he credited himself as being “one
of the liberators of the French city of Troyes in 1944,” and a “spiritual son of General George S.
Patton,” to cap it all. To make sure everyone would believe all this, “Major Guint” managed to find
out a fancy military uniform he covered with all sorts of medals and pins, which he wore with a
cowboy style military cavalry hat. Indeed, “Major Guint” in his well-ironed uniform and with his
aviator-style Ray Ban’s was a spectacular character who impressed upon countless French people on
occasions of WWII commemorative ceremonies held in rural Burgundy.
All this seems funny, ridiculous, and even moving, possibly, yet unlikely to be taken seriously by
anyone in the United States. However, no one, journalists included, seemed to notice the sleeves of
the uniform’s jacket were too short to the size of “Major Guint” formerly “Lieutenant-Colonel”. As
unbelievable as the reader may find it, local newspapers continued on publishing verbatim
everything “Major Guint” could possibly say and claim about his erstwhile glory. Local journalists
were arguing in their defense that nothing nor anyone ever questioned the past of “Major Guint”. In
point of fact, even the American Embassy in Paris turned a blind eye on the hoax that thus resumed
for several decades, as strange as it is because the U.S. diplomatic and military representations in
France could not reasonably pretend they never knew.[415] The incredible story of “Major Guint” is
not yet finished, and I must still explain its true reason.
In 2011, when “Major Guint” departed then aged 82, his daughter took up the torch, claiming she
is “Honored Captain of the 2d Squadron, 6th United States Cavalry”. Some years earlier, she
claimed she was “Master Sergeant of the U.S. Marines Corps,” already, and she said her unit was in
Florida. To prove all this to everyone, “U.S. Officer Guint Jr.” proudly bore on the collar of her
jacket the insignia of her regiment. Nonetheless, in the French countryside where she lives, who
could remark the insignia in question is a commemorative pin anyone can buy at the National Air
and Space Museum, Washington D.C.? Anyway, still today, local French newspapers continue to
honor and to praise the deceased “Major” and his living daughter the “Captain” on official
occasions of the yearly anniversary of the Liberation of France by the U.S. troops. Now, see the
hidden and more serious flip of this fake U.S. coin.
Since the seventies and until his death, “Major Guint” had made for himself a reputation of
excellence as agent provocateur in the French intelligence community. The RG, the DST, and even
the SDECE used him numerous times to put the loyalty of recruits to the test, and to check the
loyalty of countless entrepreneurs, local officials, and would-be-politicians. If “Major Guint” was an
authentically disturbed person, his daughter “the Captain” is not, in addition to being now a regular
DGSI agent in domestic intelligence. In the early 2000s, the DGSE hired her in the frame of a short
counterespionage mission, in which she attempted to trick a French national believed to be a CIA
agent, and to hire his mother as informant by the same occasion—the would-be CIA agent in
question was myself, actually. Otherwise, “Captain Guint” has always been on the payroll of the
French Ministry of Education as teacher in a primary school, which public body, it is useful to
remind, has a notorious inclination for hiring left-leaning and mentally fit candidates; certainly not
someone claiming a stance in favor of American values, and to be captain in the U.S. Marines
Corps!
Perhaps the reader heard of Jean-François Revel, prominent French journalist and writer who
passed away in 2006. While praising regularly American values and capitalism, Revel was elected
member of the prestigious Académie Française however, home of the greatest French patriots and of
many spies since the 18th century. At best, Revel was a secret “diplomatic channel” between France
and the United States for a while; somehow, as economist and writer John Kenneth Galbraith is
rumored to have been between the United States and the Soviet Union, I mean.[416] As an amusing
aside, “Jean-François Revel” truly was but an assumed name of Jean-François Ricard. The interest
to be found in the latter detail is that not so coincidentally, perhaps, the French mainstream media
present Matthieu Ricard his son currently and implicitly as no less than “leading authority on
Buddhist religion in France”. Not coincidentally again, but in reason of unprecedented French
political correctness in favor of China this time, Matthieu Ricard refrains conspicuously from
uttering names and places such as “Dalai Lama” and “Tibet” on each of his innumerable
appearances on the French television.
As I often heard in France, “Like father, like son,” and daughter, too, as the case of “U.S. Marines
Corps Captain Guint” further exemplifies it. Who are those deceivers, exactly; and how are they
seeing themselves in the back of their minds, truly?
“Major Guint” lost his bearings at some point and in addition to his regrets. That is probably why
he was also known as a heavy drinker with a fancy for American whisky. As about his daughter, I
could hear and see with my own ears and eyes his daughter the “Captain” does not at all indulge in
similar self-delusion. Jean-François Ricard aka Jean-François Revel was a true believer, possibly,
and his son, too, in my own opinion. Then, are those people and many others of the same ilk lying,
or do they sincerely believe what they say?
 The answer is, this is of no importance because the same psychological phenomenon of self-
identification to another person, real or imagined for the circumstance, often is expected. It
reproduces with agents, as I explained in the Part I of this book. That is why they all should be
considered as agents in the service of the French intelligence community nonetheless, regardless of
what they could say or think about it. They are unconscious agents in intelligence in the best (or
worst?) of cases, and my explanations on recruitment applies to all of them, fully. Some lie all the
time and they even have fun with it, whereas others understand they have a stake in lying. Some are
haunted by doubt permanently; some others believe sincerely what they say, and one must never
forget this may extend to fanaticism. As I had to deal and sometimes to cope with a score of agents,
I found in several of them a recurring particular pattern I missed to mention earlier, or I just took for
granted my reader would understand it. Field agents, I mean, whose trade is to lie constantly,
therefore. I seize the opportunity to make myself clear about this point once and for all.
Those bizarre agents seem to be “two different persons” at the same time in each such instance,
with about the same characters expressing themselves simultaneously. I am not alluding to double
personality disorder, therefore: a myth in psychiatry, anyway. Neither am I alluding to the agent
who seems to be another person all of a sudden because his case officer instructed him so. One is an
immature person, and he authentically is. This is visible in his demeanor and on his face, and up to
his tastes, fancies, and what not. Altogether, he is not the kind of person one would take seriously
nor dread, and he has to himself to appear as sympathetic and pleasant on desultory conversations.
The other is harder to define otherwise than the antithesis of the first. He is a down-to-earth and
much more mature person, responsible and self-willed, who sometimes surfaces above the other. He
does not really hide behind the first, and so it is not about deceiving others on purpose with some
dark scheme in mind. In fact, these two characters in one rather seem to cope with each other in a
disorderly and clumsy manner, so much so that that the first dominates the outside, while the other
inside takes back the control of the situation each time things are getting serious. This person with
his two characters struggling in him still does not seem to have enough self-control to be dangerous
in some way, all on the contrary. It is easy to believe the two talk to each other in thought, but
neither it is about schizophrenia. The unique bad point in all this is, this kind of spy generally is a
con artist in his soul who, somehow, cannot help himself with it. For he often fools and crooks
others in a way that clearly was not intentional at the inception, and he does it as if in perfect
accordance with the definition of the Freudian slip, i.e. “an unintentional error stemming from
unconscious feelings”. Beware this sympathetic character, for he is a bad guy deep inside, whose
kindness, sincere at times, actually has the lower hand. That is why he may easily and sincerely
deny the wrong he really did to others. Nobody trained him to be as he is; he was this double
character before he was recruited, due to this peculiarity, precisely.
The method of occupying the place in French counter-interference is not recent in its principle. It
has been a common practice in France, where Fouché, again, invented it in the early 1800s. I guess
it extends to religion since about 1873. The SDECE and then the DGSE have commonly recruited
priests, pastors, rabbis, imams, and Buddhist masters, and this agency even “creates” some “from
scratch,” if I may put it that way.
The same so particular method applies to values and cultures of countries other than the United
States and extends as far as to activities as apparently innocuous as Buddhism. I can testify that
pagodas and other Buddhist monasteries in France, especially when Thai, are closely monitored and
always infiltrated by snitches of the French intelligence community, exactly as Muslim mosques are.
The main cause of this unexpected scrutiny is Thailand is known as an ally to the United States.
More to the surprise, certain French intelligence executives are convinced that Tenzin Gyatso, 14th
and actual Dalai Lama is an agent of the U.S. CIA. In July 2017, the French intelligence community
launched a smear campaign against the Dalai Lama, whose mainstay is a book titled Le 14e Dalai-
lama un imposteur agent de la CIA (The 14th Dalai Lama, an impostor agent of the CIA), officially
written by an unknown individual named “Ojeda Mari Victor”.[417] This move, I strongly suspect,
might rather be justified by a French will to keep good relations with China, as it is prompt to
chastise countries that welcome officially the Dalai Lama on their soils.
Dress code, fashion dress, and clothing accessories have been potent media of influence in all
times, countries, and cultures; today, more than ever. The messages they carry are defined by a
compound of their implicit purposes and practical usefulness, styles, colors or their combinations,
shapes and customizations, symbols and texts printed or else on them, and by the manner to wear
them. Therefrom, those messages may communicate a particular country, region, culture, political
stance, religious belief, or some social claims. In all countries, a large majority uses clothes and
much codified associations of clothes and fashion accessories as media for communicating silently
and implicitly with others, before uttering a single word. In this large majority, we find a “sub-
majority” who use the means only to fulfill a need for belonging to it. In this sense, we may call
those clothes and their thus codified associations “social markers”. It was the reverse until the 1960,
we notice, because there was not much diversity in dress code before the 1970s, even when we
crossed borders at the time. We name “dress code” or “fashion” these precise and abstract patterns,
and then everyone knows dress codes and fashion are changing constantly. Then there are countries,
regions, and culture in which a dominant dress code or fashion may remain the same for long
periods and for several possible reasons.
Anyone wants to remain accepted as full member of the majority must follow scrupulously
changes in the dress code and fashion of the place where they live, and then they must change it
again to melt in the faraway places where they move. Very often, to abide the custom is a matter of
survival in one’s country, region, culture, and then of one’ social middle, as I explained in the
previous chapter about influencing people with accents. Then we find numerous and diverse
minorities that associate clothes and clothing accessories in particular ways, in order to
communicate more individualistic or identity claims. It is all about meta-communication, once
more, exactly as in a number of animal species.
That is why specialists in communication and in influence use the expression “social markers” to
name clothes, and clothing accessories more especially, when seen as message carriers; that is to
say, things used as media and messages, simultaneously—being understood that social marker
relates specifically to claiming one’s belongingness to a social class. That is why deceptions with
social markers are common in everyday life and in nearly all ordinary people. Almost everybody
spend more money than they should for a suit, a shirt, a sweatshirt, a tie, a pair of shoes, a belt, a
watch, a pen, a wallet, a purse, a scarf, etc., only to bring evidences of positions and social statuses
they truly do not have. There is nothing wrong with it; the richer and more educated we appear, the
easier it is to befriend and mate. Cars follow even more, or rather they take the lead, as we have
seen earlier. This is a matter of social survival, and even just of survival, of need to being and of
need to preserve the species. I would really love to have a Rolex, by the way; but my Casio makes
it, as it does not yet look too old. What for exactly, if I have a smartphone that gives the time with a
precision that even the most expensive watch cannot challenge?
In all other types of messages, we are talking about meta-communication in general.
The intent of this presentation is to underscore how influential dress codes, clothes, and clothing
accessories are everywhere in the World, and why those things are very important, from the
viewpoint of French experts in influence. With respect to domestic influence and counterinfluence
in particular, those specialists consider that their impact on the society is considerable, much greater
than it seems at first glance when in a country whose ruling elite perceives individualism and
capitalism together as a plague to be eradicated. That is why there is a real concern in French
domestic influence for not to relinquish dress code and fashion to simple considerations of supply
and demand.
At the end of the previous chapter, I explained how the CCA plans and gradually shapes by years
and decades the trends and mores of the French population, and thus imposes supply to shape the
demand. Subsequently because inevitably, the guidelines of the CCA also define the evolution of
dress code and fashion, though this think-tank does not design those other trends and patterns.
Instead, two other very discreet and more specialized think tanks are in charge to define the dress
code and fashions to come in France yet based on what the CCA says. One is introducing itself as a
private company named Promostyl, based in Paris and created five years before the CCA, in 1966—
I do not remember the name of the second. The two bodies proceed exactly as the CCA, and they,
too, edit exclusive reports, each bearing the title Les Tendances de Promostyl (The Trends of
Promostyl). As I once was entrusted the right to peruse one such report, I can say they are similarly
thick books, but in landscape format, on which are printed the colors and patterns the French masses
will like the next year. Unlike the CCA, they do not plan dress codes and fashions by decades.
The method for launching trends in dress code and fashion in the country is the same I explained
about the CCA, except some details inherent to the types of media that clothes, and their
accessories, are. New fashions in clothing are obviously launched by conventional media such as
print and online magazines, television, and even movies. They need stronger support and media
coverage in order to prevail over the cultural trends coming from foreign countries, due to the
natural exchange of cultural flows, I summarily explained earlier, which specialists in
counterinfluence also monitor. The most effective way to do so is to relying on passive and
unconscious agents of influence, who in this instance should rather be seen as opinion leaders.
Those are celebrities and prominent personalities in all middles and fields of activities who
regularly appear in the mainstream media. Thus, simply by being seen on television and in
magazines, they call the multitudes to mimic implicitly their dress codes; it is as simple as that. In
the previous chapter again, I explained the influence that stars, heroes, and people wield upon the
masses. Most of those silent opinion leaders in fashion are given, lent temporarily, or sold at
advantageous bargains and upon exclusive invitations, clothes and fashion accessories they must
wear on their media appearances. Therefrom, the reader understands an additional stake that certain
French business groups have in enticing foreign personalities and prominent persons to wear
French-designed clothes and related accessories, not so seldom through the same advantageous
conditions.
The high degree of politicization of the masses in France led to a similar importance given to
colors and more particularly to shades. This other form of cultural influence is isolated from dress
code and fashion because it extends to many other goods of consumption. The reader who expects
me to name the colors red and pink might be surprised to read me saying “not at all”. Two reasons
come to explain the avoidance of communist red and socialist pink. In France, influencing the
masses about colors is directly relevant to active measures, and even the two have a common
history, as the reader is going to see.
First, there is a need to the ruling elite to deceive about the real aims of its agenda, at home even
more than abroad. The French ruling elite sees no interest in presenting France as a country where
leftist values would be enforced up to colors from authority. For colors are the first, most obvious,
and simplest means used in all times of history to claim and to promote ideologies and religions, to
mark territories and their exact borders, and to federate people around a myth and its narrative.
Thereof, and reciprocally, colors are means of camouflage and of deception to hide one’s true
political credo and aims. Historically, the best-known use of colors for camouflage and deception
occurred in naval warfare and remained uninterrupted until the invention and availability of
electricity and light bulbs coupled with the Morse code, still for visual communication. Before the
latter discoveries, colors were the only available means of long-distance communication at sea,
therefore of deception to conceal one’s true identity and intents. This use never ended nor even
recessed in intelligence, to the point that it remains more common than just frequent in human
intelligence and is even at the origin of the expression “false-flag recruitment”. Of course, a country
cannot reasonably expect to deceive another by relying on deception with colors, but it can do it
with its own population when it associates the doctrine of active measures with its politics and
agenda, which particular case concerns France.
The refusal in France to promote the colors pink and red aims to obviate political rivalries among
the people and to deny it the opportunity of politically supported arguments, unifying and stronger,
therefore, when opposing the current politics of the government. The latter provision actually is the
same that supports the current claims that the French government and its acting president are
“Republican,” without ever mentioning the nouns “progressive,” “leftist,” and related, as explained
in the previous chapter. Therefore, conspicuously avoiding the use and promotion of the colors red
and pink is an implicit message to the masses, having the value of operative symbol, meant to nip in
the bud all claims that the country would be ruled by leftist and collectivist principles. For the
record, the doctrine of active measures purports to define this type of provisions, and then to enforce
its application in a coherent manner at all levels of the government, in all public services, and even
in the major industrial bodies, publicly owned, semi-publicly owned, and private, regardless.[418]
The second reason not to promote the colors pink and red is a deliberate rejection of bright colors
in general; for French experts in influence consider that bright colors tend to arouse individualism
and hedonism. Thus, the use of red is accepted on condition this color be dark about as red wine is,
i.e. Bordeaux or lie-de-vin in French, and exactly. The same recommendation about shades applies
to all colors alike, and the opposite use of pale colors is similarly recommended for the same reason.
The reader can easily see this by himself by looking on the graphic design of book covers on the
merchant website Amazon.fr, and by comparing them with the dominant colors of American books
sold on Amazon.com. The stark contrast between the two ranges of colors will strike him, doubtless.
French dress code follows the trend with even darker colors, and the same rule applies to cars.
The most thus promoted colors in France for a number of years are black, and then gray, regardless
of the shade. Yellow and white are especially rejected because the first is a color associated with
gold, money, materialism, and to capitalism by extension; and the second because it expresses pride,
oneness, and individualism. There is an exception for white, if associated with a contrasting color
such as black or any other dark color. This explains why silver is discreetly promoted over gold in
jewelry in France; although the French elite are not concerned about this, ironically, except when
making public appearances and on television.
To sum things up about domestic influence through dress code and fashion in France, influencing
the masses in their tastes in dress code is done by the simple and ordinary uses of audio-visual
media and print press, and by relying on the peer pressure effect that takes place naturally. The main
objectives of this provision are to stemming drifts in fashion dress, and to planning and normalizing
dress codes and fashion according to concerns essentially relevant to the breeding of a distinctive
French culture, ideologically loaded at some point.
Helping the French fashion industry comes as an expected corollary, yet as a secondary concern.
Then, exactly as in the book industry, a small door is left open to minor business companies for
selling clothes and clothing accessories that do not follow the trend; otherwise, a minority would
notice the abnormality and complain. Ironically, foreign brands having relevant activities on the
French soil are implicitly obliged to follow the thus imposed trends, since they do not have the
power to challenge them and would put their future at stake in doing so. This is particularly visible,
for example, when visiting an American H&M outlet in France, in which customers for the last
fifteen years could hardly find anything else than either dark or pale colors, with much white for
women, however. Brands such as Polo Ralph Lauren and Nike seem willing to question the rule, as
both largely promote bright colors in their outlets in France.
For a number of decades, the French intelligence community, as its counterparts in other Western
countries, has been concerned with the importance of monitoring dress codes and fashion. In
France, this discreet action has become stringent in the two last decades, following the rising trend
of wearing sails and other Islamic fundamentalist burqas in the Muslim minority, between other less
striking examples. In spite of claims of religious freedom by Western Muslim women who truly
have been influenced in this respect, I am sorry to say, the formal aims of the practice are become a
trend serving the real aims of a deliberate action of religious and even ideological influence,
indisputably.
In totalitarian countries as in others where political issues must overwhelm the masses, clothing is
generally hijacked as medium carrying a political message. In countries with strong far-leftist
leaderships, uniformity is an implicit requirement because it aims to suppressing individualism
presented as a form of dissent, or of disrespect to the doctrine defined by the ruling elite. Then
political fundamentalism is encouraged more or less openly because it results in self-monitoring in
everything and in dress code, therefore, inescapably. In totalitarian leftist countries, women in
particular are encouraged to a uniformity matching that of men, consisting in a promotion by the
State of a unique men-like dress code justified by a doctrinal principle of equality. This action of
influence leads to the renouncement to femininity and to seduction, therefore, extending as far as no
makeup, short hairs, and no glittering jewelry or no jewelry at all. Then the religious-like practice
evolves toward the expression of one’s far-leftist political commitment through dress code, which at
this stage no longer qualifies as dress code, in point of fact, but as uniform in both sense of the
word. Indeed, dress code has the power to change who people are in their minds, and the method
completes advantageously those explained in the previous chapter. The description of this type of
implicit indoctrination can be otherwise simplified by using words such as “defeminization” or
“masculinization”. Henceforth, I will take the liberty to use the former, of my own, in view to
simplifying my explanations that will conclude this chapter.
Remarkably today, in Western societies where political pluralism is encouraged, women who
commit to leftist values and / or who adopt anti-establishment stances sometimes express passively
nonetheless conspicuously these claims by adopting the practice of defeminization, I just explained;
even when the stance is moderate by comparison with what it implies in full in countries where it is
imposed to everyone as a doctrine. There is an important difference between passing for an
exponent of far leftism in a country where life is comfortable and freedom of speech is granted, and
another where being far-leftist is compulsory under threat of varied sanctions starting with social
quarantine and exclusion from the group. Most concerned Westerners fail to see this reality,
exemplified by a true dramatic story in a chapter to come.
Totalitarian countries indeed export their dress codes, even when this does not necessarily
translate a deliberate action of political influence, but rather a fashionable import justified by a quest
for individuality. At first glance, the psychological phenomenon is akin to identifying to a hero, as
explained in the previous chapter. Here the difference is that the hero is a body of individuals
welded together by a shared commitment, whose apparent strength elicits praise and then
idealization. It is the same, exactly, as with those men who dream to join a military elite unit on the
only criteria of impressive discipline, high-end gears, and feats; all the while brushing away the high
cost in hardship and frustrations all this entails. However, be it conscious or not, the motive may be
more complex than it seems a priori because the cause in free countries is twofold and the motives
contradictory. It comprises an overwhelming need for individuality coexisting with a contradictory
need for belonging to a minority claiming a withdrawal from the norm, i.e. the majority in anything,
perceived negatively. In other words, this behavior is a strong individualistic claim in societies in
which encouraged diversity may be deceptively perceived as “an imposed norm”. I say
“deceptively” because women who self-defeminize in far-leftist countries are not offered the same
freedom of choice, obviously.
In the end, the social phenomenon of women who self-defeminize in free countries is one effect
among many others possible including boredom and frustration; that is to say, a form of action,
since it is irrelevant to inhibition. Men who adopt the same stance with similar strength in their
commitments do the same, although, in their case, the ideologically loaded dress code is obviously
less likely to catch the attention, since the practice does not command them to “look as women”.
The exact opposite is true in right-leaning societies, in which the norm includes a frantic quest for
oneness and eccentricity including conformity to a norm that indeed exists, too, e.g. uniform-like
gray suit and shirt with tie and dress shoes.
Most, if not all, of the special provisions in domestic influence and counterinfluence I reviewed in
this chapter rather owe to a French fear to lose political control and grip, I explained earlier. Exactly
as there has been in the United States a fear of “the Red under the bed” in the McCarthy era, I have
witnessed in the DGSE an authentic fear of “the Yankee under the bed”. However, the election of
Barrack Obama as President of the United States in 2008 exerted considerable influence on the
perception French people have of this country, regardless of the political party to which this
politician is affiliated. Anyway, the event put the United States on a stand politically and ethically
superior to that of France in the eyes of many French liberals, as eloquently testifies for the
following anecdote.
On November 5, 2008, at the French Parliament, François Fillon then Prime Minister mentioned
in a speech Barrack Obama had just been elected President of the United States. The announcement
triggered unanimous applauses and cheers among the assembly. Fillon was visibly befuddled and
was thus forced to pause for a few seconds. Then he raised his voice to call the crowd to order, and
to remind vehemently to everyone this was no cause for enthusiasm, since “Barrack Obama is an
American”. The remark sobered up everyone and caused a silence; the atmosphere resumed to
normal for the rest of the parliamentary session, as if nothing of particular ever happened.
 21. On the Use & Monitoring of the Media in France.
M odern and organized domestic influence in France began on May 20, 1631 with the printing
of the first French newspaper titled La Gazette de France (The Gazette of France). It was an idea of
Théophraste de Renaudot, eminence grise of Cardinal de Richelieu, himself eminence grise of King
of France Louis XIII, for informing the literate bourgeoisie on French foreign affairs and shaping its
opinion, simultaneously. A large majority among the French population of that time was illiterate, as
everywhere in Europe. People of the countryside did not read nor write, and spoke countless local
variants of patois, instead. Notwithstanding, the political significance of La Gazette de France was
considerable, especially because even the King and Cardinal Richelieu wrote papers for it.
Actually, the inventor of the newspaper was German printer Johann Carolus who shortly earlier
in 1609, in Strasbourg, had launched Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien
(Communication of all Important and Memorable Stories), quickly forgotten for wants of a royal
sponsor. In Russia, Peter the Great reproduced the concept of La Gazette identically when, in 1703,
he ordered the launch by ukase of the newspaper Ведомости (Vedomosti), which title, in point of
fact, is the literal translation of “the gazette”. Vedomosti reported military stories, how diplomatic
relations went on, and a few other news of the various sort. In 1711, in Britain, Joseph Addison and
Richard Steele took up the idea, too, to launch The Spectator.
One could describe these first newspapers in history as “media of ready-to-think for the masses”.
Gustave Le Bon was the first to explain this in 1895, but certainly not the first to understand it when
he wrote, “Surveying the public opinion is the main concern of the press and of the governments.
What is the effect of an event, a legislative project, a speech; this is what they have to know,
constantly. And the thing is not easy because nothing is more versatile and more changeable than
the thought of crowds, and nothing is more frequent than to see them welcome with anathemas what
they had just acclaimed the day before”.[419]
Eventually, the appearance in the Gazette of the first paid advertisings made this medium a
cornerstone in the history of communication either.
In France, the freedom of the press was constitutionalized in 1791, yet remained moderated by
the State in reality. Censorship was officially enforced again three years later only, in 1794;
thenceforth, it was repeatedly re-abolished and re-established until today. The freedom of the press
actually never really existed in France. When the censorship of the media was enforced unofficially
but definitively, the State entrusted it as a mission to the secret police of the 19th century, as
previously explained in the chapter 13 on “Domestic Intelligence”. In the 20th century and from the
Great War of 1914-1918 in particular, the military took it over for good. Today, on demands of the
DGSE and the DRSD, the DGSI takes in charge the calls to order and sanctions against unruly
journalists.
I begin this new chapter with a chronological account of this evolution that led to an intricate
form of control over the media in France, as it is at present.
Between the 1830s and the 1840s, the creation of the first French press agencies brought
sophistication in the censorship of the news. With the help of his uncle Charles Constant Havas,
Charles-Louis Havas founded Havas press agency, which gradually took over the leadership in the
the latter activity. Not coincidentally, Charles Constant Havas by then was formerly Deputy Chief of
Joseph Fouché, head of the secret police during the reign of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, for the
record. Havas had remained senior executive in this body of the aftermaths of the French First
Empire until he created the forerunner of the 2d Bureau. In other words, Havas press agency was a
creation of the then incipient French intelligence agency.
These facts come to explain why the State gave to Havas’ nephew exclusive technical means and
special rights to found his company; the expected result of this being a monopolistic press agency
virtually state-owned. Thus, not only Havas became the news provider of nearly all French
newspapers, but it also acquired the status of top-tier World leading press agency, which it still is
today under the new name Agence France-Presse–AFP. In details, between 1852 and 1857, when
the French Republic became the Third Empire, Havas did a beginning in advertising and split into
two branches for this: one for information (the future Agence France-Presse–AFP), and the other for
advertising, IP, incorporated as a public limited company and renamed Havas Agency in 1879.
As seen from the viewpoint of newspapers’ directors and owners of the mid-19th century, a press
agency offered the great service to spare the hefty running cost of hiring permanent press-
correspondents abroad. The other flip of this coin, on which the 2d Bureau counted, was that all
newspapers that subscribed to the services of Havas thus were made honestly ignorant of all facts
this press agency was instructed not to report about. Even better, as Havas quickly won a reputation
of reliability, everything it did not report was implicitly deemed “dubious” or “unworthy to be even
alluded to”. Unofficially, Havas became a state press agency while gaining unquestionable renown
and seriousness abroad. In 1920, the merger of Havas with Société Générale d’Annonces
transformed radically the company and made it a large business with activities extending to radio
broadcasting and the then booming film sector, and to urban advertising from 1923. JCDecaux, the
company for which I worked in domestic influence in the early 1990s, took over the latter activity
eventually.
Back to the late 19th century, the developments in the media sector and the advent of the
telegraph provided the extraordinary opportunity to the 2d Bureau, to give to its flying agents cover
activities of press reporters and correspondents, thus justifying their most obvious curiosity by the
pretense of a democratic right to inform the people. Of course, the role of the French newspapers
did not limit to tell news from abroad. Even if Havas and a few other press agencies now similarly
state-controlled gave news on what was happening in France either, the newspapers still had their
own columnists and reporters who investigated in the field. That is why, in the France of the 1890s,
it was well established already that each newspaper had “a spy of the secret police” in its editorial
room, in receipt of occasional tips from its editor or owner. Actually, those domestic spies in the
French media were agents of the 3d Bureau of the 1st Division of the police, a body earlier created
in the 1870s by Prefect of Police Louis Andrieux. Specifically, the duties of this police body were to
watch editors, writers, and reporters, to keep abreast of their movements, the quality of the people
they visited, and even how they spent their free time. There often was an advantageous reciprocity
of some sort between the owners and chief editors and their watchdogs of the 3rd Bureau. For the
owners of the main newspapers of the country were perfectly aware of the full professional qualities
of those particular employees, the terms of which being that they enjoyed the benefit of breaking
news the secret police alone could know about. The practice is still in use today, but it is supervised
by the DGSE.
As I explained earlier, organized state propaganda in France began between 1873 and the First
World War, and it was obviously associated with media and literature censorship by the same
occasion during this period. From 1914, about everything the media in France could publish was
approved, censored, or even fabricated out the whole cloth by the State, justified by wartime and
newly by the military in principal. In details, in 1914, the military created first a small propaganda
service named Propagande du Grand Quartier Général (Propaganda of the Great Headquarters), and
at the same time the police created a Bureau de la Presse (Press Bureau), to which were appointed a
relatively small number of censors coming from the whole country. Those censors, of rural origins
for most, were settled in the capital in emergency and tasked at once to monitor theaters, movies
theaters, and the press, of course.
One year later, in 1915, the military created an additional 5th Bureau, otherwise explicitly named
Bureau de la Propagande et de la Presse (Bureau of Propaganda and of the Press). This more potent
secret body, associated with the intelligence activities of the 2d Bureau, had seven specialized
services. These were the Unité de Contrôle (Control Unit), the Unité de Renseignement
(Intelligence Unit), the Unité de Centralisation du Renseignement (Intelligence Collection Unit), the
Bureau Interallié (Inter-Allied Office) or joint task force with the wartime allies, the Office de
Recherches et d’Études de la Presse Étrangère (Office of Research and Studies on Foreign Press),
and the Service de la Propagande (Propaganda Service). The latter was a think tank of a sort that
thought and conceived propaganda messages tuned with intelligence collected abroad, the
propaganda of the enemy, and information and feedback the six other services supplied. The 5th
Bureau also supervised the censorship of the mails of all soldiers, in order to exert control upon the
morale of those who were on the war front. To master this ambitious task were created nine cells of
15 to 25 men each, who at the end of the war had grown up to be in the capacity to opening and
checking an average of no less than 180,000 mails a week. At the same period, the Propaganda of
the Great Headquarters had been overhauled to become the Press Bureau of the Great Headquarters
of the Army. This Bureau had about 400 regional supervisors dispatched in the country, each tasked
to instruct the amazing number of 5,000 censors on which kind of news and other information had
to be censored. Chief Editors of all newspapers were given the word to submit to their military
contacts any news of a victory of the enemy before their reporting. Additionally, they were
instructed to avoid cautiously emphasizing good news for France, lest the population could say that
what the press reported was nothing but sheer propaganda. It should be said that in nearly all
countries in this Europe then at war against itself, all governments did about the same.
Remarkably, the 5th Bureau had been placed under the command of a commissioned officer who,
on the order of the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, had previously been “posted” as General
Secretary of a newspaper of the then leading Socialist Party, with the additional quality of member
of the GOdF. The unofficial relationship between the military, the Socialists, and the liberal
Freemasonry was in no way surprising to the few who moved in the inner circles of the political
power. For the Socialists had definitely gained power since the early 1900s thanks to the GOdF and
its influential underground network.
Eventually, from 1916 to 1917, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had its own staff of censors,
together innocuously named Maison de la Presse (House of the Press). Its mission limited to
selecting which foreign newspapers could and could not be imported in the country. Some were
barred from import in France under the pretense that the news they reported were biased and
deceptive or total bogus, even when they were true or because they were so, precisely.
State control over the media in the aftermaths of the war resumed as it had been before, but with
the additional strength and effectiveness the military had brought on. It was no longer the exclusive
garden of the police, especially because chiefs of police owed their positions to elected officials.
From 1927, journalists and reporters were issued an International Press Card–IPC, an official
protection tantamount to a diplomatic status of a sort in the eyes of foreign authorities, justified by
the freedom of the press. For the lives of numerous press reporters during the war had known an
abrupt end under firing squads, and the luckier did long prisons terms. One among the most famous
French spies who worked under the cover of press reporter in wartime had been Gaston Leroux,
who since then had won worldwide renown as novelist.
In March 1938, Prime Minister[420] Léon Blum created a Ministère de l’Information (Ministry of
Information), first under the explicit name Ministère de la Propagande (Ministry of Propaganda).
For the record, Léon Blum is a historical figure of French socialism who yet remained active under
the German occupation and thereafter—anecdotally, I worked with his grandson for a little while in
the mid-1990s. The French defeat against the Germans forces in June 1940 imposed a pause of five
years to the French socialist system of governance.
On September 10, 1944, a few days only after the German garrison had surrendered Paris on
August 25, 1944, the Ministry of Information was re-created. Gaullist politician André Diethelm
headed it before Jacques Soustelle took over the position on May 30, 1945. It is noteworthy that
Soustelle, a socialist politician, had been France’s master spy in the service of the Soviets during the
war. Previously, on November 27, 1943, in Algiers, General Charles de Gaulle had named him head
of Free France’s foreign intelligence agency in wartime, named Bureau Central de Renseignement
et d’Action–BCRA. The name changed shortly before the Liberation of France for Direction
Générale des Services Spéciaux–DGSS (Directorate-General of the Special Services). Soustelle,
also a respected scholar and a specialist in anthropology, for long was considered the man in charge
of information, communication, and propaganda; sometimes officially, sometimes not. He began his
career in politics as a Marxist internationalist activist and columnist for the far-leftist publications
Masses and Spartacus. From 1935, he had written articles for L’Humanité French leading
communist newspaper, which was supported from Moscow and financed by the Soviets at that time,
already. Soustelle has always been known as a Communist, and he is accountable indeed for the
recruitment of numerous Communists in the DGSS, among whom many were soviet agents. He has
been the most influential spy in the penetration of the French foreign intelligence agency after the
WWII, decisive for the decades to come and until today. Although one of his closest aides in the
1960-1970s has been my hierarchical superior for one year,[421] he never told me any specific about
this. Actually, Soustelle was appointed Minister of Information twice, first in 1945 and for a few
months[422] upon his leaving the DGER that had succeed the DGSS, and later in 1958 for a few
months again when De Gaulle, backed by the military, took the power through a revolution of
palace and became President of the Fifth Republic of France created on the occasion.
From 1958, the Ministry of Information was sometimes established as such, and some other times
as a State Secretariat. Transformed in 1968 as a ministry, and in early 1969 as a secretary of state,
this body was not renewed under the presidency of Georges Pompidou the same latter year. It was
restored again as Ministry of Information in April 1973, to be dissolved definitively thirteen months
later only, in May 1974, by liberal politician Valéry Giscard d’Estaing when he was elected
President. This body had also been responsible for the control of television and radio broadcasting
from its inception, as we soon shall see.
Earlier on September 2, 1944, upon the Liberation of Paris from the German forces, influential
figure of the GOdF Georges Bérard-Quélin and several other liberal members of the French
Resistance founded the very exclusive club of influence Le Siècle (The Century) in Paris, otherwise
self-described as a political think tank. Members of the inner circles of the French elite only were
admitted in its midst; the prerequisite never loosened since. The formal aim of Le Siècle was to
bring together the elite, prominent journalists, and media moguls to get to know each other over the
left-right divide. The real aim was to spread and to preserve the old progressive principles of
Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, mixed with new developments of the early 20th century such as
economic planning the political thinker could not imagine in his time. Since then and at present,
many senior officials, business leaders, moderate right wing and left-wing politicians, and most
representatives of the realms of publishing and media moguls are members of Le Siècle. On their
meetings, they are expected to agree around a common consensus for developing a sense of
belongingness to a same very exclusive middle heading toward a unique objective: to serve the
national interest and the common good around an idea of Jacobin republicanism. Le Siècle actually
took over the GOdF for carrying out the watchdogging of the inner circle of the civilian elite
nonetheless under the discreet control of the military.
Everything happens in Le Siècle must stay unknown to the masses, and indeed no investigative
journalist or paparazzi ever published a single line about what is said in the very exclusive and
secretive society. To some extent, the existence of Le Siècle is accountable for the fact that members
of the elite at the highest level of power are not members of the French liberal Freemasonry. This is
about compartmentalizing power under military watchdogging, actually. However, Le Siècle does
not have the typical features of a secret society, but rather of a very exclusive British club. It is in its
midst that the control of the French elite over information and the media begins, by way of a tacit,
common, and friendly understanding between the ruling elite, the leading figures of the media and
cultural activities, and the elite in business, economy, and industry in general. That is how and why
the leading French businessmen are actually are agents in the service of the French national interest
and not solely of their own. The latest French version of the Wikipedia page about Le Siècle, dated
April 2018, says that by January 1st, 2011, the circle had 751 members, and that 159 guests were
waiting for full membership.
Three months later, on December 19, 1944, De Gaulle, then temporary head of the State,
instructed journalist Hubert Beuve-Méry to create a leading national newspaper. It was christened
Le Monde (The World), which title does not suggest any French nationalist idea, remarkably. One
could be tempted to see in it a revival of the saint-simonianist newspaper Le Globe (The Globe,
meaning “the Earth”), as I explained in a previous chapter. I do not know who picked up the name,
but I strongly surmise the idea was about the same as for International Herald Tribune in 1967. For
the record, this other newspaper was first founded under the title Paris Herald in 1887 in Paris as a
European edition of New York Herald. The New York Times Company finally took control of
International Herald Tribune in 2002.
Still in 1944, Beuve-Méry was Chief Editor of Temps Présent, a Christian French weekly
newspaper, but he also was staunchly anti-American. De Gaulle knew well the opinion and feelings
of Beuve-Méry about the United States, at least because in 1944, on the eve of the American
landing, he wrote the following. “The Americans are a real danger for France. It is a danger very
different to that of Germany or of which the Russians could possibly threaten us with. It is a threat
of a moral and economic order. The Americans can prevent us from making a necessary revolution,
and their materialism does not even have the tragic grandeur to that of totalitarians. If they maintain
a true cult for the idea of freedom, they do not feel for a moment the need to free themselves from
the servitudes their capitalism entails. It seems the abuse of well-being has diminished vital strength
in them in a worrying fashion”.[423]
In spite of what Beuve-Méry wrote above, Le Monde from its first issue on was the Soviet
NKGB’s key outlet for spreading anti-American and pro-Soviet disinformation in France.
According to the Mitrokhin Archive,[424] the KGB that had succeeded the NKGB in 1954 had given
to Le Monde the explicit codename Bестник (Viestnik), or “Messenger”. The Mitrokhin Archive
identified two senior journalists in its staff plus several contributors handled by the Soviets in the
operation. I take the liberty to present a few personal finds about this point, below, because they will
help the reader understand other facts I will explain in a next chapter.
 In the United States of the 1950s, the House Un-American Activities Committee–HUAC
investigated a French immigrant named Louis Dolivet who had made a career in this country as film
producer. Dolivet had collaborated with actor Orson Welles on several projects from the early
1940s. Researches undertaken by Karl Baarslag, former Director of Research for HUAC, suggested
Brecher “had lived for a time in the small French village of D’Olivet, from which he derived the
fictitious identity he used in the United States.
“According to the December 15, 1949 issue of French magazine La Revue Parlementaire, ʻthe
French secret police knew Dolivet as Ludwig Udeanu, a close associate of notorious Soviet agent
Willy Muenzenberg.ʼ In Barslaag’s account, ʻunder the Comintern name of Udeanu, Dolivet had
written for Inprecorr, the journal of the Communist International,ʼ and ʻwas the brain of a
Communist operation that infiltrated and took over French paper Le Monde. In 1932, he was in
Amsterdam helping organize one of the Soviet’s first World congresses for peace,ʼ ʻwas behind the
scenes pulling wires for the Comintern at the 1933 World Committee for the Struggle Against War
and Fascism, and in 1935 in Paris for another Soviet-instigated Universal Rally for Peace”.[425]
“Soviet intelligence uncovered later appears to corroborate the basic outline of Dolivet’s story as
detailed by the HUAC. In Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight, journalist
Roland Perry confirms ʻLouis Dolivetʼ was the alias of Ludovic Brecher, who was indeed a secret
Comintern agent linked to Pierre Cot and Michael Straigh”.[426]
The name Udeanu sounds much Romanian, an important fact that the reader must keep in mind
for later.
The first and largest title on the front page of the first issue of Le Monde seems to be
unambiguous about this revelation of the Mitrokhin Archive, and about French politics as well at
that time already, as it reads, “France and the U.S.S.R. have concluded a treaty of assistance and
mutual alliance for a period of twenty years.”[427] On one hand, this fact should be pondered in the
light of the similar Anglo-Soviet Treaty of 1942, which extended to the next twenty years either. On
the other hand, the position of the British with regard to an alliance with the Soviet Union quickly
evolved in an entirely different way of that of France.[428]
Eventually, in May 1954, under the mandate of President René Coty, Beuve-Méry launched Le
Monde diplomatique aka “Le Diplo” (The Diplomatic World aka “The Diplo”), a monthly
newspaper of information and opinion initially published as a supplement to daily Le Monde. Le
Monde diplomatique should collect the interest of the reader, although it has always been far from to
be a major newspaper. The first reason for this was that this publication aimed the readership of
“diplomatic circles and major international organizations”. Second, it was actually created on the
initiative of François Honti, not a French journalist or politician, but a Hungarian diplomat, former
consul of Hungary in Geneva in the immediate post-war period. Hungary was a country of the
Warsaw Pact since 1945, for the record. Honti was appointed Director of Le Monde diplomatique
upon its creation, and he held the position until 1973. Third, in a much less subtle way than Le
Monde was, not to say openly, Le Monde diplomatique became a French medium of Soviet
influence and anti-American propaganda from 1973 in particular, this time under the direction of
anti-American Claude Julien, former journalist for Le Monde and enthusiastic supporter of Fidel
Castro.
Today, Le Monde diplomatique is still a weekly newspaper of far-leftist political influence
claiming the respectable circulation of 240,000 copies. Additionally, it is printed in 40 different
international versions and translated in 26 languages, which fact would raise its overall circulation
to 2,400,000 copies worldwide, allegedly. The company Le Monde SA, publisher of Le Monde
newspaper, owns 51% of Le Monde diplomatique, even though it publicly distances itself from this
fact because of its heavily loaded far-leftist and anti-American content, precisely. As Le Monde is
the leading French newspaper and is seen abroad as the voice of the French Government, it has an
important stake in being seen by the public as an objective publication. The reader notices, and he
should always keep in mind, that the contradiction of doing something everyone can see while
claiming with insistence and eye to eye doing the exact opposite, and even going as far as acting
offended and claiming reparation when accused to lie in this circumstance, is a permanent and
omnipresent feature in French affairs. For it comes as a strange culture in France to make a clear
difference between being caught in the act of lying and acknowledging the lie; French see the
former as unimportant and the latter as unacceptable. As anti-American propaganda mill, Le Monde
diplomatique exerts considerable influence in the leftist intellectual elite worldwide. It is
accountable for coining and spreading new particular words, concepts, and views in international
politics, and for launching trends, whose common and final objective is popular leftist revolution in
the United States and in all capitalist countries—knowing that revolution does not necessarily
means violence and civil war, and may perfectly be a gradual and peaceful takeover obtained
through persuasion and popular consensus.
As example, for decades, Le Monde diplomatique has been doing consistent efforts in the latter
endeavor to replace definitively the use of the word and name Américain (American) by “États-
Unien” (“United-Statesian,” or “Usian” or “Usonian”), whenever naming citizens of the United
States and anything that conceptually originates, pertains, and belongs to this country. This is all
about influence through semantics, a recurrent technique of influence and disinformation in French
and Russian intelligence. Le Monde diplomatique supports this action of influence with an argument
saying that naming the citizens of the United States “Americans” would be tantamount to endorsing
a U.S. imperialist perception of continental America, and would suggest that citizens of the
countries of central and South America are “property of the United States”. The real and final aim
of the contrivance, the reader guesses, is to eradicate the sphere of influence of the United States, as
once defined by the Monroe doctrine or perceived as such today.[429] Remarkably though, Le Monde
diplomatique extends the particular form of political influence to the UNO with the other noun
“Unosian”; or “Onusien” in French, since the acronym UNO is changed into ONU in this tongue.
Overall, any issue of Le Monde diplomatique is written with a particular syntax of the wordy
kind, in which rare words serve an indignant discourse oddly reminiscent of the rants of erstwhile
Soviet Pravda. Intellectually more accessible versions of subjects and opinions this newspaper
brings on weekly are found in Courrier international, a French weekly newspaper launched in
1989; and of late, online on Thinkerview, a YouTube television channel whose popularity in France
rose spectacularly since 2018 with the support of both the DGSE and the Russian presence in
France, as we will see in detail at the end of this chapter.
In the 1990s, I was once in touch with Ignacio Ramonet when he was Director of Le Monde
Diplomatique, by then in the frame of a project to edit on CD-ROMs and to spread a collection of
all past articles of this newspaper. At the same time, one of my subordinates who worked in my
intelligence team at a desk located not far from my glass cube office, was carrying on projects of
disinformation and black propaganda against Microsoft to be spread by Courrier International. For
one of our important projects of that time was to investigate on what we then called “the Microsoft
galaxy,” in the expectation to launch a disinformation campaign alleging that Microsoft was a front
of the CIA. At some point, I was discharged from the project of which I was then the supervisor, to
pass it on to another unit I did not know of. As an aside, to be discharged unexpectedly from an
investigation or other works without further notice is common in the DGSE. Even when a deskwork
is finished and sent, the identity and exact activities of its recipient remain unclear or completely
unknown, due to the rule of compartmentalization.
Back to the chronological order of this introduction, a few months after the launch of Le Monde,
on March 23, 1945, was also created a state-controlled television channel, whose studios were rue
Cognacq-Jay, in Paris, in the place where the German forces of occupation first settled it as
Fernsehsender Paris (Paris Television) in 1943. The decision was accompanied by the
nationalization of radios stations, and by the establishing of a monopoly of the State over news and
the media in general. The single French television channel that also was a public company was first
and simply christened Radio-Diffusion Française aka RDF (French Broadcasting). RDF had no
autonomy, therefore, as this public body of television broadcasting was under the full control of the
State, in accordance with the 1945 State Monopoly Ordinance on airwaves.[430] It was successively
placed under the direct authority of the Ministry of Information, then of a State Secretary for
Information to the Presidency of the Council,[431] then of an Under-Secretary of State for the
Presidency of the Council,[432] then of a Ministry of Youth, Sports and Arts and Letters,[433] then of
the Presidency of the Council,[434] then of a Secretary of State for the Presidency of the Council,[435]
and finally of a Secretary of State for the Presidency of the Council in charge of Information.[436]
On February 9, 1949, when RDF changed its name for Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française aka
RTF, its staff numbered 72 only. Television at home was considered an exclusive service for the
elite, and its programs were made accordingly, exactly as for La Gazette de France more than three
centuries earlier. Yet television broadcasting remained totally devoid of autonomy, and under the
direct control of the State via the Ministry of Information. On June 29, 1949, as the first television
daily news journal was launched, about 3,000 French families owned a TV set, but four years later
only, in 1953, the number had jumped to more than 125,000.
 The real evolution in French television broadcasting happened on January 1st, 1958, and changes
were as follow. Paris Inter television channel became France 1 Paris-Inter, showing that it was
now the reference station broadcast 24 / 7 of RTF, the latter acronym becoming the name of a public
service broadcasting several TV channels simultaneously. France 1 Paris-Inter favored direct and
instant information and reflected all aspects of the daily life. Eventually, the Parisian program
became France 2-Regional, a channel of entertainment broadcasts from regional stations. National
Program became France 3-National, focusing on cultural and artistic programs reflecting all French
intellectual activities at the highest level. The cancelling of the musical program having caused
discontent, it was re-introduced under the name France 4-Haute Fidélité on March 27, 1960. The
first TV game show was created in April 1958, and the first TV news-magazine[437] in January
1959; the next day De Gaulle was introduced officially as the first French President of the newly
founded Fifth Republic. The making of this news-magazine in particular, titled 5 Colonnes à la Une,
[438] was considered a highly sensitive work. Each of its issues comprised a dozen of topics for a
total duration of about 90 minutes, broadcast monthly at 8:30 PM. Advertising on television did not
yet exist.
From the idea to its broadcasting, all stages of the development of 5 Colonnes à la Une were
placed under control of the military and of senior executives of the SDECE. The Ministry of
Information, essentially a domestic influence agency run by spies since Jacques Soustelle had
created it, decided which subjects were to be presented in each issue, and the whole had to have an
educational vocation for the masses. 5 Colonnes à la Une also introduced TV war reportage for the
first time in France. The backbone of the magazine was “decreed” on editorial meetings, and a list
of the topics was compiled to be endorsed by a Directorate of TV news and a Directorate of TV
programs, both working under control of the Ministry of Information. When the subject of a report
was considered sensitive, it had to be submitted to censors on a first private release. Actually,
censorship remained occasional not to say rare, as television journalists and the Director of
Programs were trusted officials themselves; they knew well what should not be said and shown to
the masses.
At that time, the Soviet penetration in France limited to the inner circle of political power, the
military, and the SDECE. The Soviet presence and influence in France were to expand significantly
from the early 1960s onward. France was to remain a full NATO member still for a few years. For
the moment, one of the most influential executives in the RTF was Pierre Lazareff who, during the
war, had learned his job at the Office of War Information, in the United States. Then Lazareff had
moved to London, where he had been appointed head of the American Broadcasting System in
Europe and had directed radio broadcasts beaming to German occupied Europe.
For the reason above, De Gaulle ordered that Lazareff’s privacy be put under permanent
surveillance,[439] and he instructed to be personally informed of whom he was seeing in private. De
Gaulle dreaded Lazareff worked under directives of the United States and so of the CIA in
particular. Besides, Lazareff had made for himself a reputation of proponent of the freedom of the
press, and he was frequently at odd with censors. Ironically, this fact put him against his will on the
side of a rising leftist trend in the RTF, remotely and discreetly fueled by the highly influential
French Communist Party, itself acting under instructions decided in Moscow.
On June 27, 1964, the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française–ORTF (French Television
Broadcasting Office) replaced the RTF by decree, but all programming, news broadcasts, especially,
remained under the strict control of the State. The purport of the ORTF was to modernize the public
service of French radio-television broadcasting and to “satisfy the needs for information, culture,
education, and entertainment of the public,”[440] in accordance with the provisions of the decree in
question.
From the early 1960s, the first visible changes on French television resulting from Soviet
influence were the frequent broadcasts of stop-motion animation short films produced in certain
countries of the Warsaw Pact, Czechoslovakia in particular. This import remained insignificant
however, and no one watched those films broadcast in mornings and afternoons when the audience
was at its lowest. They disappeared definitively with the end of the ORTF and the Ministry of
Communication in May 1974, when liberal politician Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was elected
president.
The first French TV series appeared in the 1960s, and France largely imported American cartoons
such as Tex Avery and TV shows Zorro, The Untouchables, Manix, Batman, Get Smart, Bewitched,
The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and even The Invaders, which all knew enormous popularities in France
and entered indeed French kultur. The more so since French dubbing at that time was the best in the
World, reputedly. As about movies programming, they were a mix of French and American films
broadcast on Sunday afternoons and evenings in particular. Since then and until today, never any
movies nor even any attractive program was broadcast on Saturdays, and the French public was
never given any explanation about this fact it perceived as an annoying and frustrating oddity. The
untold reason was all about domestic economy, actually; for the government did not want the
population to stay at home watching series and movies, instead of going to movies theaters and
spending money to keep private businesses working on Saturdays. The rule was broken very
recently, but only due to the coming up of pay-per-view television and private television channels.
Nonetheless, the major channels indeed continue enforcing the old rule decided more than half a
century ago, and still at this time the French population does not know why.
The paradox of the 1960s with respect to cultural programing was that, on one hand, the Ministry
of Culture had been created in 1958 to promote French-made cultural and artistic content in order to
counter what was perceived as American cultural interference, and on the other hand, that France
continued importing massively American movies, TV series, and program concepts, just because
they all seduced a large majority not to say everybody. Regardless of whether the U.S. Department
of State indeed had a hand in the spread of American culture in France or not—through what this
public body internally named public diplomacy—it unquestionably gave a hard time to the Soviets
and to a certain French intellectual elite that struggled to spread anti-Americanism in France. The
American way of life, consumerism, capitalism, and individualism were hugely more attractive than
the discourses of the best leftist propagandists who, often and as a matter of fact, were taken as
absurd and risible caricatures of Soviet politicians and other stern proponents of social and
economic dullness and misery. The reason for the strange discrepancy was also of an economical
order; the United States had financed French economic prosperity with the Marshall Plan and still
by then with the dollar-gold convertibility.
On May 3, 1968, the first week of the general strike that crippled the country for one month, the
cult-like TV news-magazine 5 Colonnes à la Une disappeared for good. I was entering my preteens
at that time at that time, yet I remember well watching the news and seeing the striking pictures of
young protesters charging police forces in Paris, using large street trash-bin covers as shields of
fortune, as the warriors I had seen in Cecil B. DeMille movies. On the second week of May 1968,
most of the staff of all TV channels joined the general strike, and news on television became nearly
inexistent. All one could watch limited to animal documentaries, movies, cartoons, and TV series.
Television had accidentally become all about entertainment, with no news and no one speaking. An
eerie atmosphere of uncertainty about everything settled in all homes. The situation lasted until June
23. The staff of the ORTF that had reached 12,000 at that time was largely penetrated by the left, yet
the far-leftist strikers accused the ORTF to lying, that its programs and news were politically biased,
and of collusion with the ruling elite and the police. In short, state television broadcasting was
described as an instrument of alienation of the masses, since there were still no privately owned TV
channels. The leftists were correct or almost in their perception, but television broadcasting in
France remained in the same situation and even worsened once they took over definitively in May
1981, and until today. I explained how in detail in the chapter 19 already, and I am explaining how
from a bureaucratic angle in this one.
On May 11, 1968, journalists and producers of monthly news magazines did broadcast a news
release through Agence France Presse–AFP (new name of Havas press agency, for the record)
saying, “[they] feel that the scandalous lack of television news coverage that has been the result of
recent events violates the professional honor of all television staffs. [And they are asking] for urgent
broadcasts of a programs for a wide audience in which all actors in the academic drama will be able
to express themselves freely”. The “actors” alluded to actually were those who reformed
definitively the French media, communication, and arts and entertainment in 1981, summarily
presented in the chapter 19.
However, the leftist takeover of the ORTF was not yet complete after that. There still was a
majority of rightists and even of anti-communists in the staff of the ORTF, and this struggle for
power over the control of information in France lasted until the late 1970s. In point of fact, the
French left took as a provocation that five months after the strike of May, on November 1, 1968,
was broadcast the first commercial on TV.[441] Television in color had made its appearance in
France thirteen months earlier on October 1, 1967. For a while, the considerable improvement in
television broadcasting limited to Channel 2, and the price of a TV set in color was about 4,500
francs, or a little less than half the monthly minimum wage of that time. On January 8, 1969, was
created the Régie Française de Publicité–RFP (French Advertising Bureau), a private company yet
officially created by decree, on condition that the publicly owned ORTF owns 51% of its shares, and
that its sole business was to hold a monopoly on the sale of advertising space on all French
television channels.
The economic depression that started in 1974 offered on a silver plate to the Soviet Union, the
French Communist Party, and the French Socialist Party, all they needed “to be right,” and granted
them a free hand to conspire against all members of the French economic elite, whose sympathy for
the United States was known. This explains why the hunt for British and American agents,
entrepreneurs and businessmen, as well as those, French, with sympathy for the United States began
at exactly this time.
From that year on, however, state control over audiovisual programing resumed under a mix of
self-censorship and unofficial censorship supervised in part by the Ministry of Culture, and in
another by a special squadron of the Gendarmerie based in Rosny-Sous-Bois, in Paris’ suburb—this
fact remained unknown to the French public to date either. Additionally, the Élysée Palace could
directly ask to censor a particular program and to fire a news presenter at once. When Francois
Mitterrand was elected President in May 1981, several of his newly appointed ministers publicly
revealed that when they entered the presidential office in the Élysée Palace, they found next to the
president’s desk a console whose switches allowed direct and immediate communication with the
directors of all television channels and mainstream radio stations. The particular had always been a
state secret theretofore. Those officials also said on their interviews that the media console was at
once disconnected and removed, and that state control and censorship over the mainstream media
was thus abolished with the coming of Socialism in France.
Actually, the control and censorship in question immediately resumed by the other means that I
explained in the chapter 19; that is to say, implicitly only. From May 1981, a massive purge began
in the French media; numerous figures of the French media landscape were removed from their
positions, leaving their places to socialist and communist upstarts with or without previous
experience in radio and television broadcasting, regardless. These events marked the spectacular
rise of music production company AB Productions created in 1977, which a few years later was to
become television production AB Group. The new Socialist government created new television
channels, Canal+ in particular in 1984, headed from its inception and until 2002 by Communist
journalist Pierre Lescure, whose programing mixed recent films, sports games, progressive satiric
shows mocking rightist politicians and the United States, and one porno film broadcast monthly at
midnight, as additional bait.
The coming of the FM band in radio broadcasting was highly instrumental in politics in the late
1970s, when the Socialist Party used it to launch the concept of “free radio stations” opposing the
publicly owned and conservative radio stations. The launch of those stations, which all were
spreading a bespoke leftist counterculture for the youth, was an event whose influence was so large
that it could be compared to a “new May 1968 in the media”. Years later, in June 1999, the DGSE
instructed me via Institut Pratique du Journalisme–IPJ to give a special training to a co-founder of
Radio Nova, one among the most popular and influential among those free socialist radio stations,
which merged with a media group soon after Mitterrand became president. I was surprised to learn
that the DGSE had hired him full-time as specialist in influence, and that his job at the moment I
was training him was to help create a luxury fashion print magazine in New York City.
To a significant measure Francois Mitterrand, the Socialist Party, and the Communist Party
definitively overthrew the old ruling elite thanks to the radio stations. It should be said that if they
did broadcast illegally, additionally, yet the government did little against it, lest to be accused of
censorship and of new strikes as in 1968. Additionally, intelligence agencies, the police, and the
Ministry of Defense were poorly reactive to the demands of the liberal political elite for
intervention.
After May 1981, the illegal free radio stations were legalized and included in the mainstream
media. The content they broadcast was easier to monitor and to censor, simply because those who
had created them were become the upstarts of the new socialist elite. They each had extraordinary
perks and a vested interest in lying to the masses and to censor. The best radio hosts were rewarded
with enviable positions and further fame in the major radio stations and television channels of the
defunct liberal elite. The provision bestowed them upon a power of influence they used to preach a
new narrative, further spurred in their zeal by a feeling of revenge and social justice against
everybody, of which I summed up the premises in the chapter 19. The multitudes could not possibly
know what was truly happening in France, as all foreign governments and media became
accomplice of the takeover by their sole silence.
May 1981 since then is a cornerstone in the history of the media in France, as seen from the angle
of politics, of course. The active measures eventually diluted the French socialist stance and
narrative, also because they were no longer of any use as formal aims. In truth, socialism limited to
an alibi coming to justify who had the power and who had not, and who enjoyed a good life and
who did not. The Socialists actually lived as the French monarchic noblesse and the Fermiers
généraux of the 18th century since they had taken over, arguing for this of past persecutions that
existed only in their minds, and always in an indignant tone as a rule in the practice. I have often
heard my older half-brother ranting after a few drinks and telling his guests ever-changing stories
about his past difficulties, which he actually made up out of thin air, in the same indignant style.
Once only he confessed to me, I quote him in substance from recollection, “With two whiskeys well
packed, I can become someone very nasty”. That was little to say, I can tell.
In the following fifteen years or so, the change for a new scale of values, beliefs, and mores were
successfully implemented in the minds of the masses. Only the baby-boomer generation knew
firsthand that life was much more pleasant before 1981, and not stricken with restrictions and taxes
of all sorts. The new governments and presidents of after 1995 were people shortlisted and vouched
by those who had secured their power in the previous decade.
The SDECE had been considerably overhauled and changed its name for DGSE in 1982. Its
potent extensions in domestic intelligence, and the liberal Freemasonry led by the GOdF, together
had made France the Leviathan of my comparison in the chapter 12 on active measures. In point of
fact, that is how and why, exactly, the DGSE adopted unofficially a human eye as its symbol, and
integrated it in the “S” of its temporary and unofficial logo with a dual meaning that only
enlightened people could understand in its full meaning. This new secret political apparatus that
since then worshiped synarchism and “reasoned dictatorship” was now in position to claim
whatever political doctrine it wanted as formal aims for France, since there was no need to state the
real aims explicitly. The reader knowledgeable in France’s contemporary history knows that the
governments that succeeded the Mitterrand era from 1995 never reverted to the liberal system of
before 1981, regardless of their ideological claims. From Jacques Chirac to Emmanuel Macron
today, they all did nothing more than to resume and to strengthen the provisions of an agenda
slightly overhauled between the 1970s and the early 1980s. As President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy
distinguished himself in the arts of deception and diversion he had previously acquired as lawyer,
and with a gift for charming his interlocutors that remains unique in the history of French
presidency.
As for the multitudes, their takes on the situation is not warranted, since they have been made
unable to make a clear distinction between liberalism, progressivism and socialism, between
fascism and National Socialism, and even between left and right. They are permanently confused
and deceived on all these, and cannot think about it anyway, as they would not find a serious book
in French language that could explain it all in clear words. Their minds are constantly overwhelmed
by broadcast pointless talks, speeches of opinion leaders devoid of substance, and large titles on
front-pages about inconsequential, absurd, and fake issues. This is a non-cooperative game-like
denying them any chance to ask a question about what is happening in the country, actually. Thus,
the talking heads—since this is what those opinion leaders objectively are—can assert today that
France is a liberal country and an indefectible ally of the United States, and tomorrow that this is not
quite true, as those who hire and reward them see fit. At best, a minority can revolt and go on
demonstration in streets; the ruling elite nonetheless enjoys other means to stifle their complaints
and to wear their combativeness down to inhibition in the end. Better, they even invite the
vanquished to come and repent on television set on prime time. Evidences of the situation I am
describing are innumerable and permanently available on television screens and on the Internet. The
meaning of the word “realpolitik” has never been so true in France since 1981; I will exemplify it in
the Part III of this book, with accounts of cunning major deception operations and anti-American
campaigns of disinformation launched from that year on, exactly.
With respect to the new role given to the media, of an importance that had never been so crucial
in France’s history before, the change had to make those information carriers indispensable
resources at the service of a new policy in intelligence, implicitly. As seen from this angle, the
definition of intelligence itself had to be rewritten. For the main objectives of the French
intelligence community, and of the foreign intelligence agency the DGSE in particular, no longer
focused on stealing secrets, but on wining minds and hearts, and, more importantly, on influence,
agitprop, and disinformation.
The reader now knows the historical path, aims, and changes that led to today’s methods in
monitoring and control of information in France. Again, the goal with this is defense against similar
possible retaliation from the targets that France is attacking since the end of the Cold War. Indeed,
France’s posture in domestic influence and counterinfluence is that of a country at war, epitomized
by the upsurge in intelligence capacities and recruitment. Now, I describe the methods.
In theory, a good index to make a first judgment on the development or regression of domestic
influence and domestic espionage by country is to consult the Press Freedom Index; for the
corollary of a growth in domestic influence and domestic espionage is a proportional regression of
the freedom of the press. Maurice Dufresse, a former senior executive of the DGSE turned
whistleblower, once in 2010 confirmed publicly this agency indeed has a source, contact, or agent in
all French media.[442] The Press Freedom Index, therefore, should not be regarded as a reliable
source. The more so since the organization investigating this matter, Reporters Without Borders–
RWB, was founded by Robert Ménard in 1985, in Paris, in the wake of the socialist takeover either,
under the name Reporters Sans Frontières–RSF. Still today, Ménard is at the same time an active
French politician and the actual (2018) mayor of the city of Béziers, to begin with. Earlier in 1973,
he joined the Ligue Communiste Révolutionaire–LCR (Revolutionary Communist League), which
in France is the party of Communist hardliners. Eventually in 1979, Ménard left this party for the
French Socialist Party–PS; but in 1981, when Socialist François Mitterrand was elected President,
he left it and claimed he had no membership in any political party anymore. Finally, Ménard
affiliated unofficially to the Front National–FN of Marine Le Pen (renamed Rassemblement
National–RN, or National Rally, in June 2018), and he was elected mayor of Béziers with the
support of this party, precisely.
The reader may assume reasonably and logically that Ménard truly does not stand by the values
of Le Pen and her new party. Actually, he is serving the same interest Russia found in supporting
financially this party, and in thus corrupting it. For the record, in 2014, the FN acknowledged it had
received a loan of 9 million euros (about $11,000,000) from the First Czech Russian Bank (FCRB),
a private company based in Russia, following talks in Russia between Marine Le Pen and Vladimir
Putin.[443] European Deputy Jean-Luc Schaffhauser,[444] a would-be-ally of the FN and a former
international consultant for French military plane builder Dassault Systèmes, secured the Russian
loan on behalf of the National Front.
On October 1st, 2012, Ménard and Dominique Jamet[445] co-founded the far-rightist news website
Boulevard Voltaire, which truly is a “lure for attracting birds”[446] and a medium of political
influence discreetly supported by Russia either. Boulevard Voltaire seems to have been created to
succeed the other news website Réseau Voltaire, a Russian propaganda mill officially banned from
France in 2007 following complaints and justice suits.[447] The latter publication is still active
however, and is currently run from the Middle East by Russian agent of influence Thierry Meyssan
its founder. Despite all this, Réseau Voltaire actually is in no way targeted by the French intelligence
community.[448] I am adding the latter specifics because the name of Meyssan will arise again in the
Part III of this book, this other time as author and front man in a major Russian disinformation
campaign launched against the United States from France in 2002. Not coincidentally again, one of
the main contributors to Ménard’s Boulevard Voltaire news website is French national and
Lebanese-born journalist André Bercoff, another agent of influence who will also appear later in the
same Part III.
Now, the reader knows that Reporters Without Borders has been created and is currently headed
by a man whose past and current activities unquestionably dismiss all objectivity and impartiality
this organization may claim. Subsequently, it casts a serious doubt on the real activities and aims of
its network of foreign correspondents.
In France, journalist is a right granted by the Commission de la Carte d’Identité des Journalistes
Professionnels–CCIJP (Professional Journalists ID Card Commission), beyond a professional
activity. The CCIJP is an official commission of the French Government ruling the condition of
French journalists that edits for them a year card with a specific number allowing passing barriers
set by the authorities to limit the access to communication and press releases of the government to
the “right persons”. The card also gives free entrance to most museums, exhibitions, theaters,
cinema, etc.; and its holding in France is the necessary condition to become professional journalist.
As a perk, its grants his recipient an income tax abatement, substantial by French standards.[449]
 The French press card is granted to unofficially shortlisted would-be-journalists, and to other
professionals working as staffers in the mainstream media, even when their activities are not
directly relevant to journalism in the facts. It rather is a mark of trust or a reward for compliance
during apprenticeship and for restraint with respect to matters that the public should not know.
There are other prerequisites of the peculiar sort, ranging from inherited privilege to being contact
or agent of an intelligence agency. As example, in the 1990s, I once met a flying agent upon his
return from Canada who had been sent for a long mission in this country with a flimsy if not
disputable cover activity of journalist that justified his holding of this card.
Nonetheless, French journalists who work for the mainstream media and the regional press can
hardly exert their activity without good connections with the police, other public bodies, and
political figures. Those who stray from the untold rule of restraint are ostracized and deprived of
“breaking news” forthwith, whereas the others who best demonstrated their discretion and celerity
are rewarded “scoops” and exclusive interviews.
Income tax abatements, exclusive perks, and good connections are not the only special privileges
the State grants to its obedient press, and by far, since most French newspapers and major
magazines benefit from generous subsidies annually amounting to several million euros in some
instances. Then there are other substantial financial aids disguised as private financings, given at a
loss by a number of businessmen acting as super-agents of the DGSE or as fronts of the Russian
intelligence community. In some instances, the Russian financial support is even publicly known,
given by Russian agents and oligarchs, as in the cases of France Soir national newspaper; or else
Marianne newsmagazine, nearly all publication previously edited by Lagardère group, and Le
Monde newspaper since 2018, all now owned by Czech mogul and middleman of Russia in Europe
Daniel Křetínský. The table I set up on the next page provides the reader with exact figures for the
years 2015-2016 about funds given directly by the State to privately owned mainstream media.
In the light of all these facts, it comes to no surprise that the French journalists can hardly be seen
as free to report objectively on anything. Many know much more than they report about the
intricacies of politics and the government, and countless succulent news that would certainly boost
the audience of the media they are working for, but not their careers, certainly.
The specialty of investigative journalist in France is a running joke in editorial rooms, or a myth
that one can see only in movies. National scandals in this country rarely owe to happenstance, and
serve some hidden agendas whose objectives may be hard to guess because of an eclecticism that
depends largely on directives in active measures. The alternative and its four options, I explained at
the beginning of the chapter 19, range from deception operations and disinformation aiming a
foreign country or just the French public, to blacklisting, and to the social eliminations of important
personalities and witnesses of lesser importance. Then come the need, fundamental, to show then
and now to the masses that journalists indeed are doing their job honestly. In reality, in all French
media, the use of the word “scoop” is explicitly forbidden, and anyone dares transgress the rule can
expect nothing in return but frowns and raised eyebrows, unless the thing is a plane crash or some
erupting volcano. Even a train accident in the country may easily turn to be a sensitive matter,
whose reporting must be proofread carefully and approved by the Editorial Manager who knows
what should not be said about it.
As about the topic of intelligence, the French press has its regular reporter specialists who have
their entries in the secluded middle, simply because they are active members of the French
intelligence community and of the DGSE in particular the more often.[450] No one else is permitted
to debate publicly on on such sensitive things. Customarily, either the Editor-in-chief or the
Publication Manager enforces the implicit censorship. The reader can see that the unofficial
provisions warranting state censorship stay as they were in the 19th century, without any change but
to the DGSE that took the relay to the police to guaranteeing that the masses do not wake up.
 As I worked sometimes under the cover activity of journalist—without the holding a press card
though—and even under that of teacher in the branch, I am in position to explain that French
journalists are expected not to see the obvious, still less to comment it. Instead, they must report
honestly the facts of the events only. All questions, contradictions, oddities, and conjectures the
specifics may raise must be brushed aside and left unreported. If ever the latter sort of information
must be brought to light for one reason or another, then “more experienced” and trusted reporters
and columnists are here to handle the matter. The fear of the embarrassing detail, single word or
name rules a parallel hierarchy of responsibilities and trust in the profession. The news must be
handled with the same care as miners do with nitroglycerin because many in the flow, anecdotal at
first glance, may be explosive or potentially so, either from a domestic or diplomatic standpoint or
both. The care extends not to damaging the image of a leading business since all enjoy the status of
economic heritage / SAIV.
Censorship in France goes thus far, not only because large industrial groups also finance the
media by buying advertising space all year long, additionally, but also because of one’s membership
to Le Siècle exclusive circle. All this makes up for a neat caesura to exist between news reporting
and opinion making, with two corresponding and distinct categories of journalists who do not much
mingle and interact with each other, due to the higher social rank those of the latter type hold, to the
least.
Monitoring and handling the media unbeknownst to a population of several tens of millions
remain a complex and burdensome business. I must cite some concerns I was brought to know,
therefore.
Effectiveness in the control of the press in France depends also on the support of the GOdF and
other liberal masonic lodges. It would be hard to find in this country a periodical in which no one in
its managerial staff belongs to a liberal masonic lodge. Then a journalist who is not in “good terms”
with certain key people will not remain for long a desirable employee. Up in the hierarchy, the
owner of a newspaper who does not work “by the book” has to prepare for the end of his subsidy
and sales of advertising space, and then for bankruptcy and the cancelling of his press card as final
and logical consequence for the impediments. The disappearance of L’Aurore right-leaning daily
newspaper in the early 1980, between other examples, is largely attributable to the enforcement of
the latter provision. Once more, French media mogul Robert Hersant, who actively supported the
Socialist Party in the 1980s, handled the burial of L’Aurore and spared Le Figaro before the military
took it over through the official ownership of Serge Dassault, chairman and chief executive officer
of Dassault Group military aircraft builder and provider of private jets to super-agents. Then police
and gendarmes have their “favored investigative journalists”. The former regularly tip the latter and
reciprocally, exactly as in the late 19th century either. So much so that quite often, a journalist goes
as far as doing undercover police investigative jobs to help a little.
Of course, there is a concern about the likelihood for a young journalist to vent his indignation
about the practices. This explains why the access to journalist jobs and the issuance of press cards
are cautiously monitored and controlled, and the shortlisting is done in schools and training centers
on journalism. As example, for a short while in 2000, the Institut Pratique du Journalisme–IPJ, in
Paris[451] provided me with a cover activity of teacher and pertaining tasks. The executive in this
reputed institute who hired me was a DGSE intelligence officer under cover himself.
In French schools of journalism, students are carefully monitored and put on test unbeknownst to
them, in order to spot those who might be hired as press correspondents abroad / flying agents,
contacts, or agents in editorial staffs, and the others who seem to be too concerned with ethics and
moral. Teachers and professors in journalism must inform their managers on the profiles of all
students. The former, often ex-journalists themselves, are in regular and friendly touch with many
media in the country, and with numerous journalists who once were their pupils. This empowers
them naturally to issue informal nonetheless trustworthy accreditations. Of course, either fresh
students ignore all this, or they are perceptive enough to understand it; in any case, a medium for
which they have been shortlisted unbeknownst to them will hire them. Those deemed unfit to go by
the hidden realities of the job will be stirred towards careers in specialized journalism on goods,
products, cultural activities, and all such matters that do not imply regular relations and tacit
understandings with the authorities and politicians. This is done so softly, discreetly, and with
suitable effectiveness that troubles with journalists very rarely happen in France.
A journalist who attempts to break the law of silence is threatened, inescapably, and the first
threat he is exposed to is the likely loss of his press card, and so of his job. Nonetheless, they cannot
publish anything without the approval of the Chief Editor, and an additional provision in safety is
that the Chief Editor cannot publish anything out of the tacit consent of his Director of Publication,
who often is the owner of the medium in addition to have membership in a liberal masonic lodge or
in Le Siècle. Cases of people who are assassinated while attempting to reveal sensitive information
to the media happen, as we have seen in a previous chapter, whereas suspicious deaths of journalists
have to be avoided at all costs; indeed, those are rare to the point that I am unable to recollect any
such case, save for the suspicious death of Jean-Edern Hallier, to date.
At some point in the chapters 18 and 19, I explained a few things on the phenomenon of reverse
psychology, and I promised to present its application with a true example. In my opinion, and for
much I know, the story, below, tells its most successful use in domestic influence in France. Its
effects still prove true today, 45 years later, although the setup was as simple as inexpensive. In
passing, the American reader will be surprised, doubtless, to know that this clever scheme actually
was directly inspired by the Watergate scandal in the United States, at a time it has just erupted.
André Escaro, cartoonist and director of Le Canard enchaîné newspaper, came out of a movie
theater to pick up his car he parked by 173 Rue Saint-Honoré, in Paris. The latter specifics come to
explain how and why he passed “by happenstance” by the new premises where the weekly had to
settle upon the completion of works in the building. There, Escaro said, he saw “light through the
windows,” which was unexpected so late at night. Moreover, he added, he “surprised two police in
uniform equipped with walkie-talkies” in front of the entrance. That is why Escaro entered the
building and climbed the stairs. On the third floor, he said he saw “two guys posing as plumbers in
full swing”. In fact, “the plumbers in question turned to be DST agents who were busy installing spy
microphones in the offices”. Escaro saw raised floorboards, wires, and electrical boxes: all things
irrelevant to plumbing. In point of fact, Escaro specifies, the plumbers actually were a “sonar
group” of the DST while a “fountain group” took charge of locks for the break-in.
The following morning, Escaro made a front-page for Le Canard enchaîné with this striking
story. The expected consequence of it was a national scandal, and a considerable increase in the
circulation of the newspaper. The weekly went from 450,000 copies sold on average to more than a
million in the week following the breaking news. That is how Le Canard enchaîné became “the
most trusted newspaper in France,” overnight. However, the perceptive reader probably spotted the
following discrepancies in Escaro’s account of the facts, which the French public and even other
journalists always failed to see.
First, how is that the two police downstairs, in uniforms and using walkie-talkies, to add to the
oddity, failed to do their cover job? This is quite gross when talking about the bugging specialists of
the DST; renamed DGSI since then, for the record. Second, how is that possible Escaro could know
that the “plumbers” in question were legit agents of the DST, and not of the RG or the SDECE? Did
these particularly dumb spooks granted him a need-to-know on the spot, and told the sensitive
specifics while caught red-handed? Did they show some cards with “DST Sonar Group” and “DST
Fountain Group” printed in big red letters on them while they were courteously apologizing for the
disturbance? Third, why did these agents and their watchdogs downstairs come to execute their
mission at 10:15 pm, at a time and in a place in Paris downtown where numerous people are
wandering in streets? To cap it all, how lucky Escaro was to be at the right time and the right place
“to see the light” in the offices of the newspaper he worked for.
Indeed, I know no spy even if freshly trained who would take such a tale at its face value. The
public, yes, certainly because it loves sensational stories as this one, and, as I said, passion always
takes over reason. Nonetheless, I know this story is a hoax, simply because many know it in the
DGSE, and because it was staged by its ancestor the SDECE, and not by the DST in actuality.[452]
Of course, the SDECE and the DST at that time had the expertise and the power to infiltrate,
corrupt, or coerce any staff member in any newspaper including Le Canard enchaîné. French
journalists working in France are not protected by any immunity of any sort, and to be the
privileged holder of a press card is no remedy against their recruitment as sources. Had the
journalists of Le Canard enchaîné refused to cooperate or to let themselves be corrupted, they all
would be submitted to the same repeated administrative controls, fixed fines, labor union strikes,
and other hassles commonly used in similarly exceptional cases. Now, I explain why the hoax was
done with Le Canard enchaîné in particular.
The name Le Canard enchaîné translates as “The Chained Duck” or “The Chained Paper”
because a “duck” in French slang means “newspaper”. Then Le Canard enchaîné is a satirical and
highly popular leftist weekly newspaper featuring investigative journalism and leaks from would-
be-sources inside the French Government. The usual nature of the leaks makes Le Canard enchaîné
a forerunner of WikiLeaks. As other particular it does not accept any advertisements, and is privately
and collectively owned by its employees, mostly. Its editorial staff is notoriously secretive, and very
little is known about who really runs it, and how its journalists are recruited, exactly.
Back to the realities I know, for decades, the SDECE and eventually the DGSE have been using
Le Canard enchaîné for the same reasons as Russia uses WikiLeaks today, exactly. That is to say,
leaking secrets serving the agenda of this agency in domestic intelligence, and deceptions about the
French Government aiming foreign countries that are interested in its inner workings and agenda.
Additionally, with respect to the latter use, the DGSE relies occasionally on this newspaper to
“leak” news about itself, which truly aim to deceive the French public more than foreign spies who
are not so easy to fool. The latter provisions in active measures prove effective altogether, especially
for serving a particular phenomenon in mass psychology, I learned under the term “catharsis per
proxy,” is in the Lexicon of this book because unlike “peer pressure,” “subtext,” and other
“groupthink,” the reader would not find it on the Internet. I just add the followings for the
circumstance.
In France, the public loves to see the wrongdoings of its political leaders to be publicly exposed,
since most French are convinced that they are liars and corrupt people, regardless whether it is true
or not. Consequently, there is a need in domestic intelligence to satisfy this particular demand.
Additionally, there is a need to breed in the minds of the masses the belief that the press of their
country is free, and that the freedom of speech is enforced. As the expression suggest, catharsis by
proxy aims to allow the masses fulfill their need for social justice, consequential in this country to a
steady decline in the general standard of living of the lower and middle classes. In their minds,
reading Le Canard enchaîné produces an effect similar to schadenfreude, a German word and its
meaning that together are largely known in the United States, but not at all in France.
The goal of the fake bugging of Le Canard enchaîné was to make for this leftist newspaper a
popular reputation of high reliability at the expense of the DST, and not to that of the SDECE, we
notice. Anyway, the success of the so simple, quick, and inexpensive mission proves remarkably
enduring, as the newspaper stays unanimously considered in France as the most reliable medium,
since the popular belief still today holds that “the DST wanted to know who its sources are, yet
failed shamefully to do so; and never could thereafter, lest of a new scandal”.
I know of spicy secrets on some French VIPs that nearly all French journalists know either.
However, neither Le Canard enchaîné nor any other newspaper ever published a single word about
those facts to date. This reality could be epitomized, perhaps, with the following other anecdote.
 On January 25, 1984, François Mitterrand then President of France for almost three years
recognized Mazarine Pingeot before a notary as his daughter he had with one of his mistresses. All
journalists in all major media knew about the existence of this hidden child of the President since
the very beginning of his first presidential term, in 1981, and so did Le Canard enchaîné, of course.
In 1982, Jean-Édern Hallier,[453] a journalist among the most reckless one could find in France,
attempted to make the latter information public, in vain. The cause of Hallier’s failure is the law of
the silence of the press, I explained earlier, of which Le Canard enchaîné is not exempt, I confirm. It
was not until the death of François Mitterrand, thirteen years later, that two paparazzi named Pierre
Suu and Sébastien Valiela at last published a photo made on September 21, 1994, they titled
“Mazarine and his father at the exit of the restaurant Divellec,” in the November 3, 1994 issue of
Paris Match weekly newsmagazine.
As this case of censorship went very far, it once happened that a television journalist asked to
well-known paparazzo, “Why did not you do your job with this affair of the hidden daughter of the
President?” The embarrassed man answered, verbatim, “This concerned too closely the privacy of a
person. Moreover, he was the President.” Again, the public fails to ask the question, “How long
have French paparazzi worried about public figures’ privacy?”
Paparazzo Sébastien Valiela was not in the least threatened for his “scoop,” and even neither was
he a few years later when, again, he was the first to reveal an affair between President François
Hollande and actress Julie Gayet, once more supported by photographic evidences. Valiela is a man
endowed with exceptional privileges, indeed.
Media and domestic influence are not solely for adults. Upon the liberation of France, on June
1st, 1945, the French Communist Party–PCF, more supported and financed than ever by the Soviet
Union at the time, launched a weekly comics magazine for 11 to 13 years old titled Vaillant. The
PCF chose the name in an attempt to lure people into believing the other weekly for children Cœurs
Vaillants was published again since its closure by the Germans in 1940. Union des Catholiques de
France–UOCF (Union of Catholics of France) had created the latter publication in 1929, which had
known success with a weekly circulation of close to 400,000 copies in the late 1930s. However, in
1952, the French political right-wing revived Journal de Mickey (Mickey’s Weekly), a weekly comic
for 8 to 13 years old launched in France in 1934. Journal de Mickey met success overnight, and it
became the leading publication for children in France during the same decade, with a circulation
peaking at more 630,000 copies a week.
To the PCF, the challenger was no longer Cœurs Vaillants and the Catholics, therefore, but
Mickey and the Americans. Consequent to the success of Journal de Mickey, the circulation of
Vaillant was declining at a catastrophic rate of minus 10,000 copies a month. As Vaillants went as
down as 80,000 copies a month in 1966, the Communists changed the title the same year for
Vaillant le Journal de Pif and created new characters to compete with these of Journal de Mickey.
The featured characters of Journal de Mickey at that time were Mickey Mouse, of course, and
Donald Duck, the Beagle Boys, Goofy and, most of all, the much capitalist Uncle Scrooge. The idea
of the Communists was to challenge Disney’s characters with stories focusing on the theme of social
justice.[454] However, Journal de Mickey kept on holding the leadership, and that is why three years
later in 1969, the Communists changed again their title for Pif Gadget, and introduced the idea to
sell the publication with a free gift little toy for the same price; the package being much advertised
at a considerable cost. The formula proved to work, as its average circulation jumped instantly to
350,000, and even happened to peak at 650,000, depending the appeal of the gift toy. In spite of
these considerable efforts, Pif Gadget never stole the leadership to Journal de Mickey and
disappeared in 1993. Earlier in 1972, French owned media group Hachette, publisher of Journal de
Mickey, launched Picsou Magazine (Uncle Scrooge Magazine), a bi-monthly comics featuring
Uncle Scrooge because the character had become the most successful in France in the meantime,
ironically. The Communists launched again Pif Gadget in 2004, but since then the title, characters,
and concept are regularly changed in the hope to meet a success proving ever-elusive.
In a large majority of cases, we notice, all comics’ heroes address children whose brains are not
yet grown up, and who are more receptive to fantasy than adults are. Children are still discovering
things, feelings, emotions, how others behave and what their concern are, the middle and the society
surrounding them, the World in a word. Comic’s stories and fantasy make their imagination work
and help develop their brain capacities to build mental images, emotions, and situations. From still
images and captions, they figure living and vivid motion, sounds and feelings; and they may feel
they are one of those sketched heroes, we have seen earlier. They cannot yet grasp intricacies in
politics, and they may never do even they reach adulthood. They remain influenced by the narrative
of the scenarios they find in those comics magazines and books. Everything children learn from
those publications also shapes who they will be as adults, their moral and scale of values, and how
to behave with others. They are unable to decipher influence and propaganda tricks, meta-
communication, and subtexts that happen to be subtly introduced in stories. How could they, since
neither their parents are, in an overwhelming number of instances? All this comes to explain why
the DGSE has also specialists whose missions are to monitor publications, board games, video
games, and educational computer programs for children, and even to supervise their making
sometimes.
There is no desire in the DGSE to teach the masses about all those tricks in influence,
propaganda, and disinformation, much the opposite, actually. This agency considers that teaching
the public to spot and to “decode” possible foreign or bad influence in fictions, as early as in school
from grade 9, i.e. 14 to 15 years old, since it would the right moment, would also teach them do to
so with domestic influence and propaganda conceived to influence them in a way serving the French
government and the scale of values and beliefs it wants for the Nation. The policy was decided in
the aftermaths of the WWII by the first experts in influence and counterinfluence and by Edgar
Morin in particular. Morin was an intelligence officer and a scholar who defined the ordinary people
of the masses as somnanbules, or “sleepwalkers”. He coined the other secret meaning for the latter
noun that since is still in use in the DGSE to sum up on which assumption the French public
opinion, and the scale of values and beliefs of the masses, must be taught.
The explanations above help the reader understand why the French public is totally ignorant of
the words and names, “peer pressure,” “groupthink,” “minority influence,” “meta-communication,”
“paralanguage,” “Milgram experiment,” “demonization by association,” “echo chamber,” “need for
belonging,” and still less of the notions they denote. These words and their French translations never
appear in the French media and in books either. More to his surprise, I guess, I once made a try with
a student in psychology who was on her third year of study, and gave up after uttering three such
words only, as each left her shared between puzzlement and defiance because she never heard any.
When I attempted to explain to what schadenfreude and the Milgram experiment are, she snickered
and retorted, “It is stuff of the old school, completely outdated. Psychology made tremendous
progresses since”. In the Lexicon of this book, the reader will find the definition in domestic
influence of the word “sleepwalker,” and also of the expression “catharsis per proxy” I used earlier
because the latter has not yet been leaked on the Internet, both in French and in its English
translation still in this year 2018.
Television stays the first and most popular of all media in France, as in about all countries if not
all. Since then, anything is said on any of the major television channels in France has diplomatic-
like value because of this state control and efficient censorship, precisely; that is exactly how the
French ruling elite and the DGSE see it. The printed press is paling by comparison, and it addresses
increasingly literate individuals of the middle and upper classes, due to the cost of reading a daily
newspaper and newsmagazines entails in France. In this country, however, the regional press
opposes greater resistance to online media than the national press does. Besides, weekly and
monthly magazines actually offer much more to watch than to read, with averages retail prices that
increasingly deter the steadily pauperizing French middle class. The smartphone is become more
performing than print magazines, as taken independently of the cost.
In the 1990s, I taught a number of employees of the leading state-owned TV channels France 2
and France 3, and I have been in touch for years with many others. This allows me to tell a few
more notions about domestic influence and propaganda on French television in the 21st century.
Because of their inherent immediacy, radio stations and television channels remain the most
tightly controlled media, with explicit and visible security measures, and then with more numerous
implicit means the French population cannot see. Major French TV channels are sheltered in
buildings under heavy surveillance, as police headquarters are, and a number of their employees are
contacts and agents of the DGSE at varied levels of their hierarchies. For example, and about
leading TV channel France 2 alone, I knew one such employee who was lighting manager, another
was TV reporter with a specialty on military affairs and conflicts, another was working on video
effects and graphic design, and two others were year-long contractors as musicians and music
composers. In the large building of France Television headquarters, on the west fringe of Paris,
crossing the checkpoint beyond the large interior hall is a privilege offered to few. Indeed, I saw no
big difference between entering this place and the premises of a service of the DGSE, except the
former is infinitely more pleasant and its employees seem to be happier, to put it mildly. I often
wondered about how influential one’s parents must be to be granted a job in this public company.
Freshly graduated students in relevant fields quickly understand that to be hired in television
broadcasting is not at all a matter of skills. Many are thus forced to give up and reconvert or take
odd jobs. The stringent surveillance on television broadcasting in France is certainly not an
exception in the World, yet I believe it would shock the American reader. The concern for thus
securing the conditions of television broadcasting extends to the careful shortlisting of people who
work in this branch, therefore.
Actually, TV journalists whose mission is to carry out reporting-surveys often are specialized
staffers employed full-time by the intelligence community or their agents abroad. However, when I
trained some of them, in many instances, I noticed they remain authentic journalists who simply
learn certain tricks and methods in intelligence. Those teachings are informally introduced in
normal journalism courses, without notice and unbeknownst to them, even though many are not
fooled with the real purpose of certain methods they learn so, inevitably. They are just expected to
assume the “specifics” are integral to the trade of normal journalism in the field. This particularity
makes those TV journalist “hybrid,” if I can put things that way. Then it makes sense when one
knows that French journalists are shortlisted on their political orthodoxy and on their tacit
agreement with a rule saying that certain news and things must not be broadcast. They are explained
which facts must rather be reported to their hierarchies only. They “understand,” to sum it up in
French intelligence cryptic jargon.
Therefrom, some remain ordinary journalists until their retirements, and some others become
spies under the cover activity of journalist. Nonetheless, the line between journalism and spying is
thin, and it is even not red. Both investigate on all kinds of matters, and they must trick people to
make them talk. Both are often brought to use sophisticated hidden cameras and microphones
unbeknownst to those they interview. For investigative journalists carrying a press card in France
are legally granted the right to do their job with hidden spy microphones and cameras, and even
night vision cameras sometimes. They are allowed to disguise and to carry out interviews under
fictitious identities and pretenses, exactly as spies do. Those methods are common practices in
French journalism, and their uses explain how exclusive reports can be made as “entertaining” as
thrillers TV shows of the NCIS genre are. Often, I have seen on French television journalists who
resort to bold and intrusive tricks and methods that trained spies only are supposed to know. In
addition, I have seen a number of TV news magazines in which they even resort to techniques and
special spy gadgets of the same kind as the DGSE and the DGSI use.
French television broadcasting and the perception the masses have of it are radically different of
what they are in a country such as the United States. By comparison, American people typically
organize their evenings before the screen as one does with a menu in a restaurant. Not in France,
where the six oldest and leading TV channels TF1, France 2, France 3, France 5, M6, and Arte
alone collect about 57.4% of the audience (Dec. 2017) because they all broadcast the news mixed
with entertainment. Among the latter channels, the State owns France 2, 3 and 5, which makes them
public services. French people zap much less than Americans do; a large majority wait for “the hour
of the news” occurring about thrice a day: on lunchtime, on dinnertime, and at about midnight for
the last journal, still exactly as it was more than half a century ago.
Poorly enthusiastic attempts have been made to create channels broadcasting news round the
clock on the examples of CNN, CNBC, and Fox News in the United States. We find France 24,
which international channel has been created especially for a French-speaking audience living
outside France, and for reasons truly relevant to information warfare, as we will see in a next
chapter. BFM TV is the latest of those attempts with respect to a domestic audience, but this channel
is currently suffering repeated accusations of media-censorship and state propaganda in its own
country. In the two latter cases, there are the additional problems of financial means and of a quality
in all respects that is down under that of any similar American media. Actually, the rising news
channel in France at this time is the French version of Russia Today–RT.
French TV news documentaries are information carriers French domestic influence and
propaganda specialists favor. In the two last decades, those specialists developed considerably and
successfully a trend in news documentaries on subjects they name faits de société, translating as
“facts of the society,” and faits d’actualités, or “facts of the news”. Those programs have no real
equivalents in the United States, and the closest American example I find is Bad Boys, to help the
reader figure their form and substance. In France, those documentaries all are about domestic
influence, without exception. Their themes focus on particular social issues presented and debated at
length by voiceovers, which do not interest journalists because they are of minor interest or are not
relevant to any real actuality. Usually the real aim of their makings is to warm up the audience in
prevision of new laws and regulations. Then we find the promotion of vocational activities, decided
in the frame of a fight of the government against unemployment. Many programs are made with the
same style to encouraging fraud reporting, to go to work in certain foreign countries, to foster
enlisting in the police and in the military, and countless other subjects of the same vein, relevant to
the immediate concerns of the government or just to shaping the public opinion. The goal is
sensibiliser la population, or “raising the awareness of the masses about something,” “or drawing
their attention to something,” in French domestic influence jargon. As the subjects they tackle are
uninteresting not to say boring, they are made with a care and means similar to those given to series
and action films, including dramatic or dynamic music accordingly; all artifices that make them
catchy in the end.
Nowadays, on all main channels, those particular programs fill airtimes, especially on France 2
and M6 on prime time during working days. On Saturdays and Sundays, still on the latter channels,
the 52 minutes documentaries—the 8 remaining minutes being for the commercials—fill up entire
afternoons and continue on evenings, one after the other on a row, only interrupted by commercials.
Nonetheless, their audience is large and even peaks because there is not much else of greater interest
to watch on all other channels at the same moments, including on those privately owned. Therefore,
younger people and households of the middle-class shift to pay-per-view Netflix, while a small
minority subscribes to Amazon Prime.
The programming of the “awareness-raising thriller documentaries” is often advertised several
days ahead, as if they were exclusive reports of exceptional interest, implicitly. The public is used to
and indeed enjoys watching them for hours on a row, without ever realizing they truly are all about
domestic influence and propaganda.
In a more elitist style of what PBS is in the United States, French-German and bilingual Arte is all
about propaganda 24 / 7, indeed. Posing as a cultural and educational channel, Arte programming
puts the emphasis on an alternative view of the World, unambiguously made to challenging and
even questioning a would-be-American and capitalistic perception of life, sometimes explicitly
described as “nauseating”. The recurring themes Arte broadcasts are green activism and global
warming, the virtues of the European Union and a progressive perception of this entity, criticism of
the U.S. industry, economy, and politics, Nazi politics and atrocities during the WWII, the Spanish
War of 1936-1939 and popular revolutions in South-America, and would-be-anthropological studies
of third-world cultures. In all those programs, though the overall quality is technically good or even
excellent. Scholars, scientists, historians, politicians, and former officials seriously support the
arguments developed, astutely mixed with those of activists, thus making the stances that the latter
advocate apparently unquestionable. Films broadcast on prime time on Arte are of the serious genre,
presented as classics and featuring film directors such as Pedro Almodovar, Chris Marker, Ingmar
Bergman, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Frederico Fellini, and others who distinguished
themselves as exponents of causes invariably leftists. Again, entertainment for the sake of
entertainment is unwarranted.
The reader now understands how and why nothing of what happens in the premises of French
television channels escapes the all-seeing eye of the Ministry of Defense and of its DGSE. In the
early 1990s, I have been in touch for a couple of years with a staff member of Thalassa TV
program, broadcasts weekly on France 3.[455] This ex-colleague once alluded to me it was a
wonderful cover activity to send spies of the Service Action abroad. Again, on France 2, Fort
Boyard TV game show often hires members of this service, unbeknownst to the audience, which
particularity must be taken as a quick “vacation tour” the DGSE offers to those paramilitaries, I
assume.
Beside all I explained above, TV channel Russia Today–RT and press agency Sputnik are flexing
their muscles in the French audiovisual landscape, as their activities and means have been steadily
growing in France for the last decade. This makes them serious challengers in the specialty of news
in this country. In spite of rare pretenses of claims from the French Government that RT France is
serving Russian propaganda, a growing number of French officials, entrepreneurs, police and
military, and even intelligence officers indeed give their takes on French current affairs on the stage
of this TV channel, unconcerned, as if it was all normal. Everything must stay implicit. The
numerous remarks on social networks about the oddity stay unanswered, and both the other media,
the government, and the DGSI put their heads in the sand. Indeed, RT France appears to be heading
toward a position of top-tier news channel in the country, and to strongly relying on Internet online
video and live broadcasting to succeed, with the support of Ruptly GmbH, a German-based Russian
video news agency.
 Of late, Russia launched unofficially Thinkerview, a YouTube TV channel broadcasting on live
about once or twice a week still at this time (2019). The audience of this other medium rose to
several hundred thousand viewers, with peaks in excess of 1 million, thus making it a newcomer
and a challenger in the French mainstream media. Along the three years of existence of Thinkerview
at this time, it became obvious that the French Ministry of Defense and the DGSE in particular are
jointly supporting this medium in several ways. Thinkerview has a number of odd characteristics
that make it an unprecedented experiment in French television broadcasting.[456] Although its
studios are based in the suburbs of Paris, it poses as an anonymous and unofficial media with no
publicly known address, nor telephone number, nor even a website or email address, in line with the
Anonymous movement, and it does not stop short of the latter analogy of mine.
Officially, an anonymous French national whose name and face are not publicly known to date is
heading Thinkerview. Only his snarling voice with his Paris’ working-class accent is familiar to
regular viewers, as he never appears in front of the cameras on interviews of the French
personalities he conducts, too. He introduces himself not as a journalist, but as a “hacker journalist,”
in line with the Anonymous movement and WikiLeaks. In a short interview he once gave to Ivan
Erhel, journalist with Sputnik Russian press agency, he crudely stated with the rebel and defiant
tone of someone who has a chip on his shoulder, “A journalist, in our opinion, must be someone
who goes on find out the news, no matter what it costs to him … no matter what it costs to him …”
he insisted on repeating, “his career, his family, his children, his loans, his press card, his nice car,
and the beautiful chick he shows off with when he goes to vernissages with his buddy journalists
alike”.[457] The intent appears laudable in spite of an unmistakable rage against the whole World, yet
it is not followed by much substance in the light of all the realities I report in this book.
In spite of the latter peculiarities completed with insisting rude language and offhanded manners
that normally do not come as advantages when interviewing prominent personalities, Thinkerview
and its staff succeed inexplicably in their ambition to challenge major French media. The interview
commonly lasts more than one hour or even two without ever any interruption. As on June 14, 2019,
and for the last two years, Thinkerview thus conducted 158 interviews of French and Russians
personalities and officials, whose common distinctive characteristic in character is open anti-
Americanism. The head and host of Thinkerview once claimed that his offers to interview American
diplomats of the U.S. Embassy in Paris were declined—understandably, indeed. The subject of
intelligence and espionage is often brought upon at one point or another, which comes as an
additional peculiarity. In point of fact, the talk of the would-be-hacker journalist betrays a
familiarity with the realm of intelligence acquired in the DGSE, and possibly in an elite unit of the
military, in my opinion. Indeed, he worked for a while in a “thinks-tank” with intelligence analysts,
he once stated, which I hold as the truth without any difficulty.
Thinkerview already hosted several times “former” high-ranking executives of the DGSE Pierre
Conesa, Alain Juillet,[458] Alain Chouet, and a number of employees and agents of the same agency.
Then we find Army General and former Military Attaché at the French Embassy in Washington
Vincent Desportes, former Chief Editor of Le Monde newspaper and current head of Mediapart
online newsmagazine Edwy Plenel, France 2 TV channel leading presenter and far-leftist Élise
Lucet, Russia’s Senator Alekseï Pouchkov, Council Minister at the Russia Embassy in Paris Artem
Studennikov, President and Director of Information of RT France Xenia Fedorova, journalist and
speaker of Sputnik press agency in France Ivan Erhel, and leader of the far-leftist party La France
Insoumise Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
On December 6, 2017, Thinkerview had no difficulty with organizing a conference at the French
War School, which privilege claims serious credentials normally denied to anonymous, amateur, and
activist journalism.
Due to the aforesaid, Thinkerview became a popular enigma in France, and many assume, not
without some good reasons, that this media actually is a front of an intelligence agency. In early
2019, following the latter popular concern, “someone” posted on a blog a long article pretending
that Thinkerview is “a propaganda mill of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad”. This is
obviously inconsistent with an in-depth analysis of the more than 150 interviews available on the
YouTube account of Thinkerview. Further scrutiny allowed me to discover that the latter online
paper was written in a style I know well, typical of a diversion action in anticipation as the trolls of
the DGSE use to craft them, just in case another anonymous publishes on the Internet the same
analysis and conclusion I just wrote. The technique, pertaining to counterinfluence, is explained in
the Lexicon of this book at the entry “Bury (to)”. Additionally, it proved easy to identify the author
as a member of the counterinfluence team, I presented in the chapter 20. I spotted him again as the
author of the French Wikipedia page on Thinkerview, and of two articles about this medium on
Atlantico.fr news website. For years, the same person co-administered the fake French libertarian
Internet forum Libéraux.org.
The most surprising, perhaps, is that with an audience that today challenges those of certain
leading French newspapers and TV programs on major channels, no journalist ever revealed on the
Internet where the studio of Thinkerview is, nor the identity of its presenter, although they know him
very well, thus betraying implicitly and permanently the real purport of their work, openly this time.
 22. COMINT / ROEM.
I n France, communication intelligence and communication jamming are as old as postal mails.
The justification for “gentlemen to read each other’s mail” began in this country in the early 17th
century, with the creation in great secrecy, of course, of a public body named les Services (the
Services) aka le Cabinet noir (the Black Cabinet). Its missions limited to opening mails and to
deciphering coded messages. From it comes the use to call formally the agencies of the French
intelligence community or even just one, indifferently, les services secrets, or “the secret services”
aka les services, or “the services,” always in the plural form. Saying “the secret services” is largely
in use in the public, while one just says “the services” internally in the DGSE. That is why this
agency says, “the privatization of the services” while talking about itself alone, and not the same or
else in the singular form. Well, it is a matter of local culture, as not adding an s to police confuses
me each time I want to stress “several of them”; and since French people say “police officer” on
condition he is indeed a commissioned officer in this corps. It would seem British people solve the
problem by using the other words “policeman” and “policemen” in this endeavour.
As no historian has been able to say in which year exactly the Services / Cabinet noir was
created, the marked interest of Cardinal Richelieu for domestic intelligence suggests it happened
during his incumbency between the 1610s and the 1640s, therefore. In 1722, under the reign of King
Louis XV, the Cabinet noir evolved to an intelligence agency and was renamed le Secret du Roi (the
King’s Secret), quickly shortened into le Secret (the Secret). French spies and historians alike
consider le Secret as the true first French espionage agency. Actually, Louis XV created le Secret to
help Louis François Prince of Conti sit on the throne of Poland; for, at that time, this country was
the sole in Europe where the King could be elected. Possibly, this true story tells the first recorded
case of a country meddling in the electoral process of another, be it said in passing.
From the late-1790s, the Post Office was responsible for the sensitive task of mails opening, until
the late-1840s, when this public body was discharged of it; officially only because it continued so,
actually. Minister of the Post Office Germain Rampont abolished the practice in 1870, but officially
again. Nonetheless, the Post Office has always been an auxiliary of the secret police, and not only
for opening private letters, since mail carriers often were asked to spy on individuals while
delivering mails, in addition. Those agents de la fonction publique (agents of the public service) are
still doing all this today, even formally sometimes, when the police investigates and shadows
someone suspected of a grave wrongdoing relevant to criminality, espionage, or terrorism. Then the
practice extends to the other concerns of blacklisting, stalking, and socially eliminating. In the latter
case; the best example I can tell about it is mine.
Indeed, in the 2000s, I personally experienced the disturbance in a very open manner when I was
living in the town of Pont-Sainte-Marie, in the département of Aube. In the details, the local Post
Office sometimes denied me its service under some absurd pretexts, and some other times without
any justification. The attitude was expressed in the sternest manner, in front of other customers who
were wondering what was happening. When I sent the parcels of my belongings I sold on eBay, one
of the employees of this post office summoned me to open the boxes, very offhandedly, as if for
bullying me. Thereupon, I had to prove convincingly I was indeed the rightful owner of everything
the boxes contained. When I asked why, the official simply answered the Post Office is entitled the
right to investigate on its customers at any time, as it sees fit. Each of those times, the visible
concern of the clerk suggested she was personally concerned and even upset. When the municipal
election period arrived, the only ballots I received in my mailbox were these of the communist
candidate. I did not mind, as I never vote anyway; yet I still do not know whether this was an
attempt to elicit my commitment forcibly, just some provocation, or both, exactly. I was the target of
an ongoing social elimination carried out by a team of close to ten people, half of whom were Serbs,
it should be said.
From the late 19th century, specialized employees of the 2d Bureau read, photographed, and thus
archived all intercepted mails that were thought of interest.
In 1863, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had created a small cell of specialists in cryptography
and code breaking it named le Chiffre (the Number). This ministry hired civilians gifted in
mathematics, and for long, they were the best code-breakers in the country, reputedly in the 2d
Bureau and the police.
From 1865, landline telegraphy had made the subject of a number of international conferences
already. On July 10 to 22, 1875, the Convention of St. Petersburg decided that the use of
cryptography in international telegraphic communications was legal. That is why the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs worked constantly on improving the safety of its coded telegraphic correspondence
against foreign signal interception and code breaking.
Between the late-1890s and the 1910s, le Chiffre of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had acquired
mastery in cryptography and code breaking, unparalleled in the military because there was a rivalry
between the two that extended to the code breakers and cryptographers of the police. The code
breakers of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had broken successively and successfully the codes of
the Italians, British, Turkish, Germans, Russians, Spanish, and later in early 1914 of the Germans
again, just in time before the First World War broke out, yet never durably. The codes of the
Belgians, Austrians, and of the Americans proved the easiest to break, until the war at least, it is
said. Meanwhile, the rivalry over telecommunications interception and code breaking between le
Chiffre of the Foreign Affairs and its counterparts in the police and the military still was ongoing.
Opposing viewpoints between the three about whether helping tsarist Russia or not was the cause of
this, in part.
From the early-1880s, cryptography in France had reached a degree of sophistication hardly
challengeable elsewhere in the World. The military also conducted important works in code
breaking, and it put radiotelegraphy on test in the search for intelligence. A partnership between the
Army and the Post Office that was also in charge of all national telegraphic communications gave
birth to an important military telegraphy unit of more than six hundred men, settled in the Fort of
Mont Valérien, near Paris. Circa 1910, the unit grew with the creation of a wireless
telecommunication station that in three years evolved to a regiment of about 1000 men.
Still in the 1910s, the Army associated with the Navy to create several “listening stations” in the
region of the Mediterranean Sea to intercept the coded wireless communications of the British and
Spanish navies. This was the first joint use of wireless telegraphy and cryptanalysis in the search for
intelligence of military interest. Gibraltar was bound to become a hub of telecommunication
interception of strategic interest between Europe and Africa; logically, given its location on the map.
The military and the police took up the name le Chiffre that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had
chosen first, possibly inspired by le Secret; the term is still in common use in these three bodies
today.
As for postal mails, domestic telephone tapping in France is as old as the first telephone lines, and
it became an organized activity in the 1880s, which the military took over at once. In 1888, they
settled the first service of domestic telecommunications interception and deciphering in the
Invalides, Paris, where it still has some relevant activities today, as we shall see. In the 1880s, the
Ministère de la Poste & du Télégraphe–P&T (Ministry of the Post Office and Telegraph) had
succeeded a Direction des Lignes Télegraphiques (Directorate of Telegraphic Lines). However, the
body was placed under the authority of the Ministère de l’Intérieur (Ministry of the Interior); that is
to say, the civilian police. In sum, the police gave access to the telephone landlines of the country to
the military. The secret cooperation between the police and the military resumed until 1958, when
the GIC was created; soon, we shall see the intricacy in all its details.
Publicly available information on the history of telephone tapping in France are inexistent to date.
Its official history, as told by the official historians, states in substance, “The German occupying
forces in the WWII were the first to listen to private telephone conversation in France, and they did
it from the underground of the Invalides. There was no such a thing as listening to private
telecommunications in this country before 1940, period”. The practices of intercepting and jamming
communication has certainly been rumored among the public for long however, since Alexandre
Dumas alluded to it as early as in 1844 in his famous novel The Count of Monte Cristo, when
telecommunications were still semaphore signal.[459]
As the running cost of a personal telephone landline was too expensive to the lower class in
France for as long as until the early 1970s, the Government limited domestic eavesdropping to the
middle and upper classes, essentially. Exceptions were certain telephone booths in streets deemed
“strategic,” post offices, and telephones in public places such as cafes, bars, restaurants, and hotels.
The peculiarity of domestic telephone tapping in this country is to have ever been done from within
the publicly owned telephone company, which alone could send telecommunication signals
elsewhere for recording and analysis. Actually, the use comes from the older habit of opening mails
in post offices. Indeed, the Ministry of Post Office and Telegraph was entrusted the additional
responsibility for one century exactly, from the late 1880s to the late 1980s. From the latter decade
on, the half-privately owned company France Telecom-Orange took over the ownership of
telephone infrastructures and their exploitation, and resumed the cooperation in telephone tapping
with the police and the military under this new form and supervision by the DGSE.
Until April 1998, the French public ignored that the DGSE spied on foreign telecommunications,
and that this agency had listening stations almost all over the World, thanks to an important support
of the military via the DRM. The DGSE leaked deliberately this information for the first time to
Courrier International leftist weekly magazine at a time someone in my team was in daily touch
with a journalist of its staff.[460] The same week, Courrier International also informed the French
public that the U.S. NSA was listening to civilian European telecommunications.[461] Nearly all
other French media did echo chamber to the breaking news, which evolved instantly to a scandal.
This cell of the DGSE of which I was deputy director leaked all the latter secrets on order of this
agency; theretofore, the name “National Security Agency” was not well known in France. At that
time, one only of my ex-colleagues, Jean Guisnel,[462] who worked under the cover of “special
reporter” for Libération socialist daily newspaper and eventually for Le Point weekly
newsmagazine, had written a few papers and a book[463] on the NSA. However, this earlier literature
of the Anti-American propaganda genre had limited to the capacities of the NSA in code breaking,
and focused on domestic spying in the United States, in addition to a few revelations on information
warfare on the Internet between the United States and France. Guisnel knew well the secret
specifics of the feud.
To the DGSE, two reasons came to justify the need to reveal to the French public it did the same
as the U.S. NSA, using similar “listening stations” equipped with large satellite antennas for this.
The first was, “If we reveal to the World that the Americans are tapping telephone conversations
worldwide, then they will certainly retaliate by revealing we are doing the same; and the CIA will
leak intelligence about it that will embarrass us reciprocally. Therefore, better “cutting the grass
under the foot” of the Americans by being the first to acknowledge our guilt while driving the
attention of the public on the bigger capacities of the NSA, dwarfing ours and thus minoring our
fault. In other words, “If France does this, it’s only because the United States did it first. The
additional advantage of being the first to say the truth is to be in control of the specifics that the
public must not know”. The second reason was, “The leaks to the media must draw the attention of
the public on the interception of telecommunications transmitted by satellites,” whereas the U.S.
NSA and the DGSE alike no longer focused their efforts on satellite telecommunications at that
time. In reality, it was all about spying on telecommunications exchanges between countries through
optic fiber submarine cables. Thus, the two leaks to the media were true, but they were old stories
already, limited to the intent and substance, and lied by omission about the form. Indeed, in the late
1990s, satellite telecommunications were rapidly receding at the favor of submarine cables and
optic fibers, which offered much greater computer bandwidth capacities than satellites could. The
boom of the Internet was much accountable for the shift. France and the United States for long had
been tapping submarine telephone cables transmitting analogic telecommunications, in use since the
19th century, but the coming of satellite telecommunications that the Americans had invented and
set in place from the 1960s had brought an evolution in the practice.
As about domestic telephone tapping at this time in 2019, the French Government is still denying
the existence of the permanent capacity of the DGSE, and some other agencies, to spy on the
telephone lines and Internet communications of any French citizen at any time; and even more, as
we will see. More precisely, the French Government states officially that such a thing is impossible
without prior authorization given by a judicial authority and a legally justifiable reason. The latter
pretense is not entirely false, but not entirely true either. In order to demonstrate its good faith in this
respect, the French Government acknowledges two types of interception on landline telephone,
cellphone, and Internet telecommunications including emails, SMS, Internet browsing, and all
related metadata in addition to the access to FaDet. These are

1. Judicial (criminal), which has to be ordered legally by a Procureur de la

République (District Attorney), Juge d’Instruction (Examining magistrate), or Juge
des Libertés et de la Détention–JLD (Judge of Freedoms and Custodies). The
duration of an interception for one individual or a business, regardless, is renewable
by periods of 1 month for a maximum of 4 months on a row, and
 2. Administrative, ordered under the responsibility of the Prime Minister. Such
interceptions are said to relate to exceptional cases officially defined as follow.
“Exceptions may be authorized, in particular cases, under the conditions specified in
Article 4, by means of electronic communications for the purpose to seeking
information pertinent to national security, the safeguarding of the essential elements
of scientific and technological heritage of France, or the prevention of terrorism,
organized crime and delinquency and the reconstitution or maintenance of dissolved
groups, under the law of January 10, 1936 on combat groups and private militia”.

In the two cases above, the Commission Nationale de Contrôle des Interceptions de Sécurité–
CNCIS (National Commission for the Control of Security Interceptions) is exerting its official
control. Judicial telephone and Internet tapping are the jobs of the police and the Gendarmerie when
in the framework of the fight against common criminality and law enforcement. However, this does
not limit to grave affairs such as murders and organized crime, and by far when arrived in the 2010s.
For it is now legally possible to tap the telephone and Internet lines of a small gang of petty
burglars.[464] According to the French media, in 2018, the French Government was poised to vote a
new law authorizing the legal interception of the telecommunications of any French citizen on
suspicion of petty tax dodging; that is to say, everybody and anybody, at any time.
Technically, telephone and Internet tapping are easy-to-do things because technology transformed
electric landline telephone communications into digital data signals automatically processed by
computers. This remains true even though the same old copper telephone wires are still in use
because the modern technology called ADSL, in large use in France, works perfectly with them and
offers satisfying performances in these conditions at no additional cost. Before the coming up of
ADSL and computer processed telecommunications, tapping a telephone landline was complicated,
relatively costly, and awfully time-consuming by comparison; yet anyone could do it easily with
little knowledge. These were the only reasons limiting the use to major criminal affairs, espionage,
terrorism, political-financial affairs, and to monitoring the privacy of VIPs. Now, I explain how
judicial telephone and Internet tapping is carried out today.
Upon legal issuance to a police officer of a criminal order from the judge of his regional district,
he transmits this authorization to the PNIJ, which is a public body in permanent relation with the
ARCEP. The ARCEP is the holder of the national registry of all telephone numbers; cellphones
included, of course. This makes the latter agency in capacity to know at once the telephone numbers
and Internet connections of anyone in France, and the names of his supplier-providers, or else the
same by reversing the process from a telephone number with no name associated with it. From a
bureaucratic standpoint, the CCED is responsible for establishing relations between the ARCEP and
the PNIJ, and it is proceeding under the responsibility of the HFDS who act under the more or less
official authority of the military.
Upon the PNIJ knowing the names of the supplier-provider(s) of an individual named in a
criminal case, this body can set a permanent computer connection with all his landlines and wireless
lines, and give an online access to it to the police officer or gendarme who requested the service. For
law requests all telephone and Internet supplier-providers in France to give permanent access to the
lines of any of their customers to the PNIJ, at any time and at once. In passing, this explains why
France denies foreign telephone and Internet providers the right to do business in France. On the
contrary, the DGSE encourages and helps discreetly France Telecom-Orange to settle subsidiaries
abroad, and to associate in the landings of submarines cables worldwide. Each time a foreign
country grants France Telecom-Orange or one of its subsidiaries the right to be telephone and
Internet access provider on its soil, this company invariably and quickly conquers this foreign
market through dumping; as it did in Switzerland and in Italy, lastly. Still better with respect to the
latter country, French group Vivendi acquired 24.6% of the shares of Telecom Italia, the national
Italian telephone company, and obtained that French national Arnault de Puyfontaine becomes its
executive chairman, in addition. The same would be unthinkable in France.
Additionally, the demand to the concerned private telephone and Internet access provider includes
the geolocation of cellphones in a service package it gives via the PNIJ to a police officer or
gendarme. In 2018, the accuracy of the location of a cellphone user on a map greatly improved,
thanks to an advanced technology called “multilateration”. Multilateration calculates the differences
in time for a signal to travel from a cell phone to each of the several cellphone towers nearby,
regardless whether the cellphone is being used or idling. This technology helps greatly track the
moves of anyone, as long as his cellphone is powered on. As an aside, even setting one’s
smartphone on the “Airplane” mode or deactivating cellular data connection is not yet enough to
evade one’s geolocation and the hijacking of its inbuilt microphone, camera, and everything else. A
smartphone indeed stops communicating with cellphone towers nearby only on condition to power
it off.
The PNIJ indeed pays a fee to telephone and Internet supplier-providers for tapping lines, which
fact caused the following problem. As the police and the Gendarmerie resort increasingly to Internet
and telephone tapping, the jaded familiarity resulted in a spectacular and concerning rise of the
operating budget of this service of the French Ministry of Justice. Already, the invoice that Thales
Group sent for the development of the system amounted to more than 100 million euros. In 2015,
the PNIJ paid the additional amount of more than 120 million euros in fees alone to telephone and
Internet supplier-providers for eavesdropping, and the yearly expenditure is constantly rising since.
Between 2006 and 2016, the number of judicial telephone interceptions by the police and the
Gendarmerie alone would have multiplied by five, to reach in September 2017 an average of 10,000
tapped telephone conversations a day in continental France. The figure is much greater in reality,
once we add administrative telephone interceptions and all others that the DGSE and the DRSD
daily carry out, carry out daily, out of all official controls.
As for the recording and storage of telephone conversations and corresponding metadata, these
tasks are taken in charge by another service of the Ministry of Justice, named Délégation aux
Interceptions Judiciaires–DIJ (Delegation for Judicial Interceptions). The DIJ keeps all those
records and metadata in what it calls internally coffre-fort numérique (digital safe). The storage
duration of this digital information can legally last up to five years, depending the gravity or
particularity of a criminal case. The DIJ provides those records on CD-ROM (USB key today,
probably) upon official demand from a District Attorney, Examining Magistrate, or Judge of
Freedoms and Custodies. Officially, the police and the Gendarmerie do not have the right to record
all data that the PNIJ puts at their disposal by online streaming. Therefore, they must listen to it on
live with a headset connected to a computer while typing conversation’s transcripts, simultaneously!
The proceeding is so impractical, not to say impossible, that the recording of the conversations and
Internet interceptions, illegal therefore, is common practice in reality.
As an aside, the police and the Gendarmerie are requested to use the service of a special unit of
the DGSI called, Centre Technique d’Assistance–CTA (Technical Assistance Center), each time
they need to break the access code of a smartphone or of any other computerized device, and to
decipher the encrypted data it contains.[465] The French law on privacy obliges cellphone
manufacturers to assist judicial authorities in breaking those codes anyway.
Things are entirely different in the second case of administrative telecommunications
interception, and the government lies by omission when it officially describes what this other type
of telephone and digital data tapping, and recording is. Officially, administrative interception is the
exclusive work of the Groupement Interministériel de Contrôle–GIC, a particular public body
supervised by the military acting as service provider to the DGSI, DGSE, and all other intelligence
agencies. For a long while, the DST and its successors the DCRI and then the DGSI had their own
wireless telecommunications interception infrastructures on the French soil, including for foreign
interceptions; but in 2018, those are seriously ageing and are not overhauled. Actually, the GIC,
DGSE, DGSI, and the DRSD do not have to ask for any justice warrant to monitor private
telecommunication on the French territory.
The GIC is the central public body for domestic telephone tapping, chiefly because it is an “inter-
ministries” intelligence agency in the facts; and because the government ordered that this body
works hand in hand with the national telephone company from the day of its creation. As a useful
reminder at this point of my explanations, the national telephone company became France Telecom
in 1988, and was renamed again France Telecom-Orange in 2006, since then shortened into Orange.
To sum things up, Orange, now a French multinational telecommunications corporation, has two
permanent interlocutors with regard to telecommunications interceptions, which are the GIC for
domestic interception, and the DGSE for foreign interceptions. Nevertheless, the situation changed
since the adoption of the policy of mutualisation du renseignement (intelligence pooling between
agencies), and since the Ministry of Defense is (unofficially) providing telecommunications
interceptions to all intelligence agencies, even to the police and the Gendarmerie.
In 2000, I was shifted for a few months to the headquarters of the COMINT service of the DGSE,
French counterpart of the headquarters of the U.S. NSA, exactly. My official position and activity in
it limited to being guard of the Security Service, due to some reasons I will explain in the chapter
27. The headquarter and its unique building posed at the time as an obscure and nameless
department of Orange. There was indeed a promotional poster for Orange in the entrance hall, at
least. Thus camouflaged yet in full view, it was located Avenue de la Marne, in Montrouge, at the
number 42, 52 or 62; I do not recollect exactly, yet the three numbers may all be correct because the
corresponding area has just been entirely razed as I am writing this paragraph in late 2018.
However, these facilities had the particularity, uncommon in business activities, to be heavily
protected against intrusion by human and electronic means of security; and against fire, of course, as
customarily in the DGSE. In this six floors building sheltering about two hundred specialists with
executive ranks mostly, Jérome Ventre its director had his office at the fifth, with windows offering
a view on the grey suburban Avenue Pierre Brossolette, on the other side of the building, beyond a
deserted and walled parking lot on which the big shredder and the trash containers could not be
seen. The two only peculiar marks of the place that could suggest a connection with electronic and
communication intelligence were in the yard facing the building, near its main entrance. One was a
ten-foot tall and shiny, stainless-steel sculpture representing a fancy satellite antenna. The other,
much more discreet, was an old and bulky telephone underground junction box, with a small
commemorative plaque in memory of French telecommunications employees who put their lives at
stake by placing spy wires inside during the German occupation.
Underground the facilities, there were a number of secret meeting and course rooms of varied
sizes, and a mini museum on cable telephone tapping that featured some old devices put in
exhibition behind glass panes. There was an underground parking lot for those who came to work
by car. The latter detail should caught the attention because there was even no parking lot at all for
the employees at the DGSE headquarters, except for the Director, a few senior executives, and VIPs
who happened to come there by car. There was a cafeteria on the first floor, but neither its room nor
the meals it served were of a fancy sort, even though about no one among those who worked there
had an educational degree below master.
On nights, an anonymous guard of the Security randomly gave me telephone calls to check
whether I had not fallen asleep, and to ask if everything was all right. Some other times, on
evenings, the Chief of the Security Service asked to me before he left whether the guy of the labor
union was still in his office. Had I said “Yes,” he angrily mumbled something as “Fuck!” and added,
“Be sure to record the exact time of his leave”. As Security Officer, I was privy to access all rooms
of the building. The exceptions were the tiny TEMPEST (“airgap”) rooms the size of a small private
bathroom, where the Intranet router racks were sheltered behind combination-lock doors—one per
floor save for the first—and the offices of the Security Service from which activities in the building
were electronically and automatically monitored round the clock. Possibly, the reader is curious to
know how the office of the Director of the COMINT service of the DGSE was like.
Although this office was the largest in the facilities, with a space of about 15 x 24 feet, it was not
impressive and even sober. The Director’s desk was larger than the average, of course; much of the
ordinary, ageless, and inexpensive sort, however. The real privilege was an additional small table for
the desktop computer. As for the computers of all other employees in the service, made by Compaq,
that of the Director connected to the Intranet network only. Indeed, the Director of “Frenchlon” did
not have direct access to the World Wide Web in his office; he was not trusted with that himself.
Scientific books on electronics and physics filled a large library showcase behind the desk, yet none
related or even seemed to allude to eavesdropping, a priori. Nonetheless, sensitive reference books
and classified documentation were stored in the two large armored cabinets with combination locks,
put side by side against the wall facing the windows. There was a cheap and small round meeting
table with three chairs around, and a tripod paperboard next to it, often covered with formulas or
obscure diagrams relating to Taiga, the computer database management system of the DGSE. I just
described the most remarkable things one could see in this office, which includes everything therein,
indeed. I am unsure about the hypothesis of a frame against a wall, a poster, or anything of that sort
but, I am sure, there were no flag or seal of any sort. Overall, the place was no fancier than the
typical office of a Stasi executive that one can see in espionage movies and in history
documentaries. Remarkably, the office of Charles-Henri de Pardieu, at that time Director of the
Directorate of Economic and Financial Intelligence of the DGSE, looked much the same, save for a
set of four or five ancient books probably published in the 18th century, and a small African mask
put on feature on a small and old wood coffer; this eclectic gathering of symbols intending to
convey cryptic indications that French spies only can understand. De Pardieu however enjoyed the
privilege of two personal office communicating one with the other through a private door: a normal-
sized office where he worked and a large one for meetings because of the sensitive papers and
folders that permanently cluttered the desk of the former.
 For much I could see by myself in the COMINT service, limited by virtue of my position, it is
correct that the DGSE handles communication interceptions abroad by its own, with a clear focus
on submarine cables since the 1990s, as we shall see in detail. In 2000-2001, this service seemed to
have a marked interest for countries of the Arabian Peninsula.[466]
At the time the GIC was created, in 1960, the national telephone company still was a ministry that
had just been renamed Ministère des Postes et Télécommunication (Ministry for Post Offices and
Telecommunications). For long, this ministry held its old name of 1930, Ministère des Postes
Télégraphe et Téléphone (Ministry of Post Offices, Telegraph and Telephone), whose popular
acronym “PTT” survived until about 1990. Yet “PTT” indeed stood as the name popularly given to
this public body until it was christened Orange, and thus became a would-be-business activity
interested in financial profits, exclusively.
“Inter-ministerial Control Group” or GIC are name and acronym telling little to the public, on
purpose, partly because thus, the masses could not know what this public body was doing, if ever
they came to know of its existence; partly because a more explicit name such as “Directorate for
National Telephone Tapping” would have been un-democratic. To be accurate, the GIC was created
soon after General De Gaulle took the power in May 1958. The following year, De Gaulle appointed
Michel Debré Prime minister, as this politician had a marked interest in hawkish notions such as
power, order, police, the military, spies, and shadow operations. France had lost the First Indochina
War of 1946-1954, and by then she was still waging the Algerian War of 1954-1962. De Gaulle also
picked Constantin Melnik as his advisor in intelligence affairs because this other man was a
prominent figure of the French intelligence community.[467] To say, eventually in the 1970s, Melnik
happened to be known to the public as a master spy, somehow as CIA Counterespionage Chief
James Jesus Angleton was in the United States, and with a similar reputation. Earlier in the 1950s,
Melnik had been appointed to the 2d Bureau, the old military intelligence agency of the Ministry of
Defense then freshly renamed Ministère des Armées (Ministry of the Armed Forces). Eventually,
Melnik was appointed Technical Adviser at the Ministry for Post Offices and Telecommunications,
and then Technical Adviser at the Ministry of the Interior; that is to say, the police. At about the
same time, the U.S. Rand Corporation was training him on American methods. Melnik was
regarded as a top brain and as the best French specialist in intelligence of that period.
The creation of the GIC actually was the idea of Melnik, and it materialized on March 28, 1960,
as an event of considerable importance yet classified at the high degree Secret Défense. No one in
the public knew about it, therefore. Forty-two years later, on April 12, 2002, the existence of the
GIC was finally made official and public in the following terms—my verbatim translation. “The
inter-ministry control group is a service of the Prime Minister in charge of security interceptions”.
[468] That is all. Oddly enough, we notice, Lionel Jospin, who at the moment was no longer Prime
Minister since about one month, signed the decree. More especially, he was about to be reported as
a Russian agent.[469] By chance, I kept a full copy of the classified text of the creation of the GIC in
1960, signed by Prime Minister Michel Debré, of which I can make the following verbatim
translation, presentation included, therefore.
DECISION OF THE PRIME MINISTER OF MARCH 28, 1960
creating the Inter-ministerial Control Group (GIC)
Decision No. 1 E
General provisions.
l) An ʻInter-ministerial Control Groupʼ is set up to ensure all wiretaps and telephone and
telegraphic recordings on wires, as well as those of PTT network referrals for microphone tapping,
ordered by the governmental authorities.
2) The Inter-ministerial Control Group is placed under the direct authority of the Prime Minister.
The Prime Minister to which he is the responsible appoints the head of the Inter-ministerial Control
Group.
In the event the Prime Minister delegates all of his powers, those resulting from this decision are
ex officio exercised by the Ministry of the Interior.
3) Any listening or telephone and telegraphic recording on wires and any return on PTT network
of a microphone listening must be authorized either by the Prime Minister, the Minister of the
Interior, or the Minister of the Armed Forces.
 In case of impediment or absence, these ministers may grant a special delegation ʻvery secretʼ
[Très Secret Défense][470] to a member of their cabinet.
4) Any authorization to listen or return on PTT network delivered under the conditions defined by
paragraph 3 above shall be the subject of an order of execution by the Minister of Posts Offices and
Telecommunications.
The head of the inter-ministerial group alone is authorized to treat these questions with the
Minister for Post Offices and Telecommunications.
5) A commission chaired by a representative of the Prime Minister, including a representative of
the Minister of the Interior and of the Minister of the Armed Forces, is responsible for examining
regularly whether the production of the Inter-ministerial Control Group is in conformity with the
needs of the various services concerned.
The mission of the commission is, inter alia, to guarantee that the dispatching of interceptions
between the various stakeholders is in accordance with their respective missions, to settle in the first
instance the disputes that might oppose them on this subject, to study and propose protocols for the
dispatching of interceptions between these parties, and to organize intelligence sharing between
them.
To this end, the representative of the Prime Minister keeps the general file of authorizations for
eavesdropping and referrals granted, and at any time he gives access to it to the representatives of
the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of the Armed Forces.
If necessary, the committee will call for a meeting of the Inter-ministerial Committee of Ministers
it represents.
6) The Inter-ministerial Control Group shall transcribe the tapes, telephone, telegraph, and
microphone recordings referred to in paragraph 1. above.
Each minister is the recipient of the raw information obtained from the intercept he has
authorized. The Prime minister is the recipient of all this information.
7) For its mission, the Inter-ministerial Control Group has staff put at the disposal of the Prime
Minister by the SDECE, the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of the Armed Forces, the Ministry
of the PTT, and the listening and recording facilities in the various departments and services
currently engaged in telephone interception.
A circular letter from the Prime Minister will set the administrative and financial management
procurements to the Inter-ministerial Control Group.
8) The regime of eavesdropping in Algeria and in the territories directly attached to the
metropolis will be fixed by a subsequent decision.
9) All provisions contrary to this decision are canceled.
Done at Paris, March 28, 1960
The Prime Minister,
Michel DEBRÉ.
Since the 1990s, at least and until today, the GIC is a paramilitary-like body in which the Ministry
of Defense—renamed again Minister of the Armed Forces since June 21, 2017—overlords the
others unambiguously. In point of fact, its headquarters are located in a segment of the Hotel des
Invalides in Paris, which belongs to this ministry,[471] along with the ANSSI. The GIC has large
underground facilities underground the Invalides, entirely used for domestic telecommunication
interceptions. For some years, its rooms were filled with racks of tape recorders recording telephone
conversations on ordinary audio cassettes. For a short period, the DGSE shifted to DAT audio
cassettes and corresponding computer data storage. Since January 29, 2017, the Director of the GIC
is General engineer of armament Pascal Chauve, formerly adviser to scientific and technical affairs
at the SGDSN, also located in the Invalides, who replaces Navy Rear Admiral Bruno Durteste in the
position.[472] Chauve’s Deputy Director is Lieutenant-Colonel Philippe Brocard who holds the
position since May 2015.[473] In the frame of its relations with the DGSE, the GIC is officially[474]
in permanent touch with its COMINT service I earlier named.
For a few years, the French mainstream media published occasionally a tiny list of “listening
stations”[475] of the GIC in France, as a would-be-striking revelation. Actually, the list in question is
outdated and largely incomplete. Some French bloggers, who seem to express particular interest in
the matter of communication intelligence, posit that most GIC stations might be secretly located in
the regional military facilities of the Direction Interarmées des Réseaux d’Infrastructure des
Systèmes d’Information de la Défense–DIRISI (Joint Direction of Infrastructure Networks and
Information Systems).[476] The DIRISI is the very official telecommunications and information
systems organization of the military, created on January 1, 2004, which makes this assumption full
of good sense. In point of fact, since the early 2000s, and very possibly earlier in the 1980s, the
Ministry of Defense indeed is strengthening a partnership between military units with a specialty in
signals, and the DGSE and the DRM with regard to telecommunications interception on the French
soil, from overseas territories, and from partner countries.
For a while, there were much more regional GIC “landline telephone-tapping stations” on the
French territory than what the French media pretend. The GIC cells in Corsica, for example, were
conspicuously missing on this list,whereas there is a particular need for telecommunication
interceptions in this large island because of endless troubles caused by anti-French Corsican
secessionists, extending to assassinations and bomb plots.
Until about 2005-2006, in my own estimate, there were as many GIC cells as cities large and
important enough to be administrative préfectures, which would make 101 at least. Nonetheless, the
latter number is probably still inferior to the reality, since there were several such units in Paris
alone. In fact, their locations and total number were set in accordance with those of the normal
telephone technical facilities, and the latter were not settled necessarily in the largest cities of each
French préfectures. For example, in the 1970s, landline telephone tapping for the very quiet
départment of Creuse operated from the small town of Boussac, and not in Guéret, préfecture and
largest city of this administrative area where the local bureau of the RG was located. Then, as other
example contradicting any hypothesis of a generality, the GIC unit for the département of Aube was
located in Troyes downtown until the early 2000s, its largest city and préfecture.
As I once happened to go for a short visit to one of those GIC cells, and as I knew of the locations
of a few others, then I believe that most of them still in the early 2000s did hide under cover
activities such as branches and bureaus of civilian public services having specialties obscure enough
to concern nobody. The one I once went to was located in an old rococo-style building that officially
was an unclear regional service of the Ministry for the Economy and Finance. The particular
provisions taken to ensure its secrecy and security at that time are worthy to be described.
As seen from the outside, it was a quiet old mansion with much character, built by a wealthy
family of the late 19th century, most possibly. Next to its entrance, was etched the name of this
administrative service in a small aluminum plate: an obscure specialized tax office that was not in
the phonebook. Its large metal and glass door opened without difficulty on an entrance hall. This
first room was abnormally quiet, and from there I could not see nor hear anyone working. The only
chance to see someone seemed to be the ugly metal door of a small elevator installed in the 1970s,
in my estimate.
So, I slipped into the all-brushed-steel elevator, still narrower than what its door suggested, to the
point that only one people could use it at a time. I waited for the door to close on me until I heard
the soft noise of a lock. I pushed the 2d floor button, but nothing happened. As I gave a push on the
door to make my way out back in the entrance hall, I understood it had locked on me. For a few
seconds, I pictured myself trapped for hours in a coffin-like steel box in which I could barely move.
At this precise moment, I heard a creaking loud voice coming from a small metal grid, asking who I
was. I promptly answered with relief, as I was coming on appointment, adding that the elevator
refused to do anything. The voice said, “No, no, it works … push again on the second-floor button”.
I understood there was a camera lens I could not see, as the voice knew of my predicament. Indeed,
the box rewarded my second attempt to press the button “2” with a smooth and silent lift.
When I opened the door, the few people I saw struck me. They all were old beyond retirement,
casually dressed as if at home and certainly not a work with a desk-job. I did not spot any electronic
device in the two small, stern, and poorly lightened rooms I could see, even not a computer. Could
those elderly use a computer anyway? A headset and some boxes with a few buttons seemed still
possible. The atmosphere of nothingness I felt there overwhelmed my thoughts; I knew it was the
most intriguing things I would remember from the eerie experience. As I was delivering my
package while an old lady gave me a defiant gaze, I chanced a joke about my desperate situation in
the elevator, yet everyone remained mute, as if I just attempted to elicit some big secret. Even a
polite smile in return was too much, apparently, or else courtesy for long did not make any sense to
those people, more probably. That was all nonetheless; I was clearly expected to go back to the
world of the living already. The elevator worked all-normally for the return.
“Notoriously,” people who worked in those cells of the GIC were discharged and retired rank-
and-files with highly secret clearances. Upon giving their younger lives to some intelligence
agencies, they were thus advantageously “recycled” in guise of retirement homes. I heard rumors
about other such cells that hid in all-ordinary buildings, but whose elevators could not normally stop
at one to three whole floors, without explanation. Once more, the reader notice, secrecy, and
security provisions of this so particular sort are common in the French intelligence community. No
flags, no large seals, no large rooms with giant screens everywhere, no lines of electronic clocks
telling the time from Tokyo to Anchorage, no “Alpha-Tango-Charlie, do you copy me,” and no “Sir,
Yes, Sir!” The real thing is gray, disturbingly quiet, cold, cheap, uncomfortable, anonymous,
timeless, nameless, faceless, lifeless, sickening and possibly deadly.
Technically speaking, the GIC today is the provider of domestic telephone tapping to all
intelligence agencies, except the PNIJ of the Ministry of Justice that gives telephone and other
digital data tapping to the police, the Gendarmerie, and the investigative units of the customs and of
the Ministry for the Economy and Finance. In this year 2018, the GIC regional telephone-tapping
antennes do not exist anymore for the following reasons.
From 1999, landline telecommunications in France gradually changed from analogic-electric to
computer ran digital-data ADSL.[477] Google is telling me that the change was about complete in the
whole country in 2017,[478] and I know that meanwhile the military was secretly expanding a
gigantic national telephone and Internet tapping center in the town of Taverny, and in other cities of
the far Northwestern suburbs of Paris. Still for much I know for one part and understand from
deductive reasoning for another, since 2005, the exact location where telephone and Internet signals
coming from the whole continental France are computer-processed is the huge underground
facilities of the Centre d’Opérations des Forces Aériennes Stratégiques–COFAS (Strategic Air
Force Operations Center). This base of the French Air Force, whose official name is Base aérienne
921 Taverny (Taverny Air Base 921), was deactivated definitively on July 5, 2011. Yet it remains a
secret underground place, and the access to a large part of its aboveground remains a restricted area.
Upon demand of the Ministry of Defense, Google Map website blurred certain parts of it. All those
security measures make up for the plausible alibi of sensitive military activities of the classic sort.
For the Strategic Air Force Operations Center remains officially active there, although with a much
reduced staff of 200 only because the other military units moved elsewhere.[479] The small town of
Taverny is located about six miles Northeast from Paris, to be precise. To figure the size of its secret
facilities, read, below, what was publicly known of it in 2006 when its Air Force units and the COS
were still quartered in it.
The Air Base 921 is divided into three tiers of approximately 37 acres each. The first is in a
former gypsum quarry underneath the forest of Montmorency. This underground section formerly
housed operational command centers, in addition to all facilities in which energy, air conditioning,
and normal telecommunications were managed, produced, and dispatched. The second tier, in
surface, is appropriately named Zone vie (“Life Zone”). It formerly was home to all the entities that
contributed to the support of the operational command centers; that is to say, the command of the air
base, catering, accommodation structures, emergency services such as medical service, fire brigade,
and Gendarmerie / DRSD / Security Service, between others unspecified, if any. The third and last
tier outside, called, Zone haute (“High Zone”), formerly sheltered highly secured means of military
telecommunications. The Taverny Air Base 921 had no planes, simply because it has no runway but
one heliport.
By its huge size and sheltering capacity, the underground Air Base 921 indeed is a secret town in
the town of Taverny, to the point that the former largely contributed to the economy of the latter
until 2006. The Commandement des Opérations Spéciales–COS (Special Operations Command),
French equivalent of the USSOCOM was there until the latter year. For the record, connections
between the COS, the DGSE, and the DRM are numerous, and so close that it would not be
excessive to say that the former actually is part of the two latter. It actually is the pool of
paramilitary manpower that the French media use to name “Service Action”.
Although the Air Base 921 is large enough to shelter a national telephone and Internet tapping
center, I know that some among its staff are working and living undercover in anonymous civilian
buildings of its surroundings that are Taverny downtown. As I know there are other specialized
telecommunication interception and code-breaking units also working 24 / 7 underground in other
towns located near Taverny since the 1990s at least.
Formally,, the DGSE, the DRM, and the Ministry of Defense in general call their
telecommunication interception units and centers, Centre de Renseignement Électronique–CRE
(Electronic Intelligence Center). What those entities name guerre électronique, or “electronic
warfare” comprises several specialties in signals interception. That is why there are other units
named Centres de Télémesures Militaires–CTM (Military Telemetry Centers). The missions of the
CTMs are relevant to ELINT, and more particularly to locating spy satellites, drones, spy planes,
and radars. Officially, a CTM officially is a military detachment with a specialty in ELINT, used
either by the DGSE or by the DRM or both. Then we find Détachements Avancés de Transmission–
DAT (Advanced Signals Detachments) that are COMINT cells or units posted in French overseas
territories, and in foreign countries with which France has a joint intelligence partnership. What
French journalists call centres d’écoutes, or “listening stations,” actually are either CREs, DATs, or
CTMs, formally speaking. For example, large “listening stations” such as Taverny and Mutzig are
CREs, whereas a DAT specifically is a military detachment that can serve as military cover activity
for a secret CRE of the DGSE or / and of the DRM.
The DRM and a number of military units of the Army, Air Force, and Navy together assist the
DGSE in its COMINT, SIGINT and ELINT capacities, and provides it with planes, ships, and
submarines. On the map, below, next to Taverny I added the towns of Feucherolles and Alluets-Le-
Roy, where the DGSE has large satellite parabolic antennas. These two “listening stations,” and the
other locations on this map are for telecommunication interceptions of foreign origin. The CRE /
CTM of Domme are the largest of the latter kind in France, considering however that the use of
satellite parabolic antennas for telecommunications interception knew a steady decrease since the
1990s. Must be added to this cooperation the half-publicly owned and private companies Orange
and Alcatel-Lucent, plus a number of private telephone and Internet providers.

Anecdotally, in the early 1990s, the wife of one of my ex-colleagues worked on Minitel
communication tapping in an underground facility of a department of Crédit Agricole bank, located
in a small town near Taverny either, and half hidden in a wood nearby. The official activity of this
technical banking department was online banking accounts engineering.[480] Actually, to be an
employee in this bank was covering her real activity in financial intelligence.
 The boom of the Internet since the late 1990s is causing a considerable increase to the already
disproportionate expenditures of France in intelligence activities. Today, the GIC no longer needs
grandpa-and-grandma-operated telephone tapping cells, but those were inexpensive by comparison
with the costs of redirecting telecommunications automatically to a national telephone tapping
center, the necessary decoding of modern telecommunications, and the fees to pay to telephone and
Internet providers, I earlier detailed. Besides, all those interceptions must still be interpreted by
human means in the end.

The official description of administrative telephone and digital data interception is made vague
enough not to imply “spying on persons of interest living on the French soil”. For the record, those
individuals are prominent French personalities whose qualities endow them with a power of
influence, be it economic, political, social, or cultural. Today, the interest of the DGSE in taping the
telecommunications of those VIPs is justified by a need for an effective monitoring of trends in the
society, and by the ordinary filling of their dossier secrets guaranteeing their loyalties. Not all of
them have membership in the liberal Freemasonry and in Le Siècle allowing the strengthening of
their commitment to French republicanism, and by far; even though the quality does not yet offer
absolute certainty in the eyes of the watchdogs.
Then, the DRSD is monitoring constantly or randomly the telecommunications of people who are
working in intelligence and on particularly sensitive matters; their privacies are always less
important than their possible corruptions and leakages of sensitive information. Additionally, we
find all people who are investigated discreetly during their shortlisting for sensitive positions in the
military, and public and private sectors. The latter concern extends as far as to people expected to
join the GOdF or to access high degrees and authority in it, since the activities of this Freemasonic
grand lodge in particular are sensitive either. Then, of course, come French nationals and foreigners
living on the French soil who are suspected of activities ranging from large-scale tax-dodging,
white-collar criminality, espionage, terrorism, sedition and encouragement to it. Those other
individuals often are cautious and skilled enough to take effective precautionary measures to evade
a surveillance they often thought likely. They obviously have an interest in acting under the radar of
the ordinary police and the Gendarmerie, and these law enforcement bodies are not trained to track
and to investigate this minority with reciprocal effectiveness.
The creation of fake websites, political, religious and else to lure targets of the latter kind, and to
thus collect their IP addresses and other metadata unbeknownst to them sometimes prove effective,
but many are enlightened and wary enough not to fall in this trap. At this degree of difficulty,
concerned intelligence agencies are left with monitoring certain key words typed on French-
speaking versions of Google and other search engines, screened with the cooperation of the Internet
access providers. The DGSE learned how to make profit of metadata, as this abstract yet
unencrypted intelligence allows to make accurate inferences from connections between cellphone
numbers, their frequencies, precise locations, and the same between email addresses and social
networks, messaging applications, including discreet messaging on video games between game
consoles. Anecdotally in the latter respect, agents of the DGSE for long have privileged video game
World of Warcraft online in their own service, not only though, as French company Ubisoft
Entertainment gives a discreet hand to this agency.
Notwithstanding, it is becoming increasingly difficult today to connect anonymously on the
Internet in France. From personal experience, I would not trust new tools such as Tor and Orbot, in
my particular case, because I raise some doubt about the reliability and more especially the
neutrality of the volunteers of the Tor overlay worldwide network. Most of those unselfish
contributors actually are far-leftist and anti-establishment activists, yet generally unaware to be
manipulated remotely from Russia in the end. Indeed, I tested these tools for a while, just to see
their processing and to understand how they work, exactly.
Of late, free Wi-Fi access points in public places request registrations that obviously imply giving
an email address or a phone number under formal and innocuous pretenses of business and direct
marketing, or else of protection of people’s privacy. The real aims are to identify and to track people
whose Internet searches and connections are tagged “suspicious” by automated software powered
by artificial intelligence, or else to track a particular IP address to know all moves of its holder.
Today, very few email address providers do not request giving one’s phone number or another email
address, on the pretense of preventing ever-possible identity thefts. Protecting one’s privacy with
real effectiveness is still possible, but this claims stringent and restrictive precautionary measures
that many would consider extraordinary and too constraining, and relevant to hacking and pirating
in all cases; tiresome on the long run anyway.
Even if insignificant by their number, there are those individuals the DGSI, the DGSE, or another
such agency want to coerce for some reason or to eliminate socially, which missions necessarily
imply round the clock telecommunication surveillance and jamming.
Finally, among the new domestic and financial intelligence agencies France created since the
2000s, some with a specialty in financial intelligence, the fight against white collar criminality, and
tax dodging enjoy enlarged means of investigation, official and not, and thus resort to wiretapping,
geolocation, and tracking electronic payments with banking cards; all this in real time, if necessary.
Overall, the daily monitoring of the telecommunications of all those people claims an enormous
daily number of telecommunication interceptions, and a commensurate number of specialists
working full time on the task. This comes to explain why the new policy of intelligence pooling
between agencies was officially decreed, and why the DGSE launched recently a campaign of
massive recruitment that since then is ongoing.
Additionally, and to the surprise of the reader, certainly, an already old particularity of the French
domestic intelligence apparatus is that most of its spy microphones connect either directly or via a
relay to the national telephone network. This allows the DGSE and the DGSI to receive signals sent
by the ordinary microphones inbuilt in all landline telephone sets and cellphones. Listening to those
interceptions is possible to an intelligence officer simply by using an all-ordinary telephone landline
or cellphone from anywhere in France, or even from any foreign country. More to the
sophistication, the thus intercepted conversations are recorded digitally and automatically “by
default” anyway, and thus can be listened at any time eventually, and several times if necessary,
from a central data storage system. I know that the latter options were available in 1998 and
possibly earlier. All people living on the French soil and having a cellphone, smartphone, or
landline telephone set at home, thus have an inbuilt spy microphone that the DGSE can use
remotely and stealthily at any time for listening to what they are saying and doing. Contrary to the
probable assumption of the reader, this use of inbuilt ordinary microphones in telephone sets backs
in time to the analogic and electric telephones, and possibly to 1959 or earlier, as testify for the first,
third, and sixth points of the decree of the creation of the GIC, I repeat, below, in bold characters to
underscore my saying.
“l) An ʻInter-ministerial Control Groupʼ is set up to ensure all wiretaps and telephone and
telegraphic recordings on wires as well as those of PTT network referrals for microphone
tapping, ordered by the governmental authorities”.
 “3) Any listening or telephone and telegraphic recording on wires, and any return on PTT
network of a microphone listening has to be authorized either by the Prime Minister, or by the
Minister of the Interior, or by the Minister of the Armed Forces.
“6) The Inter-ministerial Control Group shall transcribe the tapes and telephone, telegraph, and
microphone recordings referred to in paragraph 1 above.”
However, the cunning spy trick today has one major flaw that did not exist before the invention
and large availability of cordless landline telephones sets and cellphones because, when the DGSE
or another intelligence agency is discreetly listening to someone’s conversations at home or outside
thanks to the inbuilt microphone of these modern devices, this obviously drains their batteries
accordingly and inescapably. If the battery of the cordless telephone or cellphone thus used as a spy
microphone is left reloading on its base or is plugged to its charger, then it is all for good to this
agency that can proceed unconcerned for hours every day. If not, when considering a smartphone
with a normal battery autonomy of about 50 hours when idling, using it remotely as a spy
microphone will drain the battery enough to reduces its autonomy to about 7 to 8 hours in the best
of cases, and possibly 5 hours only if its owner left the geolocation and Wi-Fi connection on.
Thereof, it becomes easy to the enlightened user to notice quickly an abnormal battery consumption,
which fact testifies unmistakably that someone is using his cordless telephone or cellphone to spy
on him. Trained spies do not leave their landline cordless telephone reloading on their bases all day
long, nor their cellphones plugged on their chargers for this good reason.
In the entirely different context of defensive counterintelligence, the DGSE has stationary radio
direction finding stations, whose locations appear on the previous map. Of course, these main static
stations dedicated to the permanent monitoring of radio signals are completed with radio direction
finding vehicles and small portable similar devices, all operated by the military.[481] We find also
several French military units with a specialty in electronic warfare, whose men train regularly in
radio direction finding. Since the 1980s, the numerous brigades of the Gendarmerie use portable
signal scanners for their own searches and others on special requests from their headquarters, and
for random signals monitoring under pretenses of trainings and drills.[482] The interest in signal
direction finding decreased certainly, since the generalization of the use of the Internet, even if the
effectiveness in monitoring, spotting, and tracking suspicious Internet activities are calling for a
return to old school radio telecommunications in terrorism and intelligence.
The DRM has CREs, CTMs, and DATs on the French territory and overseas. Remarkably, the
DRM uses those COMINT / SIGINT / ELINT stations jointly with the DGSE and with signals
interception and signals deciphering specialists of the German BND, indicated on the same map.
The underground CRE of Taverny has a “sister” located in Mutzig, about 10 miles west of the
city of Strasbourg. Under the cover of a military base sheltering the 44e Régiment de
Transmissions–44e RT (44th Signal Regiment), are working in these other underground facilities
numerous highly specialized staffers in foreign language translation, signal and code breaking, and
on making intelligible (mise au clair) recordings of conversations and messages resulting from
unclear or jammed telephone and Internet interceptions. The task of refining this raw intelligence is
sent in bulks to “villages,” I described at the end of the chapter 4, where first instance analysts are
working, and sent again for interpretation and refined analysis to the DGSE, thereupon.
Since 1995, the underground Mutzig CRE, officially called Centre de Guerre Électronique–CGE
(Electronic Warfare Center), is focusing its capacities and efforts on intercepting telephone and
Internet signals coming from continental European countries. The more or less officially known
mission of this CRE is to track the telecommunications of terrorists in Africa and in the Middle
East, in the framework of a joint signal intelligence task force with the Technische Aufklärung
(Technical Service or COMINT Directorate) of the German BND, and very possibly with its
Russian counterpart since 2005 at least. From a military and administrative standpoint and until
recently, the underground CRE of Mutzig still belonged to a large unit of the French Army called
Brigade de Renseignement–BR aka BRens (Intelligence Brigade),[483] whose staff would have been
3,600 in 2017. At this time, the headquarters of the BRens are located in Haguenau, about 14 miles
north of Strasbourg and 22 miles north-east of the Mutzig CRE. On July 1st, 2016, a larger military
body called Commandement du Renseignement–Com-Rens (Intelligence Command Center)
replaced the BRens. Its new headquarters, based in Strasbourg, had a staff of about 350 in 2017.
It is no coincidence therefore to find in Strasbourg the Centre de Formation Interarmées au
Renseignement–CFIAR (Joint Intelligence Training Center) of the DRM, and a second military
intelligence center called Centre du Renseignement Terre (Army Intelligence Center), with a staff of
about 200 in 2017. On July 1, 2006, the CFIAR took over from the École Interarmées du
Renseignement et des Études Linguistiques–EIREL (Joint School of Intelligence and Language
Studies). The learning programs of the CFIAR, spanning 36 months, would focus on Arabic
languages and dialects, completed with courses on coded messages deciphering in these tongues—
six hours on a daily basis—and on Russian and Chinese allegedly, although there is no French
intelligence activities against Russia whatsoever.Students of the CFIAR can specialize eventually.
They must never reveal their real identities between themselves, nor talk about their relatives and
acquaintances, nor about their training and learning course programs. The school also has a specific
training program in social networks monitoring.[484]
The Mutzig underground CRE is working 24 / 7 under the tight surveillance and military
protection of a special unit of the COS. The staff of the 44th RT working inside has five compagnies
(Company), each with a distinct specialty, plus one, whose staff is scattered in several CTMs and
DATs of the DGSE / DRM overseas. One of these companies actually is the Security Service.
Although the 44th RT officially is a unit of the French Army under the command of the Centre
des Forces Terrestres–CFT (Army Command Center), it truly receives its orders from the DGSE
“via” (?) the DRM and the Com-Rens. The regiment focuses its efforts on civilian telephone and
Internet interception in continental Europe, mainly. The intelligence missions entrusted to this
regiment are integral to a general mission internally called Connaissance et Anticipation–CA
(Knowledge and Anticipation), relevant to strategic intelligence.
Inside the Mutzig CRE is also working another special military intelligence body called Centre
d’Analyse du Signal d’Intérêt Terre–CASIT (Army Center for Signal Analysis). The CASIT is
responsible for collecting, analyzing, and formatting into computer files intelligence previously
downloaded as raw signals and data on computer servers. Under the appearance of an all-military
unit, the CASIT actually has a dual-purpose mission: military and civilian. Internally, everything
relates to the DRM and the DGSE (staff, material, and infrastructures) is cryptically said to be “hors
Budget Opérationnel de Programme (BOP) terre” (out of the Operational Budget Program of the
Army).
The Bureau des Opérations du Régiment–BOR (Regimental Operations Office) translates
demands from the intelligence agencies into precise interception orders; this is the first stage in the
regiment’s process. Upon the issuing of those orders, the second stage of intelligence research and
collection begins. In order to carry out a first filtering of all intercepted signals (sounds, texts and
metadata), a sub-unit increments the databases filled with raw-intelligence. In the third stage, called
traitement du renseignement (intelligence processing), analysts look into those databases for finding
out, dissecting, connecting, and cross-checking intercepted messages and sources for their
exploitation as coherent and pertinent intelligence.
The training of those raw intelligence analysts spans several months. Some of them, more
specialized than others, follow a complementary training module on data decoding to penetrate
protection techniques that certain targets use in the transmission of their information. The fourth
step is enciphering and sending refined intelligence to the DRM or to the DGSE accordingly, once
considered relevant to the initial demands. In the DGSE, the intelligence received is dispatched to
other analysts, each having a specialty in one of the numerous areas in which this intelligence
agency has an interest. As examples, the latter specialties are politics, military affairs in a country in
particular, computer engineering, aeronautics and space, arms trade, finances and economics,
chemistry, biology, agriculture, and many more.[485] In the chapter 5, I described in detail who the
second instance analysts are, the specifics of their work, and their work environment.
Overall, from the initial stage of a specific demand to the reception of refined intelligence and its
final synthesis by highly specialized analysts and their chief analysts, all intelligence staffs follow a
same general process in four stages universally applied in French intelligence, although some split
the fourth stage in two, which thus make five. In both cases it is called “cycle du renseignement”
(intelligence cycle), pictured on the next page.
This implies that the reception of refined intelligence itself often calls for news demands, whence
this representation as an endless circle that, internally in the DGSE in particular, is said to have been
inspired by the entirely different field of archeology, as the process of historical research is the same
in its principle. The refined and archived intelligence in large computer servers together constitutes
a library providing results from targeted and very specific searches, with key words processed by
Taiga database-management system software. Then artificial intelligence can help in the search
through crosschecking, relevancy, patterns identification, re-arrangements corresponding to exotic
demands and forecasts, established from the bulk of intercepted telecommunications and their
associated metadata. Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly important role in
telecommunications interception and data analysis, chiefly because of the huge quantity of raw
intelligence collected every day is impossible to treat and to classify humanly.

Artificial intelligence has its own limits, beyond which Man takes over. Computer technology in
2018 was still far from the prowess of HAL 9000 in the Sci-Fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey. No
intelligence agency in the World can reasonably expect to enjoy anytime soon the help of an
automated computer system that would be able to say something as “Just a moment. Just a moment,
Dave; I’ve just picked up someone’s second degree allusion on a telephone conversation in
Marseille that 100% suggests it’s all about hostile intelligence activity”.
Overall, there have been nine officially claimed DRM–DGSE COMINT / ROEM detachments
overseas, which can be either CRE, CTM or DAT. However, a number of them were dismantled in
the last decades, still due to the considerable decrease of the use of satellites in telephone and
Internet signal transmission. That is why the existence of a French CRE in South Africa is a highly
likely hypothesis, due to a close partnership in intelligence between France and this country, and to
the recent landing of the telecommunication submarine cable ACE (see map). For long, the DGSE
and the DRM, in cooperation with the Technische Aufklärung of the German BND, run
telecommunications interceptions together from the United Arab Emirates, thanks to a close
relationship between the latter country and France that began in 1973, under the presidency of
Valéry Giscard-d’Estaing.
 Staffs working under military status in these overseas COMINT / ELINT / SIGINT detachments
have insignias such as the one shown above, and the color of the spider on these insignias varies
according to the geographic location of the detachment. First, there is an original and generic
insignia, whose spider is black. Then there has been Bangui, in Central African Republic (dark red),
Cap-Vert (green), Dakar, in Senegal (light green), Djibouti (red), Réunion (marine blue), Mayotte
(orange), Papeete, in French Polynesia (yellow), and Port-Bouët, in Ivory Coast (white).
The DRM enjoys the ownership of the COMINT / ELINT / SIGINT spy ship Dupuy-de-Lôme
A759, shown on the next page, which entered service in the French Navy in April 2006. This spy
ship is modern, therefore, in contrast to the spy ship Bougainville L9077 that had the same mission
from 1998 to 2006. The Dupuy-de-Lôme is specifically designed for signals interception overseas,
pursuant to the Moyens Interarmées Naval de Recherche ElectroMagnétique–MINREM project
(Joint Naval Resources for Electromagnetic Research). All her means of electromagnetic
interception have been designed and built by Thales Group, which today is one of the three main
providers in signals interception, deciphering, telecommunication engineering, and related
capacities for the French intelligence community, along with the other companies Alcatel-Lucent,
and Bull.[486]
The Dupuy-de-Lôme A759 is 338 ft. long for a displacement of 3,100 t. (3,600 t. full load).
Thales Naval France has designed her according to civil standards and for long-term missions, to
meet the need for intelligence gathering of electro-magnetic origin from the sea; that is to say,
interception, direction finding, listening to radio communications, goniometry of radar signals, and
first instance analysis onboard. This is the first ship of the French Navy designed specifically for
this mission. Two crews are servicing the ship for a technical availability of 350 days per year
including 240 at sea. Each crew is composed of 66 people (33 sailors and 33 intelligence specialists
assigned), to whom can join up to 38 additional intelligence specialists according to the missions.
The range of Dupuy-de-Lôme A759 is about 3,400 nautical miles at a speed of 16 kn.
With respect to telecommunication interception overseas, the DRM and the DGSE share
obviously their respective communication intelligence gatherings, and the partnership with the
German intelligence service BND extends to this capacity. Russia would have joined the group or
France alone for an unknown number of years. Furthermore, the effort in the search for
communication intelligence includes a significant financial participation from Germany, and from
Russia very possibly since the years 2005 to 2008. For example, the German BND is co-financing
the DGSE “listening station” of Mayotte[487] (see map) and the DRM’s CRE / CTM / DAT of the Al
Dhafra Air Base 101, in the United Arab Emirates. The permanent installation of French forces in
this Arabian State is the direct consequence of a defense official agreement that binds the UAE to
France since January 1995.[488]
Several of the French satellite listening stations of the DGSE and of the DRM, shown on the map
page 613, have been deactivated in the last ten years, due to the worldwide shift from satellites for
international telecommunications to optical fiber submarine cables. Today in 2018, about 90% of
World trade is going through fiber-optic cables drawn between continents.
In 2007-2008, State Councilor Jean-Claude Mallet advised newly elected President Nicolas
Sarkozy to invest urgently in submarine cable tapping, and in computer capacities to collect and
decipher optical data automatically.[489] Mallet is rather known as a specialist in nuclear weapons,
but as former Director of the SGDSN among a number of other reasons, he is also familiar with the
intricacies of French intelligence. In the early 2000s, Mallet planned the installation of a new
computer system to breaking codes, which would have been “officially” installed in the
underground of the DGSE headquarters in Paris.
 Bernard Barbier is another personality in French
telecommunications interception who was appointed Head of
the COMINT service of the DGSE in 2006. As one of his
predecessor, Jérôme Ventre, Barbier is a civilian trained as
scientist who previously headed the CEA-Leti aka Laboratoire
d’Électronique des Technologies de l’Information (Electronics
Laboratory for Information Technology), which, be it said in
passing, is one of the World largest organizations in applied
research in microelectronics and nanotechnology.

The objective of the DGSE is to tap as many submarine

cables as possible, beginning with those located under the
Atlantic and the Mediterranean seas, since France connects to
them (see map, and its technical explanations). However,
problems are that the cost of this intelligence program is huge,
and that it claims the additional and delicate hiring of hundreds
of engineers, mathematicians, specialists in telecommunication
and other relevant scientific fields. This comes to explain the
recent campaign of massive recruitment, I earlier commented.
Very possibly, Russia was influential in the launch of this new
program because it was done at once upon Sarkozy’s return
from this country in 2007, where he spent much time in private
with Vladimir Putin, and for a number of additional reasons I
pinpoint all along this book, about each time the former French
president is named.
The good news for the DGSE was that French global
telecommunications equipment company Alcatel-Lucent
installed several cables landing on the French coasts, and that it
has an expertise in intercepting data going through submarine
optical fiber cables. Then Orange owns all submarine cable
landing points in continental France. Contrary to the PNIJ, the
DGSE does not pay anything to Orange for intercepting
communications on these cables. The latter telecommunication
group, in technical partnership with Alcatel-Lucent, greatly
helped the dozen of highly specialized technicians of the DGSE
to install branch boxes directly in the cable arrival rooms on the
shores, all owned by the former company. Then, from those
“bypass facilities,” cables go to clandestine premises from
which intercepted signals are going straight to the underground
bases of Taverny and Mutzig, where they are sorted out and
processed for intelligence search.
In 2017, the DGSE would have been in theoretical capacity to
intercept foreign telecommunications from about 40 countries
outside continental Europe, mainly in Western Africa, Western
and Southern Europe, the Arabian Peninsula, Asia, and even
Australia. Although the World map on does not show any
connection with Japan, yet the DGSE successfully intercepts
international telecommunications from this country. The latter
capacities in foreign telecommunication interceptions toward
the east bring our attention on the submarine cables landing on
the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, also shown on the map.
Must be added interceptions on the Americas-II cable
extending from Florida, the United States, to Brazil through the
Caribbean—the more so, since this cable was landed very early,
in August 2000. Additionally, the DGSE would spy on about
half a dozen of “small” cables in the Caribbean region, such as
the Southern Caribbean Fiber extending from Puerto Rico to
Trinidad and Tobago, and the Global Caribbean Network–GCN
extending from Puerto Rico to Guadalupe. The map shows the
whole network of the thus intercepted cables, whose references
and details are indicated. Allegedly, the whole of these
capacities in telecommunication interception even allows to
tapping telephone communication inside the United States, on
the East coast in particular. However, the prowess would be
possible under exceptional circumstances only, when telephone
traffic in this U.S. region saturates[490] because, in such case,
certain U.S. telephone operating companies would solve the
problem by transiting telecommunications via France for short
durations.
Finally, we find all other European landlines
telecommunications intercepted by the CRE of Mutzig with the
help of the German BND. The motives for this, at least, are the
telecommunications between European countries, Britain, and
the United States transiting by France, and more especially
Switzerland, geographically stuck in the middle of the European
continent, and a prime target of the DGSE, since circa 2005-
2006. Officially, the CNCIS has authority for legally limiting
the scope of the interceptions to certain topics such as terrorism,
nuclear proliferation, and large contracts. Allegedly, the
regulating body always denies requests for eavesdropping in
view of economic or political intelligence in countries of the
European Union. Of course, the DGSE does it in reality, thanks
to its partnership with the German BND, and very possibly,
again, to its other partnership with its Russian counterpart.
Officially, the enormous French foreign intelligence program
began in 2008 and was all set in 2013 for a cost of 700 million
euros, which claimed simultaneously the hiring of a first wave
of about 600 new DGSE employees, highly skilled specialists in
relevant fields for most.[491] The reader understands that the
underground of the DGSE headquarters is not large enough to
shelter, packed together, all these specialists in computer
technology, artificial intelligence, telecommunications, and code
breaking, plus 600 more expected to be hired for 2022, contrary
to what the French media say. For the record, there are three
underground floors beneath the headquarters of the DGSE, in
Paris, whose deepest is 130 feet down under the ground; but one
at least of these levels is occupied by the secret meeting and
conference rooms.
Once more, the reader may reasonably assume the massive
hiring coincided with the changes that occurred at the Taverny
underground base between 1987 and 2011, with a boom in 2006,
when nearly all military personnel left it. Indeed, from 1987 to
1990, important works were done in the underground of the
Taverny Air base, to build a large communication deciphering
and computer analysis center, named at that time Centre de
Transmission et de Traitement de l’Information–CTTI
(Transmission and Information Processing Center). Actually, the
CTTI would be the direct ancestor of the Plateforme Nationale
de Cryptage et de Décryptement–PNCD (National Platform for
Encryption and Decryption), bringing huge capacities to the
treatment of telecommunications intelligence. Once the work
was complete, the underground of the Taverny Air base
sheltered the largest Faraday cage in Europe for protection
against leaks of radio-electric waves and EMP attacks, with
super-computers inside working 24 / 7 on deciphering codes.
Before 1987, the underground facilities of the Taverny Air base
were already used as telephone tapping hub because it offers the
advantage to be located near Paris, and to be right on the path
where pass cables coming from the French west coast, where
transatlantic submarine cables heading toward England and
America are landed.
For long, it comes as a culture in the DGSE to install its
super-computers and computer servers underground, exactly as
this agency favors all highly sensitive meetings in identical
conditions. The main reason for this is a fear of computer
electromagnetic interception (see TEMPEST in the Lexicon),
and ElectroMagnetic Pulse–EMP weapons. Relevant to the
latter concern, I was once explained that the United States holds
an expertise in the latter technology.
Then we notice the tens of millions of euros in super-
computers that the ANSSI purchased between 2016 and 2017,
which would have been sheltered in the Fort de Rosny, in
Rosny-sous-Bois, Eastern suburb of Paris. For long, the Fort de
Rosny is a hub of the Gendarmerie, in which we find several
specialized schools and training centers of this military police
corps. That is also from this place that French television and
radio broadcasting are monitored since the 1970s, at least, be it
said in passing. Today, this is again from this place that the
Gendarmerie monitors Internet activities relevant to
information; that is to say, websites, forums, blogs, social
networks, and even online game activities. However, as all those
missions do not justify a so large investment in computers; a
hypothesis says that they would possibly extend to the treatment
of the of data flows coming from the CRE of Mutzig, in a joint
effort with the DGSE and the DRM, therefore.
The super-computers of the DGSE daily sort out tens of
millions of voice telecommunications, emails, and metadata,
and they sort out automatically the telecommunication
exchanges of targeted individuals, foreign public services and
agencies, and private bodies by telephone numbers, IP
addresses, and even banking accounts and credit card names and
numbers previously targeted.
The theory says that one program recognizes voices, and
another translates what they say into French. However, all this
does not go as simply and smoothly as expected because, still in
2018, speech recognition software were still far from to be
100% effective. Comes to add to the difficulty the huge
continuous data flows that are overwhelming the staff of
“listeners” and first-instance analysts. Therefore, the demands
for telecommunication intelligence of the DGSE still have to be
very selective. The DGSE and other intelligence agencies
cannot but target certain particular sources, up to the artificial
intelligence and human capacities of the former agency. Then
France’s financial power naturally limits her technical and work
force capacities, far from equaling these of the United States
and of the U.S. NSA in particular.
Then there is the other problem of the ever-increasing
difficulty in breaking ever-effective encryption protocols in
Internet telecommunications. Any individual with a minimum
computer skill can easily encrypt a file in a way that makes it
virtually undecipherable to the best super-computer in the
World. Even if the prowess were possible, then how to repeat it
with thousands of such encrypted telecommunications that go
through the Internet every day. Additionally, the DGSE is facing
the other problem of the enormous energy consumption of all its
super-computers and data centers, even though EDF, the
monopolistic and publicly owned energy provider in France, has
close ties with the military. To exemplifies this, the DGSE found
the idea to use the heat produced by the computers working in
the underground of its headquarters to heat, alone, its offices
above the ground and to cool those computers, simultaneously.
As other large intelligence agencies in World, the DGSE is
expecting much from the yet inchoate quantum computer
technology. When it will be available, this agency will be in
capacity to decipher old highly sensitive encrypted messages it
is storing in its databases pending this day. I know that the
DGSE is much interested in ongoing researches in quantum
computer technology since as early as in the mid-1990s. For the
moment, France counts on the recent multiplication of her
intelligence agencies, on distributed computing networks, and
on its partnerships with the German BND, the South African
intelligence service, and the Russian intelligence community.
That is why the DGSE is refocusing its search for
telecommunication intelligence on metadata interception and on
its analysis with artificial intelligence. Metadata are not
encrypted for obvious reasons, and interesting intelligence and
inferences can be drawn from the analysis of connections
between people and private and public bodies, their frequencies,
durations, and geolocations.
In the frame of the policy of intelligence sharing between
agencies, the DGSE is offering an exclusive yet limited access
to its huge databases to all other intelligence agencies,
completely out of all governmental control. The practice is far
from to be new, as it was first established in 1960, when the
GIC was created. From a technical standpoint, this joint
intelligence task force involves the permanent presence in
DGSE’s underground computer facilities of small crews of
computer engineers appointed as “signal interception
representatives” to each intelligence agency. There those
collaborators are granted permanent access to selected data
libraries, plus additional accesses on a need-to-know basis,
pertinent to the current needs of the agencies they work for. The
explanations above just summed up what the PNCD is about
exactly.
France would be happy to create or to partake in a European
joint task force in intelligence, but on condition to lead it, or to
co-lead it with Germany, at worst. Besides, I am not sure that
Germany is spirited by the same aggressiveness in intelligence
as France is, and , I assume, the special relationship between
France and Russia complicates this expectation; but for how
long and depending what imponderable, no one and no artificial
intelligence can forecast?
We are reaching to the following dilemma. Are human efforts
and financial investments in spying on other’s business yielding
commensurate benefits? That is not quite sure, even if the goal
limits to win big commercial contracts. Nonetheless, the
recurring problem is, it costs much more to decipher a message
than to scramble it. Those who are working on those nearly
metaphysical questions consider that one could record every day
the whole data flow in anticipation to the day it will be easier to
decrypt it. This way to turn round the problem not only is not
new, but a number of intelligence agencies in the World have
been successfully relying on it for long. However, the flow of
encrypted telecommunications has become much bigger than it
was in the 20th century, and it is constantly growing, mixing big
secrets with desultory conversations that are also encrypted
using effective methods. So much so that we could compare the
amalgam to tons of solidified lava in which, maybe, there are a
few “gold flakes”. Actually, I just borrowed the metaphor on
mining to the “COMINT service” of the DGSE, whose
specialists sometimes rejoice to find a “nugget”. Today, a single
performing submarine cable can carry 160 terabits of data per
second or 20 terabytes. In other words, continuously recording
the flow of data transiting by only one such cable would fill ten
2 terabytes computer hard disks each second. On this basis, I let
the reader doing the math to figure the daily investment in
hardware and in electricity necessary to accomplish the absurd
prowess.
In the late 1990s, the DGSE acknowledged that more than
90% of the intelligence it collects through telecommunication
interceptions is unimportant or worthless. The figure means this
collected intelligence is just additional information about facts
that are known or strongly assumed already, most of the time.
The thing is, in other countries as in France, spies do not send
big secrets to each other by emails, and they do not speak in
clear talks on telephone. Therefore, telecommunication
interceptions rather help figure trends, and come to confirm the
value of isolated facts or patterns noticed and spotted by others
means, human intelligence generally. By comparison, this is
about the same as struggling to know more about a criminal
cold case in the hope to find out who the murderer was, by
gathering, collecting, reading, and analyzing painstakingly as
many press articles and police reports one can find about it. The
sole difference being that, in the field of intelligence, certainty
stops short of material evidences a court of justice would claim.
 DGSE intercepted submarine cables
(see map on the previous page).
SeaMeWe-3
Request For Service–RFS: September 1999.
Cable Length: 39,000 km.
Owners: Orange, BT, KDDI, SingTel, Telecom Italia
Sparkle, Telekom Malaysia, OTEGLOBE, AT&T, Proximus,
Communications Authority of Thailand, China Telecom,
Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Telecom Egypt, CTM, PT
Indonesia Satellite Corp., Jabatan Telecom Brunei, KT,
Portugal Telecom, Maroc Telecom, PLDT, Saudi Telecom, Sri
Lanka Telecom, Turk Telekom, Tata Communications,
Chunghwa Telecom, Verizon, KPN, Telekom Austria, SingTel
Optus, Telstra, Vietnam Telecom International, Omantel,
PCCW, Pakistan Telecommunications Company Ltd., Cyta,
eircom, LG Uplus, Softbank Telecom, Telkom South Africa,
Rostelecom, Orange Polska, SingTel Optus, Telecom
Argentina, Myanmar Post and Telecommunication (MPT),
Sprint, Vocus Communications, Djibouti Telecom, Embratel,
Vodafone, Turk Telekom International, Ukrtelecom.
SeaMeWe-4
RFS: December 2005.
Cable Length: 20,000 km.
Owners: Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Limited
(BSCCL), Orange, SingTel, Telecom Italia Sparkle, Tata
Communications, PT Indonesia Satellite Corp., Telekom
Malaysia, Airtel (Bharti), Sri Lanka Telecom, Etisalat, Saudi
Telecom, Communications Authority of Thailand, Tunisia
Telecom, Verizon, Pakistan Telecommunications Company
Ltd., Telecom Egypt, Telstra.
SeaMeWe-5
RFS: December 2016.
Cable Length: 20,000 km.
 Owners: Telekom Malaysia, Bangladesh Submarine Cable
Company Limited (BSCCL), China Mobile, China Telecom,
Orange, Myanmar Post and Telecommunication (MPT), Saudi
Telecom, Sri Lanka Telecom, Telkom Indonesia, SingTel,
Telecom Italia Sparkle, TeleYemen, China Unicom, du, Turk
Telekom International, TransWorld Associates (Pvt.) Limited,
Ooredoo, Telecom Egypt.
IMEWE
RFS: December 2010.
Cable Length: 12,091 km.
Owners: Telecom Italia Sparkle, Etisalat, Tata
Communications, Pakistan Telecommunications Company
Ltd., Orange, Airtel (Bharti), Saudi Telecom, Ogero, Telecom
Egypt.
TAT-14
RFS: April 2001.
Cable Length: 15,295 km.
Owners: BT, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Sprint,
TeliaSonera, KPN, Telenor, Etisalat, OTEGLOBE, SingTel,
KDDI, Softbank Telecom, Zayo Group, Portugal Telecom,
Slovak Telekom, TDC, Telus, Tata Communications,
Telefonica, AT&T, Proximus, Elisa Corporation, Cyta,
Rostelecom, Vodafone, CenturyLink.
Africa Coast to Europe (ACE)
RFS: December 2012.
Cable Length: 17,000 km.
Owners: Orange, Dolphin Telecom, Cote d’Ivoire
Telecom, Gambia Submarine Cable Company, MTN Group,
Orange Cameroun, Sonatel, Cable Consortium of Liberia, STP
Cabo, International Mauritania Telecom, Canalink, Orange
Mali, Orange Niger, Republic of Equatorial Guinea, Sierra
Leone Cable Company, GUILAB, Benin ACE GIE, Republic
of Gabon, Republic of Guinea Bissau, Republic of Cameroon.
Circe South
 RFS: February 1999.
Cable Length: 115 km.
Owners: VTLWavenetdf, euNetworks.
FLAG Atlantic-1 (FA-1)
RFS: June 2001.
Cable Length: 14,500 km.
Owners: Global Cloud Xchange.
Asia Africa Europe-1 (AAE-1)
RFS: June 2017.
Cable Length: 25,000 km.
Owners: China Unicom, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat,
Omantel, Djibouti Telecom, OTEGLOBE, Pakistan
Telecommunications Company Ltd., PCCW, Ooredoo, Mobily,
Viettel Corporation, TeleYemen, Retelit, Reliance Jio Infocom,
Global Transit, Vietnam Telecom International, Metfone,
Hyalroute.
TE North/TGN-Eurasia/SEACOM/Alexandros
RFS: July 2011.
Cable Length: 3,634 km.
Owners: Telecom Egypt, Cyta, SEACOM, Tata
Communications.
Notes: Telecom Egypt operates TE North but has sold fiber
pairs to several parties. Tata Communications owns two fiber
pairs on the cable which the company refers to as TGN-
Eurasia. SEACOM owns one fiber pair. Cyta owns one fiber
pair and the branch to Cyprus which the company refers to as
Alexandros.
Med Cable Network
RFS: October 2005.
Cable Length: 1,300 km.
Owners: Orascom Telecom Holding.
 Americas-II
RFS: August 2000.
Cable Length: 8,373 km.
Owners: Embratel, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, CANTV, Tata
Communications, Telecom Argentina, Orange, Portugal
Telecom, C&W Networks, Telecom Italia Sparkle, Entel
Chile, CenturyLink.
Southern Caribbean Fiber
RFS: September 2006.
Cable Length: n/a.
Owners: Digicel.
Eastern Caribbean Fiber System (ECFS)
RFS: September 1995.
Cable Length: 1,730 km.
Owners: Orange, AT&T, BT, Verizon, Sprint, Guyana
Telephone and Telegraph (GT&T), Codetel, C&W Networks.
 PART III.
FOREIGN Intelligence
“Promises are binding only those who believe in them”.
—Charles Pasqua, French politician and spy, ex-salesman in beve ages and
alcohols, co-founder of the Service d’Action Civique–SAC, ex-Deputy to
the French National Assembly for the Hauts-de-Seine département for the
UDR party, ex-Senator for the Hauts-de-Seine, president of the RPR group
in the Senate, former Minister of the Interior, and ex-convict.
 23. The Special Relationship between France and Russia.
D o not lift thine eyes, reader. There are no Saints nor holy men in this paradisio, where flying
agents are no angels and shine their own ways in the darkness. Beatrice, afraid, failed to appear for
the engagement, perhaps you expected. Here and now, I am still your guide, Virgil, you met in
Inferno; are you remembering me? Did I not warn you that this Comedy could never be divine?
Should you feel misled, read again the epigram on the title page of the third and closing part of your
literary journey, and learn.
It is impossible to explain the relation France has with Russia without telling the other she has
with the United States. In the latter country, France makes the news once to four a month on
average, as Germany, Italy, or Japan do. A majority of American people knows France through
clichés, essentially; not much beyond the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre Museum, the Champs Élysées,
cooking, wines, cheese, a handful of luxury brands; and labor union strikes, of course. Many name
Paris when asked which place they would choose to trip. In their views, political considerations do
not matter that much, essentially because they are too intricate. Nonetheless, they make a neat
caesura between leisure and politics or they do not because France would be an old mercurial ally.
American people do not know on France much more than they do about the three other countries
I named above, and that is normal. Then would all those Americans be surprised to learn that, every
day indeed, the French media have something to say on the United States? Not because French
people would be very demanding of news on this country, but because their media impose the
abundance not to let them making up their mind alone while taking a lunch in a McDonald’s or
watching American movies and TV shows. Should the reader understand French, he would discover
with bewilderment that the plethoric media coverage on the United States in France always paints it
black, especially when on debates on TV between experts, analysts, historians, and journalists. Yet
the sarcasms would never be compelling enough to make the French multitudes renounce to
McDonald’s, Levi’s, Amazon, Coca Cola, American movies, and TV series. Today, France’s ruling
elite has not much to entice them beyond words. Whereof, the expression “love-hate” that better
informed journalists and writers on both sides of the Atlantic often use in their attempts to sum up
the so particular French feeling toward the United States. The true opinion of the French multitudes,
never published because it would be politically incorrect, says, love only. At this point of his
reading, the reader learned that the French masses do not have a say about what their elite state and
decide for them.
To support my latter statement, I remind that the French population voted “No” to the joining of
France to the European Union. For wants of any reliable statistics, I would say that no more than
30% of French dislike American people, and that no more than 20% of them have a negative
perception of the United States, in the most pessimistic estimates. The American culture, its values,
and its numerous symbols together arouse continuously the love feeling, sincere, indeed. That is
why the French ruling elite, its loyal servants, and a truly small minority of leftists among the
French population together strive to keep alive a fire of hate against the United States, without
which the scapegoat would die of cold.
As for the diplomatic relations between, the two countries have been practicing doublethink and
double-talk since the end of the first American War of Independence in 1776. To be precise, the uses
were recorded for the first time by the United States Congress, when it passed the Alien and
Sedition Acts of 1798, consequent to the case of French interference in American politics known as
the “XYZ Affair” of 1797.[492] The diplomatic incident stressed the realities of France’s ambition in
her rallying the North American Colonies against Britain, her scapegoat of that time. I will not
elaborate on the attempt of Napoleon III to draw a profit from the American Civil War, this time by
providing discreet help to the Secessionists from Mexico. Even though France spied on the
telecommunications of the U.S. Navy before the WWI broke out, the decisive joining of America in
the conflict in 1917 marked a height in the relations between the two countries, unprecedented for
more than a century at that time. Bartholdi’s Statue is nothing but a bright spark in a long night; the
message of liberty her little sister in Paris repeats to the French worth it to never appearing as a
feature of her birthplace. The French-American friendship spanned the years 1917-1918. The
following year was the actual starting point of French anti-Americanism on an initiative of the
government of France. I explain why and how to the reader who still assumes Hubert Beuve-Méry,
Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Boris Vian launched the trend in the 1950s.
 French anti-Americanism truly took root in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and more
especially during heated discussions between U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and French Prime
Minister George Clemenceau, when the former wanted a fair peace treaty that did not punish
Germany. The American demand for mercy to the Germans clashed with the will of the French to
crush them revengefully. Yet I see that the story is known and commented in American webzines,
once in a while. The true cause, lesser known, came when the United States asked to France to pay
back her enormous war loans, whereas at the same time defeated Germany had to pay as much for
reparations. In the eyes of the French politicians, asking for money was shocking; the United States
were an ally of France, and they had had an equal interest in involving in the war. Anti-American
statements flourished in the French media upon the disagreement; that is how and when the United
States took the role of Britain, and even that of Germany for the occasion, of responsible for all that
was not going well in France. Criticism against individualism and free capitalism came as additional
argument supporting the validity of French socialism, itself shaped by centuries of Roman Catholic
power and popular belief in the evil of money.
So much so that arrived on the eve of the Second World War, a mix of socialism à la française,
religiously inspired defiance against free capitalism, and of politically correct resentment against
America had shaped the French mindset, now torn between attraction for modernity, comfort, and
prosperity, and a resigned submission to a pervading leftist authoritarian technocracy. Let alone a
Soviet influence that had transformed into interference in French affairs as early as in the 1930s.
The scale of values of the French Republic was evolving to cognitive dissonance, reminiscent by
analogy to those men who drive away their suppressed homosexuality by marrying a woman, and
who go as far as to express their hatred against their likes through violence in their vain hope to
bury the terrible secret for good. The French perception of the United States being summed up, I can
enter the subject of this chapter.
Good diplomatic relations between France and Russia formalized in 1891, by conventions with a
political and military objective to defend against central empires in the process of coalescing. Until
1917, France had given a hand to tsarist Russia in many ways, including against the revolutionary
Bolsheviks. It is little known the 2d Bureau indeed trained and helped its Russian counterpart, the
Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order[493] or Guard Department,[494] better
known as “Okhrana”.[495] As it is not well known that, in the meantime, the Prussian intelligence
service was training and similarly helping Japan to create her own intelligence agency. Thereof, we
can say that France indeed helped Russia fight the Japanese until the disastrous Russian defeat at the
naval Battle of Tsushima in 1905. Can we see in this a French proxy war against Germany via
Japan? Possibly—I could not say, as other issues and prospective existed in Eastern Asia. The
shaping of a French public opinion favorable to Tsarist Russia at that time was the most visible as a
strong encouragement to buy stock of the ongoing TransSiberian project; all those who complied
most enthusiastically lost their saving for good in it.
With the successful second Revolution of 1917 in Russia, secretly supported and financed by
Germany because this country thus expected to get rid of this other enemy during the Great War,
[496] France severed abruptly her good relations with Russia, newly renamed Soviet Union.
Following the event, it was question in France of a “great divide” otherwise called “the Schism”
between the Socialists on one side, and Red socialist hardliners on the other who had rallied under
the banner of Internationale ouvrière (Second International). Friedrich Engels had founded the
organization in 1889, on the myth of the class struggle of his friend Karl Marx. Its evolution, called
“Second International,” was founded in 1919 in Moscow to make it a soft branch of the Communist
International[497] aka Komintern aka Comintern[498]. In short, at that time, the French Government
saw the Soviets and the Red socialists as dangerous extremists to be put in a same bag as the
Anarchists, all under close surveillance of the recently created RG, therefore. The Comintern rallied
together all communist parties in the World that recognized the new Soviet regime in Russia as their
leader; logically, since the Russians had been the first to put an end to the class struggle in their
country. Most French political parties of the 1920s were born from the Schism between the
Socialists and the Social democrats of the Second International, their revolutionary and reformist
wings.
France became the first priority target of the new intelligence agency of the Soviets, the
“VChK / Cheka,”[499] because this country had granted asylum to a large number of former senior
military and officials of tsarist Russia, due to the good relations between the two countries. The
Soviets dreaded the latter diaspora could seek revenge and conspire against them to take back the
power in Russia with the help of France. The luck of the Soviets was that instead of liquidating the
staff of the old tsarist Okhrana, they had recruited them on the spot because they had understood the
value of their experience and privileged relations they had had for years with the French 2d Bureau.
Moreover, the Soviets perceived France as the most valuable and easiest target in Europe, a means
to conquer the other European countries in a pincer movement, and as a large port offering direct
accesses to Britain, the United States, and the Mediterranean Sea. In the early 1920s, committed
Communists in France and in Germany were numerous, and many members of the Comintern in the
former country had kept friendly and influential connections among the Socialists in the French
Government. However, if Soviet influence and action thus grew in France until the WWII, it had
stopped short of Germany in the early 1930s, due to the rise of aggressive National Socialism in this
other country. For the record, the goal of the Comintern was to spread the Soviet revolution
worldwide, since its leaders considered that communism could not survive if enforced in one or a
few countries only.
By 1934-1935, France was no longer the priority target of the Soviet intelligence agency and of
the Comintern because the latter indeed had reached their objectives in this country, which
materialized in 1936 with the general strike of May-June, the victory of the Popular Front, and the
creation of a left-wing government led by socialist politician Leon Blum. Upon this success, the
Soviets newly focused their efforts on the conquest of Spain, which started with the Spanish Civil
War in the same latter year, on that of England, and on that of the German and U.S. military
industries. In the meantime, the Soviet Cheka had considerably grown and had changed its name
twice, first in 1922 for GPU,[500] and second, only one year later in 1923 for OGPU.[501] Arrived in
1934-35, as the OGPU had further expanded its capacities to fulfill the latter ambitions, it changed
its name again for NKVD,[502] headed from 1938 to 1945 by infamous Lavrentiy Beria. I simplify to
the extreme my explanations about these evolutions of the Soviet intelligence service because they
were too intricate to be worthy of exact descriptions in this book. As testimony of the earliest stage
of the special relationship between France and the Soviet Union, the following facts are
enlightening.
In 1935, the Soviets had pioneered military parachute with parachuting successfully infantrymen
with their gears. Through unclear circumstances because those were secret or censored anyway, the
French military sent three officers to learn the Soviet method of parachuting, among whom I can
name Captains Frédéric Geille and Charles Durieux. Upon their return to France, on September 12,
1935, Ministre de l’Air (Air Minister) General Denain decreed the creation of the first French
parachute training center, to be settled in Avignon-Pujaul, Southern France. On October 3, 1936,
new Air Minister Pierre Cot signed another decree stipulating that Combat Air Brigades thenceforth
would include air infantry units. Some among the French military say that French soldiers went
again to train in parachute and methods in Soviet Union before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of
1939 between the latter country and Nazi Germany. All this is at the origin of the creation of the 1er
RCP, first French parachute regiment and elite unit of the Army, still in existence today.
I named French Air Minister Pierre Cot in the chapter 21 already because he was a close
acquaintance of Comintern agent Ludovic Brecher. Previously, in 1932, Cot had been Under-
Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the Centre-left government of Joseph Paul-Boncour; he was
appointed Minister for Commerce in 1938. “Through the decrypting of 1943 Soviet intelligence
cables through the Venona Project, it was established that Cot was an agent of the Soviet Union with
the code name of ʻDedalʼ”.[503] Cot went to the United States where he spent the war years teaching
at Yale University while operating as a Soviet spy handled by Vasiliy Zarubin, the NKVD Chief
Rezident for this country.[504] Cot received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953, and his son Jean-Pierre
Cot was Minister in the Socialist government of Pierre Mauroy in 1981-82, and twice a member of
the European Parliament in 1978-1979 and 1984-1999. Since 2002, Cot Jr. has been a member of
the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.
The European hub of the Soviet Comintern was in Berlin until 1933, when Hitler rose to power,
and resettled since then to Paris. Stalin dissolved it officially in 1943 to avoid antagonizing the
United States and Britain at a moment the Soviet Union had to rally with these Western countries
against Germany. In his recollections, Leopold Trepper, agent of the Soviet military intelligence
service GRU and organizer of the Soviet spy ring Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra),[505] said that
Communism has two strong symbolic places in the World that are worth tripping to: the Red Place
in Moscow, and the Place de la Bastille in Paris.[506] Trepper was a Soviet agent in Paris until 1929,
when he was expelled and went to Moscow, from which place he tripped regularly to Paris again to
build and to manage the Soviet Rabkors underground network.
 Lenin had had the idea to create the Rabkors in the aftermaths of the Revolution of 1917. In
Russian, the plural name Rabkors is a contraction of Рабо ие корреспонденты, or “Worker
correspondents”. The reader may find a Wikipedia page on the Rabkors by typing “People’s
correspondent”. To this definition I add that in the aftermaths of the WWII, this secret network in
France had about 2,000 members who sent letters regularly to L’Humanité communist daily
newspaper, a medium supported and financed from Moscow, for the record. Those letters were
reports on the situation on industry and commerce in France, and in public services up to the police
and the military. The Rabkors were essentially lower-class people with minor positions that allowed
them to spy on unnoticed. From 1929 to the 1950s, they greatly helped the Soviets identify French
entrepreneurs with anti-Soviet and anti-Communists feelings, and proved useful with providing
intelligence on the French military industry during the Indochina War of 1946-1954. In addition to
the latter facts, more or less publicly known today, I am in position to explain in this chapter many
other things about the Rabkors that never were publicly known until today because I have known a
number of them.
The Rabkors were also used as watchdogs and secret assistants of French senior executives in the
private and public sectors, sometimes unbeknownst to the latter and sometimes not. Many of them
had official membership in the French Communist Party and in the CGT labor union. However, not
all Rabkors and their sources affiliated to the latter party and organization, and those even concealed
their communist stance. Generally, they occupied mid-ranking responsibilities in public and private
companies, public services, the military, and the police, and they acted indeed as spies do, some
consciously and some others not.
Because of the above-explained infiltration, in the aftermaths of the WWII, a first series of
betrayals at high levels began to plague French politics, the military, and the SDECE. In September
1949, the latter agency played a major role in an affair that had to be known worldwide as “Scandal
of the Generals” aka “Generals’ Affair”. The Sûreté Générale (police) revealed that the Army Chief
of Staff had trusted confidential documents relating to the War of Indochina to another general who
had given them to an agent of the SDECE, who had given them in turn to the Communist Vietminh.
The French Government attempted to bury the story by instructing the media not to print it, but the
Paris correspondent to Time magazine had sent it to New York already. However, unbeknownst to
the American journalist, an unspecified French intelligence agency was eavesdropping all
dispatches that foreign journalists sent to their countries from Paris. This explains how and why the
French Embassy in Washington tried to suppress the story, arguing that it was deeply embarrassing
for the reputation of France in the World. The U.S. Government denied the French begging demand,
however, citing the First Amendment. Therefore, the scandal first broke out in the United States,
indeed published by Time magazine, and thus became known in France as “Affaire des Généraux”
(the Affair of the Generals) aka “Affaire des Fuites” (Affair of the Leaks).
In France, the counterintelligence service DST, then headed by Roger Wybot, and the justice ran
further investigations on the case, and exposed a number of suspects who turned out to be senior
executives in civil service and prominent socialist politicians. They were no less than Joseph Laniel,
Pierre Mendès France, Edgar Faure, François Mitterrand, Jacques Duclos, and Emmanuel d’Astier
de La Vigerie. Earlier, the DST had formally framed Astier de La Vigerie as a Soviet spy already,
but Edgar Faure, and François Mitterrand who had to become President of France in 1981, were the
most suspected.
In the 1950s, the SDECE parachuted operatives in Vietnam and in Eastern Europe, yet all those
sent by this means to Eastern Europe were captured upon his landing, as if the exact locations of
their drops were known in advance. It was quickly determined that the Soviets could not possibly
know all this otherwise than tanks to a source in the SDECE holding high position; for identical
failures had happened with the parachuting of agents in Vietnam. The reader will soon discover that
the Soviets actually had well penetrated the French intelligence service at that time. Anecdotally,
former intelligence officer and member of the Service Action Erwan Bergot wrote an excellent
espionage novel based on this betrayal from within, he titled L’Homme de Prague (The Man in
Prague).
I testify firsthand that the Rabkors were still very active until the 1970s and even in the 1980s,
and that their secret activities in the former decade in particular proved helpful for identifying and
sabotaging from within private companies whose owners had anti-Communist and anti-Socialist
stances. Once François Mitterrand and the Socialist Party took over in 1981, the Rabkors worked
hand-in-hand with Socialist-committed entrepreneurs to shortlist workers and junior executives
deemed fit to access higher positions and responsibilities. During those proceedings, they put to the
test the beliefs of the “chosen ones,” unbeknownst to them and through staged circumstances.
Moreover, they taught them “the right way” to behave with blue-collar workers and on “the social
duties of the entrepreneurs” they were expected to become upon their indoctrination. Those recruits
were not asked to register to the Communist Party nor to the CGT because the goal was to handle
them as agents infiltrated in the French private economy and in public services. For the latter good
reason, they were even not expected to commit to communism, exactly as today an agent of the
DGSE, and also of the Russian SVR, is not necessarily expected to know he is a spy in the service
of one these agencies—of both agencies very possibly, actually. I am even inclined to believe the
Rabkors did not know the Soviets thus named them, or “Travailleurs correspondants”. Actually, I
did not know until years later about the word “Rabkor,” when I recognizing them instantly in a
written account of their profiles and missions. From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, there were
close but neatly compartmentalized connections between the Rabkors, the SDECE / DGSE, and the
GOdF.
None of the dozen of Rabkors I knew personally during the 1980s had membership in a masonic
lodge. In the latter decade, the Rabkors, their own agents, the DGSE, and the GOdF together formed
a large and tight network of influence and domestic spying in the French private economy. They
were highly effective in cleansing the country from all people in the middle and upper classes who
were resilient to the new humanist-leftist viewpoint. Some seemed to be endowed with a
considerable influence that contrasted starkly with the insignificance of their social rank and official
responsibilities. Those influential blue collars remained highly regarded and respected, and
Frenchmen who had accessed the upper-middle and upper class thanks to them even dreaded their
secret power. The Rabkors and their pupils that had been the upstarts of after the socialist takeover
of 1981 could remain in touch together for long periods, to remind to the latter “from which cradle
they came from,” and “the scale of values that they had to keep standing by” along they social rises.
Their occasional and seemingly informal meetings took place in private over one drink or two or
even a meal sometimes and never involved other people who were not in the known. The Rabkors
were not meant to reach higher social statuses themselves anyway, yet their destiny of eternal blue
collars did not seem to bother them, as they all were spirited by a high sense of duty and sacrifice,
indeed. Typically, they were discreet and humble people, poorly educated yet not stupid, and those
who were knowledgeable in the history of communism and of the Soviet Union nonetheless did not
indulge in ranting as French leftist intellectuals often do. They listened attentively to people much
more than they talked.
The earliest known case of such Soviet intelligence activities in the French private sector is the
creation of the front company France-Navigation in 1937, whose leader Joseph Fritsch, I presented
in the chapter 7, was also one among the first French-Russian super-agents.
Describing the connections between the French Resistance, communism, and Moscow between
1940 and 1944 would probably not interest the reader, as they are wartime stories, essentially.
Nonetheless, investigating on this subject is a tricky and risky venture because, still today, French
and Russian trolls are actively monitoring and censoring everything relates to this topic on the
Internet, as in the media and literature. As example, on the Wikipedia pages relating to the Francs-
Tireurs Partisans–FTP, communist wing of the French Resistance in the WWII created at the end of
1941, everything relating to their communist commitment and membership is oddly inexistent; that
is to say, censored. The reason for this is that the Soviets had recruited many people who enlisted in
the FTP as secret agents against the Germans, and that they obviously remained Soviets agents after
the war. Those agents were helped to access influential positions in the French public and private
sectors, the military, the police, and even the intelligence community. The latter fact connects to the
Affair of the Generals, I briefly presented earlier, as it explains how this French betrayal in the
service of the Soviet Union was made possible. Not all evidences and testimonies could be
destroyed definitively, however. A handful of journalists and former French free fighters published a
number of facts and names in the aftermath of the war, inescapably and irremediably. That is largely
thanks those scarce testimonies that I can explain the followings.
In the wake of the Normandy landings of June 1944, a secret battle for the control of the French
military began at once, and the French Communist Party–PCF was particularly influential in its will
for the French Resistance to take over the leadership in this body. At the beginning, the PCF lost
against De Gaulle, whom the Americans helped and coached, but at the first legislative elections of
October 1945, the PCF became the first political party in France with 25% of votes, and the Free
Fighter communists had taken the control of about all préfectures outside of Paris. The PCF was
under the more or less publicly known authority of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union–
CPSU, due to the provisions and aims of the Comintern, I explained at the beginning of this chapter.
The Soviet Union exerted its influence in this party via French politician Jacques Duclos in
particular, who had left France in November 1939 to live in Moscow until November 1944. During
the war, the Soviets had given to Duclos a role of senior correspondent of the Rabkors in Moscow,
which explains why Duclos never was a member of the Resistance during the German occupation.
He had been trained in communist rhetoric and agitprop in the 1930s, when he was baker’s
assistant. As an aside, the DGSE’s practice to recruit, train, and indoctrinate agents under the
pretense of apprenticeship in cooking finds its origin in the latter period; now, the reader knows its
inventor was the Comintern. For long and until the late 1970s, the same method also applied to the
trade of typographer, a vocation that communist conspirators colloquially called “l’aristocratie du
proletariat” (“the aristocracy of proletariat”) until the 1980s because it was a job for blue collars
gifted with higher intellectual capacities. Moreover, typographer was an occupational activity of
particular interest because those who did it were the first to know what the media and the elite were
about to publish.
Although Duclos, member of the French Communist Party’s Political Bureau, held an influential
role in Soviet espionage in France as leader of the Rabkors’ network, he was left free to resume his
position at a high level in the French Government from 1945 to 1947. On November 8, 1945, he
was elected to the highly influential position of Vice-President of the Assemblée Constituente
(French legislative election), and first he proposed to this body the nationalization of a large part of
the French economy, banks, insurance, energy, iron and steel, chemistry, and merchant marine.
Duclos remained a prominent and influential French politician until his death in 1975. He was
member of the lower chamber of the Parliament almost without interruption until 1959, although he
had been cited again among the prime suspects in the Affair of the Generals. More than that, he
even left the lower chamber of the French Parliament for the higher position of Senator, which he
held until his death. Duclos’s closest partner was Maurice Thorez, head of the PCF from 1930 to
1964, Minister of the Public Service from 1945 to 1947, and Vice-President of the Council in 1947.
When Jacques Soustelle, a prominent figure I presented had re-created the French foreign
intelligence agency under the name DGSS in October 1944, this body owned no less than 1,400
vehicles, and 123 buildings, houses, and apartments, in addition to the military barracks of
Boulevard Mortier that were its headquarters already.[507] Most employees and spies of the new
DGSS were ex-members of the French Resistance with a large communist membership, but many
among them also were simple opportunists, con artists, and harder criminals. Executive positions in
the new French intelligence service had been given to a majority of ex-chiefs of the FTP Resistance
faction who, therefore, had been agents of the Soviets during the war.
Anecdotally, if I may say so, those first French spies of the Liberation assassinated on orders
from Moscow a large number of their country fellowmen who had cooperated with the Germans,
more or less discreetly, but often arbitrarily and without substantial evidences. That is how and
when the French foreign intelligence service trivialized assassinations of French nationals, and even
of its own agents and employees, called “operations humides” (“humid operations”) until the
1960s, and then “opérations homo” (“homo operation”), and finally “éliminations physiques”
(“physical eliminations”), as we have seen in the chapter 11. One among those first assassinated of
the immediate aftermaths of the war was Commissaire Divisionnaire of the RG Henri Renaudet, son
of renowned historian and specialist of the Italian Renaissance period Augustin Renaudet. Henri
Renaudet also was the father of my elder brother to whom I allude at times in this book.
Henri Renaudet had indeed largely collaborated with the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst when
he was head of the RG for the Le Havre region, all along the occupation and until the Landing of
June 6, 1944. Previously, he had been Commissaire of the same domestic intelligence agency in
Moulins upon his teaching and training at the police school of Saint-Cyr au Mont-d’Or. As many
other important collaborators at that time, Renaudet was lured to go to the Faculté Dentaire de Paris
(Paris Dental Faculty), where he was poisoned by the means I described in the chapter 11 on
physical eliminations. It is quite ironical and even cynical, I find, that in 1965-1966, the SDECE
recruited his son my stepbrother with a specialty in counterintelligence, after he was indoctrinated to
communism. However, it seems that the latter peculiarity actually owed to an informal tradition in
French intelligence, for my brother’s grandfather, historian of the Italian Renaissance period
Augustin Renaudet, had been agent of the 2d Bureau himself in Italy during the Great War of 1914-
1918, with a completely unrelated specialty in military navy. That is why and how grandfather
Renaudet happened to be interested in the Italian Renaissance period and in Niccolo Machiavelli on
whom he even wrote a book, and married a woman of the Italian bourgeoisie of Firenze. From my
perusing of family archives on Augustin Renaudet and testimony of my mother, I learned about his
contempt for the Christian religion, although his wife was a devout Catholic, and about his strong
interest in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, of whom he read all books.
On early January 1946, after the DGSS had been renamed DGER for a few months, the
intelligence agency was given the new name SDECE, which it kept until 1982. The change of the
name DGER for SDECE was decided when Communist Jacques Soustelle left the position of
director of this agency to Gaullist André Dewavrin, formerly known in the Resistance as “Colonel
Passy”. Dewavrin, who had been a chief of the French Resistance acting under the orders of De
Gaulle from London and not from the Soviets, had been entrusted the mission to heal the French
foreign intelligence agency from all its ills; that is to say, to cleanse it from its parasites,
conspirators, and Soviet agents, of course. In all, Dewavrin fired 8,323 full-time staffers exactly, or
more than 80% of the staff of the DGER. The drastic measure gave a start to the new SDECE with a
staff of about 1,500 carefully shortlisted employees only.[508] However, some among the latter who
kept influential positions in this agency were Soviet agents, as testified eventually Philippe Thyraud
de Vosjoli, former SDECE Chief of Station in Washington and defector to the United States.[509]
Chief of Station in Washington and defector to the United States in 1962. Later in the 1950s, the
problem of the few Soviet submarines had evolved to the degree of a Soviet influence inside the
SDECE, which in turn caused a major and determining diplomatic incident between France and the
United States, as we soon shall see.
It did not take long before Dewavrin was tricked with a plot organized from Moscow because of
the purge he had done in the SDECE, precisely. He was discredited and then removed from this
agency in May 1946, a few months only after his appointment. The French Communist Party had
been largely instrumental in Dewavrin’s disgrace, orchestrated from within the French Government,
and against De Gaulle, too, who had been forced to resign earlier in January 1946 from his position
of head of the State.
The latter series of events weakened considerably the SDECE from within. Upon the departures
of Dewavrin and De Gaulle in 1947, the Soviet Ministry for State Security–MGB,[510] previous
name of the KGB, and the Soviet military intelligence service GRU planted agents under false
French identities in the Ministry of Defense then named Ministry of War, in the SDECE, and in the
entire French political apparatus. As I was privy to peruse certain classified files relating to money
counterfeiting in the context of a particular strategic project in the mid-1990s, I will present in the
chapter 27, I was brought to discover incidentally the names of three of those Soviet agents in the
SDECE between 1945 and the early 1960s. There was Antoine Dowgierd, “born in Poland in 1916,
by then living 21bis Rue Soyer in Neuilly-sur-Seine.” Dowgierd worked until 1963 with the SDECE
as analyst and technical and scientific translator in an intelligence cell sheltered by the Délégation à
la Recherche Scientifique,[511] then settled 15, Rue de Provence, Paris. Earlier, Dowgierd worked
for ten years of so with the SDECE as agent under the cover of translator at the UNO, I recollect. A
note on him said that he performed poorly as agent while occupying the latter position. Dowgierd’s
spouse was the sister of the wife of another Soviet agent named Alexis Chouvaloff, “Russian born
in 1926 and naturalized French,” who worked under the cover of car salesman in Paris. The third
was Czeslaw Bojarski, hired full-time in the SDECE as expert in documents and banknotes
counterfeiting from 1945 to 1963, with no known cover activity. Bojarski was “born in Poland on
November 15, 1912, had graduated at the Polytechnic Institute of Danzig, Poland,” allegedly, and
naturalized French after the war. Quite remarkably, Bojarski at some point in his life made a profit
of his skills to make false French banknotes because of his cheap salary and life standing. His
banknotes were so well done that he could print large quantities for decades, and was not caught by
the police until 1963. Bojarski’s arrest made front pages, and he remained known worldwide as the
greatest banknotes’ counterfeiter of all times. Chouvaloff had a fair share of responsibility in
Bojarski’s arrest; he disappeared from France shortly after.
Former SDECE Chief of Station Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli, in his written testimony he titled
Lamia, reports the abuses of the special service of the SDECE that manufactured false French
identity papers and diplomas since the mid-1940. Yet he does not name its staff members in his
book, nor much elaborate about this service. Nonetheless, I can testify today that Bojarski was the
best talented of those specialists. He crafted his first fake documents during the WWII for the
French Resistance, and very possibly for the FTP and Soviets agents. In early 2001, I once had a
phone call with Bojarski’s daughter, who told me he was still alive, but had Alzheimer’s disease.
The penetrations by the Soviet MGB and the GRU in France actually were easy, for the French
Communist Party all along the 1940s had many members in the French police and in préfectures
who established for them genuine French identity cards and driver licenses. Sandor Rado, former
member of the Red Orchestra Soviet spy ring, confirmed this fact.[512]
From 1947 to 1958, the civilian counterespionage agency DST, by then led by charismatic Roger
Wybot, seriously investigated on these Soviet penetrations of the French Government. A number of
successful arrests rewarded his efforts, such as the public exposure of several Soviet agents and
submarines in the frame of the Affair of the Generals, including Jacques Duclos. However, when De
Gaulle returned to power as President of the new Fifth Republic he created, in May 1958, he oddly
dismissed all evidences that Wybot brought to him about the remaining Soviet submarines, and he
even removed him from office for this very reason. The latter event marked the definitive end of
Soviet spy hunting in France, in spite of claims of the contrary in the following decades, justified by
a need to save appearances aiming the public and serving French foreign affairs, diplomacy, and the
building of the European Union. We will see in this chapter that the DCRI and the DGSI, successors
of the DST from 2008, maintained the use. If ever the reader is fluent in French, I highly
recommend to him to buy a used copy of Wybot’s book—out of print since the late 1970s—in
which he will find a detailed account of the Affair of the Generals and of the DST’s investigations
and finds on the Soviet penetration of the French Government until 1958.
Additionally, the French Communist Party PCF, backed by the Soviets, became highly influential
in public affairs thanks to the dossier secrets that the FTP Resistance faction had retrieved at once at
the end of the war. From 1945, the communist underground organization in France and the Soviet
intelligence service established their own database of individual files and cards, recording the
wrongdoings of as many decision makers as they could. Thus, many French people who had more
or less discreetly cooperated with the Germans could be turned in as Soviet agents, under the threat
that their shameful pasts be publicly exposed. That is how many of those who had been senior
officials in the Vichy Government became sources of the PCF and of the Soviets, consequently. Not
only they thus were left scot-free in spite of their collaborations with the Nazis, but the Soviets even
helped them access influential positions in the French Government, the police, the military, and in
large publicly owned companies.
Those who lingered or proved poorly cooperative indeed were publicly exposed. Between other
better-known examples, this happened to André Desprez who, after the war, had been appointed
Director of the Société Nationale des Constructions Aéronautiques du Sud-Est–SNCASE (National
Society of Aeronautical Constructions of the Southeast). L’Humanité, main newspaper of the PCF,
for the record, published on its front page a compromising photo of Deprez, which resulted in his
removal from position on March 1, 1957. The SNCASE interested the Soviets for obvious reasons,
and soon after the latter event, this company merged with SNCASO to form Sud Aviation. Years
later, Sud Aviation was amalgamated into Aerospatiale, and finally into EADS group, whose
cooperation with Russia remains close today.[513] It is noteworthy that if France has shown for
decades certain reticence with elaborating about her long-lasting cooperation with Russia in
aeronautics and space, which formally began with the French-Soviet agreement signed by De
Gaulle in Moscow on June 30, 1966, she tends to be boastful about it since the early 2010s, all on
the contrary. We will see more about this, too, in this chapter.
The Soviet MGB also infiltrated the GOdF that had reborn from its ashes in the aftermaths of the
war, and they could do it easily thanks to the archives of the French liberal freemasonry that the
Soviet Army had retrieved in May 1945 in the castle of Wölfelsdorf. Among such other cases that
were to be publicly known, I name Pierre Guay, former agent of the Gestapo who, after the war,
became member of the GOdF, senior executive in the French police, and a source of Soviet
intelligence acting under this threat until the 1960s.
The year 1958 must be considered as a second stage and cornerstone in the rise of the Soviet
power in France. In the aftermaths of the Second World War and until the 1950s, at first glance,
there was an authentic and easily explainable friendship between France and the United States,
which included the closest allies of the latter country, Britain first, and then Israel. However, things
were entirely different in the eyes of the French military, and it was even worse in the all-seeing one
of the SDECE. Several historians from both sides of the Atlantic report a concerning feud between
large forces of French Communist free fighters on one side, and De Gaulle and his followers,
backed by Britain and the United States, in the last months of the war on the other.[514] This
situation comes to confirm that the ground for the Cold War to come was well laid even before the
WWII was over.
 During his long desert crossing of 1946-1958, De Gaulle caught a fear of an “American
hegemony” over Europe, seemingly. Decades later in 2000, Pierre Messmer, former Minister of the
Armies under De Gaulle’s mandate from 1960 to 1969, still bitterly said with his loud voice
imposing respect, “Americans are arrogant”; yet he did not elaborate about what he meant exactly.
[515] All I could understand of it, therefore, was that Messmer alluded to a military-like inclination
for blunt authority of the Americans from the first approach on. It should be said in the latter respect
that completely unlike most Americans, French hardly cope with military-like discipline and
submission to this form of request. They are much more Latin than they figure themselves, with a
character and a negotiating behavior opposite to these of the Germans, typically; the difference with
French-speaking Swiss and Belgians is striking already. Notwithstanding, French politicians believe
they can get on well with the Germans and work together. I witnessed how different people the
French intelligence officer and his German counterpart are, as the latter displays the education and
good manners the former rejects with contempt as expressions of bourgeois mentality. Most French
people tend to take authority and discipline as an aggression they feel they must strike back against,
arguing either of Gallic identity and mores backing far in time to a period of resistance against a
much disciplined and highly organized Roman Empire, or of a peasant soul of the years 1000s,
when French farmers transformed into soldiers at the service of their local lords.
Since 1936, French blue collars have always been lured by experts in agitprop into going on
strike. In the 1930s, already, the French Communist Party organized evening training courses on
agitprop with the support of the Comintern. At that time, the RG proved powerless against the
Soviet-supported threat, although this domestic intelligence agency was much experienced about
fighting anything acted underground. After the war, the French Communist Party, supported by the
Soviet Union even more than before, resumed the activities of its labor union the CGT with repeated
strikes that have become known among foreign tourists as integral to French culture since. There
were even sabotages in French ammunitions plants during the Indochina War of 1946-1954. The
U.S. CIA knew well all this, and that is why, in 1948, this agency attempted to counter the Soviet
tactic in France by creating Force Ouvrière–FO (Workers’ Force), a new French labor union
opposing the CGT.[516] However, the latter attempt proved fruitless because many in the French
Government and in the military discreetly supported the Communist Party and its CGT; there will
be more to this in this chapter to surprise the reader. Arrived in 1958, the relations between France
and the United States were comparable to a simmering boiler about to explode. Watch the
explosion, three years later.
On December 15, 1961, executive in the Soviet KGB and diplomat Anatoliy Golitsyn[517]
defected to the United States via Helsinki, Finland. There, Director of the CIA Counter-intelligence
Division James J. Angleton personally interviewed him. What Golitsyn revealed left the Americans
speechless, for this man “demonstrated that NATO’s headquarters in France were so deeply
penetrated that all secrets of this body were deliverable to Moscow within 48 hours. The most
worrying news was Golitsyn’s firsthand information pointing to the existence of a KGB spy among
De Gaulle’s closest, most trusted advisers”.[518]
In the spring of 1962, “this moved President Kennedy to take extraordinary measures[519] to warn
De Gaulle of traitors close to him—a warning that De Gaulle, always suspicious of America,
refused to heed”.[520] The revelations of Golitsyn about France in particular were as follow,
verbatim.
“The Ministry of the Interim, which has responsibility for internal security; the French
representation in the NATO organization; the Ministry of Defense, and the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs were all penetrated in the higher echelons by KGB agents. An official who then appeared to
be a member of De Gaulle’s cabinet, and who had ministerial or near-ministerial rank in 1944 in De
Gaulle’s first government, had been identified in KGB discussions as a KGB agent. A network with
the code name ʻSapphire,ʼ consisting of more than half a dozen French intelligence officers, all of
whom had been recruited by the KGB, was operating inside the SDECE itself. A new section for
collecting scientific intelligence had been or was being created inside the SDECE, with the specific
mission of spying out U.S. nuclear and other technological advances, eventually in the Soviet
interest”. [521]
Below is my transcript from French of the letter that John Fitzgerald Kennedy made delivered by
hand to De Gaulle, although I cannot guarantee its authenticity with absolute certainty.
“Mr. President of the Republic,
 The circumstances being of an exceptional gravity, I believe I should speak to you directly, and
without having recourse to the diplomatic communications in use. By the revelations of an
important member of the Soviet secret service who has just obtained asylum in the United States, we
have been informed of the existence in France of a vast intelligence network working for the Soviet
Union. Its members belong to the ruling circles of your country, and they exercise the highest
political, military, and economic responsibilities. My services are at your disposal to provide you
with the specifics that will put you in a position to neutralize this threat to the security of France
and of the free World.
The President of the United States of America
John F. Kennedy.”
In early June 1962, a senior officer of the SDECE accompanied by five counterintelligence
officers of the SDECE and the DST landed at the Washington airport. The intelligence officer
telephoned first the SDECE Chief of station at Washington, so that he sends out a car to pick them
up and arrange for a convenient place for them to stay for several days. The Chief of station had not
been warned of this early visit. As an apology, the intelligence officer told to him that the SDECE
was no longer sure of the security of its communications, even not of the safety of their codes, and
that it could not be certain of “who was getting its reports”. They came to interview Soviet defector
Golitsyn.
Less than a fortnight earlier, De Gaulle had sent General de Rougemont to Washington already,
for this man then attached to the Prime Minister’s office as Director of the 2d Bureau of the
Ministry of the Armed Forces, with the responsibility of coordinating the various branches of
military intelligence, had excellent connections in the American capital. Yet De Rougemont avoided
his French friends and the French Embassy in Washington, including the SDECE Chief of Station.
Instead, he made direct contact with the CIA, and that was through these particular circumstances
that he was taken to Golitsyn to ask to him as many questions as he wished. There was an intensive
questioning of Golitsyn for three or four days, at the end of which the French general came out
shaken by the appallingly detailed information that the Russian defector had on the innermost
workings of the French Government, and of its security and intelligence systems.[522] De
Rougemont eventually confided he had begun the questioning half-convinced that the whole thing
was some sort of trick by which the Americans were trying to dupe De Gaulle. He flew back to
Paris with an entirely different feeling to make his report directly to de Gaulle’s trusted assistant,
Etienne Burin des Roziers, who was holding the official position of General Secretary of the Élysée
Palace at that time.
The six men of the SDECE and the DST who came in to Washington after that had been
instructed to put the Soviet defector to the test because one of his most disturbing assertions, in their
own viewpoint, was that French KGB agents in the NATO headquarters in Paris were so
strategically placed and so easy in their methods. The team was to stay there for a couple of months,
and its men tape-recorded all interviews with Golitsyn, always in presence of CIA officials.
A whole library of secret NATO documents, Golitsyn insisted, was available for reference in
Moscow. In addition, the KGB’s familiarity with supposedly super-secret NATO material was so
intimate that its officers, in ordering fresh secret documents from their sources in Paris, indeed
freely used as theirs the NATO numbering system. Thinking to trap Golitsyn, the French asked to
him if he had ever seen NATO documents himself. “Oh, yes,” the Russian defector answered with
self-assertiveness, “Many”. Thereupon, he was shown a collection of some scores of classified
NATO documents dealing with various subjects. Many were authentic; a number however had been
fabricated in Paris for the occasion. They put the whole lot before Golitsyn, and they asked to him
to pick out those he had read in Moscow. Golitsyn did not identify all of the papers but those he
claimed he did read in the Soviet Union. All documents he pulled aside were the bogus ones. The
French were dumbfounded, was it said.
The few biographers and historians who wrote on this event say De Gaulle did not believe at all
the revelations of Golitsyn, and that when he read Kennedy’s warning letter, he shrugged for it was
written in green ink. Not much more is known about this episode in particular. Others indulge De
Gaulle for his alleged ignorance on matters of espionage, and they jokingly quote him as calling the
SDECE le machin (“the thingamajig”) because he “had all the brave soldier’s contempt for men
playing at spies”. However, when reading the testimony of Roger Wybot, head of the DST from the
early days of the liberation of France to 1958, we discover an entirely different attitude of De Gaulle
about counterespionage. In reality, the military statesman much relied on intelligence during the
Algerian War of 1954–1962, whereas the “brave soldier” always dismissed anything about Soviet
secret activities on the French soil each time his Director of the DST warned him about it. In any
case, with the revelations of Golitsyn, De Gaulle and his closest entourage understood that they
could not play double game any longer with the Americans, as testifies for the unexpected second
part of the Golitsyn story, below.
First, what should have normally happened in this situation did not. The French remained silent
about the Soviet spies in their administrations that Golitsyn had helped identify. The DST arrested
only one French official and the justice life sentenced him. This man was Georges Pâques, who
worked since July 1961 at the press service of the headquarters of the Defense. Later, in October
1962, he had been promoted as Studies Director of the Institut des Hautes Études de la Défense
Nationale–IHEDN (Institute for Advanced Studies in National Defense). Three more months later,
Pâques was called to work at the NATO press service, and he stood there until his arrest in August
1963. Pâques had been recruited as Soviet agent in Algiers in 1943 by Alexander Gouzovsky,
advisor in the Soviet Union embassy in Paris who had fled to this city. Pâque’s successive handlers
until 1963 had been Alexander Alexeiev, Sergei Gravrichev, Alexei Tritchin, Nicolas Lyssenko, and
Vassili Vlassov. It is noteworthy that between 1947 and 1949, Pâques has been in touch in Paris
with Ivan Agayants, founder of the Directorate D of the KGB in 1961. The latter fact strongly
suggests the hypothesis saying that Pâques has been involved consciously or not in a game of
deception at some point, as red herring for deceiving the French; but certainly not the CIA, in the
affirmative. Pâques obtained the presidential grace of Georges Pompidou seven years later, in May
1970. Note in passing that Pompidou’s daughter married Soviet and French super-agent André
Guelfi, a man I presented earlier in this book. Pâques died in 1993 in Paris, then aged 79. Thirty-
four years later, in 2004, several Russian television programs presented Pâques posthumously as a
Soviet hero.
Second, in 1963, SDECE’s Chief of Station in Washington Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli reported
spontaneously to the CIA that his hierarchy in Paris asked to him to organize a clandestine
intelligence ring in the United States, with the specific purpose to collecting information about U.S.
military installations and scientific researches. What furthermore troubled Thyraud de Vosjoli is
that, in their details, the objectives he was asked to spy on matched exactly a scheme that Golitsyn
had revealed to his French interrogators months earlier. Additionally, the SDECE had asked to him
to give the names of the sources he had in Cuba.[523] Thyraud de Vosjoli refused to comply, arguing
for it, “If there is one inviolable rule in the intelligence business, it is that one never discloses the
identity of a source. It is a matter of common sense”.[524]
The hierarchy that Thyraud de Vosjoli alluded to actually limited to two senior executives of the
SDECE, who were Colonel Mareuil, in charge of coordinating the SDECE liaison with foreign
intelligence, and Director of the SDECE General Paul Jacquier.[525] Their meeting with Thyraud de
Vosjoli took place at the headquarters of the SDECE in Paris, early in December 1962. Two months
earlier, in October 1962, as Jacquier had been recently appointed head of the SDECE, he had paid a
first protocol visit to U.S. officials in Washington. He did it chiefly to James J. Angleton, with the
aim to investigating by himself the claims of high-level infiltration of the French intelligence
community that Golitsyn had made.
According to British journalist and author Tom Mangold, who investigated the affair from the
United States, Jacquier felt deeply offended that Angleton regarded Colonel Léonard Houneau, the
newly appointed deputy head of the SDECE, as a Soviet mole.[526] Houneau had been a respected
leader of the French Resistance, a veteran intelligence officer since the WWII, and a close friend of
Jacquier. Most of all, he was a close friend to De Gaulle. Houneau, too, had come to Washington to
meet Angleton when he had just been appointed director of all intelligence, counter-intelligence,
and research in the SDECE. However, ulterior and particular events confirmed that Angleton was
right about Houneau, and that a second Soviet mole in the SDECE was Colonel George de
Lanurien, who had been the first to launch the idea of a spy ring in the United States to steal U.S.
defense secrets.
At this point of the affair, it should be said that if Angleton behaved so boldly with French
intelligence representatives, it is because the CIA still gave to the SDECE millions dollars’ worth of
high-end equipment. The latter materials included communication and coding machines the French
military had used in Indochina and were still using at the end of the Algerian War of 1954-1962.
This was part of a deal in which the CIA received intelligence the French collected in a number of
regions of the World, in return. Cuba was one of those regions the CIA was particularly interested in
at that very moment, for the French visits to Washington relating to the interviews of Golitsyn
occurred not long before and during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, precisely.
SDECE’s Chief of Station Thyraud de Vosjoli also led his personal investigation on this
incredible story of Soviet infiltration of his country, and even of his own hierarchy. His conclusions
about it coincided with an unexpected message from Paris, he received on September 16, 1963,
saying that his mission in the United States had to end on October 18, exactly, and not a single day
more. Thyraud de Vosjoli waited for that day, when he sent a letter to the Director of the SDECE in
which he gave his official resignation. He did not embark on his scheduled plane, and he never
returned to France after that. The last lines of the letter deserve to be quoted verbatim in the context
of this chapter:
“Considering that the questioning I was subjected to on Cuba proves that some members of the
service were worried over the efficiency of my work against the Soviets;
“Considering that by demanding to know the identity of my sources, although you have been
informed by American intelligence services of the presence of infiltrated Soviet agents in your
organization, you committed an imprudence which could only serve the agents of a foreign power;
“Considering that your order to collect intelligence on the United States, even at the price of a
rupture of diplomatic relations between the two countries, could only benefit the Soviets;
“Considering that the cancellation of my mission on Cuba, although the results obtained were
outstanding enough to bring the Americans to thank you, was of benefit to the Soviets;
“Considering that the contemptuous criticism of the Penkovsky[527] reports can only serve the
Soviets;
“Considering that the lack of support showed by the service in an inquiry on the French contacts
of Wennerström[528] can only protect Soviet agents;
“Considering that the orders I received were technically unrealizable or could only bring a crisis
beneficial to the Soviets;
“Considering that the vexations I received during the past nine months do not leave any doubt as
to your determination to harass me and to neutralize the representative of French intelligence in
Washington, whose knowledge is considered embarrassing;
“Considering that the reports received from American intelligence on the presence of Communist
infiltration agents inside the service and inside the French Government, have been corroborated by
the Pâques Affair;
“Considering that for all reasons mentioned above, it is impossible for me to cooperate in any
way with the SDECE;
“I have the honor to submit my resignation as of today, October 18th, 1963, reserving all my
rights for future legal action.”
An angry, shaken, and indignant man wrote this letter, clearly. As liaison officer between the CIA
and the SDECE, Thyraud de Vosjoli found himself stuck in a crossfire, testimonies say. Angleton is
said to have suspected him at some point to be a Soviet agent himself, which comes as a little
surprise given the troubled circumstances and what is known of Angleton’s particular character.
Meanwhile, the SDECE had begun to think that the CIA had recruited its chief of station as agent in
place. In reality, both the SDECE and the CIA harassed indeed Thyraud de Vosjoli in the months
preceding his resignation and no one wanted to be seen in his company anymore. Several other
American testimonies introduce Thyraud de Vosjoli as “a weak man” who had been astutely caught
in a counterintelligence operation ran by Angleton. Allegedly, he “was paid by the CIA”[529]
because this agency wanted to know the extent of French espionage against the United States and
that of the Soviet penetration of the French Government. Thyraud de Vosjoli formally became a
French defector to the United States anyway, and it is known that Angleton indeed arranged for his
defection.
After years of hiding his identity, Thyraud de Vosjoli sold a book idea to American author Leon
Uris. The novel was printed in 1967 with the title Topaz, a substitute for “Sapphire,” the KGB
codename of the Soviet spy ring in France that Golitsyn had given. Thereupon, Alfred Hitchcock
made a film of the story with the same title, released in 1969. In 1970, Thyraud de Vosjoli published
his account in English of his intelligence career during the WWII and after, to which he gave the
title Lamia. “Lamia” actually was the codename the SDECE had given to Thyraud de Vosjoli—not
chosen at random, apparently. As one could expect, he added in this book his personal interpretation
of the events he witnessed between 1962 and 1963.[530] I recommend to the reader the reading of
this other book, especially because it is published in English, even though it is available in used
copy only, as it is out of print for a number of years.
For a while, Lamia ranked up to the fifth place in the best-selling books list of The New York
Times, and so the special relationship between France and the Soviet Union was well known in the
United States at that time; but forgotten since, apparently. In 1972, a French translation of Lamia
was released in Canada first, and then in Belgium and France. This time, former SDECE
intelligence executive Colonel George de Lanurien went to justice to sue Thyraud de Vosjoli for
defamation, and demanded a withdrawal of publication of the book. On August 3, 1972, a Paris
court of justice ordered the confiscation in France of the book Lamia, in which Thyraud de Vosjoli
suggested that all French intelligence services and even France’s senior ministries were riddled with
Soviet agents. Indeed, Lamia and the name Thyraud de Vosjoli stay unknown in France, and never
have they been cited in any publication or book in French language on the subject of intelligence.
The revelations of Golitsyn and the existence of Thyraud de Vosjoli were not known publicly
until the last days of April 1968 when Life first published it,[531] with a Magritte-style photo from
the back of French defector Thyraud de Vosjoli in full cover, crowned with the title, “The French
Spy Scandal”. The breaking news, though dated at that time, stirred shock and bewilderment in the
United States, as the reader can easily imagine. In France, however, the French Government opened
the umbrella and the SDECE did a good counterinfluence job, as French people could hardly find
anything about the scandal in any newspaper or magazine. When American journalists pressed with
questions the French diplomatic representation in the United States about Thyraud de Vosjoli, they
were answered that this man was a conspiracy theorist who suffered from delusion of persecution.
Was not he, alone, who pretended that the French Government, loyal ally of the United States,
attempted to spy on in this country at the behest of the KGB?[532]
The date of the public release of the story in Life was certainly not coincidental, I believe. For the
next article in this issue is about the first far-leftist student riots in West Germany, and a similar
event broke out in France less than one week later, on May 2, 1968.Inside the SDECE, Thyraud de
Vosjoli passed for a traitor, and with the zealous hatred propriety commands among French spies he
was childishly nicknamed “Joli Roti de Veau,” a phonetic anagram meaning “pretty roti de veau.”
There was a French-Russian retaliation of a sort following the release of the French translation of
Thyraud de Vosjoli’s book in 1972, and of the film Topaz three years earlier, yet very few people
correctly understood it as such until I reveal it today.
On April 7, 1973, French film director Henri Verneuil released an espionage film titled Le
Serpent (The Snake), re-titled Night Flight from Moscow in its English dubbed version, after a
scenario written by renowned journalist and enlightened historian on intelligence Gilles Perrault.
The first particularity of this film is its cast, comprising leading actors Russian-born American Yul
Brynner, Henri Fonda, and British actor Dirk Bogarde. As taken in the first degree, Le Serpent is a
well-made espionage film that still today remains thrilling, but … Scenarist Gilles Perrault for
decades has had privileged connections with Soviet spies, has a leftist stance, and dislikes
Americans and the United States; all details that come to explain the followings, though partly only.
Under the pretense of entertainment and of a fiction, Le Serpent actually is a seriously
documented piece of disinformation and influence proposing to the public an alternate version of
the true story of Golitsyn. The originality in the intent was that about no one in France could
possibly understand it as such, as the scandal had been censored successfully in this country. It is
clear, therefore, that those who discreetly ordered the making of Le Serpent in emergency had hired
first-class American actors, and invested heavily in it, in the expectation to export and make it a
success in the United States and all English-speaking countries. For the plot pictures Golitsyn,
played by Yul Brynner as “Colonel Vlassov,” as a fake defector whose mission is to lure the CIA
into believing the French and German governments and intelligence services are penetrated by
Soviet moles. The first minutes of Le Serpent feature the delivery at the Élysée Palace, Paris, of the
personal letter from John F. Kennedy to Charles de Gaulle, although the exact names of the two
presidents are unspecified. However, a voiceover specifies the date of the delivery on “December
15,” which indeed is the day Golitsyn defected to the United States, not coincidentally, therefore.
Thyraud de Vosjoli is never alluded to in Le Serpent, but scenarist Perrault introduces the
personage of “Philip Boyle,” a British intelligence officer and a Soviet mole anyone is
knowledgeable about intelligence identifies inescapably as Harold “Kim” Philby because of the
convincing performance and physical resemblance of British actor Dirk Bogarde. Actually, Philip
Boyle is Le Serpent (“the snake”) in the plot; the sole true Soviet mole in the Western intelligence
community according to the film, and the main responsible of the entire deception operation against
the CIA. Henry Fonda plays the role of James J. Angleton—or John A. McCone—under the name
and function “Allan Davies, Director of the CIA,” who supervises personally the debriefing of
Soviet defector Colonel Vlassov. As for the traitor in the French intelligence service, the film
proposes an entirely different version, in which the Director of the DST, played as “Lucien
Berthon” by French actor Philippe Noiret, is accused to be the sole Soviet mole in France and
forced to resign from his position, although he is innocent.
The film concludes on the unmasking of fake defector Colonel Vlassov, who get away with it by
being swapped on the Glienicke Bridge in Germany with U.S. U2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary
Powers, not named though, and on the suggestion that the deception operation of the KGB caused
the dismantlement of the Western intelligence community. Remember in passing that Vlassov was
the name of the last handler of Georges Pâques, with whom he was caught red-handed by the DST
in August 1963, upon counterintelligence information supplied by Thyraud de Vosjoli.
As far as I can see, Le Serpent never gained any popularity in the United States, and so the
attempt of the SDECE, and that of the KGB, therefore, to convince the American public that the
CIA was duped, proved a failure. At least, Le Serpent indeed remains one of the best and most
realistic French espionage films to date, unsurprisingly, given the exceptional care and amount of
money invested in it.
Later in 1986, French journalist and essayist Thierry Wolton published a book, he titled Le KGB
en France (The KGB in France). It is a well-documented account of several affairs of Soviet
espionage in France, and an enduring bestseller since.[533] In it, Wolton wrote a dozen of pages on
the Golitsyn affair, sometimes translating word for word phrases of the article of Life of April 1968,
written in principal by Thyraud de Vosjoli himself. Strikingly, however, neither Wolton cites the
issue and title of this magazine yet he quotes, nor even does he name “Thyraud de Vosjoli” a single
time in the whole book. Additionally, Wolton presents the revelations of Golitsyn as “inconclusive,”
thus taking up the official denial of the French Government in 1968.
Anatoliy Golitsyn died in an unspecified location in the United States in 2008, then aged 82.
Thyraud de Vosjoli seems to have lived for a while in Mexico and in Canada upon his defection, and
then settled at an unknown date for good in Lighthouse Point, Florida.[534] He passed away in 2000,
then aged 80.
Soon after De Gaulle took the power in his country and reformed the French Constitution and the
government in 1958, he had sent a memorandum summing up a French demand to United States
President Dwight D. Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. In it, an
unambiguous request was made to extend NATO’s geographical zone of influence, that NATO’s
integrated system be reformed, and that France be associated with the governing of the Free World.
The Americans and the British agreed reluctantly to tripartite meetings, but the first proved
inconclusive, “essentially because of disagreements on three major points: nuclear weapons, the
integrated system—i.e. the role of the French forces in the Western set-up—, and differing visions
of Europe. Note that Golitsyn had not yet defected at that time.
“While France was determined to acquire nuclear power, the United States, fearful of nuclear
proliferation, attempted to halt procedures by denying help to the French nuclear program. The U.S.
did not take kindly to France’s financial investment in nuclear research, which resulted in France
inability to invest in NATO’s effort in terms of traditional weapons.
“In NATO’s strategy of ever-increasing integration, De Gaulle finds further justification to
accelerate France’s withdrawal. According to him, the integrated military system places France in
an insufferable position of subordination. It deprives France of an efficient and autonomous force;
might possibly lead the nation into conflicts that are not hers; weakens the population’s spirit of
defense and, ultimately, strips high command of its sense of responsibility. De Gaulle intended to
maintain French forces in a reserve role, as opposed to ‘frontline’ defense at the edge of the Iron
Curtain.”[535]
In 1959, the French fleet in the Mediterranean Sea withdrew from the NATO’s integrated
command, and the withdrawal of all naval forces from the North Atlantic followed in 1963, two
years after the revelations of Golitsyn. Finally, in 1966, the French land and air forces in Germany
withdrew from the NATO, too,[536] and in June the same year, France and the Soviet Union signed
officially an important agreement of cooperation. The reaction of U.S. President Johnson to France’s
shift of stance in favor of the Soviet Union certainly frustrated his administration because he said he
had to allow for the possibility of another reversal of situation in French politics. Johnson said,
verbatim, “As our old friend and ally, France’s place awaits her wherever she decides to resume her
leading role”.
On a conversation I have had with Pierre Messmer in 2000, at the Institut des Hautes Études de
Défense Nationale–IHEDN (Institute for Higher Studies in National Defense), Castle of Vincennes,
the former Prime Minister under De Gaulle implicitly confirmed all I just explained. He told me,
verbatim, “Our [tanks] EBR 75 and AMX 30 were [in the 1960s] poorly effective, and it was the
same for our light infantry arms because De Gaulle did not care about all this. His priority was to
invest as much as we could in our force de frappe (strike force), and in the development of the
Mirage [French supersonic jet fighter-bomber] to carry the atomic bomb. We did not have enough
money to pay for everything”.
In effect, still in 1979-1980, when I was in the Army, French military bases in Germany were
poorly equipped and very low on budget until their definitive closures. French troops in Germany
were not at all instructed and indoctrinated on the Soviet threat, although they were there for that
very reason.[537] The internal editing of military classified documentation on the armies of the
Warsaw Pact practically stopped in the 1960s. In the early 1980s, intelligence books such as
Russian-French Military and Technical Vocabulary still were old copies authored by “Headquarter
of the 2d Bureau – Ministry of the Armed Forces,” also printed in the 1960s. No one read it
anymore. The SDECE did not do any espionage activity behind the Iron Curtain, and neither the
Ministry of the Armed Forces (then newly renamed Ministry of Defense) nor the French
Government asked for intelligence on the Soviet Union. I once met an ex-colleague in the DGSE
who told me about his life in the Soviet Union when he was sent there to help the Russians on a
particular technology in electronics. He said the Soviets monitored all his moves nonetheless, and
he and all his colleagues knew that the places where they were quartered were bugged. “Russians
are warm people, but they are distrustful,” he added jokingly.
In 1966, the implementation of the exit of France from integrated NATO was carried out quickly,
and accompanied by a revision of the organization. All U.S. military bases in France were shut
down, yet France remained a NATO member at its highest level. The same year, there was an
ongoing French-British cooperation, as France by then had become eager to maintain relations with
Britain in various areas, even though they had been “bizarre” all along the presidential mandate of
De Gaulle. De Gaulle had vetoed twice the entry of Britain into the European common market for
the following reasons that the public did not know.
On January 14, 1963, De Gaulle held a press conference during which he opposed the United
Kingdom’s application for membership, arguing on an incompatibility between continental Europe
and the British economic interests. He demanded that Britain accepts all the conditions of the six
members of the European common market, and abandons her commitments to the countries
included in her free trade area; that is to say, the United States, especially. I am sorry for the French
to say that by asking this, De Gaulle acted implicitly and indisputably as a Soviet agent himself.
On January 28, the French Government imposed on its five European partners—shocked by the
unilateral veto—an adjournment of accession negotiations with Britain. De Gaulle dreaded the new
candidacy of Britain would jeopardize the Common Agricultural Policy–CAP, and would have the
effect to transforming the European Economic Community–EEC into a vast free-trade area.
Especially, he saw in Britain a Trojan horse of the United States, whereas the idea that France would
be the Trojan horse of the Soviet Union in the European Union did not bother him in the least.
According to De Gaulle, the British membership would have distorted the European Europe in an
“Atlantic Europe”. He was in favor of deepening and accelerating the Common Market rather than
enlarging it, and he questioned the “European spirit” of Britain.
De Gaulle’s attitude was also explained by reasons that did not only concern the interests of the
EEC. To the anti-English resentment that he had been harboring since his exile in London during the
WWII, came to add his fear of an Anglo-American agreement on nuclear questions. Earlier in
October 1962, the supply of American Polaris rockets to the British had been a serious blow to the
“Franco-British harmony,” whereas de Gaulle was getting ever closer to Germany.
In late May 1966, as France was disengaging from NATO, De Gaulle went to Moscow
accompanied by Minister of Foreign Affairs Maurice Couve de Murville to sign an important
alliance treaty with the Soviets. Below, I translate verbatim some points of the “French-Soviet Joint
Declaration of June 30, 1966,” which I selected due their relevancy with European affairs, the
Vietnam War, and the sharing of technology and scientific research including high physics and
atomic energy.
“European problems drew first and foremost the attention of De Gaulle and of the Soviet
statesmen. Those problems obviously are of paramount importance to France and to the Soviet
Union since it is from their solving that the establishment in the whole continent of a normal
situation depends on, and, consequently, of a real and stable peace. To them, the concerns are above
all about the European security and the German question, on which the two parties exchanged their
views.
“Both governments agree that Europe’s problems must be considered in a European framework,
first. They believe that the States of the continent must devote their efforts to the creation of
conditions necessary for the agreements to be concluded, and to the establishment of a climate of
detente between all the countries in particular, in the East as in the West. Such climate would
actually encourage closer relations between the latter, and the examination and settlement of the
problems that arise, consequently.
“To France and to the Soviet Union alike, the first objective is, in this spirit, the normalization,
and then the gradual development of the relations between all European countries in the respect of
the independence of each, and of non-intervention in their domestic affairs. This action must resume
in all areas, be they economic, cultural, technological, and political, of course.
“It was noted with satisfaction on both sides that significant progresses have been made already
towards the normalization of the situation in Europe. The latter effort must be pursued with the
intention to paving the way for fruitful cooperation over Europe from all parties.
“France and the Soviet Union have agreed that their own cooperation can constitute a decisive
contribution to the latter endeavors. The two countries note with satisfaction that, in recent years,
important progresses have been made, which are the results of De Gaulle’s trip to Moscow and the
talks he had on this occasion with the Soviet leaders. They are determined to continue in this
direction, striving to rally gradually in their efforts all European countries.
“The situation in Southeast Asia has been examined. The situation in the Indochinese
Peninsula was found to be increasingly worrying, due to the worsening of the war in Vietnam that is
multiplying suffering and chaos in this country, and is dragging the neighboring states Cambodia
and Laos into precariousness. The French Government and the Soviet Government continue to
believe that the only possible solution to such a situation, which poses a threat to the cause of peace,
is a settlement based on the 1945 Geneva Agreements excluding any foreign intervention in
Vietnam. In this spirit, they agree to continue exchanging their information and to confront their
views.
* * * * * *
“As for the French-Soviet scientific relations, it was found that contacts between French and
Soviet scientists and researchers have become numerous and fruitful [sic]. Their development for
the mutual benefit of the two countries will be encouraged. The conversations have shown the good
results already obtained in the framework of the cooperation between France and the USSR for the
pacific use of atomic energy. Plans were made on both sides to broaden the latter basis to joint work
in high-energy physics in particular.
“Foreign ministers signed a cooperation agreement for the study and exploration of outer space
for peaceful purposes, as well as an agreement on scientific, technical, and economic cooperation.
The French Government and the Soviet Government attach great importance to these two
agreements, which will increase trade and develop cooperation between the two countries in science
and technology, particularly in the most advanced fields.
“It was decided on both sides to conclude a consular convention between France and the Soviet
Union and to exchange negotiations for that purpose very soon.
“In view to strengthening mutual confidence and broadening the areas of agreement and
cooperation between France and the USSR, the two governments have decided to resume
consultations among themselves on a regular basis.
“Those consultations will focus on European problems and other international problems of
common interest. The two governments will endeavor to concert their efforts in the interests of
peace and security in Europe and in the World. Additionally, the consultations will relate to bilateral
relations, taking into account the will of the two parties to develop friendly relations and further
cooperation between France and the USSR.
“In order to reinforce mutual contact at the highest level, France and the Soviet Union have
decided to establish a direct line of communication between the Kremlin and the Élysée, which can
be used for exchanges of views and the sending of messages whenever it appears necessary.
“De Gaulle invited to visit France the official Soviet leaders with whom he had talks, Mr. L. I.
Brejnev, Mr. A. N. Kossyguine, and Mr. N. V. Podgorny. The latter gratefully accepted the invitation
on behalf of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the Soviet Government.
“The visit of De Gaulle to the USSR and the talks to which it gave rise constitute a vital
contribution to the development of the understanding between France and the Soviet Union, and
between the French people and the Soviet people. Thus way, the joint efforts will contribute to a
renewed feeling of confidence in the traditional role of Europe as bedrock of civilization, and in
common interests in the progress of peace throughout the World.
“The President of The President of
the French Republic. the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet of the
USSR.”[538]
The reader, insightful enough to see in the excerpts above the suave hypocrisy of the Soviet
Union and the willful blindness of submissive De Gaulle, just discovered how is redacted a
capitulation treaty between a country and a more powerful other that rules it unofficially, and what
realpolitik is, exactly. This, therefore, tells us that De Gaulle did not cooperate with the Soviets, but
surrendered. Thereof, the remaining question, “Surrendered under which threat?” I do not have the
exact answer to the question beyond the facts I present in this chapter, which together suggest that
the French Government at some point was overwhelmed by a Soviet infiltration analogous to the
terminal stage of a cancer. I know that the CIA, conscious that France could not possibly evolve
toward a country such as Germany and Japan, attempted for years to limit her evolution to a soft
form of socialism capable to resist against Soviet hard communism; in vain, as we just saw. The
French people cannot help itself with always returning to the old system of Catholic spirited
serfdom that shaped its collective mindset along centuries, evidenced by the establishment of two
imperialist systems of governance that followed two popular revolutions. The myth of the fierce
Gallic resistance to authority actually is a call for despotism, whatever the narrative can be. From
within, I witnessed the obsessive-compulsive pattern countless times.
Beyond the form, the reader may notice that the substance of the “alliance treaty” is insisting on
four main points. These are the highly influential role of France in the building of a European Union
of which the Soviet Union was visibly expecting something; a scientific and technologic
cooperation; the War in Vietnam; and the U.S. presence in the Indochinese Peninsula. Were not
clearly mentioned in it a however real and consistent “cooperation” in the fields of aeronautics and
space, which justified the sending of countless French scientists and engineers to work in the Soviet
Union for decades. Its latest actuality is the settling of a rocket launch pad in Kourou, French
Guyana, to be soon presented with relevant specifics.
Remarkably, earlier in November 1959, in Strasbourg, De Gaulle had given a speech in which the
following short sentence struck many. “Yes, it is Europe, from the Atlantic to Ural; it is Europe, the
whole Europe that will decide the fate of the World!”[539]From that speech on, De Gaulle often
repeated the phrase, thus making it a motto among the French ruling elite since then. At the height
of the Cold War, it obviously called the bipolarity of the World and its order into question. It
worried even the Soviets themselves, who never wanted, to date, that their influence over France be
officially acknowledged and clearly known to the public. For as long as France would pose as a
democratic and independent Western country, she could negotiate and obtain for the Soviets and
their official satellite countries of the Warsaw Pact everything was otherwise denied to them. If
France were officially recognized as a Soviet ruled country, then her word and negotiating
capacities on the international stage would have no more value than these of Romania or Poland.
On September 29, 1967, the Commission of the European Community published its opinion on
the application for membership of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark, and Norway, in which it
proposed to open at once accession’s negotiations with them. Despite this opinion, France’s partners
that favored a first enlargement of the European Community–EC continued to face the opposition of
De Gaulle. The French President advanced “economic difficulties facing the United Kingdom,” and
demanded “a solution to major problems be found before their joining to the Community”. Contrary
to the five countries of the EC that had aligned already, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands,
and Luxembourg, the French Government still disputed that the entry of the United Kingdom into
the European Common Market, even on condition of accepting the terms of the treaties, could
change fundamentally the nature of the Community and make it evolve towards a large free-trade
area. Apart from the economic arguments put forward to block the United Kingdom’s accession, De
Gaulle’s concerns were of a different nature.
Contrary to the commitments the U.K. made in the economic field, British Prime Minister Harold
Wilson did not rally to French conceptions of foreign and defense policies. He continued to
advocate the need for the engagement of the United States in the defense of Europe, and he rejected
the creation of a European nuclear force. De Gaulle dreaded that in an enlarged European
Community, not only France was likely to find it more difficult to defend its economic interests, but
also to lose her leadership in favor of a more Atlantic-leaning orientation with the joining of new
members. This concern, the reader notices, echoes indeed the terms of the treaty France had signed
with the Soviet Union the year before.
Five years earlier, on November 1962, the French and the British governments had signed a treaty
committing themselves irrevocably to financing and building together the Western World’s first
commercial supersonic airliner, eventually christened Concorde; a name conveying wishful
thinking. However, an espionage affair that had allowed the Soviet Union to build the Tupolev Tu-
144, exact replica of the Concorde, eventually became a scandal that stained the relation. The Tu-
144 even made its first flight on December 31, 1968, a few months before the Concorde did. The
affair of Soviet technological espionage actually was an excuse covering the reality of a continuous
sending of French technology in aeronautics to the Soviet Union, but De Gaulle’s willful blindness
did not work well with the United Kingdom. However, in spite of all the difficulties and intricacies,
Britain joined the European Economic Community–EEC on January 1st, 1973.
Did De Gaulle indeed realize that his signing of the French-Soviet agreement of 1966 had
reduced his position to that of pawn of the Soviet Union? It seems that not because of the general
strike of 1968 in France that actually was a Soviet coup. Today, no historian disputes that in the
morning of May 29, 1968, in the height of the general strikes that had stopped the economy in
France, De Gaulle’s mysterious and short getaway from France in a helicopter and alleged return
from Germany resulted in an eerie change in this country. On May 28, the day before, François
Mitterrand then head of the Federation of Democratic and Socialist Left had stated, “There is no
more State,” and he had declared he was ready “to form a new government”. On May 30, the next
day of De Gaulle return in France, not only the civil unrest ended suddenly and mysteriously, but
also a huge crowd of his supporters shown up from nowhere to march throughout the Champs
Élysées and to acclaim him. The crisis of May 1968 in France ended magically on this oddity. In
2005, I could not but be struck by the obvious passing reference the scenarist of the controversial
Norwegian TV series Occupied introduced in its first episode. In this fiction the head of the
Norwegian state is abducted for a short while by Russians in a helicopter, and agrees to submit his
country to the unofficial rule of Russia. De Gaulle’s helicopter trip lasted six hours, and no one ever
knew what he did during that short time that could stop overnight the strikes of May 1968 in France.
He resigned one year later, on April 29, 1969, since his presence no longer was needed, and he died
thereafter on November 9, 1970, then aged 80.
Resorting to massive communist-led strikes to incline a French president towards implicit
obedience was no novelty in May 1968. It succeeded for the first time in June 1936, and brought
socialist politician and liberal freemason of the GOdF Léon Blum to the position of Prime Minister
of France, following the alliance of June 1934 between the Communist Party and Socialist Party–
SFIO that put an end to the Schism between socialists and communist hardliners, immediately
followed the next year 1935 by an alliance treaty between France and the Soviet Union. Actually,
the Soviet Union took the power in France much earlier, but it had to relinquish the trophy to the
Germans who took it militarily four years later. Nonetheless, the reader notices the recurrent Soviet
pattern in the two takeovers of 1935-1936 and 1966-1968: first, infiltrating and corrupting discreetly
the government of the country to be conquered; second, organizing a popular revolution one or two
years later to enforce officially the communist reforms and to start indoctrinating the ignorant
masses.
I guess I am the first to explain the method of the labor union strikes in France. I heard about it
very early and through circumstances that by then I believed accidental because one of my remote
relatives explained its specifics to me. In the 1960s, this man who became father in law of my
brother partook regularly in the shadowy side of those strikes, acting as courier between the Union
des Industries et Métiers de la Métallurgie–UIMM (Union of Metallurgical Industries) and several
labor unions including the far-leftist and mighty CGT, of course. His quick missions, he said,
limited to repeat short messages between the concerned parties and to deliver large amounts of cash
he simply carried in suitcases. This happened from the 1950s onward, when his actual position was
chartered accountant at the UIMM, a rather low-ranking job; yet he was not a rabkor, I believe. I
could hardly doubt his astounding confession was true when, in the 1990s, a colleague in the DGSE
told me another story, similar in all respects. Moreover, I witnessed facts confirming once and for all
that the two had not been kidding me.
For long, the DGSE has numerous contacts in all labor unions,[540] and this agency is even
exerting a determining influence on the appointments and elections of their leaders.[541] This other
fact not only is unsurprising but also logical while considering other particulars about the circulation
of elite and the system of dossier secrets in France, I explained earlier. The thing was, and is still
today, very possibly, that each time a newly elected president goes a little too far trying his power he
believes supreme, soon he must face concerning domestic troubles; large and crippling labor union
strikes come first. Then, if the cocky President has not yet been witty enough to figure the
connection between his “recklessness” and the organized unrest because the two seem completely
unrelated, the swell of the strikes and their spread to other labor-unionized corporations are planned.
Thus, the President is invited “to clear his mind and to rather focus on his daily presidential
obligations and official representations”. In other words, he must “understand” he has not been
elected to reform everything does not fit his views on how the country ought to work. In passing,
the reader knowledgeable in intelligence notices certainly the apparent irrelevancy between the
cause and the effect, recurrent in spycraft for eluding any accusation of conspiracy.
The President must act and behave as the supreme authority of the State at home as abroad, and
not really of the Nation beyond what he must say to the people on the occasions of his speeches on
television. He is supposed to follow the instructions and recommendations of his advisors because
as the human being he still is, he cannot possibly master all matters relevant to the ongoing affairs
of the country. The State has a policy and an agenda that were defined long before he was elected,
and a handful of people no one ever heard about actually shortlisted him as a presidential candidate
according to his qualities for fulfilling the position, along a process of which he knows little
himself. The President, too, had a dossier secret before he was elected, and his position does not
grant him any access to it. One day, he will no longer be the President, whereas officials who are
under his authority will still hold their positions and will continue to provide recommendations to
his successors. Then and now, senior servants indeed remind this reality with suave defiance to
ministers, I was once told.
What I just explained does not mean all labor-union strikes in France would be nothing but
regular applications of the secret rule because the ever-worsening social and economic situation in
France is also increasingly accountable for true expressions of sincere discontent. The other cause of
the strikes is the crucial need for the labor unions to protect the legal provision on the rights of labor
unions and workers, written in the brick-sized French Code du Travail (Labor Code). For this is
from this book that labor unions derive their might challenging both the private economy and the
government itself.
Perhaps, the reader who keeps track of news on France noticed with understandable perplexity
that police officers who give speeches to the media on criminal cases in progress are union
representatives in the concerned local police, as if it were all logical and understood to everyone,
whereas, the public in other countries expects to hear and to see police chiefs. Come to add to the
surprise, probably, that police unions are represented and active in the DGSI, and that there were
shop stewards in the services of the DGSE until I left this agency. The logic in these two cases
simply is that since the police officers of the DGSI are civilians, and that the DGSE hires civilians,
then these agencies have the obligation by law to have shop stewards representing a labor union.
The labor union that was active in the DGSE in my time was Solidaires Unitaires Démocratiques–
SUD, which actually is a French group of trade unions. SUD is ordinarily known to favor
progressive or even radical views, and to work with the alter-globalization or anti-globalization
movement. This fact causes the frequent and understandable annoyance of the Security Service in
the COMINT service of this agency between 2000 and 2001. The shop steward in a DGSE service
enjoys a particular status granting him, for example, to stay working for hours in his office past the
time at which all other employees left. The French intelligence agencies do not escape the Labor
Code stating that there must be a shop steward in all private and public company with more than 50
employees.
 In the light of my explanations above, the reader understands that labor unions in France make up
for one among the most potent means of influence in domestic policy, enough for impeding
presidential decision-making. The CGT, which for decades has been the leading and most influential
labor union in France, has always been directed and funded by the Soviet Union.
I make an aside at this point to say that, unlike in May 1968, the Yellow vest movement of 2018-
2019 clearly did not enjoy the support of labor unions and was authentically spontaneous and
sincere. The claims of the Yellow vests were about the same as those of the French labor union, yet
the public was befuddled, understandably, when it saw that no labor union rallied or even just
supported those independent protesters. This fact is one out of a number of causes explaining why
the Yellow vest movement faded without yielding anything to those who rallied it. The others
causes actually were measures of the intelligence community to stifle the weekly protest
movements, which I present and explain, below, because they are relevant to the general subject of
this book, and even of this chapter at some point.
1. Spoiling the movement during its rallies by using snitches and violent agent provocateurs,
exactly as Napoléon III did with his blouses blanches (white jackets), today called “black
blocks,” run / manipulated by Russia, and posing as anarchists and exponents of the far-left.
2. Sowing confusion within the movement by instilling doubt and mutual distrust among those
who join it, and using the measures of the following points for this.
3. Spotting would-be-leaders / heroes in the movement, and discrediting them with various
sorts of provocations and accusations of collusion with the police.
4. Doing the reverse of the point 3. simultaneously, by giving media coverage to agent
provocateurs posing as would-be-leaders and heroes of the movement; and, in selected
instances, by proving deliberately that they actually are agent provocateurs, in order to make
impossible all attempts to either prove or disprove that the would-be-leaders of the point 3. are
not agent provocateurs actually. The purpose of this measure is to sow further doubt, distrust,
and a climate of mutual suspicion within the movement in order to destroy it from within.
5. Media-censoring true would-be-leaders and heroes in the movement to make them disappear
from public view, and thus preventing them from accessing notoriety and fame.
6. Demonizing the movement on the Internet by associating it with conspiracies launched by
would-be-Christian fundamentalists, anti-Semites and racists, fronts of the Israeli intelligence
service, “the Americans,” or even “the Russians”.
7. Limiting the media coverage of the speakers of the movement, or agents posing as such, to
the Russian TV channel Russia Today–RT in order to support the theory of the last option
explained in the point 6.
8. Sending fake good Samaritans to the movement posing as “its security service,” identifying
themselves openly as “experienced ex-Russian mercenaries,” in order to further demonize by
association the protesters.
9. Instructing the media to be insisting in their coverage on all the measures above in order a.
to justifying to the public the violence of the anti-riot police forces, and b. to deterring the
public from standing by the cause of the movement.
We notice that Russian TV channels having activities in France indeed gave large coverage to the
Yellow vest movement while the French media under-reported, biased, or even censored news
relating to their claims and actions.The intricacies of this very particular tactic owe to the fact that
the Russians are conscious of the negative perception that the French public still have of them today.
Indeed, the Russians in France play regularly a cunning double game consisting in passing as “the
bad guys” in the country, in order to restore the now flimsy image of the French Government that
thus may pose as “the good guys, after all”. We will see in the chapter 27 that the tactic reproduces
the more often in the other context of fake counterespionage operations ruled by active measures,
aiming to prevent the happening of substantiated denunciations of the special relationship France
has with Russia. This actually is the old trick of the two police officers playing “the kind cop and
the nasty cop” during interrogations, here applied to politics.
Overall, the tactics that have been used to stifle the Yellow Vest movement in 2019 together are a
sophisticated demonization acting simultaneously on several fronts, mixed with aggressive
counterinsurgency for long mastered by a branch of the police little known to the public, named,
Sous-Direction de l’Ordre Public de l’Agglomération Parisienne (Sub-Directorate of Public Order
of the Paris Agglomeration). This body of the civilian police is acting under the direct authority of
the Direction de l’Ordre Public et de la Circulation–DOPC (Directorate of the Public Order and
Traffic). France has an expertise in counterinsurgency that for long is acknowledged worldwide,
which even the People’s Republic of China proved unable to equal in her attempt to stymie the
Umbrella protest movement in Hong Kong in 2019.
In the aftermath of the first oil crisis of 1973, there was an intensive hunt in France for American
and British agents that lasted until 1981, jointly led by an informal coalition that reunited the
SDECE, the GOdF, the underground network of the Rabkors, and the Ministry for the Economy and
Finance. As my brother was directly concerned by counterintelligence activities, this makes me able
to present some of its specifics.
Everywhere in France, the lodges of the GOdF played a major role in the large-scale operation,
which took the forms of countless missions, most of the time with no real certainty that the targets
indeed were contacts or sources of the British and American intelligence communities. It was good
enough that the owner of a SME had a fancy for American cars to be seen as a “likely agent of the
CIA”. This fact comes to explain in passing why agents working in counterintelligence in France
sometimes have American cars themselves; the goal of it being to deceive French who are thus
targeted or just to spot American sympathizers. When the target headed a SME, a cell of economic
intelligence of the Ministry for the Economy and Finance simply instructed an informant working in
it to collect specific types of information, according to the possibilities his position in it granted him
with. Sometimes, the informant was a liberal Freemason or a Rabkor; in some others, he had an
acquaintance in the business who generally had membership in the CGT labor union, in the
communist party PCF, or both. As those missions always were to shut down those SMEs, either
through their bankruptcies or because of fraud to the internal revenue service, the best-valued agents
in place held positions of accountants and executive secretaries. I remember of one of them who
was only the delivery driver of the company, but who proved a serviceable asset on the long run.
For he was instructed to recording the exact quantities of all raw materials his company purchased,
and the number of all finished products it sold. Then the data were compared with those that the
Ministry for the Economy and Finance had received from the local bureau of the internal revenue
service, as the goal was to spot discrepancies significant enough to prove the existence unreported
incomes. The head of the cell of the Ministry for the Economy and Finance was a man named
Marin, himself a dogged committed communist with membership in the GOdF. Marin was always
available on the phone, even late at night.
The main leads of the SDECE to hunt French people suspected to be British or American contacts
was hidden money, and the assumption that some of them were about to flee to the United States or
to Switzerland. For the agency assumed, they knew that the Socialists and the Communists would
win at the next presidential election of May 1981. Of course, if those suspects planned to flee
France, they could hardly do this with luggage filled with wads of French banknotes or gold bars
because the French banking system has always been under tight control since Napoléon III created a
number of private and leading banks in the country in the second half of the 19th century, still in
existence today under their old names or new ones for most.
Therefore, the SDECE also believed that those privileged French citizens had to convert their
assets in diamonds, simply because it was the best way to conceal important amounts of money
when crossing a customs checkpoint. To be accurate in my explanation, the latter trick was not
expected to materialize just because it seemed “logical, and highly likely, therefore”. Actually, the
idea of the SDECE or of the Soviets, I could not say, clever anyway, was to suggest astutely to those
French rightist bourgeois to convert their hidden money into precious stones. I explain the specifics
of the latter scheme, as I knew them firsthand.
First, the SDECE created two companies of a very particular kind; named Union des
Diamantaires (Diamond-Merchants Union) and Les Diamantaires d’Anvers (The Diamond
Merchants of Antwerp). Claude Barry, an intelligence officer of the SDECE then on his early 50s,
who earlier had had a consistent experience in intelligence affairs in Black African countries,
headed the second from Place Vendôme, Paris. Barry had begun his career in the Air Commandos, a
special unit of the Air Force that yet belongs to the COS today, for the record. As I knew Barry
personally, I am able to specify he was a passionate arms collector who owned an amazing
collection without equivalent in any museum to my knowledge, whose theme was pistols firing
metallic cartridges from the earliest models in the late 19th century to the 1930s.[542] He had
married a woman of Swedish origin and lived at that time in Saint Germain-en-Laye, near Paris.
 The claimed activity of both front companies was to sell diamonds as a financial investment and,
most importantly, without registering the names of the buyers, so that the latter could evade the
scrutiny of the French tax administration. Meanwhile, some journalists wrote that the Parliament
was working on a project of law obliging precious stones sellers to report the names of their
customers to the internal revenue service; this was true, but it also was an additional contrivance
meant to come as an encouragement to invest in precious stones forthwith. Therefrom, the two
companies regularly published ads in two French financial magazines and in a financial newspaper
known to have a right-leaning and affluent readership.[543] Obviously, the salesmen of Union des
Diamantaires and of Les Diamantaires d’Anvers were all agents of the SDECE and had membership
in the GOdF additionally. Their job was to meet their customers at their dwelling places upon their
telephone calls to the numbers printed on the ads. Thus, it was possible to know how much money
each of the latter had hidden and wanted to convert into precious stones. All along, the customers
could not possibly believe that the diamonds salesmen they met actually were agents of the SDECE
who transmitted all information they could collect on them to the Ministry for the Economy and
Finance. As the grand operation proved a complete success, it was decided in the meantime that it
would no longer limit to framing British and American contacts and agents. Newly, the mission
extended to identifying all wealthy French who would be tempted to flee France or simply to hide
their money before the Left would take the power in May 1981. In a number of instances, the
evidences of hidden money and tax dodging that the salesmen agents thus collected and recorded
transformed into threats serving the recruitments of double agents against the United Kingdom and
the United States. As for the other customers who would be of no interest in a similar respect, they
would simply be turned in to the internal revenue service and heavily fined.
Indeed, the SDECE and the Soviets even tricked then acting President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing
himself with about the same scheme. In 1973, when he was Minister of Finance, infamous Emperor
of the Central African Empire and dictator Bokassa I offered two small diamonds to Giscard
d’Estaing. The SDECE and the Soviets knew it, and decided to leak it to the agency’s good partner
Le Canard Enchaîné, the satiric newspaper I largely presented in an earlier chapter, when it was
timely in October 1979, on the eve of the presidential campaign. Thereupon, Le Monde newspaper
hyped enough the news to make it a national scandal, although the value of the diamonds was small,
which further contributed to Giscard d’Estaing losing his 1981 reelection bid against Mitterrand.
I know that people who bought precious stones to the Union des Diamantaires and to Les
Diamantaires d’Anvers were numerous, yet I never knew if the operation was a success in
counterespionage and recruitment in particular. Eventually, in the early 1980s, upon the SDECE
changing its name for DGSE, I learned that several of the salesmen agents had been into serious
trouble with justice because they had largely indulged in the opportunities their missions offered
them. Indeed, they had scammed many of their customers. Their mistake, however, was they had
wrongly assumed that since the money of their customers had not been reported to the internal
revenue service, then the latter could hardly sue them for fraud. Additionally, at least two of those
agents, whom I can name as Abegg and Daprey, had found the idea to sell their own diamonds and
other precious stones instead of those of the two front companies they worked for. For this, Abegg
made regular trips to Thailand, where he bought precious stones and swallowed them to pass the
Thai and the French customs checkpoints at the airports. At some point, he even provided other
agents with their own stones, too. That is how Abegg and his personal network of salesmen became
rich within a couple of years, free of income tax. The first problems had surged in the form of
lawsuits filed by people who indeed had paid their taxes on the money they had invested in precious
stones. A series of local scandals ensued, and some DGSE agents and masons of the GOdF had to
serve prison terms for real.
Daprey, ex-military in an elite unit and 4th degree Secret Master in the GOdF, alone was reported
by the media to have thus defrauded people for 60 million francs or $10.2 million at the time of his
arrest. Anecdotally, as Daprey found himself penniless and even homeless upon his release from
prison, he defrauded his own son by asking to him to guaranteeing a loan from a bank for an amount
of 600,000 francs ($102,000). Thereupon, the latter had to reimburse the integrality of the amount as
his father had disappeared with the money. Abegg, mason in the same grand lodge with the 30th
degree of Knight Kadosh managed to escape the justice. Another of those agents, former free-
fighter during the WWII and Worshipful Master of the lodge of the GOdF of Auxerre at that time,
had even paid for his retraining in Antwerp, Belgium, as precious stone expert. In passing, the
parallel business of diamond trafficking had been reported to the Security Service of the SDECE
very early, yet it closed its eyes for a while about it for some reasons I am unable to explain. No
journalist ever reported the involvements of the SDECE, the GOdF, and the Ministry for the
Economy and Finance in those affairs, of course. Later, I learned that most French who fled France
actually did it after Mitterrand and the Socialist Party took the power and all along the 1980s, not
before.
Overall, the activities of the SDECE and the GOdF against the United States and Britain on the
French soil were so intense and aggressive that several French nationals were assassinated,
including a non-commissioned officer of the Prefecture de Police de Paris (Paris Police
headquarters) with whom my brother was in close touch circa 1976. Some of the deceased,
including the latter, were members of the regular masonic grand lodge GLNF, but also of the GOdF.
In the late 1970s, numerous passionate conversations I heard between Freemasons who worked with
the SDECE, let alone those who held official positions in the police at that time, allow me today to
say that when Francois Mitterrand and the French Socialist Party, backed by the French Communist
Party, came to power, they were helped in their success by the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of
the Interior, the Ministry for the Economy and Finance, the GOdF, and by the Rabkors who were
still active at that time.
In 1921, a group of wealthy Russian immigrants founded a bank in Paris, which they named
Banque Commerciale pour l’Europe du Nord (Commercial Bank for Northern Europe). Four years
later in 1925, the bank was sold out to Soviet interests and its name shortened into BCEN, with the
name Eurobank added to make it BCEN-Eurobank. BCEN-Eurobank major shareholder was
Gosbank, the state bank of the Soviet Union. BCEN-Eurobank created a network of agencies in
other European countries, and its charters stated that its purport was to facilitate and to develop
Soviet trade with Western countries. After the WWII, the general policies of BCEN-Eurobank
agencies in Western countries remained under the direction of the Soviet authorities through
Gosbank. From 1961, as BCEN-Eurobank had agencies in the leading European financial centers, it
became an active participant in both foreign exchange and Eurocurrency markets. At the end of
1967, in France, BCEN-Eurobank’s assets were $774 million. The French Communist Party PCF
had 219 banking accounts in BCEN-Eurobank, and communist labor union CGT had 200. That is
how Soviet money financed the PCF, CGT, L’Humanité newspaper, and intelligence activities in
France, very simply and openly.
Soviet citizens generally occupied the top key posts in Western based BCEN-Eurobank agencies.
However, things were different in France, where BCEN-Eurobank staffed largely with French
nationals hired for their banking expertise rather than their ideological commitments, before they
were tricked in some way and turned agents. For long, former French Representative Guy de
Boysson was head of BCEN-Eurobank in Paris, until French national Gilles Peillon took over the
position and held it for years, too. Eventually, Peillon became head of French-Algerian bank Union
Méditerranéenne de Banque, and Peillon’s son Vincent Peillon was appointed Minister for
Education from 2012 to 2014. Since the latter year, Peillon Jr. is a Member of the European
Parliament for Northwestern France, allied with the Socialist Party and the Party of European
Socialists, and member of the E.U. Committee on Foreign Affairs. On October 2006, BCEN-
Eurobank in Paris became VTB Bank France SA whose headquarters are in Moscow as ПАО ВТБ
Банк (PAO VTB Bank), traded as MCX: VTBR and LSE: VTBR. VTB Bank currently has agencies
in CIS, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the United States.
The Soviet Union also used Wozchod Handelsbank A.G. in Zurich, and Moscow Narodny Bank–
MNB in London. The total assets of the Soviet-owned banks in Europe exceeded $1.6 billion at the
end of 1968, amount to be compared with about $220 million a decade earlier. The successful
development of these banks, including BCEN-Eurobank in Paris, enhanced the capacities of the
Soviets to gather commercial / financial intelligence for entering the foreign exchange and
Eurocurrency markets, tapping outside sources of funds, and maintaining a degree of secrecy in its
convertible currency dealings. In addition to Gosbank, Vneshtorgbank, and Foreign Trade Bank of
the Soviet Union co-owned these Soviet banks. Remarkably, MNB and BCEN-Eurobank were
among the first European banks to become involved in Eurodollar transactions in the early 1950’s.
Beyond their normal banking duties, the Soviet-owned banks in the West acted as fronts for the
Soviet Union, and occasionally in other communist countries for sales of gold in the Western region.
There were other banks that were not necessarily Russian, but which had been used for the
financing of business activities used as fronts. It is difficult however to determine the extent to
which those banks were aware of their complicity with the Soviet Union, and with Russia
eventually. I can name six of them: Crédit Lyonnais (French) since the 1970s at least, Banque
Populaire (French) all along the 1980s at least, Paribas (French) since the 1980s at least, Crédit
Industriel et Commercial–CIC (French) in the 1990s at least, Caixa (Spanish) in the 1990s at least,
and Credit du Nord (French) in the 1990s and 2000s at least.
I voluntary enlisted in the SDECE in the early months of 1980 while entering my twenties and
one year before the Socialists took over, yet a little knowledgeable in intelligence activities already.
The circumstances of this experience, unforgettable obviously, provide me with anecdotes relevant
to this chapter. In the France of that year, still nothing could suggest to the French public the
realities I am telling. The French population was largely ignorant of what was happening between
France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. A few years earlier, by an evening of December
1977, I seem to recollect, I had been influenced in my will to work in intelligence while watching
on television the long interview of a freshly retired counterespionage officer of the DST. This man
was telling mesmerizing recollections of his career as Soviet spy hunter. I bought the book this man
just wrote, as I wanted to know more,[544] and I did not find in it anything that could support the
idea that the SDECE worked hand in hand with the KGB at that time. I was seventeen, still naïve,
and ignorant even of the word “realpolitik”. Nonetheless, how all those who were much older than
me could question the honesty of a person as respectable as a police officer of the DST, and the
objectivity of the publicly owned national TV channel?[545] The broadcast account on Soviet spy
hunting clashed only with the activities in counterespionage of my elder brother against British and
American intelligence activities, of which I knew a little, already. I could not possibly understand
the cause of the odd and striking discrepancy, as my brother would not tell me because such matters
were secret. All I could understand was the sincere aggressiveness he displayed in his quixotic fight
against French people suspected to have relations with British spies by then he called “les Anglais,”
and with American spies he alternatively and pejoratively called “les Amerlocs” or “les Ricains,”
hardly translatable in English, but meaning, somehow, “the Yankees”.
Everywhere and all the time in these late 1970s, the French media hammered that the KGB and
Communism together was the enemy. There was much media hype on France’s own nuclear strike
force, costly submarines, and an airship carrier, if ever the Soviets attempted to invade Europe. The
history of French espionage includes testimonies of French intelligence activities against the Soviet
Union, said to have lasted until the end of the Cold War. It was even question of a “French Military
Liaison Mission near the Soviet High Command in Potsdam” concerned with French espionage
activities behind the Iron Curtain. I confess I know nothing about the latter, beyond an obscure and
old affair of a possible Soviet mole in the French intelligence community, which resulted in the
suicide of a French intelligence officer in Poland or in Czechoslovakia, consequential to an
entrapment set to designate him as the culprit.
The reality that justified the formidable enterprise of deception was the secret special relationship
between France and the Soviet Union, known to the CIA, but not to the French public, with the
passive and sorry complicity of the British and American intelligence communities. For there was a
tacit and eerie agreement of a sort between the East and the West about the so particular case of
France; the NATO did not have to intervene, since the Soviet Union had not invaded France
militarily and France did not ask for help either. American politicians and the mainstream media
never uttered a single word about the thorny situation, except once in an issue of Life in 1950, and
once in April 1968 in the same magazine, as we have seen earlier. At least, Pierre Marion, in his
personal testimony, denies explicitly the existence of any French intelligence activities against the
Soviet Union as in 1981, when he was appointed Director of the DGSE on that year. Moreover, the
way Marion talks about this situation clearly indicates that it had lasted all along the directorship of
his predecessor Alexandre de Marenches, from 1970 to 1981. To date, no one ever said that Marion
lied or was delusional after he wrote the truth black on white, and his book was never made out of
print,[546] nor even commented it, albeit it swipes the sayings and writings of countless politicians,
senior militaries, experts in foreign affairs, and spies for the entire 1970s.
 Still in the early 1990s, I was ignorant of the reality I am describing in detail today, yet I was sure
that something was definitely wrong somewhere because I have never been able to practice
doublethink. Yet I know firsthand that if, tomorrow, the French media announced that Russia had
dispatched a specialist as personal adviser to the French president, but that this does not imply
Russian interference in French affairs, the entire French population would take it for granted
without even raising an eyebrow, doubtless. Actually, the truth was always right under my nose; I
just denied it as long as the media would not spill the beans, if I may put it that way. I must tell in
which form.
At about the time of my formal recruitment in the SDECE, when I was a military in the 73d
Artillery Regiment in Reutlingen, Germany, a couple of Russians in their fifty-something came to
settle in the tiny and deserted hamlet where I lived with my mother, quite unexpectedly in such a
spot. My mother and I had been the only inhabitants of the place hitherto. Given the particular
setting, these Russians and we came to know each other naturally and quickly, and to talk about
Russia because they never said, “Soviet Union”. The woman was talkative and full of self-
assertiveness, though without excess. Her husband, much of the introverted type as if her
photographic negative, never said a word beyond “Hello” and the like, although his spouse did not
seem to wear the pants. An amusing coincidence makes that she looked much as Margo Martindale
as “Claudia” in the TV series, The Americans, save for her rather short size and her eyeglasses,
whose sober television screen-shaped black frames encircled glasses as thick as bottle’s bottoms,
reducing her eyes to two black peas. They had a German shepherd to which she talked in Russian
exclusively. “Eedee Siuda! Eedee Siuda!”[547] I remember I often heard her yelling with authority at
the large dog.
She said she came from a beautiful city named Rostov-on-Don, which she much missed. She was
very proud to be Russian, but I could not hear any bit of Russian accent when she talked in French.
On my eighteen and as a country boy, I could hardly see anything suspicious with those two
peaceful people who seemed to have crashed accidentally as a plane in the middle of nowhere. It
once struck me though, while in her house she asked to me, “Do you know what this is?” pointing
her finger at a cut square stone on the chimney. Although the gray granite rock was nowhere in use
in a radius of fifty miles at least in our area, I identified it instantly as a street pavement stone, and
that is what I answered. She slightly corrected me with a quizzing smile, “That one comes from
Paris; it did May 68”. She did not add anything; that was all about the rock. What I found odd about
her question was rather she was too old to have been one of those young 68ers I had seen on
television some years earlier. As the subject of politics never arose in our conversations, even when
she talked about her country, I quickly dismissed the urban oddity as mere palaver.
However, eventually, she lent to me a French translation of John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the
World, which I read, indeed, and found as entertaining as a historical thriller can be because it was
not quite enough to convert me to communism. It was just history to me. At about the same time or
before, I do not remember exactly, she undertook to teach me a little of Russian. I found the
experience exciting, in our region where nothing ever happened and older people chatted together in
patois. That is how, at some point, I went to “the city,” Guéret, to order a four-volume set titled
Apprenons le Russe (Learn Russian), by Nina Potapova, I remember perfectly. Eventually, I even
ordered a typewriter in this language, “Made in East Germany,” said a small screen-printed plate on
it. That is how and why I came to speak and read Russian, far from fluently though. Our neighbors
next house never said “Tovarisch” (Comrade), but “Gospodin” (Sir). My relationship with them
spanned a couple of years, maybe, and I lost touch with them definitively when I quitted the Army
and went to live in Paris. They left the place, too, shortly after, I assume, but they thus disappeared
from my life for good anyway.
In the Army and upon my recruitment in the SDECE, carried out by the DRSD then named DSM,
I was sent to Berlin for a one-week study trip or a little more. There, I once crossed the Checkpoint
Charlie to go to visit East Berlin, and the next day I went to this occupied zone again with a
colleague military, by night and by the subway. I had an ausweis that actually was a simple letter-
sized piece of paper written in French, German, and Russian. Visiting East Berlin was an
unforgettable experience, leaving me with the feeling in certain quarters untouched since 1945
indeed that the bombings of this city had happened just the day before. Dozens of years of rain and
snow had not erased the black smudges of smoke on the walls of some crumbled buildings. Walking
around in East Berlin shown me realities that books and documentaries cannot tell. The eerie feeling
told things that are forgotten now, and that generations of Westerners of after mine would never
know and still less understand; fantastic-like, indeed, except I was not dreaming. Yes, angst and fear
were included in the package. The experience remains etched in my brain as if it happened
yesterday.
Upon my return in my regiment in Reutlingen, another soldier who said he was a refugee from
Armenia gave a French-Russian dictionary to me. Fortuitous coincidence? Additionally, I was
informally granted exceptional access to a small military library filled with classified intelligence on
the Soviet military. I learned much on this particular topic this way, alone in a room underground
and behind a thick metal door. A few other soldiers about the same age as me, but rather of the
educated type, graduated already and coming from a good middle, became “my buddies”. They
taught me many other interesting things, though not always relating to intelligence: just first tricks
and fundamentals. By an afternoon, three of them brought me to a large U.S. base near Stuttgart.
There we watched a baseball game together, while eating real American hot-dogs. I bought a bier
“Colt 45” in a military convenience store as souvenir because I did not drink alcohol nor yet
smoked. The place seemed an imported mini American town, including those impressive and
beautiful American cars I could see everywhere, twice the size of French cars and four or five times
that of the Traban and Tatra I had seen in East Berlin. This other experience was unforgettable
either, especially to a young man coming from the poorest region of France.
What did I make of all this? Not much at that time, actually. I just thought I had been lucky to be
granted the privilege to cross the Checkpoint Charlie, to spend an afternoon in a U.S, base, and to
have known the Russian neighbors who taught me much about Russia. I felt I was on my way to a
long career in intelligence, my mind filled with an enthusiasm of the ingenuous kind, completely
irrelevant to the realities I had to face eventually. Indeed, I thought that, me too, I would hunt Soviet
spies someday, as this officer of the DST I had seen on television did, and that is why I continued
learning Russian by my own. This may sound funny and ridiculous not to say pathetic today,
especially in the light of all I am explaining in this book; though not funny for me. There was no
other boy of my age in my hamlet, whose population were four including my mother, the couple of
Russians, without counting their big dog and our cats, and myself. I had left school very early when
I was on my thirteen, with a very low average score of 2 ½ on 20 that ranked me to the level of a
caveman. In this earlier time, I rather spent my days restoring and riding old motorcycles that local
farmers sold for cheap or were just happy to be gotten rid of. School had begun to bore me when I
was on my elevens; I could not bear listening for an entire week to a lesson that claimed no more
than a single day to be learned.
Except for the Russians, my only friends and acquaintances lived 10 miles hence in Guéret, and
they were an officer of the RG and his colleague, both on their thirty something, much older than I
was. We did target shooting in the countryside with pistols together, which in France was obviously
unlawful, but who could possibly care or complain since the police was with me! They even sold
me two guns, a very rare Colt 1911 cal. .455 Webley auto of the British RAF in very good
condition, and a like-new Lüger P08 cal. 9mm manufactured before the First World War. They did
not care about the Russians next door when they came to see me, apparently.
My elder stepbrother was fifteen years older than I was, and we were in all respects the opposite
of each other, both physically and in character, save for our marked interest in cars, guns, and
mechanics. My brother never knew his father; he was not yet born when the latter was assassinated
in the first days of the Liberation. My father left home abruptly when I was two; for some years he
was a middle-ranking official in a branch of the Ministry of Defense, and became eventually the
owner of a factory that built parts for military planes. My brother had been a real dunce at school,
too, essentially, because he had a trouble with reading books, and was interested in girls only. He
could not stay with a same date beyond a week, however. He left school later than I did, at fifteen,
and he began to work the year after. Later, when I began to read on psychiatry because two of my
aunts ended their lives in a psychiatric asylum, I understood my brother had narcissistic personality
disorder.
He did eighteen months in the 1er RCP, which elite unit of the Army trained him intensively. He
learned English very early in his career in counterespionage, in the 1960s, at the same time he was
planted in Mercury Motors France, a French subsidiary of the American brand of engines for boats
then located in Trappes, a few miles from Paris. This company hired him as unskilled employee,
and there he rose the ladder up to Technical Manager seven years later, largely thanks to the
Rabkors because for long he was unable to write a letter without doing a couple of faults per line.
His secret task was to monitor the activities of the manager, an American citizen named Wittner, I
recollect. One of the best things my brother did execute his mission was to sleep with the personal
secretary of this man because she had an affair with him already, while he was a married man.
 I remember my brother sometimes invited at home some engineers of Mercury Motors who came
in from the United States, and with whom he stammered rather than spoke English. He was never
good in English, actually, largely because of his difficulty with reading books. The handicap,
between other things, certainly prevented him to be further acquainted with the managerial staff of
Mercury Motors in the United States and with the CEO of this company, Carl Kiekhaefer, as he still
expected to by then. That is why he never tripped to the United States.
My brother committed to communism very early. He claimed our maternal grandfather, member
of the Communist Party, it is true, indoctrinated him when he was a still a preteen. A poster of the
Che smoking a cigar hanged above his bed, and he partook in the strikes of May 1968 in Paris. He
was rather discreet with politics however, and he ranted about the class struggle and all those things
only when he was a little drunk; but often he was a little drunk because hanging in bars after work
to chase girls was his thing.
After his first experience with Mercury Motors, he was planted again in several French SMEs,
whose CEOs were suspected to be contacts or agents of the CIA or something. First, he managed to
win the confidence of those people, and then he partook in the financial downfall of each, each time
in complicity with Rabkors who always consorted against those businesses.
In his beginnings in counterespionage in the mid-1960s, he made for himself a specialty as “lover
agent”; a “Romeo,” in intelligence jargon. In passing, this comes to explain why he involved
regularly at that time in the making of compromising photos in the Whisky à Gogo nightclub in
Paris. At some point, as the end of the 1960s was nearing, he caught a fondness for a woman of his
age who dated a member of the infamous mobster gang of Jo Attia, also known as henchmen of the
SDECE. That is why this woman and he had to flee and to hide together in the country, where they
married thereupon. Of course, the romantic story was arranged, but it lasted thirty-three years and
produced two children. Much later in his life, when he had his own company and reached the grade
of Secret Master in the GOdF, he once tripped to Canada and sometimes to Saint-Barthélémy where
French intelligence and counterespionage against the United States are very active.
In point of fact, the second event in relation to Russia I experienced concerned my brother. For a
week, he invited me to partake in a bizarre clandestine printing of official posters for the Moscow
Olympic Games of 1980, on nights and in great secrecy. He died in 2014 from a rare and sudden
form of cancer shortly after he fell in disgrace, then aged 69.
Years later, circa 1996, my long-time ex-colleague Frédéric de Pardieu gave me a telephone call
for the sole reason to tell me in earnest that France had been under Russian influence for decades.
He meant the DGSE included, and I had to cope with it, thenceforth. He told me this in veiled terms
though, as it often happens in the DGSE. He insisted, “You should read Thierry Wolton’s book, The
KGB in France”. I complied with the latter invitation forthwith. Often, I read on the Internet, “Do
you remember where you were and what you were doing when you heard the news of September
11, 2001?” I remember very well this terrible event, which I first took as a hoax, and I felt about the
same when I had this eerie phone call with Frédéric de Pardieu. I had just left the Montparnasse-
Bienvenue subway station in Paris, and I was waiting at a pedestrian crossing that faces the
Montparnasse tower, the tallest French building, coincidentally. De Pardieu’s revelation came to me
as a shock because the tone of his voice alone said he was not kidding.
Shortly earlier, and not coincidentally, certainly, I believed the DGSE had attempted once or
twice to trick me or to put me to the test about Russia. Each of those times, I had reacted to it as
passively as I could, acting as if I did not pay attention. The fact is, no one in this agency ever asked
to me why I had learned Russian, actually; this surprises me, retrospectively. At last, this telephone
call gave me confirmation of a thing I had suspected for long, yet always dismissing it because “it
was absurd,” of course. How Frédéric de Pardieu does feel about this? He never told me, and I never
heard any of my ex-colleagues telling anything or even alluding about the sorry situation thereafter,
except my brother, once only sometimes during the last years of his life.
As he was entering his 60s, he had become another person, and as odd and sad as it may seem to
the reader, I no longer had sincere feelings for him at that time. The DGSE had made him a wealthy
man, but also a barbouze, and me the exact opposite. By then, he had the demeanor of a thug of a
sort, scary to everyone had to see him, except for a man of his age who was his hierarchical superior
under the cover of retired firefighter officer in Paris. The Firefighters of Paris, regarded in France as
the FDNY is in the United States, is assimilated to a military corps in the former country and placed
under the responsibility of the Ministry of Defense, for the record. My brother’s wife and their two
kids had all deserted him and even ran away as far as they could in the country. So, he lived alone in
his castle of the larger Southern suburb of Paris, and he drank more than ever. Visibly, he lived in a
state of permanent and unexplainable fear, distrustful to everyone beyond reason, prompt to seeing
plots and likely conspiracies in facts of the most trivial sort. Yet we happened to meet each other
occasionally, in my case because I considered that the fact that we were together the only survivors
of our family justified it; we were the last bearers of each other’s memories, therefore. The first of
us to disappear would leave the other with no possibility to check whether his recollections indeed
are true.
On one of those informal meetings that we had at his home because he would never come at
mine, after a long dinner, he openly confessed for the first time he “had always been a submarine of
the Socialists,” to quote him in his own words. The confidence that was not really one could hardly
surprise me. As I limited my remark to an incredulous and disillusioned stare because by then I
knew more than what he just acknowledged, still looking at me, he seemed to collapse in thought,
and finally averted his gaze while mumbling something as, “Yeah … and more than that”. That was
all. Still, he put secret symbols in display in his home. The masonic ones had won an unprecedented
majority, to the point I could not see a single DGSE cryptic sign anymore. For long, his DGSE
symbol had been an old and absurdly inexpensive rustic chest he put in prominent display in the
center of his large living room, so that no one could miss to spot the distasteful thing. It meant he
was a “secret funds collector and provider”.[548] Now, he had a three inch height teddy bear put
permanently on a table, whose apparent insignificance was questioned by another one standing up
the stairs of the large entrance hall, overwhelmingly massive because real-sized, yet a stuffed toy
again, as absurd to the unenlightened visitor as the bygone chest had been. As he was a passionate
hunter, I once hazarded to ask, disingenuously, I confess, “Why a giant toy? Why don’t you just
hunt and kill a true one somewhere?” His eyelids lifted as if I had just called for the Devil to come
in his home while exclaiming, “Never ever! I would never kill a bear. A bear … it’s different”. He
would not say how “different” because he thought, rightly, he could not afford the risk to state
explicitly that a bear, in picture or else, is a Russian cryptic sign.
To anyone was enlightened enough to understand the secret meaning, the two toy bears claimed
the true allegiance of their owner. On one hand, I found the gigantic size of the toy crossed the
limits of ridicule. On the other hand, eaten up by alcohol, and by distrust to everybody including his
own children, my brother seemed to have lost any common sense. By then, he had unambiguous
symptoms of paranoia, unless his narcissistic disorder—my mother said he had inherited from his
father—had worsened to an alarming extent. He was now an authentically dangerous individual I
had to be wary of myself, as the reader shall see in a next chapter.
I remember of a casual conversation I had with Régis Poubelle, another of my ex-colleagues with
a specialty in counterintelligence against Britain and the United States, about a “business trip” he
had just enjoyed in Saint Petersburg. At some point, he passed me a business card entirely written in
Russian while he said, “See. Hard to read, isn’t it?” As I ingenuously answered, “Not a problem to
me, I do read Russian,” he he found himself in disarray and ripped the card from my fingers,
without a word of apology on his impulsive and clumsy gesture. I did not even have the time to read
the card, but our desultory conversation was over, and the embarrassment of my ex-colleague was
obvious. He did not even dare ask me if I had had the time to read the name on the card. That is a
recurrent behavioral pattern in the DGSE, by the way: people who show self-confidence and
boldness the minute before, and who recede, collapse, and stay speechless the minute after. The
reader should know that the cuirass of the French spy reduces to a thin varnish when he no longer
feels the presence and support of his colleagues.
To conclude these few pages on my personal account to be continued in a next chapter, that is
how I became a Russian agent, as all employees and agents of the DGSE did, down from guards of
the Exterior Security Service and up to the Director himself. In my case, I was left unaware of this
peculiar quality of mine for fifteen years.
The 1980s was a rich decade in the history of Russian influence in France, as the reader is going
to see. In May 1981, following his election as President of France, François Mitterrand appointed
four members of the Communist Party as heads of senior ministries. They were Charles Fiterman as
Minister of Transport, Jack Ralite as Minister of Health, Marcel Rigout as Minister of Vocational
Training, and Anicet Le Pors as Minister Delegate in charge of Public Service and Administrative
Reforms. The event added further oil on a fire of concerns in Britain, where tory Margaret Thatcher
had been appointed Prime Minister two years earlier, on May 4, 1979. The same odd feelings
existed in the United States, where republican Ronald Reagan had taken office as President a few
months earlier, on January 1st, 1981. The situation was obviously impossible or absurd, since France
was still a NATO member. The official history of that eerie period say that “Mitterrand felt forced to
cooperate openly with the French Communist Party because he dreaded the left could possibly fail
to win the majority at the legislative elections of the seventh National Assembly to come”. The
latter major event was to happen from June 14 to 21, 1981. Mitterrand is quoted as saying to the
members of his cabinet, in substance, “Without the majority at the National Assembly [the lower
chamber of the senate], I will be a powerless president, unable to reform the country”. Mitterrand
dreaded negative and damaging reactions from the mighty United States and Britain their ally.
Moreover, Britain was a member of the European Union since 1973. The crucial yet apparently
impossible stake for Mitterrand and for the Soviet Union was that France remains integrated in both
the still inchoate European Union, the NATO, and the Security Council of the UNO. The French red
revolution of May 1981 had to pass to the public opinion for a simple change of government
following a normal election process, although all these bodies had just been duped, knowingly or
not, I could not say.
The realities I heard in the DGSE are not exactly the same as the pretenses of historians and
politicians of both sides of the Atlantic. On one hand, French spies distrust the United Kingdom in
all respects because of the special relationship this country has with the United States, further
strengthened by a common language and common cultural roots. On the other hand, the joining of
the former country in the European Union was perceived as a good base for winning more ground in
the secret war against the United States. More about this will be explained in the next chapter. Of
course, the U.S. Government, and the CIA more especially, could not possibly be fooled on the
realities underlying the election of the leader of the Socialist Party in France; the reader knows why,
now. However, the masses could still be easily lured, ready as they always are to swallow the
biggest lies the “official media” could print and broadcast; and the beliefs of the masses, that
colossus with the mind of a nine-year-old child, ever more powerful than those of the elite who rule
them are. Say anything you want on a major television channel and on prime time, and they will
take it at its face value, instantly.
The latter fact justified the making of a major disinformation operation in three parts following
the election of François Mitterrand, of which, I have to honestly acknowledge beforehand, my
knowledge limits to an eclectic gathering of clues and facts held together by mere deductive
reasoning. However, I guess I provide enough material to the reader to trust me. Nevertheless, all
disinformation campaigns address the masses and very rarely those who lead them, since they are
the hardest to fool. The goal of this ambitious French-Soviet operation was to fool the public
opinion only, but in a way meant to prevent any claim from the governments of the United States
and of the United Kingdom, it actually was a hoax. In other words, the latter countries were
expected to vouch a heavy-duty conjecture against their wills for vindicating the French claims of
independence from the Soviet Union. The plot worked as the French and the Soviet intelligence
services planned it, indeed, except for one of its three lies that was at once debunked by the fault of
an excess of Mitterrand in self-confidence. The first of the lies in the planning is also the most
interesting because it necessarily had to be planned and set before Mitterrand and the Socialist Party
win the elections of May 1981, thus proving again that the socialist victory was known in advance,
to the point of being attributed the same value as a sound premise.
On May 21, 1981, twenty days after the election of Mitterrand, German Chancellor Helmut
Schmidt met with Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office to reassure the United States about the real
intentions of the new French president, “not as leftist as they appeared,” he said in substance. One
month later on June 24, just as the French Socialist Party had won indeed the majority at the
National Assembly and transformed definitively France in a socialist country in the full and official
sense of the term, U.S. Vice President George H. W. Bush came on a diplomatic visit in Paris. The
election of Mitterrand, and now the takeover of the whole French Government by the Socialists,
called for talks between the United States and France about a number of important issues in Europe
and even in the World. From the viewpoint of the new French socialist government, as the making
of the E.U. was ongoing and as France was a leading force in the enterprise thanks her close
partnership with Germany, as the Soviets had wanted in 1966, everything had to be done to dispel
any suspicion of a secret alliance with the latter country in the understanding of the European public
opinion, if not in that of the White House in the United States and of 10 Downing Street in London.
The whole World would react very badly otherwise, obviously. Besides, Germany remained a full
member of the NATO and had U.S. military bases on her soil.
In Paris, Bush Sr. would have been told, the official history goes on, that the U.S. Government
should not worry because the Communist ministers would have no access to secrets of the French
national defense. In particular, new Minister of Transport Charles Fiterman would not control the
NATO pipelines crossing France, and he would not be aware of the plans for the mobilization of
railways in case of war. The reader, who knows now the affair of Soviet defector Golitsyn in 1961,
understands these niceties could not possibly fool the CIA and the U.S. Government. If the latter
account is true, then it was all about diplomacy and formal aims; open lies told eyes to eyes, and
hypocrisy of the utmost sort. In any case, France and the Soviet Union were venturing in a daring
challenge to the United States by submitting to the latter an alternative, whose other option was
Armageddon, thus making the unbelievable lie a lesser evil to swallow, at once and nose pinched—
wherefrom, the need for a glass of Champagne, certainly.
For the record, George H. W. Bush had been Director of Central Intelligence–DCI between 1976
and 1977. Therefore, he was anything but an ignorant about what had been going on for decades in
France. Bernard Vernier-Palliez then Ambassador of France in Washington is quoted as saying that
Bush Sr. “took the good words of the Élysée Palace at their face value”. Of course, the historical
statement was part of the deception aiming the public, to be reported by the historiographers;
remember what I explained about the practice in a previous chapter. The French Ministry of Foreign
Affairs would have asked to Ambassador Vernier-Palliez to keep abreast of what Bush Sr. truly
thought about the French version of the facts, and the official history goes on as saying that the
latter “believed it”.
One more month later on July 19, 1981, during the G7 Summit in Ottawa, Canada, François
Mitterrand is said to have taken Ronald Reagan for a word in private. The former revealed to the
latter that, for eight months, the French counterespionage had an exceptional source within the
KGB. The miraculous submarine that came in at the right moment had been given the codename,
“Farewell,” since then. Then Mitterrand said to Reagan that Farewell had been supplying the DST
the most confidential plans of Soviet espionage, and even no less than its agentura operating in the
Western World, its results included as a premium. “So, it’s the biggest fish of this kind since 1945!”
Reagan is quoted as answering to Mitterrand. Joke, of course. Since then, the French and the
Russians together published two books on Farewell, the submarine of the DST inside the KGB in
Moscow, and they even made a film of it. I will give the exact references while presenting their
authors because their biographies are of further interest. Pending this moment, the reader should
ask, “Why these books, since the French and the Russians never reveal to the public their operations
in counterespionage?” Again, keep in mind that the disinformation operation I am explaining aimed
to fooling the public opinion, only, and not George Bush Sr., nor Ronald Reagan, nor Margaret
Thatcher and their cabinets. That is why I must repeat the lie as it is written black on white in these
books, but I will make it short, as Wikipedia summarized their contents under the title’s page
“Farewell Dossier”—well monitored and censored by Russian trolls since its creation, I see.
The true name of the submarine of the DST was Lieutenant-Colonel Vladimir Ippolitovich
Vetrov, a senior KGB intelligence officer. In the late 1970s, Vetrov decided to release covertly
valuable information to France and to the NATO on the Soviet Union’s clandestine program that
then aimed to stealing technology from the West. The French counterintelligence service DST that
handled him, thought that assigning the English-sounding code-name “Farewell” would fool the
KGB into assuming that Vetrov tipped the CIA and not France, “just in case the DST would be
penetrated,” claimed Marcel Chalet, Director of the DST at that time. Thenceforth, it was under the
name “Farewell” that Vetrov the submarine would be known throughout NATO’s intelligence
services. This is a bad start for a good deception already, since we know, thanks to the hardly
questionable testimony of former Director of the DST Roger Wybot himself, that he was fired as
early as in 1958 because he was hunting Soviet spies, precisely. Let alone all other facts and
evidences I gathered in this book.
The story goes on saying that between the spring of 1981 and early 1982, Vetrov gave to the DST
close to 4,000 secret documents, including a list of 250 KGB Line X officers stationed legally in
embassies around the World. Additionally, there was a breakdown of the Soviet espionage effort to
collect scientific, industrial, and technical intelligence from the West to improve its own. Members
of the Soviet military intelligence service GRU, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and several other
bodies all took part in this struggle. Vetrov gave summaries on the goals, achievements, and unfilled
objectives of the program of the KGB, and he identified nearly 100 leads to sources in 16 countries.
The information Farewell gave to the DST enabled the Western countries to expel nearly 150 Soviet
technology spies around the World. France alone expelled 47 Soviet diplomats, most of whom were
from KGB Line X. This caused the collapse of the Soviet’s information program at a time it was
crucial, was it specified. Moreover, the U.S. intelligence community would have carried out “a
massive deception operation” in offensive counterintelligence to provide reciprocally the Soviets
with faulty data and sabotaged parts of technologies, consequent to Farewell’s revelations. Farewell
was responsible in the exposure of Soviet spy Dieter Gerhardt, a senior officer in the South African
Navy who would have spied on for the Soviets for twenty years; and he gave intelligence hinting at
a Polish coup d’état that was eventually found to be Wojciech Jaruzelski’s. Moreover, he was
alleging the existence of a link between the Soviet Union and the assassination attempt on Pope
John Paul II”.[549]
However, in 1982, Vetrov disappeared following his arrest for the murder of a taxi driver in
Russia; oddly enough for a skilled Soviet intelligence officer, though possible if he experienced high
psychological stress. So, he was tried and given a 12 years prison term for this; he would have
confessed that he spied for France while in jail. Finally, in 1985, the DST would have learnt that
Vetrov was shot in the back of the neck at the Lefortovo prison, Moscow. End of the story and of a
penetration that lasted about two years in all. Now, I present some specifics, as the story of Vladimir
Vetrov is exceptional also because it is the richest and most documented ever on an espionage affair
to date, courtesy of the victim Russia itself, and not much of the victorious and proud France, oddly
enough again.
Vetrov’s biographers say the KGB sent him in the field in France from 1965 to 1970. Therefore,
Vetrov knew about the scandal of the revelations of Anatoliy Golitsyn and Thyraud de Vosjoli, I
presented earlier, made public in April 1968 while Vetrov was a KGB rezident in Paris. Still
according to the timeline, the following month, Vetrov was physically in Paris to witness the crisis
of May 1968 in Paris, and the consequent intense activities in the Soviet embassy in this city. Again,
as a KGB intelligence officer, he knew necessarily about the changes that the latter major event
brought in France. Alike, he could not possibly ignore that Jacques Duclos, founder of the Rabkors’
network in France, prime suspect in two cases of espionage in the French Government and
involving the SDECE, nonetheless kept a highly influential position in the same government until
his death in 1975. More to the point, Vetrov had a specialty in technological espionage, specify his
biographers. Therefore, he knew at least as much as the ignorant public did, his country had had no
difficulty with obtaining in France all information about the supersonic airliner Concorde, necessary
to build the Tupolev Tu-144, which made its first flight at Bourget airport near Paris on December
31, 1968 . Finally, could Vetrov possibly ignore that France and the Soviet Union had signed a joint
agreement of cooperation in science, technology, and aeronautics on June 30, 1966; that is to say,
while he was in the staff at the Soviet embassy in Paris, highly concerned with the event.
Why, then, did this man decide to provide highly sensitive information to the French intelligence
community, rather than to Britain or to the United States? This just makes no sense, to the point that
it is risible.
The biographers go on saying that the Moscow Center called Vetrov back to Moscow in 1970,
where he would have been appointed Deputy Chief of the Directorate of Information, responsible
for technical espionage abroad. How lucky he was, given his implicit ignorance of all the facts
above mentioned. Notwithstanding, thanks to his senior position, Vetrov would have had access to
“all intelligence collected by Western sources”.
While acknowledging for a minute that “all intelligence” could be possible, then certainly not the
identity of the sources with it, or even only the amazing number of “100 leads to sources”. That is
impossible in any intelligence agency in the World, the less so “a list of no less than 250 KGB
officers abroad”. Then there is the story of an additional list of 170 KGB agents from other
directorates of the KGB, and even of the GRU, another intelligence agency with a specialty in
military intelligence and independent of the KGB, as a premium.
The reader, who has read with attention or understood at least the general lines of what I explain
in the chapter 4 on protection of secrecy, compartmentalization, and security, must acknowledge the
stringency of those rules applies in the KGB either, with some minor differences of form, possibly.
Consecutively, the reader knows that even the Director of the KGB himself could not possibly know
even a tenth of what Vetrov revealed to the DST. In point of fact, the DST knows this impossibility
very well, since no one in the SDECE knew the sources of this other agency in Cuba in the early
1960s because their handler Thyraud de Vosjoli refused to give their identities. Thyraud de Vosjoli
is clear about this point when he answered to the SDECE, “If there is one inviolable rule in the
intelligence business, it is that one never discloses the identity of a source. It is a matter of common
sense”. Not in the KGB; really?
 In the best of cases, in reality, and this time from my own opinion and experience, Vetrov could
know about a dozen of sources and KGB officers abroad, and most of what he would know of them
would be leads only; that is to say, guesses from deductive reasoning, correct very possibly, but no
more. The reader who read serious books on espionage, or better who is an experienced professional
in counterintelligence himself, knows this version of the facts about Vetrov is completely fanciful,
regardless of the position he could hold in the KGB.
Therefore, the story of Farewell could not have been invented to deceive the CIA, since this
agency knows the impossibility that I just explained, and the remark applies to all other concerned
Western intelligence agencies, including the DST itself. I do not doubt for single second that in all
those Western intelligence agencies, someone exclaimed something as, “But this is complete
bullshit! This mole is a fake or a mule loaded with phony information. Moreover, he very possibly
is a fictitious KGB officer imagined out of the whole cloth for this special circumstance”. At that
time In Washington, if William J. Casey, then acting Director of the CIA, had said to President
Ronald Reagan that he believed that this submarine of the French was authentic, then he would have
been either a Soviet mole himself or an irresponsible.
Now, the reader is left in the impossibility to refute the supported arguments above, which come
to add to all publicly available facts and dates of the French contemporary history I present in this
chapter. Thereupon, the reader certainly would ask to me, “Why, then, did all Western spies and
governments vouch the French-Soviet story of Vetrov?”
I gave the answer in advance in the introduction to this affair, yet I present it in other words
supported by a few good examples that history teaches to us. When the Western intelligence
community was confronted with the definitive Soviet takeover of France in 1981, it was facing the
same dilemma exactly as Britain did in the 1930s, when the intelligence service of this country
learned Hitler was preparing Germany for war. At that time, British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain and U.S. Ambassador in Britain Joseph Kennedy said they believed Hitler on his
words. Even when Germany invaded Poland, Britain did not make a move despite a pact between
the two countries that obliged the latter to intervene militarily. Britain and the United States
swallowed the lies of Hitler because the only other option was to go to war, a thing that U.S.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt promised to the American people he would never do. Actually, the
attitude of Britain and America proved much costlier than if they had intervened immediately in
1938, when the military capacities of Germany were still too weak to resist a preventive action. The
reality of the situation they had denied for years yet caught back the British Empire and forced it to
go to war on September 1939, following the German invasion of Poland, and the United States the
harsh way in December 1941, following the Japanese attack in Pearl Harbor.
My explanations should not be understood as a call for war, of course, but as an encouragement
to react to an indisputable expansion of very hostile intelligence activities I witnessed firsthand and
in which I was even involved at some point, by opposing more to it than resigned and silent
passivity. Herein I mean prophylactic measures of the same sort I can see happening in the United
Kingdom and in the United States since the year 2016, exactly, and at last.
For the moment i.e. not eternally, the biggest loser in the ongoing story is not the United States
nor the United Kingdom, but the French people, whose large majority is struggling to make the ends
meet while they live in a country that has all it takes to give to them the same living standards as in
the much more disadvantaged Scandinavian countries, as examples. I acknowledge, all I just
explained may be hard to believe to the reader who has no experience in security,
compartmentalization, and need-to-know in an intelligence service, even if the facts I am bringing
upon are detailed, supported by sound premises I have chosen easy to check elsewhere than in this
book. I understand even better how hard it is to someone who is unenlightened in intelligence affairs
and realpolitik to believe that the mainstream media, senior politicians at the highest level, and
reputed historians all said in chorus, “It’s okay, we believe what says the new French socialist-
communist government. We do forget the past Affair of the Generals and the Affair Martel by the
same occasion. The specifics are unimportant. We take at face value what Mitterrand said, in spite
of his reputation of serial cheater, of his position of high-ranking official under the German
occupation, of his colleagues and close friends who at that time actively involved in the hunt for the
Jews, of his situation of prime suspect in this same scandal of the Affair of the General, and of his
evidenced and confessed guilt in the other scandal of the Attentat de l’Observatoire[550]”.
That is not yet all I have to explain about this sad story because there is another and no less
interesting side of it, and because it actually is integral to a larger scheme in deception pertaining to
active measures. As seen from this wider angle, the Farewell Affair probably is the best public
relation operation ever owing to its nature and real aims.
We notice, the French told the Americans they had a source in the KGB after the election of
François Mitterrand and the victory of the Socialists at the legislative elections. For the record, the
biographers of Farewell and the DST clearly specifies that Vetrov was providing outstanding
intelligence in 1980 already. Why not before, then, when rightist President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing
and his rightist government were in power? Did those other people feel “less allies” to the United
States than the Socialists and the Communists were? A hypothesis about this says the DST did not
inform Giscard d’Estaing and his government of the existence of Farewell. Why, then, again?
In the wake of the Farewell Affair, President François Mitterrand made a point with expelling
from France the large number of 47 Soviet diplomats, again denounced by Vetrov as KGB rezidents.
My question about it is, “In which way this could possibly annoy Moscow, since the French
Government, the Ministry of Defense, the French intelligence community and the SDECE in
particular were already, largely, and for long penetrated by the Soviets?” For we know that even the
CIA and the President of the United States knew about the extent of this penetration since 1961, no
less than two decades earlier, even publicly reported in Time magazine in April 1968. This other fact
was brought again to the knowledge of the public in 1970, in a 344 pages book published by the
former SDECE Chief of Station in Washington, and commented the same year in The New York
Times and in a number of other newspapers and magazines around the World. Did everybody forget
this either, ten years later only? Actually, the spectacular and hyped diplomatic eviction aimed to no
more than fabricating an additional evidence of the independence of France from the Soviet Union,
to the exclusive attention of the ignorant public, again. The scheme and its particular motive
repeated regularly since, but never in a way that could counterbalance further evidences of the most
overwhelming sort, exposing the truth, as the reader shall see. Actually, the spectacular and hyped
diplomatic eviction aimed to no more than fabricating an additional evidence of the independence of
France from the Soviet Union, to the exclusive attention of the ignorant public, again. The scheme
and its particular motive regularly repeated since then, but never in a way that could counterbalance
further evidences of the contrary situation of the most overwhelming sort, as the reader shall see.
The story also says that the DST gave to the U.S. intelligence community all intelligence
pertaining to the case upon the meeting between presidents François Mitterrand and Ronald Reagan,
and that it allowed the United States and a number of other countries to take prophylactic measures.
The bulk of the intelligence in question would deserve a new assessment in the light of what
happened in the concerned countries eventually. For example, what about would-be-Soviet spy
Dieter Gerhardt, senior officer in the South African Navy arrested in New York? For the record,
under the mandates of François Mitterrand, France and the Soviet Union consorted together against
the South-African Government, which effort resulted in the takeover of this country by Communist
opponent Nelson Mandela. Thereupon, France and South Africa agreed together to a discreet
partnership in intelligence, as we have seen in the chapter 22 on COMINT. Why did France use the
intelligence that Farewell provided in a way that led to the arrest of Gerhardt, then?
From all the above explained comes the other question, “Who Lieutenant-Colonel Vladimir
Vetrov was, actually?” For wants of any obvious answer, I cannot but see two possibilities only. The
KGB picked him up because he committed a grave fault at some point in his career. Therefrom, he
was assigned a phony mission that would later justify his actual execution; that is to say, the
definitive disappearance of all evidences of a large deception operation. In the chapter 27, I will
show to the reader, with other evidence in hand, that the Russian and the French alike have no
qualms with carrying out this kind of plot contrivances and to sacrifice their own, even for very
little at times, as in the case of the physical elimination of former member of the Service Action
Daniel Forestier. The second possibility says Vetrov was a highly trusted and skilled intelligence
officer, much smarter and committed than what his biographers suggest, and he was given another
identity upon the completion of the most sensitive mission he was ever entrusted. Given the stakes,
the former hypothesis seems more likely because it would be an enormous risk, from the viewpoint
of the Soviets and the French alike, to invest their trust on a word given by a single individual,
whose life, privacy, and even pictures had to be made public eventually.
In 1999, Russian national Sergei Kostin released to the French public the first version of the
Farewell Affair and, integral to it, the biography and journey of Lieutenant-Colonel Vladimir
Vetrov.[551] Thrilled by a curiosity the reader easily understands, I bought this book upon his release
and read it carefully. In passing, this first printing is out of print and already hard to find today, but
this is of no importance. Some first discrepancies proved not difficult to find out in this first version
of the story, and I was surprised to find in it a number of photos of Lieutenant-Colonel Vetrov,
courtesy of Russia, again. The pictures strongly suggested they had been added only to give weight
to the story, as this was very unusual in a true and recent espionage story printed in France. The
widower of Vetrov gave these pictures, says author Kostin. Eventually, the same pictures were
printed again in a new and augmented biography of Vetrov released in September 2009, which
Kostin co-authored this time with Éric Raynaud, a French national who introduces himself as
investigative journalist.[552] Almost two years later on August 2011, Catherine Cauvin-Higgins,
another French national, took the initiative to make the biography translated in English and
published in the United States under the title Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth
Century. The latter version made good sales in this country, judging on its 342 reviews on
Amazon.com as in June 2019, largely positive with an average of 3.9 out of 5 stars. Now, see who
those two co-authors and the woman who helped in the English translation and publishing in the
United States are, exactly.
Actually, very little is known on Russian first author Sergei Kostin, the one who brought all the
substance of Vetrov’s biography and journey in espionage. I found the following short biography,
released until early 2018 by rus-lit.org, a small Russian website whose self-claimed purport is to
promote Russian literature in the World.
“Sergei Kostin is a spy novelist, expert in the history of espionage, and documentary filmmaker.
Graduating from the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Languages, Kostin refused an offer to
collaborate with Soviet intelligence, preferring to work as a translator in Algeria. He returned to the
theme of espionage during the Nineties, after being graduated from Cinema College (VGIK) as
scriptwriter and while working for Russian and French TV channels. Since then he has published
several non-fiction books on the Cold War and espionage, showing the unglamorous reality of the
spy’s life (such as The Man behind the Rosenberg’s published in English by Enigma Books in 2001)
and a series of spy thrillers centering on his hero Paco Arraya (Paris Weekend, published in English
by Enigma Books, 2008). A movie based on Kostin’s book Bonjour Farewell has recently been
made as L’Affaire Farewell, directed by Christian Carion and starring Emir Kusturica, Guillaume
Canet, Ingeborga Dapkunaite and Willem Dafoe.”
French co-author Éric Raynaud introduces himself as an investigative journalist who wrote books
on the specious suicides of former French Minister Pierre Bérégovoy[553] and of François de
Grossouvre when he was acting adviser in intelligence and foreign policy at the Élysée Palace under
the mandate of Mitterrand.[554] In early 2018, Raynaud’s Wikipedia page (French version only and
my translation, therefore) said, “He received the Prix de la Justice Citoyenne (Citizen Justice [sic]
Award),[555] and the support of Jean-Marie Rouart of the Académie Française for his book, Les
Réseaux cachés des pervers sexuels: enquête sur les disparus de l’Yonne (The Hidden Networks of
Sexual Perverts: Investigation of the Disappeared of the Yonne).” Most remarkably, the page
specifies that in 2009, Raynaud published another book titled 11-Septembre, les vérités cachés
(September 11, the Hidden Truths).[556] The Wikipedia page explains that the latter book “disputes
the commonly accepted facts about the attacks of September 11, 2001, and thus defends the theories
of conspiracy”.
Coincidentally, Jean-Paul Bertrand, head of the publishing house of Raynaud for this book, was a
contact of the DGSE when he was head of Éditions du Rocher publishing in Monaco, and publisher
for agents and employees of this agency including one I knew personally. Moreover, on September
10, 2009, Russian agent of influence Thierry Meyssan, I named a first time in a previous chapter
and will name again in a next one,[557] published on his website voltairenet.org his interview of
journalist and writer Raynaud on the release of his book presenting the attack on the WTC of 2001
as a hoax staged by the right wing of the U.S. Government, the U.S. military, and the U.S.
intelligence community. See the following excerpt of this interview.
“A major fact, for me, was the release of the report of the commission of inquiry set up by the
Bush-Cheney administration in the summer of 2004. The conclusions were so unacceptable,
intellectually, that they excited the curiosity of thinkers, scientists, academics, experts, etc. Eight
years later, their rigorous work led to accept that two major facts are proven. The first is that no
airliner crashed against the Pentagon, the second is that under no circumstances were the collapses
of the Twin Towers due to the impacts of the Boeing 767s and kerosene fires. In fact, the official
version explaining the two most striking facts, the most spectacular of September 11, 2001, is now
disqualified.”[558]
 All I reported on the author and newly co-author of the biography of Vladimir Vetrov should be
enough to convince the reader that the book Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth
Century is co-written by a Russian national whose activities remain unclear and call for further
scrutiny, and by a French national who made for himself an activity in Russian disinformation
against the United States. Additionally, note that all published facts on the activities of Vladimir
Vetrov as submarine of the DST were given to Russian biographer Kostin by the latter agency, and
more particularly by the French counterintelligence officers who handled Vetrov and analyzed the
information he transmitted.
As for third party Catherine Cauvin-Higgins, she is a French national and translator for author
Kostin who lived in the State of Colorado in 2018. The same latter year, she stated on the
Amazon.com page of the book co-authored by Kostin and Raynaud she “was Thomson-CSF
interpreter during the Farewell years, working directly with Jacques Prévost, Vetrov’s initial French
contact, and Xavier Ameil his first handler. She participated in trade negotiations with Vetrov’s
peers, in Paris and in Moscow, during those same years.” Therefore, we are compelled to understand
that Cauvin-Higgins involved in French counterintelligence at a very high degree of secrecy, and
that she is not solely acting as English translator for the publishing of the Farewell Affair in the
United States.
To conclude on the Farewell Affair, I attempt an answer to the other following question the reader
may possibly ask. “Would it be possible that the U.S. Government and President Ronald Reagan
decided to give a chance to the French by believing in their good faith?” I guess I can say, “Not a
single chance. The Americans never did such a thing in reality, contrary to what the media ever
claimed”. The latter statement is even not an assumption of mine because Reagan himself once gave
his own and true opinion about the socialist takeover of France in 1981, in a speech he gave in
France on June 2 or 3, 1982, in presence of François Mitterrand who was quietly listening next to
him. I quote him verbatim, below.
“All our European allies are sovereign nations, and the decisions they all have with how they are
governed rest with their citizens and with their elected representatives. However, the position of the
United States on the subject of communist participation in the government’s allies is well known”.
I ignore if the sentence was ever translated in French, but I am sure the French media never
commented it. Reagan just resigned to accept the tricky dilemma the United States was facing at
that time, bitterly, doubtless, and to go by a book the French and more especially the Soviets had
written alone. However, it was out of question to Reagan and to the United States he represented to
be taken as a bunch of fools. Reagan and the United States made the latter point clear, even if it
limited to the publicly released form of the elliptic sort I just quoted. Internally in the DGSE, the
Farewell Affair is never hinted at, conspicuously; it is a subject to be avoided and even forgotten,
preferably.
Before I tell the two other parts of the grand scale deception operation of 1981-1982, I find timely
to explain a few useful details about what happened in the SDECE when it was renamed DGSE, in
April 1982.
On June 17, 1981, Pierre Marion was appointed new Director of the SDECE in replacement of
Alexandre de Marenches; that is to say, at the same time the Socialist Party was winning the
legislative elections, between June 14 and 21. Before this, Marion was known officially as an
“honorable correspondent” or no more than a contact of the SDECE abroad. In reality, he had been
a super-agent, and even very possibly Chief of Station of the SDECE in Japan, and then in the
United States where he remained for ten years from 1971 to 1981. During his activities in the latter
country, Marion’s cover activity was Managing Director of aerospace manufacturer Aerospatiale’s
North American operations. From 1956 to 1972, the SDECE had instructed him to manage a large
network of undercover employees and field agents, all officially hired by Air France flag carrier for
their cover activities, and due to their specialties and missions. With all this, Marion could hardly be
ignorant of the SDECE’s hostile activities in the United States and in Japan, contrary to what
suggests his claimed stance in his biography. Then, given his cover activities, he knew, to the least,
about the close and discreet cooperation between the Soviet Union and France in the aeronautics
and space industry, with Soviet company Saturn in particular. Additionally, Marion could hardly
ignore that the latter cooperation extended to a help of the SDECE to the Soviet Union for selling
arms and aircrafts in several countries. For the record, super-agent André Guelfi actively involved
in these activities. Last but not the least, the SDECE and then the DGSE have been particularly
interest in collecting intelligence on U.S. aeronautics and space technology, at the behest of the
Soviet Union and then of Russia.
 Officially, Mitterrand had chosen Marion, but he was truly shortlisted by the Ministry of Defense
and by the SDECE in particular, with the green light of the DRSD, therefore, named DSM at that
time. Officially again, the choice of Marion as first Director of the SDECE under the new Socialist
era was voiced to Mitterrand by newly appointed Minister of Defense and Soviet agent Charles
Hernu.[559] François de Grossouvre, another man of shadow intelligence and operations who had
been freshly appointed adviser in intelligence affairs to Mitterrand, with office in the Élysée Palace,
coached Marion for a while.
Additionally, in 1982, the Ministry of Defense supported the DGSE in its unofficial takeover of
the DST by appointing General Jean Guyaux (then Colonel) at the same time Yves Bonnet was
named Director of this agency. However, we notice, General Philippe Rondot of the SDECE had
already taken office in the DST as soon as Mitterrand became President in May 1981, and he
remained active in this agency until 1993, when he was called to help create the DRM. Bonnet was
probably picked up on purpose for the sake of it because he was held in contempt[560] and even as a
“risible buffoon” in the DGSE, to quote one of my ex-colleagues.[561] Therefore, when former
Director of the DST from 1975 to 1982 Marcel Chalet eventually said that he did not inform
Minister of Defense Charles Hernu and the SDECE of the existence of his submarine Farewell in
the KGB, he lied by omission since one senior intelligence of the SDECE at least held
responsibilities at a managerial level in his agency. Interestingly however, Jacky Debain, former
Deputy Director of the DST from 1970 to 1998, said at some point in a radio interview he gave in
2018, “He [Vetrov] first told to us, ʻI got in touch with the DST because the DST is not penetratedʼ”.
[562]

The second part of the deception operation I am now going to tell aimed the United Kingdom in
particular. The reason for it was the British could not possibly ignore the French counterintelligence
had targeted their agents in France since the early 1970s, and possibly earlier. That was not yet all
because I cannot but suppose that in 1981, evidences of joint French and Soviet interference in
Northern Ireland by discreetly supporting the IRA were piling up on some desks in the MI5 and
MI6. Personally, I was not said anything about the support of the DGSE to the IRA before the mid-
1990s.
On August 28, 1982, the GIGN, a special intervention group of the Gendarmerie then headed by
Captain Paul Barril proceeded to the arrest of three Irish citizens living in an apartment in
Vincennes, Paris’ Western suburb. They were IRA terrorists, allegedly. Actually, the Irish in
question, two men and a woman, had nothing to do with the IRA; they just were ordinary tourists.
This time, the goal of the anti-terrorist operation, completely invented and staged from scratch, was
fabricating an evidence substantiating to the British public opinion that the new French Socialist
government was faithfully resuming the partnership of France with the United Kingdom. Things did
not go on as well as with the Farewell hoax, however. The heroic French SWAT-like operation
transformed instantly into a huge scandal the media christened the “Irish of Vincennes Affair”. After
that, the SDECE and the KGB would not have another counterintelligence tale to entertain the
British and Irish people, to forge the course of history between France and the United Kingdom, and
to corner Margaret Thatcher into reluctantly accepting “the lesser evil”. I come to the point with the
specifics, below, well enough explained in a nutshell by the contributors of Wikipedia, in a page
they titled correspondingly “Irishmen of Vincennesʼ affair”.
“The ʻIrishmen of Vincennesʼ affair (French: Affaire des Irlandais de Vincennes; also known as
the ʻVincennes Threeʼ, although one of the arrestees was not a man) was a major political scandal
that occurred in France during the presidency of François Mitterrand. Following a 1982 terrorist
attack in Paris, a secret police anti-terrorist cell established by Mitterrand arrested three Irish
nationals in Vincennes. Proudly proclaimed as a victory against ʻinternational terrorismʼ, the case
fell apart and the suspects were exonerated when it was revealed that weapons and other evidences
used against the three Irish had been planted by the arresting officers, who then lied to the courts
with the support of the executive.”[563]
The third and last part of the disinformation operation is known and popularly as “The Sinking of
the Rainbow Warrior”. All on the contrary to the Farewell affair, it spanned a running joke in the
DGSE that lasted until I left this agency in the early 2000s. I assume, the reader heard of it or even
knows it well, possibly. I recommend the reading of the Wikipedia page titled “Sinking of the
Rainbow Warrior” because what it tells on the specifics of the mission is certainly true, save for the
motives due to the reasons I explain, below.
 Before the Service Action sunk the Rainbow Warrior with a limpet mine at the Port of Auckland,
New Zealand, on July 10, 1985, its owner NGO Greenpeace was rising suspicions on the motives of
its green-activist activities. There were rumors about a possible connection with the KGB that
spread as far as to the unenlightened public. As for what the members and managers of Greenpeace
may think about it, this aspect is probably relevant to my earlier explanations in the chapter 3 on
“Recruiting and Training”. Greenpeace’s activism seemed to focus on Western interests in industry
and defense activities while it too often failed to see other things that could also “be harmful to the
planet” when the culprits were the Soviet Union and its satellite countries among other examples,
numerous in all. This did not much change since, actually.
In the mid-1990s, I was enlightened on the friendly relations Greenpeace has with the DGSE and
on the benevolence the Russian SVR RF expresses towards the NGO. More to the point, a number
of Greenpeace members in France even belong to the Service Action of this agency, indeed. In
France, the latter partakes regularly in the testing of the Security Service and measures of protection
of nuclear power plants by simulating terrorist attacks and intrusions, sometimes video-filmed and
signed, “Greenpeace”. I invite the reader to watch the videos of the spectacular actions of
Greenpeace activists available on YouTube, and to consider how likely it is that activists, protesters,
and other scientists can be physically fit and train themselves enough to perform at any time, and
sometimes under harsh weather conditions, acrobatics and demonstrations we cannot see otherwise
than in films of the Mission Impossible series. On certain of those videos showing assaults of large
ships at sea, the reader knowledgeable in paramilitary operations will notice the striking similarity
between the daring methods of the Greenpeace activists and these of the Commandos Marine of the
COS.
The real aim of the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, as a sabotage operation signed by newly
Socialist France, was the fabrication of an unquestionable evidence vindicating to the World’s
public opinion that Greenpeace was not a front organization of Socialism backed by spies. By the
same occasion, the resulting scandal had to prove that France in particular could not possibly use
green activism as a formal aim to interfere in the domestic affairs of Western and capitalist
countries. That is all.
As about Fernando Pereira, the freelance Dutch journalist of Portuguese origin who died as the
sole person onboard the Rainbow Warrior, I have no clue as to whether this was an unforeseen and
purely accidental consequence. The only possibility to hazard a hypothesis about his possible
assassination as an additional benefit in the mission would be to determine why he was alone in this
boat exactly, and whether he was only a journalist or a spy undercover who was collecting
intelligence on the activities of Greenpeace.
Beyond this, still today, Greenpeace remains nonetheless in the obligation to do demonstrations
against France and Russia then and now, in order to keep on its claims that there is no bias in its
activism. For the record, the latter need is normal provision in influence relevant to the method of
dosage, explained earlier in this book.
The real aims I just revealed at last explains why the sabotage team of the Service Action
clumsily left many evidences to New Zealand police investigators, all pointing to the responsibility
of France in general and to that of the DGSE, “with a surgical precision,” some would say while
reading the following specifics that since have been confirmed by further testimonies. To begin, the
DGSE and its Service Action have a long and rich experience with shadow operations, and they
never did as many blunders as the public may learn of in the “Operation Satanic,” codename of this
mission, before and after. This is even the truer while considering that the result of the operation
would be reported by all media of the World, and would collect the attention of the public even
more than a usual coup d’état in some African country.
Years later in March 2010, Maurice Dufresse, ex-senior executive in the DGSE turned
whistleblower, told on an interview he gave to Paris Match weekly magazine about the Operation
Satanic, “I was tasked to flush out newspaper sources that revealed the operation”. Dufresse then
went on explaining that the New Zealand police had found a French telephone number on the phony
“couple Turenge,” the two members of the Service Action who had partaken in the operation, by
then held in custody in the latter country as prime suspects. Then Dufresse said New Zealand police
obviously gave a phone call to their correspondents in the French Ministry of the Interior for asking
for who this French telephone number was. As the French correspondent online found the owner of
the number in question was classified information, the demand was transmitted at a senior level in
this ministry while a New Zealand police officer was holding on the line. After a while, an unknown
person at this senior level of hierarchy in the French ministry straightforwardly answered on the
phone it was “a telephone number of the DGSE, the French foreign intelligence service”. Dufresse
said he did not understand why the Ministry of the Interior told the truth to New Zealand police
straightforwardly, and still less why two agents sent on a delicate mission abroad had a telephone
number of the DGSE written on a piece of paper on them.
Indeed, even “Johnny English” does not do this in his films. More to the oddity, DGSE agent
Dominique Prieur, real name of “spouse Turenge” and member of the Service Action, said
eventually in her public testimony she did not know the emergency phone number she was given
connected officially to the DGSE. She, too, did not seem to understand why this; she found it very
clumsy, obviously. Indeed, all DGSE agents sent abroad instead have the private phone number of
“a friend” they must learn by heart, and a code word or a specific phrase to state in case of trouble.
[564] [565] Moreover, if ever such a mistake were made, then the close partnership between the DGSE
and national telephone company Orange (still a public service at the time of the Operation
Satanic[566]) warrants a number of possibilities and denials of the easiest sorts. As Dufresse
assumed, the Ministry of the Interior nonetheless would never say benightedly to a foreign police
officer such a thing as, “the telephone number you gave me is a secret line of the DGSE,” of course.
Even while acknowledging for a minute that the first mistake may happen, the second is an
impossible thing. Then two such mistakes happening on a same mission and with a same agent
cannot but be intentional. Why then, in this case of the sinking of a ship belonging to a well know
NGO that moreover caused the death of a journalist? For this would obviously result in
consequences of the gravest sort not only for the thus fooled agent, but also for both the DGSE, the
French Government, and the image of France in the World. This did not perplex only Dufresse, but
many employees of the French intelligence community until today, and journalists and historians
familiar with the subject of intelligence alike.
As an aside I find noteworthy, Prieur specified in her autobiography she had just been recruited
and trained when she was sent on her mission in New Zealand, and added she was the first woman
the Service Action ever recruited since its creation. With all this, I am left with no room for a single
doubt that Prieur and her colleague of the Service Action and phony husband Alain Maffart were
given roles of expendables. In “ordinary” circumstances of this sort, this is done to exonerate the
responsibility of the DGSE or DGSI, but in that case, extraordinary, the former agency had put
deliberately its telephone number in the pockets of those, whose arrest was highly likely not to say
planned and integral to the mission from its inception. Last but not the least, a rule in the DGSE
says that this agency must never acknowledge its responsibility in an operation, in any
circumstance, even when confronted with overwhelming evidences. The unusual official avowal of
the French Government itself that the Operation Satanic was done by the DGSE therefore cannot
but be an unquestionable evidence telling that its failure was integral to the mission, from its
inception. Therefore, the Operation Satanic actually was not a sabotage mission, but,
unquestionably, a deception operation integral to a context of active measures, exactly as the
Farewell Affair and that of the Irishmen of Vincennes were. For the record, when an intelligence
mission is ruled by active measures, it implies that those who are involved in it must be fooled too,
in order to guarantee that disinformation transform into information. As a matter of fact, DGSE
agents of the Service Action Prieur and Maffart indeed always believed they executed a sabotage
mission that failed, and not they partook in a successful active measures operation. In the chapter
27, I will tell several such true other examples of active measures operations in which I was
personally involved.
On April 13, 2000, nineteen years after his election as French President, François Mitterrand was
ailing from a cancer in a hospital in Paris. On that day, Courrier international French newsmagazine
published his last words, among which the French public could read, “France does not know it, but
we are at war against the United States. A permanent economic war; a war without dead.”[567] The
U.S. diplomatic representation in France declined to elaborate about the shattering confession, even
though it was published in plain words in a major weekly; Lafayette holds good. Since the end of
the WWII, whenever tensions arose between the United States and France, the latter seldom misses
an opportunity to invoke the memory of Lafayette as a way to shielding her real aims in the face of
the public opinion, and for the sakes of diplomacy and other interests, I earlier explained. Often, the
pretense proves a simple and effective ploy, again because the specter of the greater evil inhibits the
minds of all strategists and diplomats in the United States.
Most of what I can explain on the French-Russian special relationship at the end of the 1980s and
in the following decade concerns almost exclusively operations against the United States and certain
of its allies, in which I partook. That is why I will say little about it in this chapter, and encourage
the reader to wait for a next one in which I will explain all this in detail, except the following other
testimony of Maurice Dufresse.
“In May 1988, when François Mitterrand is re-elected at the Élysée Palace, Pierre Siramy
[Maurice Dufresse] is entrusted an urgent task: gathering at once all secret documents [i.e. dossier
secret] concerning new Prime Minister Michel Rocard, and taking them out from the official
archives of the Service [i.e. the DGSE]. Rocard’s file is particularly thick considering his leftist past
in the PSU,[568] the United Socialist Party. But this is the rule in the Boîte [i.e. “the Company” /
DGSE]: at each change of government, the DGSE ʻpurgeʼ its archives from papers [i.e. dossier
secrets] likely to be incriminating to the new ministers. […]
“They are given to the Director who keeps them in a safe. They will be put back in the shelves of
Boulevard Mortier [i.e. the headquarters of the DGSE] when the concerned ministers will leave the
Government. Sometimes those top secrets documents are lost while on their way back to their
shelves. This happened with the dossier secret of Roland Dumas in 1993, which relates to the Affair
of the frigates of Taiwan, irremediably lost after he left the Quai d’Orsay [i.e. Ministry of Foreign
Affairs].
“In the spring of 1990, Pierre Siramy [Maurice Dufresse] must sort of sensitive pieces backing in
time from the Second World War: those are documents of the Gestapo, the Sicherheindienst–SD,
and the Bureau Central de Renseignement et d’Action–BCRA. This is a time capsule of the secrets
of the Resistance and the German services, among which the names Klaus Barbie and Paul
Touvier[569] surface.
“Siramy then discovers that in December 1983, in the middle of the trial of Barbie, Charles Hernu
then acting Minister of Defense is handed over personally all documents from the DGSE about the
explosive affair. Well after his resignation from this ministry in 1985 (caused by the affair of the
Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior), he had kept those documents until February 1988 in the safe of
the town hall of Vileurbanne of which he was the mayor. He had been careful not to give them to the
magistrate in charge of the affair Barbie who had asked for.
“If the case had been exposed, then it would have resulted in a State scandal.
“For which reasons? Charles Hernu had explained all to the number two of the DGSE: ʻI saw that
certain documents could harm two people, not from my side, but who today are media moguls or
public personalitiesʼ. Having conducted his own investigation, Pierre Siramy stumbles upon the
names of these two persons—today deceased [2010]. They are a former member of the Resistance
and ex-wife of a communist representative at the lower Chamber of the Parliament, introduced as a
ʻhigh-class agentʼ by ex-Chief of the Militia of Lyon [i.e. Paul Touvier, and pro-Nazi French Militia
during the German occupation], and a journalist and writer of the Resistance little known to the
public, co-founder of a weekly and friend of François Mitterrand, who would have had a
relationship with the Germans”.[570]
From France, Russia is still much interested in the Mediterranean region, and with the help of the
French Government, the military, and the DGSE, she is craving settling her influence over this large
area. Several times, when I was in the DGSE, have I heard angry criticisms over the presence of the
U.S. Navy 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea, castigated as sheer expression of “American
imperialism” and interference; a stone in the shoe of master Russia, actually. The validity of the
Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits of 1936 was much questioned in
particular,[571] as it extends to the subsequent impossibility for Russia to have her own aircraft
carriers and to deploy those in the Mediterranean Sea. “Although the Montreux Convention is cited
by the Turkish Government as prohibiting aircraft carriers in the straits, the treaty actually contains
no explicit prohibition on aircraft carriers. However, modern aircraft carriers are heavier than the
15,000 ton limit, making it impossible for Non-Black Sea powers to transit modern aircraft carriers
through the Straits”.[572] Wherefrom, Russia’s endeavor to weaken the good relations between the
United States and Turkey one day—Turkey is an important NATO member and a key ally to the
United States in the region, holding a strategic position of primary importance on the map. The
lukewarm not to say distant relations between France and Turkey owe essentially to an instruction
given by Moscow, officially justified for the last twenty years by the claim that Turkey, previously
secularized by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, is shamefully restoring religious Islamism on her soil.
Should Turkey distance herself from the United States and ally to Russia tomorrow, this would
result as an instant taw in the diplomatic relations between France and Turkey, and soon the former
country would become a warm proponent of the integration of the latter in the European Union,
with the support of Germany. For wants of this, France is trying for long and secretly to help Russia
solve the problem the way I sum it up, below.
In summer 1995, France asked to the United States to being granted the Southern NATO naval
command, in exchange for her return to the integrated command of the Alliance. The Pentagon
obviously said “No,” arguing on the articulation between the interests of allies in the Mediterranean
region, and on the capacity of available forces—pretenses, of course. The Pentagon argues that only
the United States has interests in the Mediterranean Sea, and that France must focus on her own
sphere of influence, North Africa and Algeria in particular, Spain to Morocco, Italy to Tunisia, and
Germany to Turkey. If ever the Pentagon submitted to the French demand, the U.S. military body
says, Mediterranean countries members of NATO would have to cope with the weaknesses of their
military capabilities. Madrid could not obtain the AFSOUT573] command because she does not have
an aircraft carrier; nor Italy, given the small amount of money she is allocating to her defense, i.e.
only 1% of her GNP. “France would not have the experience of Atlantic procedures,” the Pentagon
added.
The French Navy has been working with NATO since 1970 despite of the withdrawal of France
from the organization in 1966, when she signed the agreement with the Soviet Union, I presented
earlier in this chapter. As seen from Washington, the choice of a European officer to lead the
AFSOUTH would not fail to “revive animosity between the allies”. Additionally, it would be
tantamount to say to the U.S. Congress that, “since the Mediterranean region is stable, then it would
be appropriate to repatriate all American troops deployed in Europe”. That is for the formal aims,
the real aims being that since the French demand did not fool the United States, which know indeed
which the real aims of France are, then they are not going to relinquish on a silver plate military
control in the Mediterranean region to Russia through France her proxy. It deserves to be known
that the essential argument that convinced the U.S. Congress to maintaining and financing NATO
when the armies of the Warsaw Pact disappeared were the South-North threat, the proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction, and the presence of states hostile to Western interests. To which I add
the Russian stance within the French Ministry of Defense, since it can hardly differ from that of the
DGSE when in private.
The explanation above is a good example among others explaining to the reader the real reasons
of France’s reluctance to disengage completely from NATO, and to continue instead claiming
friendly relations with the United States before the public opinion and on the diplomatic stage. This
is a maddening situation, of course, but this is what it is, and some politicians and strategists still
believe that yielding to the temptation to blowing the whistle about the special relationship between
France and Russia would be a call for freeing the “greater evil” from the Pandora box. The
simmering pot this situation is calls for an answer about the close and ongoing partnership between
the DGSE and the BND, its German counterpart.
Among all my ex-colleagues, only Charles-Henri de Pardieu and his son Frédéric know
something about the latter issue, doubtless. De Pardieu Sr. was in close and permanent contact with
the BND at a high level. De Pardieu Jr. sometimes went to Germany, and he knew German
intelligence officers since the time he was military in the Franco-German Brigade[574] of the
Eurocorps[575] headquarters in Strasbourg, France. Then there was my own correspondent of the
BND Thorsten Bernhardt, with whom I worked for a while on intelligence on the U.S. computer
industry. However, I considered that asking even with infinite precaution and tact to any of these
people whether Russia indeed penetrated the BND would yield nothing but suspicion and defiance
on me. In my time in the DGSE, talking openly about the Russians was a taboo; a “thing that goes
without saying” and that is all, “sui generis,” to take up again the formula this agency loves. Still
today, my knowledge of the possible Russian penetration in the German Government limits to a
single line in the autobiography of U.S. CIA defector Edward Lee Howard, alluding to the defiant
attitude of the latter agency toward its German counterpart in the 1980s, already, and to the well-
known stories of the “Romeos” of East-German spymaster Markus Wolf, so well named. Then I
remind to the reader the following and more consistent facts, largely made public, since censoring
them is impossible.
On 24 October 2005, Gerhard Schröder then acting Chancellor of Germany signed with Russia’s
President Vladimir Putin the Gazprom’s North European Gas Pipeline deal, for a $6 billion gas link
between Germany and Russia under the Baltic Sea. Two weeks later, Schröder stepped down as
Chancellor, and a few more weeks later in early December, he confirmed he was to become
chairman of state-controlled Russian giant Gazprom’s North European Gas Pipeline company.
Today, Schröder is quoted as saying that Vladimir Putin, now his friend, is a “flawless democrat”.
He has spent much of the past decade working for the Russian energy industry, serving as a board
member of several consortia of which Russian-government-controlled energy company Gazprom is
the majority or sole shareholder. In early August 2017, Schröder’s stellar career in the Russian
energy industry reached new heights, as he was nominated for a position as an independent director
on the board of Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil company in which the Kremlin also holds a controlling
stake. A Russian Government decree (ukase) published on August 11, 2017 confirmed the
nomination. Even renowned Soviet moles Kim Philby and still alive George Blake—aged 95 in
2018—never were so highly rewarded as Schröder is. Remember also the little role of German
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt at the beginning of the Farewell affair.
On July 11, 2008, French TV channel LCI was broadcasting its show Preuves à l’appui
(Supporting Evidences), so well named for the circumstance, as we are going to see. That day, its
theme and title were, “DCRI, Les nouveaux agents secrets” (“DCRI; the new secret agents”). The
reason justifying the topic in the France of that year then under the presidential mandate of Nicolas
Sarkozy was the DCRI had just been created ten days earlier on July 1st to succeed the old DST.
The guest of the news show hosted by LCI TV journalist Christophe Moulin was Judge Jean de
Maillard, specialist on white-collar criminality and highly knowledgeable on economic intelligence.
At some point, while talking about the expectation of the moment for the newly created
counterintelligence and counterterrorism agency, De Maillard, apparently caught in the heat of the
discussion, gave leeway to something that was clearly bearing on his mind, to the obvious
embarrassment of Moulin however. I translate verbatim the epic and enlightening moment.
Judge de Maillard: “What I am saying simply is that today we are focusing on certain threats,
and that the others are downplayed. When you try to read in the functions that have been attributed
to the DCRI and in its organization chart, you see nothing about a certain number of threats—which
are threats, indeed!—, not of the political kind per se, but on the society, which become political at
some point however. When you have Russian mafia people greeted in ministries today, and who
have become full partners—Russian mafia, I mean!—full partners of the public authority, then we
ought to ask some questions to ourselves. And when certain intelligence agencies say about a
certain minister or even a higher authority, ʻbeware of whom you are talking to,ʼ this comes as an
absurdity. So, we are heading, if you agree, toward a number of problems, therefore. First, while
considering our alignment with the Americans in the fight against terrorists, does this mean today
that the only threat is becoming … is resuming on a political plane and is voted at a judicial level
with respect to the fight against terrorism? We are exposing ourselves from a political standpoint,
and we are aligning with the Americans, to cap it all!”
TV journalist Moulin: “Uh … it’s interesting, already, to know that there are Russian mafia
people who have talks in our ministries. We would be pleased with having some names; and if ever
you can give those to us, then we would be delighted in here”.
An eerie silence settled at this precise moment. Other guest Representative Yves Fromion by then
member of the UMP—political party of acting President Sarkozy—and Chairman of the Control
Committee of the Fonds spéciaux,576] visibly ill at ease, was sneering in front of the cameras. Judge
De Maillard seemed to have been caught off guard by the question of Moulin that had left him
speechless, as if at last he realized he just did an enormous mistake. TV journalist Moulin broke the
silence in emergency by overbidding, since shifting to another subject could evidence blatant
censorship in the mainstream media he was implicitly representing.
TV journalist Moulin: “… we have less than thirty seconds left on air. Could you just answer the
question about the possible missions to come, and about how to fight those Russian mafia people
who are haunting our ministries?”
Judge De Maillard was palling and apparently wondering about what to say. Representative
Fromion attempted to save the disastrous situation by snickering and resorting to derision and open
mockery nonetheless clumsily. The wrong was done on live and on a major TV channel, and the
situation was indeed catastrophic.
Representative Fromion (laughing): Bah… Ha-ha-ha, uh, listen. We should be told in which
ministries they are because it’s going to interest many people … And as we are in need of money for
our budget, then maybe they could help a bit with that. Well … I don’t know. Uh?
From the viewpoint of the DGSE and of the Russian SVR, nothing could be done to repair the
damage Judge De Maillard just did. Doubtless, he forgot at some point that thousands of viewers
were watching and listening attentively, including a number of analysts in foreign intelligence
agencies and diplomats, of course. It was unthinkable to launch a smear campaign against a
personality such as De Maillard and to make him pass for a crackpot. This man authored a number
of interesting essays on financial crime and on the globalization of exchanges, of which I read some
myself, still today regarded as reference books. De Maillard did not fall in disgrace, however. Three
years later in January 2011, he was appointed Vice President of the Tribunal de Grande Instance of
Paris, and he is currently teaching on intelligence affairs at the Paris Institute of Political Studies
(Sciences Po).
The same blunder exactly reproduced in the 2010s, this time on an edition of TV program C dans
l’air, daily broadcast on live on France 5 television channel[577] On that day, one of the guests could
not help himself say either, “Certain Russian mafia people living in France are currently enjoying
free access in all French ministries”. The shattering revelation triggered instantly the same deep
embarrassment on stage, followed by immediate and similarly embarrassed demands of retraction,
as this television program was broadcast on live either. I do not remember the name of this other
guest, younger than Judge De Maillard and much less notorious, but I am sure I never saw him
again on screen thereafter; remarkably, since C dans l’air uses to invite the same guests in many of
its editions. Additionally, the video of this edition in particular disappeared from their respective
websites, as it happened for the one featuring Judge De Maillard.
Of late in France, at last some books, press articles, and other media increasingly often allude to
or even focus on Russian influence in this country. Their authors are even naming the ever-
increasing number of prominent French personalities who have close relations with Russian
politicians, oligarchs, mafia people and businessmen. Among these Frenchmen and the books they
published, I cite the most remarkable. Nicolas Hénin, La France russe (Russian France), Fayard
pub., 2016, Cécile Vaissie, Les Réseaux du Kremlin en France (The Networks of the Kremlin in
France), Les Petits matins pub., 2016, and Olivier Schmitt, Pourquoi Poutine est notre allié?
Anatomie d’une passion française (Why Putin is our ally? Anatomy of a French Passion), Hikari
Éditions pub., 2017.
Although all authors above have serious credentials, they all received aggressive criticism on the
French version of the Amazon merchant site Amazon.fr. Those attacks concerned especially the
devastating book Cécile Vaissie published in 2016, for she reveals in it numerous embarrassing
connections between prominent French people and Russia. Although Vaissie holds a PhD. in
political science and is currently Professor of Russian and Soviet Studies at Rennes 2 University,
known as a specialist on the study of connections between culture, the society, and power in Russia,
she however faced accusations ranging from dishonesty, slander, to amateurish journalism, up to
“conspiracy theorist” and “anti-Russian propagandist”. She was even sued for libel.
Following the creation of the Russian Federation in 1991, Soviet diplomat, and Russian agent
Vladimir Fedorovski immigrated to France where he obtained French citizenship four years later
only in 1995. Thenceforth, Fedorovski reconverted as writer and wrote forty books (2019) in French
language since, all about Russia, diplomacy and espionage. Hyped by the French mainstream media
for no explainable reason other than his past as Soviet diplomat, Fedorovski became notorious in
France, and is acting unambiguously as the man of Russian public relations in this country since,
touring French regions to hold conferences in addition to regular appearances on television to
explain Russia to the French public. However, as a smart and sly man, Fedorovski never ever
clearly and seriously answers the questions French television and radio journalists ask to him.
Instead, he made a use to dodging questions by ever shifting to his recollections of meetings with
some prominent politicians during the late years of the Soviet era, and by boasting, completely
unlike the typical Russian. Thus, Fedorovski makes of himself a constantly elusive character whose
talk actually limits invariably to humdrum. Indeed, all interviews he gave to date seem to be a same
formatted discourse including the same names, quotes, and anecdotes, regardless of the debated
subject. Fedorovski is also active in the promotion of the francophonie,[578] and is awarded French
literary prizes and diverse other honors such as jury member in literature and the medal of Arts et
des Lettres (Order of the Arts and Literature). All this for no real and justifiable reason in the facts,
as he truly is in no way a talented writer beyond the unexplainable hype he is currently enjoying in
France.
Russian power in France did not settle in Paris, but all along the French Riviera where about
20,000 wealthy Russian nationals reside today. When interviewed and asked why they came in
there, they all repeat the same two formatted answers, “Because we want to provide our children
with a better education,” and “The Côte d’Azur is the best spot in the World”. More than that, in
September 2010, was inaugurated a direct railways line between Moscow and Nice. The trip lasts 52
hours and costs 1,200 euros for a one-way luxury class ticket. The Moscow-Nice train gives pride of
place to luxury with 12 wagons, one only for the second class against six reserved for the first, and
three luxury classes, the remaining two cars being restaurants.
It is less popularly known that numerous Russians bought posh apartments in the bourgeois areas
of Paris and countless businesses in the city, to the point of challenging the wealthy nationals of the
Arabian Peninsula. Reputed exclusive luxury grocery store Hédiard, Place de la Madeleine, has
been Russian-owned for years already, as example among many others. In October 2016, was
inaugurated in Paris a huge Russian cultural and religious complex encompassing the massive
Cathédrale de la Sainte-Trinité de Paris (Holy Trinity cathedral), and the Centre Spirituel et Culturel
Orthodoxe Russe (Russian Orthodox Spiritual and Cultural Center). Parisian people and foreign
tourists can hardly miss the spot, but the bulky building defiantly standing as a symbol of the
Russian power in France raised concerns to numerous French people and scholars. Galia Ackerman,
a historian opposed to the current Russian regime, speaks of a propaganda tool contributing to a
large project of “embarkation of Russian diasporas,” already implemented in reality between 2010
and 2012 when Russia took over the administration of the Saint-Nicolas cathedral of Nice on the
French Riviera.
Incredulous about the religious claims, Parisians nicknamed the Holy Trinity Cathedral “Kremlin-
sur-Seine” (Kremlin-by-the-Seine-River), “Saint-Vladimir,” and “Putin’s Cathedral”. Vladimir
Putin indeed came to see the monument by the afternoon of May 29, 2017, on the sidelines of his
visit to Paris at the invitation of then freshly elected President Emmanuel Macron. Built nearby the
Eiffel Tower by the French company Bouygues SA on a plot of 2 acres located on the Quai Branly,
formerly headquarters of Météo-France (military-owned), Moscow financed entirely the Russian
religious complex for more than 100 million euros. It is officially intended to promote Franco-
Russian friendship and to offer to the Russian Orthodox Church unprecedented visibility in the
French capital. By resorting to an obscure French law of 1924 called droit de chapelle, France
helped Russia obtain diplomatic status for her cathedral, as for an embassy. Amen.
There is indeed a connection between Russian intelligence activities abroad and the Russian
Orthodox Church. On the French Riviera, it became obvious that Russian religious associations and
the Cathedral of St Nicholas in Nice are hubs of considerable Russian influence in the whole region
today, which has been certainly active in the takeover of Monaco, where the DGSE now owns a
publishing house named after the famous “Rocher”. The Maison de la Russie à Nice (House of
Russia in Nice) and the Association des Amis de la Cathédrale Orthodoxe Russe–AACOR-SNN
(Association of Friends of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral) guest regularly French people of the
local middle and upper classes to make them “discovering Slavic culture”.
To date, both France and Russia always introduce in their respective political talks facts and
words chosen to “vindicating” there is no such a thing as a special relationship between them.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy made an exception with the concern when he did not
make a secret of his warm relation with Vladimir Putin at the beginning of his mandate. However,
as the visible complicity between the two statesmen quickly raised questions about a possible
unforeseen importance of Sakorzy’s Hungarian origin, then the two set some distance with each
other on their meetings, and the compliant media instantly reported an “incompatibility in their
respective characters”. Since then, the French mainstream media go on repeating that Sarkozy
actually has been chronically at odd with Putin, making the diplomatic relations between France and
Russia “problematic”; the French multitudes believe it, obviously.
Completely accidentally, on a day I was watching the news about a trip of Sarkozy to Russia
upon his taking office at the Élysée Palace, I was struck by a particular detail and the weird attitude
of Vladimir Putin that in another circumstance would have allowed me to identify a case officer and
his agent. I believe many other people working in intelligence noticed the unexpected patterns, too.
Therefore, I assume a witty man such as Putin did this intentionally to send to enlightened viewers a
short and clear message as a thumb one’s nose can be. In passing, the reader must note the pattern of
telling openly a secret in front of a large ignorant public to address only one person or a mall
minority.
Sarkozy’s successors François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron behaved differently, with a zeal
that at times evolved to gross and badly acted theatrical performance. This was particularly
remarkable and bordered on ridicule on the day Macron called the Russian media “propaganda”
while Putin was standing next to him.[579] Very visibly on the video showing the latter statement,
Putin did not seem to other at all about it. It is true Macron made for himself a reputation to
overplay as no other French president ever did before him, to the point of making a performance of
each of his speeches since the day he ran for the French presidency. Yet he never attained the
outstanding sincerity of master Sarkozy, who would steal him the show every time in a comedy. As
about Putin’s poorly convincing performance on stage, we can forgive him about it because the
KGB trained him very early to stay out of the limelight, as film directors must do.
Nonetheless, the necessary denials and live performances are good enough for a public that is in
need of entertainment to forget a little the realities of its dailies, and this is what matters above all. I
am not implying the work would be sloppy; the staging is sometimes expensive, as with the
excellent “Affair of the Mistral frigates,” whose making began in 2010. The plot must not be
confused as a would-be-sequel of blockbuster “Taiwan’s La Fayette Frigate Affair,” I presented in
the chapter 11. For the record, the making of the latter spanned a respectable nineteen years
beginning in 1993. Besides, “Taiwan’s La Fayette Frigate Affair” is rather of the thriller genre due
to the number of deaths in it, whereas “Affair of the Mistral frigates” is rather in the vein of Ocean
Eleven. See the plot, below.
On December 24, 2010, a joint statement from the Russian and French presidents announced the
Russian Navy had ordered to France two military ships Mistral type. The frigates were to be built in
Saint-Nazaire by STX France, with the participation of Russian shipyards OSK for a contract
amounted 1.7 billion dollars. A debate on the provision of NATO-sensitive Senit-9 and SIC-21
command systems drove the negotiation of the sale. Yet the Russians at last obtained the integration
of the systems necessary for the management of the frigates’ shipping.
However, at the end of 2013, the Ukrainian crisis broke out and resulted in the annexation of
Crimea by Russia in March 2014. Consequently, several allies of France, Germany, the United
Kingdom, and the United States demanded the immediate suspension of the delivery of the two
frigates, which impediment put France into an embarrassing situation. The same month of March
2014, French Minister of Foreign Affairs Laurent Fabius announced that France “might consider”
canceling the sale of the ships to Russia because of the Crimea Crisis. To Russia, this would entail
contractually a significant financial compensation, of course. A few months later on November 25,
2014, two hard disks, a motherboard, a graphic card used for radar transmissions, and a high-tech
system put in place by Thales Group were “found missing” on one of the two frigates locked in
France. The sleuths of the criminal police of Nantes found no evidence of break-in and the case
simply ended in a non-suit. Finally, on August 5, 2015, France formalized an agreement with Russia
to cancel the delivery of the frigates, and France sold them to Egypt. The story ends on an interview
of President Vladimir Putin stating casually the incident “is no big deal”.
I shift to the scientific documentary genre, with the French Guiana Space Center of Kourou,
operational since 1968. It is co-managed by European Space Agency–ESA, Centre National
d’Études Spatiales–CNES, French rocket builder Arianespace, and Azerbaijani satellite operator
Azercosmos. France is a longtime partner of Russia in space and aeronautics researches and
building since their agreement of June 1966. This explains why ESA partnered with Russian
company TsSKB Progress while Roscosmos and the Russian federal Space Agency built the launch-
pad Ensemble de Lancement Soyuz–ELS (Soyuz Launch Pad) in the French Guiana Space Center
of Kourou. Finished in September 2010, it is identical to the Russian launch pad of Tyuratam
Baikonour, and has been co-financed by Arianespace SA multinational European company and the
European Union. Since 2011, Russia is launching satellites with commercial rockets Soyuz-2
imported in parts in the French Guiana Space Center of Kourou and assembled on site. Russia uses
the Kourou space center to launch her own satellites, thus justifying the number of other Russian
companies having activities in French Guiana, currently hiring numerous Russians over there.
Now, I present the story, below, last, because it has been recently released in the French media; in
the early months of the year 2019, exactly. One could find this other one belongs to the neo-noir
political thriller genre, as it tells a grave affair pointing out a collusion orchestrated by Russia at the
highest level of the French Government, exactly as Judge De Maillard implied, but this time with all
evidences television journalist asked for. Somehow, it might remind to the reader of No Way Out,
made in 1987 and starring Kevin Costner—a must-see in the U.S. FBI, I seem to know. Titled
“L’Affaire Benalla,” or “Benalla Affair” in its English version available on Wikipedia, it is an
amazing true encore.
We are in 2018; Russian businessman and known criminal Iskander Makhmudov, and Russian
businessman and oligarch Farkhad Akhmedov together go into business for an amount of 2 million
euros or so with Alexandre Benalla, acting Security Officer and Deputy Chief of Staff to French
President Emmanuel Macron. At the same time, the two Russians partake with Chokri Vakrim, ex-
member of the Service Action of the DGSE. Most importantly, Vakrim is partner of Marie-Élodie
Poitout, acting Head of the Security Service to Prime Minister Édouard Philippe. Of course, no one
knows about all this, until the accidental happening of a fight in a street of Paris on May 1st during a
demonstration, which a bystander catches on his smartphone. The video is posted on the Internet
due to its dramatic nature, and it does not take long before a journalist for Le Monde newspaper
identifies the violent anti-riot police involved in the fight as Benalla. “What he’s doing there
disguised as a police?” exclaims the journalist who uses to see the man protecting the President
everywhere he may go, always next to the statesman. As the journalist knows well Benalla is not a
police and is not entitled to strike with this quality on protesters and to beat them in streets,
therefore, the video makes its way in Le Monde newsroom. Not until July 18, Le Monde newspaper
reports the oddity, which transforms instantly into a national scandal. Le Monde’s staff obviously
investigated on the why of the incident, and looked for every bit of information they could find on
Benalla. That is how they discovered that the personal bodyguard of the President also runs a small
private security company in partnership with Vakrim, and are in business with Russians citizens
Makhmudov and Akhmedov.
As surprising as it may be, the scandal does not cause any reaction from the DGSI, although the
agency is officially responsible for counterespionage within the French borders; but did not Judge
De Maillard also implied that the French counterintelligence agency is no longer concerned with
Russian activities in France since Nicolas Sarkozy reformed it?
As the DGSI keeps on acting unconcerned, a parliamentary commission is constituted to examine
the case. However, surprisingly again from the viewpoint of the public that obviously follows the
unfolding of the affair with renewed interest, the commission is investigating the fight in a Paris’
street incriminating Benalla, and nothing else. The incident in question is certainly concerning, as it
relates to a case of usurpation of function of police officer and abuse of power under this quality to
beat people, but by far it is insignificant by comparison with the other question of collusion
involving the personal bodyguard of the President and two Russian oligarchs including a criminal.
The latter oddity explains why a few daring journalists, nonplussed and intrigued, lead their own
investigations on the presidential bodyguard. Quickly, they discover that Benalla has once been
Gendarme Adjoint Volontaire, a few years before the incident took place. The detail is in no way a
cause for alarm, and it is even uninteresting, at first glance. However, the journalists find bizarre
that Benalla finished his short experience as gendarme in 2015 with the rank of lieutenant Colonel
in the Gendarmerie, then aged 25 only. Further, in their inquiry, the journalists discover that as
bodyguard of President Macron, Benalla was bestowed upon several other privileges, so
extraordinary that very few in France could ever expect enjoying them below the position of Prime
Minister. Indeed, the Élysée Palace gave to Benalla a high salary incommensurate to his rather low
skills, education, and experience, a police vehicle, the right to carry a gun, an encrypted cellphone
Teorem,[580] a housing of function of high standing in a building owned by and located near the
Élysée Palace, whose apartments are normally made available to senior officials, several diplomatic
passports, a special identity card granting Benalla full access at any time to the lower chamber of
the Senate, common access to the most sensitive services of police and Gendarmerie, and a Secret
Défense security clearance that is one level below the most sensitive Trés Secret Défense.
The reader must note again that all these perks are offered to a freshly recruited young man still
aged 28 with no particular skill nor real diploma or significant experience in the current function,
and handsomely paid by two wealthy Russian nationals with direct and privileged connections with
Russian President Vladimir Putin. Obviously, the finds are at once released in the media, and thus
put additional oil on the fire of the affair. There is still more to come.
In March 2019, it is further discovered that beyond his official position at the Élysée Palace,
Benalla has a personal and friendly relation with President Emmanuel Macron and his wife. In point
of fact, after Benalla was finally fired because the scandal took untenable proportions to the French
Government, his privileged relation with the President resumed on Telegram messaging cellphone
application. Moreover, upon his firing, the young ex-bodyguard even used his several diplomatic
passports, neither he restituted to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs nor was asked to surrender, to pay
visits to several African heads of states. What for, and what Benalla had to say to those
personalities? It seems the unofficial diplomatic trip will remain a mystery to everyone, since no
official investigation was ever launched about it either.
For a short while, the French Senate reacts by asking officially for an in-depth investigation on
Benalla, this time following an evidence of his lying under oath before the legislative body when he
answered during his hearing he had no connection whatsoever with any Russian national. At last,
Benalla is arrested and put into custody. Yet a new oddity arises on the occasion, under the form of
the jailing of Benalla in the same cell as one of his accomplices in the Russian scheme, against all
precautionary measures the most elementary good sense commands in the frame of a police
investigation. Nonetheless, the latter event is of secondary importance as one week later only,
Benalla and his accomplice are released and left free to go wherever they want, without further
explanation. Thereupon, against all expectations, the Senate voices down its claims, and finally
becomes mute on the affair for an unspecified reason. Benalla’s lying under oath before a Senatorial
commission is simply forgotten. All along, at no moment, the French media talk about an
intervention of the DGSI in the scandal, which at this point is reported for weeks abroad and retitled
“Benalla Affair”. This is weird because several prominent investigative journalists and even high-
ranking officials in the Senate at last begin to allude to and even to name in plain words the
likelihood of an espionage affair at the highest levels of the French Government concerning both the
President and the Prime Minister and involving Russia with overwhelming evidences.
All this obviously raises questions about the exact nature of the privileged relationship between
the French President, his young bodyguard, and the two Russian benefactors of the latter, let alone
the other case of Vakrim, the partner of the acting Head of the Security Service to the Prime
Minister. The integrity of President Macron is even briefly questioned, since he could hardly
pretend to be unaware of the other particular relationship of his bodyguard with a Russian oligarch
and a Russian mafia. In passing, it is similarly striking that no journalist, especially the few zealous
who claimed to investigate on the affair hitherto, do not interview any of the dozen of “former”
intelligence officers and high-ranking executives of the DGSE who currently make their persons
available to the media, anytime. For their opinions indeed would help everybody understand what is
happening at the Élysée Palace and in the DGSI, exactly. However, France is not the United States,
and an acting president in the former country enjoys full immunity, regardless of what he may do.
There is no place in France for any Special Counsel Investigation, and the less so for a would-be-
Robert Mueller. Actually, there is even no equivalent to the U.S. FBI in the facts, and no
counterintelligence agency in this country anymore, as the reader can see, now. Well, not exactly
because the DGSI at last awakens and comes into the stage of the affair.
On May 22, 2019, the DGSI summons Ariane Chemin, journalist with Le Monde daily
newspaper. On May 29, day of her interrogation at the headquarter of the counterintelligence
agency, its sleuths inform her she was the first to reveal in the latter newspaper that Vakrim, partner
of the head of the Security Service to the Prime Minister and second beneficiary of the Russians, is
a non-commissioned officer of the “special forces”. They do not specifies that the “special forces”
in question actually is the Service Action of the DGSE, and the French media that report on the
interrogation do not find pertinent to be specific about this either. The counterintelligence officers of
the DGSI explain to journalist Chemin that as the quality of member of the French special forces in
a person is a classified information, her publishing of his name may entail grave consequences for
her, therefore.
As the investigation by the DGSI is commented in the media and in Le Monde in particular, since
it is first concerned by association, the public discovers on the occasion that publicly naming a
member of the special forces or of an intelligence agency is a grave offense called “prejudice to the
secrecy of the national defense”.[581] Most importantly, everybody in the country understands that
consorting with Russians oligarchs and mafia people not only is not a grave offense, but that anyone
would daresay a word about it even as journalist must prepare for troubles with the French
counterintelligence service DGSI.
Earlier on May 23, following the summon of journalist Chemin by the latter agency, which itself
transformed in a scandal within the scandal of the Benalla Affair, government Spokeswoman Sibeth
Ndiaye is asked by other journalists how is that possible in a country where the freedom of the press
is a right that a journalist be interrogated by the counterespionage service for having done her job?
To which Ndiaye vehemently and sternly answered, “Journalists are answerable before the justice as
any other French citizen” because, she goes on, “it is normal that a State protects a certain number
of data necessary to its exterior defense activities, and to its military activities”. Thereupon, Ndiaye
announces, “A complaint has been filed, apparently by ʻthe exterior services,ʼ” and considers about
it that “it is normal that, as an answerable person, Mrs. Chemin be heard in this affair”.[582]
The journalist for Le Monde does not make up for an exception however because at about the
same time, other journalists began to reveal that they, too, had been summoned by the DGSI earlier,
in the frame of another leak relating to French arms sales to Saudi Arabia then used in the war in
Yemen. Those specify they did not say a word about their troubles with the DGSI hitherto because
they dreaded consequences for it. Yet some people, myself alike, think that this new story that came
in out the blue about French arms sales might rather be a red herring aiming to diverting the public
opinion from the Benalla Affair, of a much graver sort. As a matter of fact, this is a trick in
counterinfluence I earlier presented and otherwise describe in the Lexicon of this book at the entry
“Bury (to)”. Moreover, an additional hypothesis says the latter story might rather be a pretense
covering threats addressed to those other journalists, in case they would persist investigating and
reporting on the Benalla Affair, for it indeed put an unrelated end to the former since.
I deliver my take on the Benalla Affair, although I guess I expressed it through my way of
presenting it, already. From abroad, I surveyed the case unfolding with the curiosity the reader
imagine, and I noticed in particular simmering exasperations underlying obliged deference in a
number of journalists, television presenters, public servants, and other pundits of the old school.
This was no blessing in disguise though, because with the same clarity the suppressed indignation,
was it real or faked, was all for the chronic one-upmanship of the lofty young president and for his
undeserving yet hallowed bodyguard. The perceived social injustice all along remained the crux of
the scandal in their eyes, and thus relegated the too complicated Russian things to a degree nearing
insignificance.
In any other country than France, avatars of Benalla and his accomplices would have been
arrested and put into custody forthwith in separate and individual cells, and their interrogation
would still be ongoing at the end of the year 2019. Either the Russian oligarchs would have returned
to their country in emergency or they would not have the time to because the DGSI would have
indicted them on charge of espionage. As for the President, should the constitution provision the
possibility of impeachment, then the legislative body would certainly be leveling charges against
him, at least on the ground of gross and grave negligence. As a sure thing, the Articles of
Impeachment would pass the House, and the Senate would vote in favor of conviction by a landslide
and then would vote “Yes” to the removal from office of the President. Only in that case, I would
express a slightly different opinion saying the bodyguard indeed was a Russian agent, but he was
more likely to have acted as a trusted watchdog or team partner of the President than as a spy,
tasked to keep Russia abreast of his dailies, loyalty, and possible troubles he might get into. The
same conclusion would apply to the head of the security service to the Prime Minister, since the two
cases make for a precise and obvious pattern supporting the latter presumption. In passing and back
to the realities of the Benalla Affair, it is noteworthy that the control of the State over the media
seems less effective than it was before Emmanuel Macron was elected President.
The movie theater is now closed. I end this chapter on some generalities, useful to the
understanding of basics on the difference between French and Russian spies in their interactions
with each other, to which I will add a bonus.
The reader can see that in 2019, the French-Russian relationship is not really a secret anymore in
France, if ever it is still one in the United States and in all other countries. Everyone in the French
Government knows it as a fact and seems to accept it with a sorry resignation and journalists either,
as we have just seen. The difference with a secret is that it remains a denied truth at this moment,
which in words would translate as, “The shameful thing that no one is supposed to talk about”. This
is about as under the German occupation, we notice, except the new occupying forces do not wear
uniforms. It is not classified since it cannot possibly be, except when the French collaborators are
involved in quality of spies, as the case of Chokri Vakrim in the Benalla Affair exemplified it.
However, if talking openly about it still is a risky venture in the year 2019, yet some ones cannot
help themselves spill the beans then and now, as we have seen with the Freudian slips about the
“Russians mafia people privy to go in French ministries as they please,” and with the book of
reckless Cécile Vaissie—which I did not yet read because I had enough substance to fill this one,
already.
All American people know well French anti-Americanism, at least because the ruling elite of
France voices it regularly abroad and not always in veiled terms. Yet the French people had very
good reasons to love America more than ever from June 1944 and until 1971 at least, for its freedom
and for all the money and goods, the U.S. Government sent to France at the expense of its gold
reserves. Actually, the United States largely paid back to France the money they had asked for their
intervention in 1917-1918, and they gave to this country even much more. The indignant French
attitude over the war loan of the First World War was nothing but a false pretense that hid a problem
rather relevant to psychoanalysis, about money, materialism, and resigned submission to the suave
authority of the fox rather than to the blunt authoritarianism of the lion. In my all-personal opinion,
the latter fact is one of the main causes of the failure of the Americans in France to the benefit of the
Soviets after the WWII. The Soviet Union and Russia do not really matter in the absolute because if
it were not about them, then it would be all about the People’s Republic of China, beyond doubt as
Maoism indeed began to appeal to many in France in the 1960s. French people and not only those
working for the DGSE cannot help themselves look down into the Nietzschean abyss, as I ever
witnessed it; they have a problem with happy endings as much as with money, and its heroes must
all finish nailed on some cross or bound to a rock where an eagle would eat their livers endlessly.
Then the American way in politics is the complete opposite to the Russian one; this is a matter of
negotiating behavior, actually. The Russian way in its first approach lays largely on charm and on
mutual and friendly understanding around an idea of universalism and peace between people, and so
on, and on. Yet corruption and blackmail are awaiting at the end of the story, always. No matter how
good friend you can be with a Russian, this will never make you a Russian in his eyes because
Russian identity is what matters the most to him. Many French self-deluded with that, many repeat
the mistake today, and many paid and continue to pay dearly for it. All those would-be-far-leftists,
humanists, and other green activists are afraid now, and they are wondering about tomorrow and
even about their very lives, deep in their minds. Meanwhile, their Russian masters live in their
country in posh apartments and mansions on the Riviera, and ride Rolls Royce’s and big black
Mercedes on their roads.
Ironically, the Americans would possibly have won the Cold War in France, if only they had
adopted the same behavior as the Soviets; but this is not in the nature of the former, of course.
French reject freedom because they feel uncomfortable with it, and seeing others happy indeed
makes them unhappy, without any exaggeration because I am not the first to say this. Humorist
Coluche, I presented in the chapter 19, had a knack to send back to the French people their own
psyche in a way that seemed deceptively simplistic or too excessive to be serious. In one of his
sketches, Coluche coined the following epigram to sum up the enduring flaw of the French people,
and it stays hugely popular in France since, not coincidentally. “To be happy, the others must be
unhappy”.
I guess this chapter definitively explained in a few paragraphs how the remote Soviet influence of
the 1930s ultimately transformed France in a Russian vanguard against the United States, and
against the will of her own people ultimately. Sometimes, I heard French spies bearing a grudge
against Americans for the other reason of “not ever having to suffer a real war in their country”.
This assumption is historically false, of course, but that is because those who say it actually allude
to the torments of the German occupation in France and to a shameful French collaboration, they are
reproducing today with another country, as if there were no other way. I said why when I alluded to
their past monarchs and to more than a millennium of uninterrupted inhibition. The governments of
modern Western countries with a Protestant religious past are now ruling in sober and functional
buildings, whereas that of France needs monarchic palaces in which everything from floors to
ceiling is gold platted and must overwhelms the minds of the multitudes. Today, most French are
indisputably more ashamed with their use to kowtow than Germans are with their past Nazism, yet
their leaders can resume the vices of their predecessors of the Middle Age, undisturbed.
Russians have the advantage over the French to derive a strong sense of superiority from their
military capabilities and weapons, but above all from how they picture their collective self. Circa
1997-98, during a lunch I had with one of them in the basement of our cover company, he abruptly
began to bombast about a said-to-be gigantic submarine under construction, already christened
Moskva (Moscow). He could not help himself exulting about this ship in a way I had never known
of him before, as if it was bound to change the face of the World.
I began to meet Russian agents and SVR RF intelligence officers first unbeknownst to me and
then consciously from 1997-98. Thenceforth, I gradually identified two distinct categories of them:
the outstanding ones who learned to speak French without the slightest accent; and the others who
cannot and who indulge with openly rolling the “r” under pretenses of other nationalities. As a
DGSE insider, at some point, I did not find any longer difficult to make the difference between a
French spy and a Russian this agency could not have possibly trained. As French spies do, Russians
clearly went through a training that meant to shape their minds according to a precise template
however much different of the French standard. Yes, I claim there is a stereotype in the Russian spy.
If you knew one or two for a certain time I estimate to one year at minimum, then you would
recognize the others with a ease you would find striking, exactly as if they all were raised in a same
family. This is indeed surprising when considering the obvious need for secrecy. By the way, yes,
they prefer drinking tea, and hot tea was always ready in the premise where I worked for more than
two years with them. All this makes Russian spies entirely different of French spies. On the
contrary, there is a diversity in typology in the latter, and they may be very different characters from
each other even if a range of stereotypes exists in them in the end. I attempted to present a few
recurrent profiles of French field agents at the beginning of this book, but each rather meant to
provide the reader with some hints. Beyond these patterns, it is all about a matter of familiarity that
some could be tempted to call “feeling” or “intuition”.
In spite of what the reader may possibly presume about my thoughts, I still respect Russians
because they typically are staunch patriots, zealous, and hard to corrupt, unlike French, I am sorry to
say. The latter are those who must be chastised for their weakness, lack of decency, and more
especially their lack of self-esteem. To exemplify the latter remark, they cannot even sue me for
betrayal following the publishing of this book because the question would be, “Who and what am I
betraying, actually?” I never pledged any allegiance to Russia, for much I know, nor even
committed to communism, socialism or green activism, since even these ideologies are hoaxes,
formal aims and crookeries serving the interests of a few chosen ones, as I witnessed it a number of
times and continue so when browsing the media today.
I once read an interesting essay on French negotiating behavior written by Charles G. Cogan,
U.S. CIA Chief of Station in France between 1984 and 1989.[583] This was a coincidence, as I did
not buy this book because its author was in the CIA, but because I wanted to know how Americans
perceive French in the relations they have with them. In it, Cogan wrote that French have what he
calls “complex of the underdog”. To support his argument, he provides premises I fully endorse.
Cogan’s arguments and my own observations match in a striking way—that is why I recommend to
read his book, in passing. Its teachings will remain valid for long because it gives details on French
behavior, tactic, and strategy in negotiations I do not explain in mine. Reciprocally, I explain many
things Cogan could not afford to say due to his past official positions in Paris and today in his
country.
Overall, I reckon Russian intelligence officers are superior to their French counterparts in the
following ways. They are intellectually superior on average, to begin with. However, I assume those
who are sent to France are carefully selected people; Russian idiots abound as much as in any other
country, certainly. The recurrent flaw found in French intelligence officers is unnecessary arrogance
mixed with overplayed manhood and an inclination for bullying expressing in various ways. Most
French tend to pose as lesson givers, already. They know how to and how things ought to be; you do
not. At this time, President Emmanuel Macron is epitomizing the Gallic behavior, which earned him
to be popularly nicknamed “Jupiter” in his own country. No one ever heard of C. S. Lewis in
France, and there is nobody in this country to explain, “When we appear to be saying something
very important about something, we actually are only saying something about our own feelings”.
Russians, on the contrary, know this very well, possibly because of their interest in epistemology.
Actually, French spies and employees in intelligence who have true superior intellectual capacities
are never arrogant, I noticed, which fact often proves deceptive when trying to guess who holds
greater responsibilities. Often, the French intelligence officer is a brazen and blustering uneducated
drudge who makes others asking to themselves why he was entrusted so important responsibilities.
Some other times, he may be inversely of the “holier-than-thou” type who comes certainly from a
decent middle, but whose diplomas and credentials prove to exceed his intellectual capacities.
Nonetheless, I explained in the chapter 3 that outstanding intellectual capacities in the DGSE are not
determining. Still today, I am wondering whether the Russians would not be accountable for this
situation; for one may find the same pattern in about all French ordinary public services.
Meritocracy, since it exists in France, is rather ruled by blind obedience and political orthodoxy.
Then DGSE executives are overwhelmed by a military culture that commits them to a belief saying
that one has not been trained, put to the test in an elite unit, and did not parachute belongs to an
inferior breed.
The SVR RF does not care much about military hardship and parachute, apparently, and nothing
ever betrays anything akin to a military culture in them, whereas the opposite often comes out in
French spies, even in those who were recruited in the civilian middle, more often than not. Russians
want things to go as smoothly and quietly as possible with their Gallic servants, above all. The
different origins, culture, and history in Russians support their strong civilian discipline, authentic
esprit de corps and patriotism, whereas French do not parallel these qualities.
Then comes in French spies a far-leftist stance that may clash with the special privileges a few are
offered, which sometimes reproduces at a senior level in the DGSE; whereas it comes as a surprise
that Russian spies seem unconcerned with politics beyond the Russian national interest and fighting
the United States. They do not even indulge in using depreciating jargon to name the Americans,
unlike their French partners. How to crusade against social inequality, the virtues of sharing,
fighting the global warming and so forth, all the while wearing conspicuously a full-gold Cartier
watch, going to posh restaurants, riding high-end Mercedes, living in a mansion, and so on? To
exemplify this French contradiction, I remember vividly of a barbouze who had fun with replacing
the “6” by a “0” in the number “600” on the trunk of his Mercedes. Yes, a “zero,” if the reader
remembers the meaning. This man on his late fifties did this because by parading with a twelve
cylinders Mercedes “000,” he could implicitly demonstrate the existence of an “aristocracy in
nothingness”. He still claimed to belong to the working class. Well, not all spies invested with
important responsibilities share the oddity, and many lead much ordinary lives, inversely
incommensurate to their skills and education. It would be difficult to me to explain the discrepancies
on a case-by-case basis; each has a particular origin that is different of all the others, I believe.
Notwithstanding, Russian intelligence officers of the Russian Federation era indeed remain
committed to the old Soviet communist values, in theory at least and for much I could understand,
but this comes in them as an honorable historical heritage and not as a practice in everyday life. As
for the idea I find in the media saying the Russians support the far right in Western countries, the
reader should not be fooled by this hasty assumption. Russians truly are staunch nationalists first,
which does not imply some rightist ideology. The truth about the connation between the Russians
and far-rightist movements nowadays actually owes to their concern about not to let the growing
rightist trend in the World gently evolving to a closeness in spirit with the United States. At this
time, they are certainly well aware that the new rise of the Right is consequent to a decades-old ad
nauseam promotion of the leftist and green-activist narratives. Truly, the political right today comes
out as a rejection of the overwhelming recurrence of the latter in political discourses and as formal
aims to enforce stringent state control, rules, and regulations over too many aspects in people lives.
Therefore, the Russian tactic is to drive people attracted by the new rightist narrative toward its
German national socialist version, opposite to American capitalist and individualist values.
Wherefrom, the effort in domestic influence in France for confusing the masses on political theories,
on the definitions of the words “liberalism,” “republicanism,” “progressivism,” and even on the
notions of “Right” and “Left” in politics. What the difference is between a far-rightist and a
communist hardliner, essentially? Simply, the former is ultra-nationalist; everything else is the same
in the facts. The few who attempt to refugee in an anarchist stance, libertarians included, are driven
toward the narratives of Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, or even Trotsky; we talk of “leftist
anarchism” without minding the contradiction. Therefrom, the discourse easily transforms Marx and
Che Guevara into “true anarchists” and “proponents of freedom”.
Russians in France do their best to be discreet, and then they are wary to conceal their feeling of
superiority over the former country and its citizens. This clearly is a pattern telling they are
instructed to behave so. Then exceptions exist in the face of French cowardice, inescapably; the
Russian contempt toward the French people happens to be visible, and it is understandable.
Collectively, Russians in France want to pass as “good guys,” mindful, thoughtful, educated, polite,
and weighted whenever they can. Expressing their displeasure is a degrading task they relinquish to
French doorkeepers and other foreign mercenaries, including with their fellow citizens living in
France, since some happen sometimes to be punished for their excesses, indeed. That is why I doubt
the media report one day a case of physical elimination in France done by the GRU, even if this
military intelligence service actually is more often responsible of this chore than the Service Action
and the barbouzes are; a rising number of clues are pointing out this other reality. To exemplify this,
I strongly doubt the DGSE ordered and carried out the physical eliminations of Lieutenant Colonel
Bernard Nut, former Service Action Daniel Forestier, Matra-Hachette CEO Jean-Luc Lagardère,
and intelligence officer Thierry Imbot.
As Russians in France are wary to feel connected in thought to their country and their minds not
be “polluted” by foreign culture, they generally do not have a television set at home and read the
news in newspapers and on the Internet instead. In addition, it may surprise the reader that those
who have children go as far as to deny them watching television in France. Possibly, they do this
upon formal instruction or recommendation. The one to whom I once asked why simply answered
that “watching television dazes people,” and that was all.
Russians enjoy the advantage to be sheltered from the throes of self-delusion and cognitive
dissonance French spies must cope with permanently, as far as appearances suggested this to me.
Russians are ready to fool people at the first opportunity, but contrary to their French colleagues,
they do not keep on insisting when they understand the target is not going to bite the bait; chess
game indeed is a reference to them. Instead, they leave a little time to pass on and try again with a
different tactic, and so forth. Russian intelligence officers are intellectually superior to their agents;
this must not be seen as a truism since it does not necessarily apply to their French colleagues.
However, I admit that I have found it more difficult to tell the difference between a Russian
intelligence officer born in Russia and one from another country. In the end, I simplified my way to
solve the conundrum by considering arbitrarily that both were same people, since they have the
same objectives—I confess I am a proponent of Occam’s razor and of the Gordian knot, each time
solutions and explanations prove elusive. Perhaps this approach did not deceive me, knowing that
Russian intelligence officers and agents often present themselves in Western countries as
immigrants from other nations whose language allows them to better conceal their accent. Does my
reader feel able to tell the difference between a Bulgarian or a Romanian, or even a Colombian, and
a national of one of these three countries speaking with a slight Russian accent?
Altogether, the characteristics of the Russian intelligence officer make him a spy one should
never underestimate. Chatting, joking, and laughing with him is possible, but trust is not an option.
This compels me to say that big changes certainly occurred in Russian intelligence with respect to
promotion and hierarchy since the Soviet era.
At some point in the chapter 21, I warned, “The name Udeanu much sounds Romanian, an
important fact that the reader must keep in mind for later”. If the reader also read the texts and
footnotes about Minister of Defense Charles Hernu and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, he certainly
noticed that French senior officials found to be Soviet agents were not all handled by Russians, but
by Romanian intelligence officers and case officers, and by the Romanian intelligence agency. I did
not add a footnote to the name of General Philippe Rondot, I named earlier in this chapter, and so I
specify now that when this intelligence officer was deputy chief of station in Romania during the
Cold War, he disappeared for three days, along with his cryptographer. Rondot would have fallen
for a sexual entrapment in Romania, allegedly. Upon his return to France, his interrogation led by
the Security Service of the DGSE would have brought no conclusive evidence of his corruption by
the Romanian intelligence service the Securitate. The official story in the DGSE says Rondot fell in
disgrace thereupon. However, how is that possible that he rose to the rank of general thereafter,
given the gravity of his fault and his subsequent disgrace, as the Security Service is supposed to
deny a so high promotion in a case of this kind? More to my point, why Rondot was appointed
special adviser to the director of the DST upon the election of François Mitterrand in 1981, knowing
the official version of his story says he was still under suspicion to have been recruited by the
Romanians at that time; that is to say, by the Soviets? By the way, Rondot happened to work in team
with DGSE senior intelligence officer Alain Juillet, named earlier in the chapter on intelligence and
freemasonry and in another for his close ties with Russia.
Now, the reader is certainly wondering about, “Why Romania, and not East Germany,
Czechoslovakia, or Hungary? Why the Soviets did not simply recruit and handle so many of their
sources and agents by their own?” Since the Cold War, the Soviet Union and Russia eventually
often use Romanian agents as proxies. Then as France was already a conquered country to them
after the WWII, they changed entirely their strategy according to terms I explained earlier in this
chapter. In other words, they needed to substantiate the denial of their influence in French affairs,
and they found that simply rejecting their responsibility to Romania was good enough, even if this
other country was their private garden either. I present all the reasons for this, as they are nowadays.
First, when a Russian source or agent in France has been framed as such by a third-party foreign
intelligence or counterintelligence service—since this is a means to coerce him into cooperating as
triple-agent—or when he is no longer of any use and becomes a liability, then Russia cannot be
publicly incriminated as the culprit. Romania, an insignificant and would-be-independent country is,
instead. Moreover, neither the media nor the public are much interested in Romanian spies.
Contrariwise, everyone pays attention when the noun “Russian” is uttered or printed, and the case
becomes instantly an affair that may drag on for years.
Second, a compromised source or agent, therefore, is hardly in position to ask for anything to
Russia. As Romania was not the actual beneficiary of the service the source or agent rendered, then
it is not a problem to the Romanian intelligence service to turn in him to the DGSI, with the
additional benefit of a pretense of good will addressing the public opinion. In such case, French
counterspies nonetheless act as passive accomplices of the Russians in the scheme that actually is a
setup; and the name of the source or agent may even be leaked to the media as a practical way to get
rid of him definitively through discredit. Therefore, the burned source or agent cannot expect any
compensation nor help of any sort from anyone; often, though not always, he will not live for long
thereafter, since he is become an embarrassing, undesirable, and worthless individual, whose mere
existence does much harm to the image and reputation of France. Russia wants assets, and she uses
to get rid of her liabilities “the hard way”.
Third, Romania has the double particularity to be a former satellite country of the Soviet Union,
friendly with Russia today, and where an unusually high number of people speak French
historically. French is the second foreign language spoken in Romania, with an estimated 24% of
her population who speak it in 2018. Because of this, France also ranks second as the foreign
country where Romanians most favor to immigrate and to work, which makes their important
minority in this country a normal and unimportant particular; much less likely to raise scrutiny as
the other important Russian presence does today.
Fourth, because of all explanations above, Romanians are the first auxiliaries of Russia in
intelligence activities in France, mainly used as handlers, agents, agents in place in private
businesses and public services, or the more often under cover activities of independent and freelance
workers.
Russia also makes an intensive use of Romanian for her intelligence missions and operations in
and from Italy because as the Romanian and Italian tongues are close, then it is easier for a
Romanian to learn Italian than any other foreign language. Additionally, as 30% of the Romanian
population speaks English, then Russia uses Romanians as agents in English-speaking countries
either.
Remarkably, Russia however does not much use Romanians in France as henchmen, tailers, and
for surveillance tasks and “dirty jobs”. To carry out jobs of this under-category, she relies largely on
Serbs, which comes to explain the true reason for which the DGSE also favors Serbs to execute
similar missions. Serb immigrants the DGSE hires on an occasional basis actually “belong” to the
Russian intelligence community in France. There are also Romanian prostitutes used for sexual
entrapments, handled in France and in this context by male Romanians, and not directly by
Russians. Those women live in conditions akin to slavery—I once saw one with his Romanian
handlers to explain this. Death threats are common, and cases of assassination have known some
spikes, in addition to even greater numbers of Albanian women, whose bodies were found in woods
surrounding Paris in the 1990s. Almost all those assassinations of Slavic prostitutes and sex slaves
remain cold cases, and the French media never report them, simply because no one really care about
them, and it would be bad publicity for France.
 24. Policy, Objectives & Targets.
The longest French intelligence mission also concerns the
oldest target country of France, and it has the additional
particularity to be a never-ending story. The reader knows
already that the United Kingdom is one among several priority
targets of the DGSE, essentially because of the other special
relationship this country has with the United States since the
aftermath of the WWII, and before because Britannia was
France’s main challenger overseas in a quest for colonies and
aggrandized dominion. The feud between the two countries
began with the Battle of Hastings in 1066, followed by more
than two centuries of French occupation, as everyone knows.
That is why the story I am going to tell began in Scotland
when the British people was regaining complete possession of
its land, in the early 14th century.
The region of present-day Scotland or so was called
“Kingdom of the Picts” from the 6th century AD. The Picts
formed a group of people whose cultural origins date back to
the Bronze Age on one side, and to the Celts on the other. By
the middle of the 10th century, the Kingdom of the Picts
changed its name for “Alba”; that is to say, after the founding
of the Kingdom of Scotland in 843. If the name was coined in
Scotland, it is also the root of “Albion,” oldest name of
England in its current geography. The Treaty of York in 1237
drawn and formalized clearly the border between the Kingdom
of Scotland and England, and it remained the same since,
remarkably. Therefore, we can say it was at the latter date that
Scotland began to exist, as we know her today.
Scottish knight and leading figure of the First War of
Scottish Independence William Wallace was born a few
decades later in 1270, historians estimate. At that time, the
little Kingdom of Scotland had become politically independent
to that of England, but not of France’s, as many ignore it.
Even, French still remained the official language in Britain
until the first half of the 14th century, whereas all British
commoners actually ever stuck to their local dialects until
William Caxton brought the printing press in the country, and
Geoffrey Chaucer and then William Shakespeare formatted a
universal English tongue. Therefore, Scotland was the last
region where the French power and culture receded before it
completely disappeared from the British archipelago, circa the
1360-1370s.
I just draw the overall picture of a political situation in the
13d century, which will bring to the knowledge of the reader
some non-trivial facts about who William Wallace indeed was
from another angle than that of the romantic and propagandist
movie Braveheart (1995).
In the years preceding the Treaty of York, and from a period
in the history of the Kingdom of Scotland that historians use to
call “Davidian Revolution,” the French occupiers of England
had established in Scotland autonomous administrative entities
called burghs, or bourgs, in French, a word that is still in use
today in France to name a rural city. Additionally, France had
instituted in Scotland the Catholic ideals of the Gregorian
Reformation that Pope Gregory VII had just launched to
strengthen the power of Rome over the monarchies of Europe.
The French had founded monasteries in Scotland under the
authority of Rome, and they had established a French-Norman
administrative dependence of the region. Thereupon, they had
introduced a feudal system governed by French-English
knights served by French immigrants. Actually, Scotland was
an early form of the French-African colonial governance
system, very elaborate at the time already.
It turns out that William Wallace actually was one of the
servants of this feudal system. The Scottish hero was
enamored of a territory that truly was dependent politically on
the Kingdom of France and on Rome religiously. Wallace
defended France and Rome interests only, and not at all a
Scotland free of all political, cultural, and religious influence,
as it is popularly believed, and as the reader is going to see. As
for the official creation of the Kingdom of Scotland with the
Treaty of York of 1237, it was in truth only the temporary
admission by England of a French possession on the main
English island. This is a first historical omission to the legend
of William Wallace in the movie Braveheart, as it presents it
to us deceptively. Below, is the material and definitive
evidence of this.
In 2005, the British National Archives handed over to the
Scottish Parliament a document of great historical value for
Scotland, previously discovered in the archives of the Tower
of London around 1830. This is a safe conduct manuscript
written on November 7, 1300 by King Philip IV of France,
addressed to William Wallace. It says in Latin, translated in
modern English,
“Phillip [IV], King of France to his lieges at the Roman
Court. Commands them to request the Pope’s [Boniface VIII]
favor for his beloved William le Wallace of Scotland, Knight,
in the matters which he wishes to forward with His Holiness,
Monday after All Saints [i.e. November 7, 1300],
Pierrefonds.”
Today’s historians, Scottish and English alike, all believe
William Wallace did receive this accreditation that presented
him with the rank of Knight in the French nobility, and thus as
a political executive in the French forces of occupation in
Scotland. As for the “them” who are not named in the
message, the same historians know they were secret agents of
the King of France in office at the papal court of Rome.
Wallace was the son of a family of humble nobility, whose
name “Wallace” is a Scottish surname derived from the Anglo-
Norman French waleis, which in turn would suggest an
incomer from Wales, or the Welsh Marches. William Wallace
became a prominent figure at the time of Scotland’s attempt to
regain independence from England, but not from France, as
the reader knows now. For in 1296, fifty-nine years after the
Treaty of York, the army of King Edward I of England had
invaded the Kingdom of Scotland that had become politically
unstable. Three more years later in 1299, Wallace and his
French and Catholic protectors had lost control of their
resistance movement against the British. The historians have
established that Wallace tripped to Paris around the latter year,
to pay visit to King of Scotland John Balliol who had taken
refuge there. It is also known that Wallace and Balliol were
waiting for a French armed expedition to Scotland because
Philip IV of France had solemnly promised to support this
possession against the English enemy.
More than half a millennium later, the presentation by film
actors Mel Gibson and Sophie Marceau’s of all the latter facts,
and the portrait of William Wallace they proposed to the
World, and to the Scottish in particular, we understand, could
have exerted enough influence possibly in a vote in favor of an
independent Scotland from England. France dearly and
secretly would like to see this event materializes again today
because this would literally cut the latter country in two, which
in conjunction with the other problem of Ireland and its own
separatists might perhaps start a balkanization of England, and
eventually makes this country much weaker than it is today,
i.e. a “Disunited Kingdom”. Doubtless, such an event would
have served the interests of Russia first, and crowned the
overdue expectations of France.
For decades, France and the Soviet Union helped discreetly
Northern Ireland in the endeavor it would secede from
England. I was explained all this not until the mid-1990s,
again by Frédéric de Pardieu, confirmed thereafter by another
of my ex-colleagues who introduced me to a young Irish
separatist on his late twenties tripping to Paris. As I was no
field spy, I spent an entire afternoon together with the
secessionist talking about Irish music and differences in
culture and opinions between Ireland and Britain. After or
before this meeting, I could not say, I was taught on
similarities between French-Breton dialect, Irish dialects of
Celtic and Welsh; that is to say, a myth acceptable enough to
support a coherent secessionist narrative.
In France and in the DGSE in particular, there is an
epigrammatic joke to boast French victory in the United
Kingdom saying, “London is the sixth largest French city”. It
seems Londoners appreciate it bitterly, as Boris Johnson
testified of it on a speech that he delivered at a Tory
conference in October 2013 when he was Mayor of London.
“Not so long ago my friends I—we welcome all sorts of
luminaries to City Hall. But not so long ago I welcomed the
former French Prime Minister, Monsieur Alain Juppé to my
office in City Hall, and he cruised in with his sizeable retinue
of very distinguished fellows with their Légion d’Honneur
floret and all the rest of it, and we shook hands and had a tête a
tête, and he told me that he was now the Mayor of Bordeaux.
“I think he may have been Mayor of Bordeaux when he was
Prime Minister, it’s the kind of thing they do in France—a
very good idea in my view.
“Joke, joke, joke! And what he said—joke! He said that he
had the honour of representing, he had 239,517 people in
Bordeaux, and therefore he had the honour of representing the
ninth biggest city in France.
“I got the ball back very firmly over the net, folks, because I
said there were 250,000 French men and women in London,
and therefore I was the mayor of the sixth biggest French city
on earth.”
To underscore the significance of the latter number, there
would have been a little more than 300,000 French living in
the entire United States in 2018. In the mid-1990s, the DGSE
invited me to register to a bus study trip to England spanning
three days—our vehicle was carried by ferry to go, and by the
train going through the Channel Tunnel for the return. While
in London, our enlightened bus driver guided our tour to the
big green and beige building of the MI6 headquarters by the
Thames, and stopped front of it on the opposite bank under the
pretense to tasting the fish and fries of a food truck that parked
there. We all ate our meal while enjoying a good view on the
building of the British intelligence service, chatting about it
with my colleague Régis Poubelle who happened to have a
long experience in counterintelligence against the British and
the Americans. Then we proceeded with the building of the
MI5, that of Scotland Yard, those of the U.S. and Australian
embassies, ending on the monumental edifice of the United
Grand Lodge of England–UGLE. Apparently, our bus driver
thought the London Tower and Big Ben were unworthy of
interest. In a small town near Leicester, a British lawyer and
his wife lodged me; to my surprise, both of them knew about
my secret quality. Yet, the couple guarded courteously from
asking too many questions; they spoke very few words of
French nonetheless, and by then my English limited to
technical words in the field of computer technology.
France’s objectives and targets are those of Russia, the
reader understood at this point of his reading. Russia instructs
France to act according to her capacities and opportunities that
are different and complementary to her own, still for the
moment. In spite of this situation, many political leaders and
governments find an advantage in it each time they strike a
deal with France in order not to pose as a partner of Russia on
the international stage. This explains why the countries they
represent have a stake at some point in denying the existence
of the Russian-French special relationship; herein we are not
far from willful blindness, again. Then, when a country posing
as a partner of the United States enters officially into business
with Russia, it often is a manoeuver aiming to obtain further
concessions from the former country in reality. Or else
negotiating with France can still be an acceptable manner to
obtain discreetly tacit agreements they need from Russia.
Reciprocally, France very often intervenes on the diplomatic
stage to obtain concessions from countries that would find
embarrassing or even impossible to accord to Russia openly.
In this game of denials, the reader notices, France
distinguishes herself by being remarkably refractory to
Chinese investments on her soil, especially by comparison
with many other Western countries. The latter particularity has
been mirroring the position of Russia vis-à-vis to China for
decades. On a same tune, Russia and France ever cautiously
limited their relations with China to occasional and limited
exchanges and partnerships. I guess James J. Angleton’s belief
in a secret partnership between the U.S.S.R. and China never
existed beyond what I just specified.
Since the official end of the Cold War and the birth of the
Russian Federation, countries ruled by Russia unofficially are
no longer called “satellites,” and we find the same pattern with
France that no longer calls “colonies” the African countries
she continues to rule since the end of the Algerian War in
1962. This new situation allowed Russia and France to
emancipate themselves from complicated issues that the
United States and the UNO are prompt to raise. With respect
to the special relationship between Russia and France, this
“new deal” engendered a cascade of responsibilities and other
partnerships hiding true dominions. The additional advantage
for Russia is she does not have to pay for everything France
does for her, since the latter country is in the position of
conquered territory, and not at all in that of ally in the sense
this word conveys to everyone. The difficulty in this game is
to maintain appearances of French sovereignty, and this
applies to Russia as much as to France, given the stakes for the
former country. If ever Russia decided to make the situation
official tomorrow, France would not have a say in it, and she
would not even issue a press communiqué, probably.
The reader also understands why France still sticks to her
formal aims and claims to be a faithful ally to the United
States. Since 2016, however, there has been a visible reversal
of perception in foreign affairs and of the protection of the
national interests in the United States, which the public could
hardly notice before 2018, shortly after the election of Donald
Trump. The reason for the sudden change in the attitude of the
United States with respect to Russia, France, Germany, and a
number of other countries, we notice, was not only the
Russians have no intention to content themselves with a
stalemate in their relations with the Americans, but also they
resumed the relentlessness of the Soviet Union during the
heights of the Cold War. It should be said, the rather passive
attitude and benevolence of the United States since 1991 was
no longer tenable and had to stop short of resignation. In the
United Kingdom, the campaign and referendum on the Brexit
echoes the reaction of the United States.
Since U.S. President Donald Trump announced the
withdrawal of his country from the Paris Agreement on
climate change in June 2017 and from the Iran Nuclear Deal in
May 2018 thereupon, French journalists, press correspondents,
and political pundits comment and deliver cold statements on
France’s relations with the United States. Since the early
months of 2019, “The Americans are no longer our allies” is
become a recurrent byword in the highly politicized French
mainstream media. Often, French prominent journalists ask to
French politicians already loaded questions to which the
simple answers “Yes” or “No” could suffice, to the point that
an eerie confusion between the latter and the former settles.
Russia seems to add some oil on the fire, yet sporadically and
unpredictably, as if she did not want anyone to guess what will
be her next move about France because she is not afraid of
chicken games. We all have seen this with the Missile Crisis in
Cuba erstwhile.
Unquestionably, we entered a new Cold War, whose
beginning was marked symbolically, in my opinion, by the
assassination in the United Kingdom of Russian former FSB
officer and defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, thirteen
years ago, already. In France, the key event was the election of
Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008 that brought considerable changes
and evolutions in the French intelligence community,
tantamount, indeed, to a sudden escalation in the secret war
against the United States that hitherto was just gently growing.
The masses of sleepwalkers are now awakening because the
will to keep them asleep is waning on both sides of the
Atlantic. Trump gave the “go” of this change in the change in
April 2018 by refusing to sign again the Paris Agreement on
the meeting in Washington with his French counterpart,
historical since then. All American people understood what
was happening in the relations between their country and
France, as they knew what Trump meant when he swept
ostensibly some imaginary dandruffs on the shoulder of
Macron before a retinue of journalists. In France, the foreign
innuendo mistook the masses in understanding it belatedly as
nothing more than American familiarity echoing Macron’s
pats in the back of Trump. For a while, French journalists and
experts on U.S. policy who know well what the motion means
were careful not to contradict the misconception. The lie by
omission no longer saved anything when on April 29 of the
same year, The Guardian titled “Tree planted at White House
by Trump and Macron appears to have vanished”. The French
media revealed the would-be-potent symbol did not survive a
quarantine, mandatory for any living organism imported in the
United States. Nonetheless, the short journey of the French
oak sapling from the site of a pivotal First World War battle
involving the U.S. marines had become insignificant, as
Trump just announced the withdrawal of the United States
from the Iran Nuclear Deal on which France dearly counted
either. Macron and his ministers experienced America’s
receding from signing again the Paris Agreement and the Iran
Nuclear Deal on a row as a watershed moment, much visibly.
Having followed the news on the “Trump-Russia Dossier”
diligently and even with certain anxiety, I seize the
opportunity to say I understood in May 2018 that Trump could
not have been possibly compromised by Russia when, on that
month, I heard the news about his decision to withdraw from
the Iran Nuclear Deal. For if Trump indeed had colluded with
Russia and had acted since then in the interest of this country,
therefore, all he had to do was to put his signature on a treaty
that someone else had already approved before him, and he
would not even have to suffer the scrutiny of anyone for this.
See no allusion in my saying that his predecessor Barack
Obama would be compromised; that is not what I want to say
nor imply. Certainly, Obama did not decide this alone in the
Oval Office, and he was president at a time that was not yet
2018. Perhaps, the reader is insightful enough to understand
that, arrived in the latter year, the real worry for the United
States was no longer about whether Iran would be in capacity
to build atomic bombs, but the relentlessness of this country—
truly another Russian proxy, for the record—in sowing unrest
and in creating troubles in the entire Arabian Peninsula. Today,
the real aims of the Iran Nuclear Deal for Iran, Russia, Syria,
and even France, as the reader is going to see, are all about the
latter reality, and, in the end, in Russia’s ambition to settle her
power in the Arabian Peninsula where her prime target is
Saudi Arabia, and Israel the stone in her shoe. I did not
mention Lebanon, as this country today belongs to Russia via
Syria and Iran and is too weak to count for anything, I am
sorry to say.
All on the contrary, Trump did a daring move with his
refusal to vouch the Iran Nuclear Deal, which infuriated
Russia and France to an extent that by far exceeded what the
media reported. Trump’s additional decision since then to add
sanctions on Iran, more stringent than ever, translates as
considerable losses to France and the end of great expectations
to Russia in the Arabian Peninsula.
Following the new U.S. posture, the sabotage of oil tankers
in the Strait of Ormuz in May and June 2019, and the downing
of a U.S. RQ-4 Global Hawk drone on June 20, 2019—done
by Iran, as everyone understood—truly aimed to nothing but
to elicit a thoughtless and strong reaction from Trump’s
Government, military, of course. If ever these provocations
had been successful, the unforeseeable yet certainly bad
consequences for this would have greatly dented the
popularity of Trump’s government and diminished his chances
to access a second presidential term. By the same occasion, all
this provided us with clues suggesting the current leader of
North Korea cannot decide for everything in this country,
contrary to what most people assumed until recently. For
North Korea clearly aligns on a policy similar to that of Iran
vis-à-vis the United States, oddly against its own interests and
rather serving those of Russia in effects. Otherwise, I am
asking to the reader, “Which are the interests for Iran and
North Korea in looking for confrontation with the United
States and their allies, since the experience proved for decades
that it does not pay and put them in a situation of isolation and
economic distress?” Why Iran resumed unabashedly her
hostile activities via the Hezbollah against Israel and
elsewhere in the Arabian Peninsula, instead of tempering her
ardors and demonstrating her good will for obtaining the
release of the sanctions that cripple her?
In any case, if Trump and his government owe their
popularity in their country to their policy of caring for the
domestic economy first, they do it also to their unwillingness
to intervene abroad and to yield to the temptation of a military
response that, in 2019 in particular, seemed to impose itself a
little too obviously.
In the end, we understand the how and why of the important
change in the relations between France and the United States
that will stand as a turning point in American contemporary
history, regardless of any partisan stance and of what one may
think of Trump as a person. As I was still watching French
television programs from abroad in 2018 and 2019, I also
noticed Russia and France were struggling to adapt to the new
U.S. posture, as they clearly failed to foresee its suddenness.
Indeed, it seemed that Russia and France were caught by
surprise, and that they could not imagine that one day a U.S.
government would dare challenge them on the enduring
dilemma of the lesser and greater evils. The time of American
inhibition clearly is over.
Since even before the election of Trump as president, his
political opponents and many journalists on both sides of the
Atlantic have repeated, “he is an unpredictable guy capable to
tell more than ten lies in a single day and to go back on his
promise without any compunction”. Well, in my opinion,
herein Trump simply was the first U.S. president to do what
the opponents of the United States have been doing since the
end of the WWII—or since the mandate of Richard Nixon, we
have seen earlier. The difference in the method, however, since
there was one, was Trump’s government did not care about
shrouding its actions in a veil of false pretenses and usual
diplomatic humdrums. Since the election of Trump, the U.S.
government did not decide to adopt active measures, of course,
but to introduce an unprecedented attitude of
straightforwardness in foreign affairs and not to rely anymore
only on passive soft power to counter disinformation,
propaganda, and agitprop. The drastic change also made the
government of Trump the first ever in American history to
expose the real aims—though not always, of course. It was the
first to disregard passion and to force the American Nation to
face reason first, for once. A about the same time, we notice,
the United Kingdom mirrored or close to the attitude of the
United States, coinciding or not with the rise to power of Boris
Johnson.
Therefrom, no wonder why many American people found
shocking the positions Trump took and the way he and his
government steered the huge boat America; seasickness
guaranteed. However, if the new method proved successful to
the U.S. national interest and the economy of this country in
particular, it has the handicap not to go by the rule of the
narrative written to elicit passionate feelings from the masses,
however brilliant Trump is in addressing the masses and in
communication. The few who think are never numerous
enough to lead the majority of those who do not. Therefore,
either Trump or his successor will be forced to revert to formal
aims soon or late.
In 2019, I saw an increasing number of French specialists in
foreign affairs, security, and defense, stating on their
interviews it is in the interest of France to cooperate officially
with Russia for “defending the country against the
aggrandized recklessness of the Americans”. This was much
of a change in posture in France either, especially by
comparison with 2018 and earlier, when the same experts
advocated greater E.U. autonomy and stronger capacities in
defense and security instead. Nonetheless, due to all facts I
presented in the previous chapter, France understood since late
2018 that the denial of her special relationship with Russia is
become untenable. Still at that time and pending further
developments, the United States adopted a new use to acting
noncommittally with France. Ominously for the latter country,
Americans officials no longer expressed themselves on the
exact nature of their relationship with it.
How France interprets the new U.S. attitude and her
prospects? I guess I know enough about France’s politics and
agenda to give some answers to this question.
Still in 2019, French strategists and economists were scared,
beyond doubt. For France’s costly special relationship with
Russia in actuality has been about tenable until the mid-2018
thanks to the United States heretofore complacent. The end of
the American tolerance forebodes difficulties in France’s
economic enterprises abroad that superseded her nuclear force
de frappe that she used to assert her reaching military capacity
overseas until she shifted in the 1990s to an economic
perception of warfare. Since the latter period, France has been
overspending in merges and acquisitions abroad and in
relevant intelligence capacities as De Gaulle did in atomic
weapons, air force, and navy though without really
relinquishing the latter. The cumulating of needs that also
imply subsequent expenditures in domestic intelligence has
been dramatically infringing upon France’s domestic budget,
which her progressive politics made costly already. Moreover,
all this has been made possible for so long a time thanks to
resources France takes from the unofficial continuation of her
colonialism in Western Africa. Africa is an important pillar of
French power and economic resources, for the record, without
which she could not pose on an equal footing as partner of
Germany to lead the European Union. Otherwise, her political,
economic, and military power would be similar to these of
Italy since the end of the WWII.
In her warmongering ambitions against the United States
and her standing apart from the NATO decided and ruled by
Russia since the Soviet era, France failed to see how she was
going to cope with her ever-worsening problems at home,
whereas she knows never Russia would help her, should her
economy no longer follow. Given her special relationship with
Russia and her costly domestic policy, she knew that failure is
highly likely to drive her toward a situation analogous to that
of a satellite country in the former Soviet era. Indeed, we have
seen in the chapter on domestic intelligence that France’s
domestic economy and social issues rank her 137th on 158
reference countries in the 2019 GINI index of distribution of
family income, already. France’s power on the international
stage truly comes at this cost. She is worrying about the safety
of her interests in Africa, as about her business prospective in
a number of other countries. As a matter of fact, the specter of
official and unofficial U.S. sanctions is already materializing
as the end of the Iran Nuclear Deal, as we are going to see
with relevant facts and figures.
For long, France has been chasing partners abroad in her
expectation to pose someday as a challenger in the U.S.
automobile sector. This began by a collaboration of Renault
cars with Swedish automobile manufacturer Volvo from the
late 1970s to 2012, with Renault partnering with American
Motors Corporation–AMC to build Jeep cars with Renault
parts, lending AMC operating capital and buying a minority
22.5% stake in the company, which eventually evolved to
47.5% and resulted in AMC becoming a French company.
Renault sold AMC to Chrysler in 1987, an American brand
purchased in 1998 by German automaker Daimler. From 2000
Renault purchased 43.4% of Japanese automaker Nissan’s
shares and acquired voting power while it relinquished to
Nissan only 15% of Renault and no voting power, thereby
giving it effective control over Nissan. Renault has a 50%
stake in the joint venture Renault-Nissan b.v., established to
manage the Renault-Nissan alliance and to lead the two joint
companies. As in this year 2019, Renault thus is holding the
sixth position under the brand Nissan with 6.8% of market
shares in the U.S. automobile sector, behind Honda. Still in
2018, Renault was expecting to sell cars under its own name in
the United States by the 2020s. Since the change of attitude of
the latter country the same year, France is certainly foreboding
her prospects slipping into her fingers, wherefrom her recent
attempts for an advantageous joint venture with Fiat–Chrysler
and considerable investments in green cars thanks to the
financial capacities of Renault-Nissan. However, in 2018, a
crisis broke out between Renault and Nissan around the
unbalance of power largely favoring the former company, and
status of the latter as being truly owned and controlled by the
French State, whose agenda is actually ruled by political
calculations pertinent to economic war France is waging
against the United States.
My shift to the subject of France’s ambitions in and against
the United States in the automobile sector is no wandering
from the question of the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran
Nuclear Deal. First, the trip of President Emmanuel Macron to
Washington in April 2018 was all about it, but, perhaps, the
reader ignores why this beyond his pretense to act as a
mediator between the signatory countries to the treaty and the
United States.
To begin, as a Russian proxy country, France not only is a
longtime friend of Iran, but she even acted as a major actor in
the Iranian Revolution of 1979, thus putting an end to decades
of good relations between Iran and the United States and
making it a representative of the Soviet interests in the Middle
East. In 1978, Ruhollah Mūsavi Khomeini aka Ayatollah
Khomeini came to seek refuge in France, as political dissident
of Iran then ruled by the Shah of Iran, a close ally to the
United States. The French Government lodged him under
heavy protection and security in a large mansion in Neauphle-
le-Château, greater and bourgeois Western suburb of Paris.
There, Khomeini could meet with numerous political and
intellectual personalities, and France and Russia helped him
prepare his revolution in Iran, in particular by propagating his
ideas by audio cassettes broadcast, duplicated in large numbers
upon their delivery in Iran. The stratagem allowed the
propaganda to evade the efforts of the Iranian Government in
against subversive activities designed from the Soviet Union
by the KGB. This explains why France has about always
maintained good relations with this country since 1979, except
during the Iran-Iraq War because France also had excellent
relations with Saddam Hussein.
Reciprocally, Iran remained to France one of her most
important trading partners in the region, especially through a
deal “oil for automobiles”. Indeed, Iranian automaker Iran
Khodro–IKCO has a long-term close relationship with its
French counterpart Peugeot Citroën–PSA and is
manufacturing and assembling a number of French car’s
models under license from the latter company. This explains
why cars in Iran are overwhelmingly French and look familiar
to French who trip in this country and see Iranian traffic on
television. Until 2012, IKCO automobiles incorporated
between 5 to 10% of Peugeot components imported from
France for an amount of 700-800 million euros ($572–654
million) a year. However, late on that year, the international
sanctions on Iran ratcheted down economic exchanges
between France and Iran, and Peugeot was forced to cut its
relations with IKCO. Four years later in 2016, after reaching
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action between Iran and E3+3,
IKCO and Peugeot agreed on making a 50-50% joint venture
named IKAP to resume their relations. From January 2017,
Iran reported a major rise in exports of crude oil to France,
with an increase of 70,000 barrels per day, with peaks of
180,000, which figure showed an increase of 61%, compared
to December 2016. Iran reached a 98% self-sufficiency in
producing parts for Peugeot models 405, and 75% for Peugeot
model 206. Despite the sanctions, IKCO remained an
important partner of French automobile companies Peugeot
and of Renault, locally sold under the same Iranian brand.
 Two years earlier in 2015, more than 130 French CEOs had
tripped to Iran to announce investments and strengthen their
involvement in this country, thanks to the nuclear agreement
earlier signed by President Barack Obama. Two years later in
2017, Peugeot sold 444,600 cars to Iran and it expected to sell
three million cars a year to this country by 2030. Renault-
Nissan had sold 160,000 cars there, and expected to sell
300,000 the next year. Additionally, still in 2015, French led
European corporation Airbus, main challenger of American
Boeing, had signed a 10 billion dollars contract with Iran Air
Tour and Zagros Airlines for the sale of about 100 airliners,
including Airbus A320neo types. French oil company Total
had engaged in a partnership with Chinese group CNPC for a
5 billion dollars investment in Iran in view to extracting oil
from the South Pars oil deposit. Finally, French groups
Bouygues, Vinci, Orange, and Accor had invested heavily in
Iran already, still in prevision to Trump’s signing with Macron
in Washington.
The latter event in itself is a story that began a few days
earlier—it deserves to be known.
On April 15, France’s Minister of Defense Florence Parly
delivered a speech following U.S. led Western strikes in Syria
the last night, and she specified, “The military operation led by
the United States, the United Kingdom, and France is
legitimate, proportionate, and targeted. That is why, with our
allies, we have made sure the Russians were warned of it
upstream”. For France indeed had partaken in an air bombing
against Syrian military sites, though moderately because she
dropped 12 bombs only out of 105. The gesture was symbolic
and cost little, therefore, but from it, President Emmanuel
Macron could reap a windfall of American goodwill on his trip
to Washington for the signing of the Iran Nuclear Deal with
his counterpart Donald Trump, planned nine days ahead from
the day of the strike, on April 23. The reader may wonder how
Russia took the French participation in a military intervention
against Syria, also its proxy country where the Russian
presence extends to an ongoing FSB counterintelligence
mission against Israel, sometimes with the technical support of
French counterintelligence when from Lebanon, and even to
ordinary police assistance.
It is about two fundamental principles in French tactics with
respect to the special relationship with Russia against the
United States: (1) flatly deny everything with sincerity even
when caught red-handed, and those who saw you with their
own eyes will come to doubt ultimately; (2) stay close to the
enemy, and thus you will know what he has in mind. Indeed,
thanks to France, Russia could know everything about the air
strike against Syria, GPS coordinates and exact schedule for
the mission included. In turn, Russia could warn Syria—and
Iran very possibly—which country thus could evacuate her
troops in time from the sites to be bombed, vehicles and
important material included, most certainly. Thus, the United
States, Britain, and France symbolically bombed empty
military bases. Whereof, the why neither Syria nor the United
States wanted to release any photo or video of the sites of the
strike to the media. On the morning following the bombing,
Syrian President Bashar El Assad conspicuously shown on
television to the World that he quietly went to his office
undisturbed, as on any other normal day, for the very good
reason that I just explained. The stake for France was several
billion dollars in various contracts… if ever Trump succumbed
to Macron’s charm and pats in the back.
Remarkably, on May 5, 2018, upon Trump stating the U.S.
withdrawal from the Iran Nuclear Deal, French leading expert
in geopolitics and strategist Gérard Chaliand could not help
himself put his reputation at stake by venturing into gross and
nonsensical pro-Iranian, anti-Saudi, and anti-Israeli
statements, all at the same time, in an interview he gave to
Figaro newspaper. “Donald Trump is wrong to believe he is
irresistible,” Chaliand said angrily.
Following the disaster for France, Russia, and a number of
other Russian allies, they could not but pin all their hopes for a
miracle to come at the 2020 U.S. presidential election; that
Trump and all the hawks who back him leave the place to
more “reasonable” and “responsible” doves, as before. Russia
and France had a new need for a return of the United States to
the attitude of before 2016, and for a U.S. ruling elite ready to
sign again the Paris Agreement, the Iran Nuclear Deal, and to
believe again in “peace,” “universalism,” and to agreeing on
everything else regardless of what it is.
France’s care for her automobile industry resumes in
domestic protectionism with similar aggressiveness. France’s
full NATO membership and the U.S. military presence in
France until 1966 had fostered a French fancy for American
cars. As a matter of fact, my parents owned successively a
Chevrolet Bel Air and a Ford Thunderbird between the late
1950s and the early 1960s, and my father never tired of
American cars. As this obviously worried the French ruling
elite and the mighty Communist Party, in 1956, vice-President
of the Socialist International and Prime Minister Guy Mollet
created an automobile tax called “vignette,” the amount of
which being established on the basis of the displacement of
their engines, with a dissuasive increase beyond a
displacement of 3.0 liter, or 183 ci, which reproduced with
registration card and insurance. As there were no European
cars powered by a block bigger than 3.0 liter exactly, the
measure aimed to discourage French people from buying
American cars, under the pretense to financing a minimum
income for the poor and the elderly—the latter never got a
penny from the first year of taxation because the State needed
the money, actually. Decades later, the DGSE once entrusted
me a sabotage mission of a sort to prevent the import of South
Korean cars in France.
In the early 1990s, beyond good diplomatic relations, the
DGSE and the French ruling elite truly perceived South Korea
with defiance, since this country is an ally of the United States
and a capitalist country. The French Government had sent
Charles-Henri de Pardieu my director in South Korea to play
there an official and major role in the signing of a commercial
contract with the government of this country. The deal he had
to strike related a large contract for French multinational
company GEC-Alsthom that were to supply high-speed TGV
trains to this country. In exchange, France would import South
Korean-made Hyundai cars, still unavailable in this country at
that time. Coincidentally or not, I would not say, for long, De
Pardieu Sr. had a friendly relation with German national
Norbert Wagner, head of Sonauto, exclusive importer in
France of Porsche cars and of Yamaha motorbikes. Actually,
Wagner also had family ties with de Pardieu’s wife who is a
German national, and a member of the German affluent
society in the state of Baden-Württemberg. Anecdotally,
Charles-Henri De Pardieu’s wife is the daughter of a WWII
ace of the Luftwaffe who was awarded the Iron Cross with oak
leaves by Adolf Hitler personally. Their son Frédéric de
Pardieu once explained to me the detail about his family on a
day I noticed with surprise a photo of the pilot in his Nazi
uniform hanging on a wall of his parents’ apartment. On his
side, Charles-Henri de Pardieu would be a distant heir of King
Louis VI of France. He began his career during the Algerian
War of 1954-1962 as French Army Officer Specialist in aerial
reconnaissance, on Douglas DC-3 airplane while working
together with U.S. Army intelligence officers, De Pardieu Sr.
humorously remembered. From his mother side, De Pardieu Jr.
is no less than a nephew of Bosch GmbH majority shareholder.
From the inception of the French-South Korean deal, De
Pardieu had to negotiate with Hyundai Motor Company that
Sonauto be exclusive importer of Hyundai automobiles in
France. My part in the story was to collaborate with Alain
Blum then former head of the advertising agency of Sonauto.
At that moment, Sonauto had just lost its exclusivity contract
on the import of Yamaha motorbikes, which event caused the
bankruptcy of Blum’s advertising agency. Wherefrom, Blum
had to create from scratch a new and much smaller advertising
agency to handle the advertising campaign for the launch of
Hyundai in France. However, what the South Koreans could
not possibly know was that Blum had fallen in disgrace for
some reason I did not know either. When I began to meet
Blum, I quickly realized he was incompetent in advertising
despite his claims of decades of experience in this branch.
Actually, Alain Blum owed his prolific career to his being
grandson of prominent socialist politician Léon Blum, leading
figure of the Popular Front of 1936, whose name appeared in
the previous chapter. Léon Blum indeed has been instrumental
in the extraordinary power given to far-leftist labor unions, led
and financed from Moscow, and he was the man who created
the Minister of Propaganda before the WWII—is there in
France any room left for true coincidence?
Nevertheless, the choice of incompetent Alain Blum to be
the advertiser of Hyundai in France had a logical explanation
at some point, which was the French Government, had no
intention to help the South Korean company sell its cars and
become popular in the country. Therefore, once South Korea
and France signed the deal “TGV trains for Hyundai cars,” my
job was to help sabotaging the Hyundai advertising campaign
while Blum would negotiate the worst advertising spaces he
could find in the country. Thus, the coming of Hyundai
automobiles in France would “naturally” transform into a
failure in the French history of the automotive industry. To do
this, I worked for a few weeks on the Hyundai national
campaign in a small advertising studio settled Place Clichy in
Paris. It was the sole time in my life I was instructed to do a
bad campaign, feeling I was doing a rehearsal of the film The
Producers, but with me, it indeed proved a successful
catastrophe, if I may say so. That is how the French fooled the
South Koreans.
Blum’s new advertising agency disappeared soon after that,
and the DGSE instructed me to work on a new mission of
domestic propaganda, whose objective was to discrediting
then acting Prime Minister Édouard Balladur. At that time, the
DGSE wanted to get rid as soon as possible of “beleaguered
Balladur,” lest he intended to run as candidate against pro-
Russia Jacques Chirac in the presidential election of 1995 to
come. I do not know the exact reasons justifying this other
sabotage, but I once or twice heard of suspicions of a possible
collusion of Balladur with Turkey. It should be said, Turkey
was an ally of the United States, too, and the Turkish
intelligence agency had a secret partnership with its Israeli
counterpart. Additionally, the DGSE considered Balladur was
leaning “too much” to the right of the political spectrum, and
his Turkish ancestry was thought a vulnerability. Nonetheless,
the DGSE much disliked Balladur for whatever reason anyone
could invent in this agency, which once went as far as “lack of
firmness when shaking hands,” I recall.
 France’s objectives in the automobile sector reproduce in
the motion picture industry with even greater relentlessness,
which comes as a more rational motive to target the United
States. Angry comments I read regularly in the American
media about the pervading leftist thought and political
correctness in Hollywood are one visible effect of the French
enterprise. Hollywood resisted mightily against German Nazi
influence and penetration attempts before and during the
WWII, and still with certain effectiveness against the Soviet
Union until the late 1960s, when France began to act as its
proxy. We notice, the shift happened at about the same time
the Soviet Union instructed the SDECE to spy on the military,
technologic, and scientific sectors in the United States, as
French defector Thyraud de Vosjoli testified in 1963. The
reader remembers the case of the film Z in 1968-1969. Unless
I am mistaken, it seems the French attack began with
significant force against CBS and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Studios Inc.–MGM. The American public knows little on what
happened in CBS and me either because I never heard of it in
my time in the DGSE. I just know it made the U.S.
intelligence community very angry. As for MGM, I invite the
reader to read first the Wikipedia page on the French
acquisition of “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,” and to consider the
roles of American businessman Kirk Kerkorian, Italian
magnate Giancarlo Parretti, and of French bank Crédit
Lyonnais in this venture. For long, these people and this bank
involved in French intelligence operations in the United States.
Kerkorian acted regularly as go-between for Russia via France
to serve the French interests in the United States in the
automobile sector either.
Would-be-privately owned paid-TV channel Canal+ was
created by the socialist government of François Mitterrand in
1984, but from the inception, this company was truly spirited
and headed by communists who acted as more or less
conscious agents of the Soviet Union, and it always had an
unusually high number of DGSE employees and agents in its
staff. The purpose of Canal+ when it still existed only as a
television channel was domestic leftist white propaganda and
black propaganda against the United States and American
values. When Canal+’ success allowed it to expand its
activities to film production, essentially under derivatives of
its name Canal, the mission and means allocated evolved to
leftist influence abroad, settling subsidiaries in the United
States, and, of course, to purchasing U.S. business in the
entertainment sector and recruiting as many people as possible
in the branch to make them agents of influence. Thus, Canal+
the company became partner and producer of American
filmmaker David Lynch’s, with The Straight Story (1999),
Mulholland Dr. (2001), and Inland Empire (2006). Under the
lead of communist and anti-American Pierre Lescure, a straw
man of course, the spectacular growth of Canal+ led to the
founding of Canal+ Group and of several corporate divisions
abroad. Today in February 2018, Vivendi Group, initially
named Générale des Eaux, a publicly owned and leading
provider of tap water in France owns Canal+ the company. As
an aside, when I left the DGSE, France also ambitioned to be
World leader in the tap water market.
In 2000, Vivendi purchased leading American company
Universal Pictures. At that time, I was at the right place to
know the DGSE held a leading role in the takeover, first
prepared from France via Canada. My ex-colleague Régis
Poubelle was involved in the operation, and he kept me abreast
of the unfolding at a time he was in close touch with
influential people in St. Petersburg, Russia. The acquisition of
Universal Pictures made France World leading country in film
production for a while. In the DGSE, this was perceived as a
huge victory and as a thumb one’s nose to the United States; a
revenge against this country and against capitalism just for
being what they are. From the same year on, the DGSE lured
and recruited a score of American movie stars, filmmakers,
scenarists, and countless film staffers. Often, film actors are
not exactly the brightest people on Earth, if I may say so, and
the recurring characteristic makes them easy preys. Moreover,
being artist is a mindset particularly receptive to the call for
passion, to the point of being a vulnerability bordering on
flaw. Once recruited, they are useful idiots much more than
actual agents; some are quick to spit on the country to which
they truly owe their careers and fames.
 With the rise of Canal+ / Vivendi, Hollywood released an
ever-growing number of American-style films loaded with
leftist and even anti-American biases. Made-in-Hollywood
existentialist films became a trend in all genres in the United
States. To the French and Russian experts in influence, there
was a need for a minimum of self-restraint in the action,
although some film actors and filmmaker let themselves be
caught in the game, inescapably. Suitable quantitative dosage
had to prevent the elevated risk for the front businesses to fall
under the accusation of leftist and foreign propaganda mills.
The ongoing production had to be mixed, therefore, not only
with traditional American-style films exclusively relevant to
entertainment, but also with a few overly U.S. patriotic others
that had to exist only to disprove the bias. That is how and
why French-owned production companies now and then
produce films having an obvious American conservative bias,
in the action genre essentially.
However, only four years later in 2004, Austerlitz had
transformed in Waterloo. France and Russia realized they
could no longer afford to feed Universal Pictures on the U.S.
soil, exactly as it happened years earlier with MGM.
Financially drained by the venture, Vivendi resigned to resell
Universal Pictures to General Electric. Not everything was lost
in the retreat; from its temporary ownership of Universal
Pictures between 2000 and 2004, Videndi managed to keep
strong links to it, today owned by Comcast, to strike other
strategic deals with several American production companies
and to transmit them to its subsidiary StudioCanal, a division
of Canal+ Group.
From its early years when it was known as Le Studio
Canal+, StudioCanal’s most notable productions include the
original Stargate movie (1994), Cliffhanger (1993), Free Willy
(1993), Under Siege (1992), Basic Instinct (1992), Terminator
2 Judgment Day (1991), and JFK (1991). To date in this year
2018, Canal+ Group produced or co-produced the amazing
number of 3,008 films and videos. The same year, the prowess
made it third largest film library in the World behind Warner
Bros and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Among the best known of
those films, we find Dunkirk (2017), The Death of Stalin
(2017), Lucy (2014), Taken I, II, and III (2008, 2011, and
2014), Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy (2011), The Untouchables
(2011), The Iron Lady (2011), The Pianist (2002), and crypto-
communist film The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain
(2001).
Still in early 2018, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs boasted
France ranked number #2 in the World in film production; this
country just needs to acquire again one of its major
competitors in the United States to reach the summit of the
mountain and to change the color of the stars as it please. In
the light of all this, if I may resume in the metaphor, the reader
understands why French intelligence activities in the U.S.
movie industry and in Hollywood in particular are so
important and intensive, completely unbeknownst to an
ingenuous American public, for much I can see.
As my knowledge of the target countries of France and of
the DGSE are consistent with my personal experience in this
agency I proceed for the rest of this chapter with an eclectic
gathering of facts and anecdotes, completed with what I said
already in the previous chapters and with what I will reveal in
the next.
One of my ex-subordinates in the late 1990s, a young man
in his twenties had lived in Japan for a while and was about to
specialize in counterespionage against this country; he was
fluent in Japanese, of course. My cooperation with him was
not entirely coincidental because the DGSE taught me on
Japanese culture in the mid-1990s. In the latter period and
before, a French counterintelligence branch with a specialty on
Japan was focusing its surveillance on a sect by the name of
Soka Gakkai that, I was explained, was a cover up for
Japanese intelligence activities. Apparently, Russian agents in
France partook very actively in the counterespionage effort
against the tiny Japanese minority in France.
I must explain a few important notions on the perception the
DGSE holds of the European Union. Indeed, it surprised me
on the long term that the staff of this agency is not at all
indoctrinated on European values, contrary to what the stance
of French politicians suggests in this respect. I never saw any
European flag or symbol in DGSE’s premises because the
interest of the agency in the European Union actually focused
on Germany and partnerships with its foreign intelligence
service the BND. Then the DGSE is interested in Belgium and
in Luxembourg as countries in which it secures its influence
for a number of years I could not number.
In point of fact, I was brought to know the DGSE is very
influential in Belgian public affairs. I once was sent for a
couple of days to the city of Namur in this country, where I
met by an afternoon several members of the Sûreté de l’État
(Belgian State Security) and then Elio Di Rupo, who at that
time was acting Vice-Prime Minister of Belgium. I do not
elaborate about these meetings because they were of the
formal genre and did not relate to any striking novelty in
intelligence. With the two or three officers of the Belgian
States Security, we talked together about money
counterfeiting, exclusively, and with Elio Di Rupo I
transmitted to him France’s renewed assurance of its help to
Belgium in what we called in the DGSE the Nouvelles
Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication–NTIC
(New Technologies in Information and Communication). The
Belgian national television channel RTBF was present during
my meeting with Di Rupo anyway, and I can only surmise it
was broadcast in this country eventually. As an amusing
anecdote, I did a blunder on when Di Rupo came straight to
me to shake my hand, out the blue and without prior
introduction. The sympathetic, warm, straightforward, and
easygoing minister behaved opposite to arrogant French
politicians, and so I confused him with the officers of the
Belgian State Security I just met. When I asked to him at some
point what his specialty was, not in the least offended he
kindly answered, “Well, I am the vice Prime Minister of this
country”. Upon my return to France, I apologized to Di Rupo
for this by postal mail, as we resumed the relation with a
correspondence on the same subject.
In my opinion, there is little doubt the interference of the
DGSE in Belgian affairs was the cause of the political crisis of
2007–2011 in this country, but that is another complex story in
which I did not partake. In the years 2018-2019, I learned of
the existence of a campaign of influence orchestrated against
the resisting Belgian Flemish region, with all sorts of
accusations ranging from hardheaded secessionism to
xenophobia, and even racism. Displays of Flemish flags are
subject to hassle, stalking, and even to open aggressions and
destructions of properties. If ever my reader is Flemish
himself, then I tell him that the latter disturbances do not erupt
spontaneously from nowhere because they are integral to a
French action of influence and agitprop aiming the submission
of the entire Belgium to new rules officially coined in
Wallonia.
Earlier, I learned France is the real owner of arms
manufacturer FN Herstal, the company that manufacture the
rifles of the Belgian military for more than a century, and
those of the U.S. military for a number of decades. At the
beginning of the takeover, the shareholders of FN Herstal were
all members of the French Socialist Party; front men acting in
the interest of Russia. Eventually, the French-Russian
ownership was transmitted to Groupement des Industries de
l’Armée de Terre–GIAT (Army Industries Group) of the
French Ministry of Defense, renamed Nexter and transformed
into a private company in 2006. In 2015, Drexter merged with
German arms manufacturer Krauss Maffei Wegmann–KMW,
and together they thus became European defense industry
holding KMW+Nexter Defense Systems–KNDS aka KANT,
headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
As about little Luxembourg, I understood this territory for
long is a private garden of Russia and even a refuge for Soviet
agents of importance.
For decades, Russia has been particularly influential in the
Netherlands. The SDECE and then the DGSE always had a
special relationship of a sort with Dutch electronics
manufacturer Philips, whose official name today is
Koninklijke Philips N.V. In the early 1980s, already, I
understood the French and the Russian intelligence
communities together had various business and political
connections in the Netherlands. As an amusing aside, later in
the 1990s, DGSE’ staffers were recommended explicitly to
choose the brand Philips when buying a CD player for private
use at home! My ex-colleague Régis Poubelle who in the
1990s had to be concerned with the strategic planning of the
purchase of Universal Pictures by French company Vivendi
SA, had had for long a cover activity of executive in Philips,
and the same eventually in PolyGram, a Dutch company
either.
From a general standpoint, the DGSE sees the European
Union as a means and not at all as an end, which perception
certainly is Russian influenced. While talking about identity
and flags, this agency has unofficial colors that neither are the
pale blue and yellow of the E.U. nor even the blue white red of
France, but red, green, and blue in this exact order. There are
not much French flags and otherwise presented colors in the
premises of the DGSE, contrary to what say the videos and
public relations operations of this agency today, or else there
has been a recent change for the sake of saving some
appearances. Among the three true and secret colors, the
reader notices the ostensible permutation of blue and red, and
more especially the green that takes over the white. The reader
might be further surprised to learn that not everyone in this
agency understands this green color the same way, as no clear
explanation for this is given. For the green color of the DGSE
is not the military dark green one would expect, but a bright
and flashy green identical to the one I feature on the cover of
the present book—so I did not choose it by personal taste or to
make it catchy. Coincidentally or not, this green is also that of
the Russian television channel Russia Today–RT.
White on the French flag symbolizes the monarchic origin
of France, and so the green color that replace it must be
understood as the elite that took over, ruling the republican
blue and the revolutionary red that stay the same as on the
French flag. As to why this so particular shade of green; only
the Russians know it, I assume. The most convincing reason I
ever heard about the conundrum is that green, as color of the
military and to war by extension, has been given the hue and
saturation of video green to symbolize information warfare.
Not so anecdotally, the reader may notice that this video green
is featured without explanation all along the film The Matrix,
whose true and interesting symbolism will be described in a
next chapter. The Russians used the green color as a cryptic
and secret sign of recognition in France as early as 1984, for
much I know; that is to say, at the time of the Soviet Union.
Still earlier in 1962, the reader remembers, perhaps, that U.S.
President John F. Kennedy conspicuously used the green color
to write the letter he sent to De Gaulle when he thus warned
him that Soviet spies had penetrated his government. Anyway,
for wants of a clear explanation, some people in the DGSE
give to color a military sense, whereas others take it as the
green activist cause. To a few others, it symbolizes the secret
power of Russia in France, although this explanation is never
told otherwise than through passing references mixed with the
usual quizzing smiles and winks of those who thus stress they
know the truth. The bizarrerie comes to explain why agents
and employees of the DGSE not all reproduce the same hue
and saturation when they use it as a cryptic recognition sign.
Finally, I must specify that the association of the colors red,
green, and blue does not exist in any official logo in the
DGSE, but only as a recurring pattern on the interior walls of
its premises including the headquarters of boulevard Mortier.
Sometimes, the three colors are painted on stair steps in the
same order, as an effective way to help the staff memorize
them. When I watched a few episodes of the TV series The
Bureau, it struck me that the colors are used the same way for
the fictional corridors and offices of the headquarters of the
DGSE.
The other recurrent and less cryptic unofficial symbol of the
DGSE is a human eye, not present on the official seal of this
agency either. The reader might be surprised again to learn that
the French foreign intelligence agency never had any official
logo or seal until 2012. Before this, there was for a while an
unofficial and vaguely European blue and yellow logo
featuring the letters “DGSE” in bold and outline characters,
whose “S” was a stylized human eye. It publicly appeared
once only in 1995 on the back cover of the book Au cœur du
secret: 1500 jours aux commandes de la DGSE: 1989-1993
(At the Heart of the Secret: 1,500 Days at the Helm of the
DGSE: 1989-1993), co-authored by reporter journalist and
agent Jean Guisnel, and former Director of the DGSE Claude
Silberzahn. Yet this older logo was thus printed without any
explanation, and many people therefrom took it as a revelation
to be taken implicitly only, including by agents and employees
of this agency!
These explanations on flags, logos, and colors only aim to
stressing the policy, objectives, and targets of the DGSE are
not necessarily the same as those a study of French diplomacy
might suggest. The discrepancies lay on the special
relationship with Russia, of course, but the ongoing doctrine
and policy of active measures is accountable for it either.
In the chapter on COMINT, the reader discovered that the
DGSE and the DRM have partnerships with their counterparts
in Germany, South Africa, and the U.E.A. For much I
understood, Germany is not as aggressive against the United
States as France would like because this other country does
not seem to lose sight of its own economic interests abroad,
domestic stability, and role in the NATO. Yet I may be
mistaken about this point, possibly. I understood that South
Africa would have the same relationship with Russia as France
does, but Russia would have bestowed upon France certain
authority over South Africa. France is waging a fight against
terrorism within her territory and in a number of countries
where she has stakes or that are in her sphere of influence, in
Western Africa in particular, therefore. Actually, there is a
reciprocity in the cause-to-effect relation translating as “the
more France mingles in the affairs of Southern countries, the
more she must dread terrorism at home”. That Germany is
much less concerned with Muslim terrorism on her soil than
France is comes as an enlightening comparison.
France’s capacities in foreign telecommunication
interception serve needs in economic intelligence against the
United States and their allies, and in other countries where
U.S. economic interests exist. Countries of the Arabian
Peninsula are especially targeted, with a focus on Saudi
Arabia. Obviously, France and Russia see Israel as an
annoying American watchdog in the region, which explains
the unofficial yet unambiguous French stance for Palestine and
much anti-Israel propaganda on the French soil as abroad
recently. Since 2006 and until about 2011-2012, there has been
recurrent rumors in Syria and Lebanon of joint
counterintelligence operations between the French
counterespionage (DST until 2008) and its Russian counterpart
the FSB to hunt Israeli spies, contacts, and sources. Since the
1990s, the French intelligence community and the DGSE in
particular are closely monitoring the Jewish minority in
France, on the assumption that the Israeli intelligence
community infiltrated it. As Israel is a close ally to the United
States, the perception evolved toward that of a French Israeli
community that would hide a U.S. spy nest. Since, France still
prefers to see her population accused of anti-Semitism than
acknowledging the latter reality.
Because of France’s special relationship with Russia, her
diplomatic relations are a game of permanent deception,
denials, and ever-changing appearances and false pretenses in
which the truth often contradicts official claims, public
statements, and “uncompromising condemnations”. On one
hand, the situation gives headaches to French journalists and
sometimes results in blunders when on live on audiovisual
media. On the other hand, this serves well the doctrine of
active measures and the tactic of fuzzy logic that makes an
opponent not knowing where the truth locates between the
absolutes values true and false, since the French public and
even staffers and agents of the DGSE are confused themselves.
Additionally, there is a need for France and Russia to hide
their joint intelligence operations and ongoing objectives
behind appearances contrived to suggest disagreements. This
comes to explain why France sometimes acts in her foreign
affairs in a way that seems impossible to explain rationally.
Nowadays, when thus behaving, either France is serving the
Russian interest only, or she poses temporarily as an opponent
to this country and as a U.S. ally, in keeping with the doctrine
of active measures again. Earlier in the 1970s, this even
confused Henry Kissinger himself, as he eventually confessed
in his essay Diplomacy that he never understood the reason for
the alignment of France with Britain during the Suez Crisis of
1956.
As I have never been concerned with the missions of the
DGSE in continental Africa, and because few only of my
former colleagues happened to work there, I am unable to
enlighten the reader about French intelligence activities in this
region. To the least, I can explain that this French historical
occupation in Western continental Africa reciprocally exerts
certain influence on the culture of the DGSE, at times. Then,
in the light of certain publicly released news, it seems obvious
that France is interested in many other African countries that
she does not yet rule. I know at least that Sierra Leone and
Liberia are two of those coveted spots. In this respect, the
discreet alliance between the DGSE and the South-African
intelligence community suggests the likely possibility of a
grand strategy consisting in trapping several other African
countries in a pincer movement, as French strategists and
geopoliticians use to say. The great interest that the DGSE is
expressing in spying round the clock on all
telecommunications going through the recently landed ACE
West-African submarine cable comes to support the latter
assumption of mine. Furthermore, I know that, in the mid-
1990s, the DGSE expressed interest in the building of oil
pipelines connecting the West-African coast to territories
located in western central Africa.
The French interest for oil clearly reproduces in the Arabian
Peninsula. There, France’s special relationship with Russia and
with the U.A.E., Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, are certainly
helpful in this large region. I assume, in this joint venture and
in the light of past events I previously explained, that the role
of France consist in advancing sometimes under the mask of
an independent Western ally, sometimes under that of an E.U.
leading representative, and at other times under pretenses of
neutral diplomatic moderator, as this country often does. As
the reader knows, in this region, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon have
friendly relations with Russia, and the longtime good relations
between Iran and France need explanations therefore,
especially because of their latest developments I alluded to at
the beginning of this chapter while talking about the aborted
Iran Nuclear Deal.
Still in the Arabian Peninsula and prior to the Iraq War of
2003, France counted secretly on Iraq, then a trading partner to
which she sold large quantities of military equipment and arms
for oil, under the supervision of French military intelligence
officer General Jeannou Lacaze. To a sizeable extent, this was
the true reason for the French unexplainable withdrawal, along
with Russia, during the talks at the UN Security Council in
2003, led by French Minister of Foreign Affairs Dominique de
Villepin.
In 1977-78, Ibrahim Souss, a member of the Palestine
Liberation Organization - PLO, which at the time was still an
independence movement known for its terrorist activities, was
discreetly welcomed in France. There, he was given a small
house in Glénic, a hamlet of 500 inhabitants lost in the centre
of France and its poorest region, the Creuse département.
Unbeknownst to him, Souss also benefited from a light and
discreet protection of the RG in this place. His residence was
kept secret and no one was going to see him until he moved to
Paris, where he occupied a small representative office.
France discreetly granted safe refuge to several former
members of the German far-leftist terrorist organization Red
Army Faction. Still in the early 2000s, one lived in an isolated
spot of the Britany region, and two women at least were
retrained as social assistants.
The most recent actuality of 2019 is exemplifying again the
French-Russian cooperation in intelligence activities abroad,
with the election of new Georgian President Salome
Zourabichvili. Born in Paris and of Georgian origin,
Zourabichvili has a long and rich diplomatic career with the
French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and she held a number of
senior positions in this ministry. From 2001 to 2003, she was
head of the Division of National and Strategic Issues of the
National Defense General Secretariat of France. In 2003, she
was appointed Ambassador of France to Georgia.
The French media poorly reported, or rather not at all, the
surprising nomination of Zourabichvili as Minister of Foreign
Affairs of Georgia in 2004 by Mikhail Saakashvili then newly
elected President of this country. More to the surprise, on
December 16, 2018, Zourabichvili was elected President of
this country herself. However, arrived in June 2019, thousands
of protesters gathered in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi to
accuse the ruling Georgian Dream Party of Zourabichvili to
being too accommodating toward Russia. Meanwhile, former
Georgia’s President Mikhail Saakashvili faced criminal
charges in his country—he self-exiled since. For years,
Saakashvili accused the government of Zourabichvili to selling
out the country to Russia. He failed to persuade voters it was
telling the truth, until the people understood, too late.
Possibly, the reader remembers of socialist politician
Manuel Valls, Minister of the Interior of France from 2012 to
2014 and Prime Minister from 2014 to 2016 under the
Presidential mandate of François Hollande, himself former
special advisor to President François Mitterrand. In April
2018, Valls considered an offer to run as candidate for Mayor
of … Barcelona, Spain, under the banner of Ciutadans
(Citizens), the Spanish centrist (liberal-progressive and social
democrat) political party. In 2019, Ciutadans was opposing the
Catalan separatist movement and political party Podemos (We
can). On September 25, 2018, Valls indeed announced his
candidacy for Mayor of Barcelona in the May 2019 elections,
and he declared he was resigning all political responsibilities
in France! Valls had already registered his own political party
of municipal scope on March 28, christened, Barcelona Pel
Canvi–BCN Canvi. Valls and his party won six seats out 41 at
the ballots. Again, the French mainstream media poorly
reported the odd political career abroad of the dogged ex-
Prime Minister of France, under the pretense that the event
was unimportant.
Certainly not coincidentally, earlier on 2014, French flying
agent of Italian origin Hervé Falciani was first in the electoral
list of new Spanish political party Partido X (Citizen Network
X Party) for the European elections. “Citizen in Internet”
elected Falciani through “open lists,” yet Partido X failed to
obtain any seat. In February 2015, El Confidencial Spanish
publication reported Falciani would collaborate with the
Spanish separatist party Podemos to draft measures against tax
evasion for this party’s political program. As a matter of fact,
French agent Falciani is an enlightened person on the latter
subject. Previously, from 2001 to 2008, he was computer
engineer at the Swiss branch of HSBC bank, and while
working in this company he stole for French Minister for the
Economy and Finance Christine Lagarde hundreds of
thousands of HSBC customer files and related banking data.
Among the files, the DGSI and the Ministry for the Economy
and Finance found the names and banking accounts of 130,000
tax-fraudsters of all nationalities, which all come as many
opportunities to coerce people into cooperating as sources in
their countries. However, before he delivered the files,
Falciani brought them to Beirut while traveling under a
fictitious identity, and there he is believed to have given a
copy of them to Lebanese Bank Audi. In November 2015, the
Federal Court of Switzerland sentenced Falciani in absentia to
a prison term of five years for aggravated financial espionage,
yet France denied Falciani’s extradition to Switzerland.
Apparently, Falciani was never compensated for his mission,
although the HSBC’s files he stole allowed France to retrieve
millions of Euros from French tax fraudsters, let alone their
huge value for the DGSE.
To cap it all, the Spanish secessionist movement Podemos
itself is a creation of the DGSE in the context of an influence
and agitprop operation, contrived from a myth and a narrative
that communist hardliner and veteran of the SDECE Stéphane
Hessel authored. The operation followed Hessel’s publication
in 2010 of the narrative as a booklet under the title Indignez
vous!, eventually translated for publication in English-
speaking countries under the title Time for Courage! From the
implication in political activism in Spain of ex-French Prime
Minister Valls and DGSE agent Falciani, we cannot but
understand the former actually went to this country to infiltrate
the party opposing Podemos, as simple field agent!
On one hand, it is little to say the DGSE is ambitious in its
expectations; on the other hand, now the reader knows these
endeavors are not those of this agency in actuality. This fact
helps understand why the aggressiveness this agency displays
to reach its objectives never misses to surprise its counterparts
and challengers abroad. This leaves foreign intelligence
executives and politicians with a perception that France indeed
threw herself in a conquest of the World single-handedly while
her population is sinking into poverty. This seems unrealistic
not to say absurd, obviously, if one does not take into account
the realities I report in this book. For decades, some historians
concluded from France’s grandiose ambitions that her ruling
elite inherited collectively the “Napoléon syndrome,” as a
reference to the frantic global war in which emperor Napoléon
Bonaparte threw the entire French population. Among German
officials and journalists, it comes as an ironic byword to refer
to France as the “Grande Nation” for the same reasons and
because of France’s incorrigible inclination to parade and to
show as a smart-ass.
 25. Strategies, Tactics, Methods.
The reader understoodFrench intelligence activities abroad are largely about
influence serving economic, political, and territorial conquests ultimately, and not
about “classic espionage” serving defensive measures. To stress this point, when
French intelligence activities appear to focus on economy and finance, the actual goal
is to preserve national interests by putting other countries in the service of those, either
by persuading their nations to do so or against their will when this is impossible.
Herein this strategy is the same as these of Germany when she designed geopolitik and
a particular jargon (e.g. panregions, lebensraum, analogous to “sphere of influence”) to
transform herself into a Reich, whose real aim was to rule the World; and of Japan in
the 1930s, when she realized she did not have enough resources on her soil to face her
demographics and to fulfill her modernization. The similarity applies likewise to the
Soviet Union when it set forth that her idea of political power was economically
unrealistic, if she did not rally all other countries to it, knowing that, again, the real aim
was her own interest—otherwise, the Soviet Union and communist China would have
melted to form a single communist country. Said in intelligence jargon, the French
intelligence activities today are all about economic warfare, and information warfare,
subsequently. Then, that France is acting in the service of the Russian national interest
is unimportant to the understanding of this fact since the form of the intent is the same,
and the consequences for the targeted countries alike. Herein I mean it does not change
anything if the reader persists believe there would be no special relationship of the sort
I describe between Russia and France, and the latter country would be acting all from
her own—but this would be irrational and even impossible in a number of respects. In
the two last chapters, I will present a number of cases of technological espionage,
which, nonetheless, still serve the same aim in fine.
Then two distinct strategies come to serve the French aims.
There is a strategy for intelligence activities serving largely Russian interests and
agenda; and there is a strategy serving France’s basic economic necessities and needs
for financing a variety of projects including the objectives of the first strategy.
Reaching both the two objectives of the second strategy claims colossal investments
and efforts, to which Russia however contributes reluctantly and poorly. Russia invests
in the French economy always and only to preserve her power in this country; the
media come as a good example in this respect. To say, it even happens that Russia
appropriates for herself alone interests that were vital to France’s needs while leaving
the corresponding costs of it to her—as the case of Algeria exemplifies it. For when we
look at the overall picture of the French-Russian special relationship, we understand
Russia sees France as “her private garden,” and that she treats this country as an
intelligence agency runs an agent, indeed. Those in France who took the decision to
stand for Russia and to see this country as a “partner” soon or late had to face this
reality.
Russia does not want partners and friends abroad, but ruled parties serving her
interests and stakes, period. The contrary perception would be normal from the
passionate viewpoint of interaction between individuals, but it never is from that of
realpolitik, and De Gaulle himself used to say, “In politics, there are neither friends nor
foes, but only interests”. Russia has her own economic and financial concerns, and
France today finds herself in the position of her servant, as complain about Judge Jean
de Maillard and a number of French scholars. This does not mean that France would
send money to Russia, but that she is called to providing financial and human resources
and more in intelligence activities to the benefit of this country, without any significant
reciprocity. Actually, Russia limits her contribution to giving to France a little help for
finding out these resources by her own. Today, the Russian “occupying forces” in
France, largely represented by wealthy Russians and the Russian mafia commanding a
secret army of mercenaries, regard French people with implicit condescension and no
longer as comrades committed to a common and would-be-altruist cause. The
communist narrative is gone or denied, to the despair of all those French true believers
and opportunists who never envisaged this eventuality until 1991. They are trapped
now, since they do not see anymore any plausible alibi at the horizon to justify the
betrayal of their own country and the relinquishing of their own interests. They are left
with a narrative sans myth or whatever narrative they want; it does not matter any
longer.
Some French decision makers behave in return exactly as countless agents do, by
substituting the harsh reality to a belief in the natural ascendancy of a would-be-elder
brother or protector; yet the attitude is nothing but collective cognitive dissonance or
willful blindness. I say “some” because there are other collaborators, unconcerned, who
see their personal interest above all, and regardless of who the leader is. Then there are
those, inhibited, who resent the situation yet resign to accept it as it is for wants of any
exit in their “electrified cage”—this was my case for a little while, before I took the
decision to revolt quietly and to flee with my family. That is why the Russians are
looking constantly for those rare French people who have a fondness for Russia and her
culture and for Slavic culture more generally and preferably. “Slavic culture” because
Russia actually does not want that those French develop a fancy for Russian culture,
exactly as the DGSE does not want their agents commit to the French reason of state.
The Romanians, the Serbs, and other mercenaries indeed are in the same boat as the
French, and none enjoys any special treatment. Russia does not have the German
perception of panregions, and she takes Slavic people other than Russians are parts of
her lebensraum instead.
All this explains why France finds a relief with self-deluding in seeing her agenda
and strategies as her owns, as long as the realities of her situation are not mentioned. In
a sense, refusing to see the truth comes as a moral exit in some sort.
My knowledge of the French strategies back in time to the late 1990s and early
2000s; I explain them and their supporting theories, below.
There are two ways only to keep France technologically and economically advanced
— “afloat” is become a more appropriate word since—and both have their respective
flaws. The first is imagining, inventing, creating, designing, patenting things, and doing
as much publicity as possible about it for further arousing national pride and the need
for belonging of the masses. The rewards of this option are a good image for the
country at home as abroad, and the stimulation of a spirit of innovation that in turn is
good for exports; that is to say, for the trade balance. The inherent flaws in this option
are financial cost, time spent, and uncertainty on a technological and economic World
stage on which several competitors are hard to challenge. Too often, French scientists
and engineers spend a great deal of efforts and money on projects that are already in
development in other countries. Therefore, there is a natural competition with richer
and more powerful challengers working with greater ease, means, and minds,[597]
which entails the elevated risk for the weaker competitor to be overtaken even before
completion, thus making the investment a complete waste of time and money.
The second option is to focus on spying on, stealing, copying, and doing reverse
engineering. The advantage that spying on offers obviously is less effort, time, money,
and no need to look for the best engineers and scientists. Yet spying on abroad with
effectiveness can be costly either, especially in COMINT, as we have seen. From this
other viewpoint, spying on is tantamount to looking for turnkey projects “bought” at a
bargain because the expected tasks and efforts from one’s scientists and engineers limit
to deciphering and handling masses of raw intelligence. Therefrom, those brains can be
paid cheaply since they are not expected to be the best. Essentially, a field spy, his
handler, and the analysts at the end of the chain of intelligence together are much less
expensive than a single Nobel Prize and his team. The cost of HUMINT is cheap by
comparison with that of COMINT; comparable to the running of a large press agency,
somehow, and this is what it is in the aResorting to this other option is depreciating to
the image of the country at home as abroad or poorly rewarding at best, unless it is
supported with suitable white propaganda and potent domestic influence, as it happens
in all totalitarian countries. It implies to resign to always rank #2 or #3 or even below
in image as in financial profits for the country. Yet it may be acceptable to a country
whose leaders are aware that ranking even #2 in innovation is out of reach anyway.
This for long has been the case to China, for example, which country has been doing
well simply by stealing what she was not yet able to do by herself. After the WWII, the
United States taught Germany and Japan how to be self-sufficient by inventing,
manufacturing, and exporting when the natural resources locally available and their
quantities cannot satisfy the domestic needs and growth.
Therefore, France considers—rightly—she cannot compete in science and
technology against a country such as the United States or Japan because the former in
particular also attracts as a magnet the best brains in the World. World top brains do not
go to work in the United States only for the paycheck, but also because this country
offers better work conditions, a superior quality of life, and all the means they need to
bring their projects to fruition. Besides, smart people want to work with authentically
smart colleagues, and not with drudges and upstarts who owe their positions to
inherited privileges and ideological commitments—the aphorism saying, “money calls
money” applies to superior intellectual capacities either, for the record.
The reader understood France rather favors the second option since she nonetheless
wants to count as a major power in a number of fields, and since she cannot afford to
find her comfort in a situation comparable to that of most other European countries
having similar size, resources, and population due to the demanding exigencies of
Russia. Thereof, France’s aggressiveness in intelligence activities grew gradually since
the early 1960s, until the effort reached the threshold of a war economy, with all its
resources sucked by business ventures that together serve no purpose other than
interferences and aggressions abroad.
That is why the DGSE and the DRM closely associate with the French Ministry of
Foreign Affairs in scientific and technological intelligence in the frame of a generic
activity the latter public body named diplomatie scientifique (scientific diplomacy).
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has a service named Mission pour la Science et la
Technologie (Mission for Science and Technology) created to serve this activity, which
subsumes a sub-body named Veille Technologique et Scientifique–VTS (Technology
and Science Watch) tasked to collecting intelligence on the latest scientific
breakthroughs, discoveries, inventions, and researches in progress in the scientific and
industrial sectors abroad.
Overall, the VTS tends to resume an old intelligence mission in aeronautics, space,
and related fields, initially launched at the behest of the Soviet Union, as we have seen
in an earlier chapter while I presented the French-Soviet Joint Declaration of June
1966. Then the various areas this sub-service is monitoring 24 / 7 are subsumed in
eight broad branches, with corresponding cells in permanent touch with DGSE and
DRM specialized analysts. As I explained earlier, those specialists are working under
the cover activities of research institutes, ministries, and public and private companies.
The branches are the followings.
 1. Research Policies in Technology and in Universities.

2. Human and Social Sciences.

3. Biology, which encompasses Medicine, Health, Pharmacy, and

Biotechnology.

4. Science of the Earth, the Universe and the Environment, which

encompasses Energy, Transportation, Space, and Environment.

5. Agronomy and Food.

6. Engineering Sciences, which encompasses Aeronautics, Mechanics,

Electronics, and Civil Engineering.

7. Science of the Matter, which encompasses Materials, Physics,

Chemistry, and Optics.

8. Sciences and Technologies in Information and Communication

(STIC), which encompasses Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT), Telecommunications, Micro and Nano Technologies,
and Computer Engineering.

In 2018, the VTS was focusing its efforts on the following areas, in general and
worldwideIn 2018, the VTS was focusing its efforts on the following areas in general
and worldwide.
Big Data, plant chemistry, desalination, innovations and technical progress for 2020,
individualized medicine, vegetable proteins for the food industry, rare metals recycling,
silver economy (innovation for longevity), energy storage, and valorization of
underwater metals.
In 2017 and in the United States in particular, the VTS focused its efforts on the
following companies, civil and military bodies and areas, which together underscore
France’s marked interest in civilian and military aeronautics and space industries.
LA BioMed, NSC / Mike Pence, Mike Pence / MSFC, NASA, UNOOSA/Sierra
Nevada Corporation, USAF / Space Corps/NDAA 2018, US Army / WIN-T, Innoflight
/ SSL / hosted payloads, United Launch Services / EELV, SpaceX / BFR/Adelaïde,
Rocket Lab / Planet/Spire, Blue Origin / Mu Space Corporation / New Glenn, CST-100
Starliner / Boeing, SpaceX / FCC, Mars 2020, Lockheed Martin / Mars Base Camp,
JWST / NASA, Brodeur Partners / Brodeur Space Group, Global Space Law Center /
Cleveland State University.
 Above the SVT, the Mission pour la Science et la Technologie offers a free Internet
subscription called, Service pour la Science et la Technologie (Science and Technology
Service). This online service allows French companies and scientists to receive by
email open sources intelligence on the latest scientific and technological breakthroughs
by country and by branch. This body publishes regularly online articles relating to
specific open source subjects.
Of course, France did not go as far as to renouncing to her own researches in science
and technology, although she has been facing permanent budgetary problems in the
latter decades, and a steadily growing unbalance in the competition with richer
countries, subsequently. These difficulties explain why French scientific and
technological intelligence has been concentrating on the best challengers the United
States and Japan.
“As usual” in HUMINT in particular and nowadays, the DGSE and the DRM count
much on French nationals hired by foreign companies, students on study trips, and
foreign scientists and engineers they manage to poach. Below, is a true anecdote about
the latter practice that completes my earlier explanations in the chapter 14.
In the U.S. State of Massachusetts, there is a charming and quiet town named
Southbridge, with about 17,000 inhabitants. For decades, Southbridge and its
surroundings has been a hub of the U.S. optical industry. In the 2000s, some of those
companies were doing scientific researches and manufactured high-performance optical
fibers and other similar things—kind of “rocket science,” say, for wants of being able
to explain more about a field that is foreign to me.
French group Saint-Gobain settled a small subsidiary about five miles from
Southbridge downtown, with a locally corresponding specialty in high technologies in
glass and optics. Next to this facility and along the road, they put a large and permanent
panel with the words “Saint-Gobain. We recruit engineers in optics,” so that everyone
is living and working in the area sees it or hears about, inescapably. The law punishes
espionage, but recruiting a scientist who holds the sought-after expertise and advanced
knowledge is not. Sometimes, things can be as simple as that: putting an inexpensive
bait along a road.
I know the U.S. FBI has a preventive counterespionage mission and that this agency
“meets with a wide variety of U.S. groups, organizations, businesses, and academic
institutions as part of its ongoing engagement on national security matters”. The FBI
does this on requests that are not mandatory, but advisory. Doubtless, FBI agents with
the required specialty must be perfectly aware of the kind of methods, I explained
above, and certainly more to advise the concerned private businesses accordingly and
suitably.
Although France renounced officially to colonialism, this country nonetheless
continues to exert potent political influence in a number of Northern and Western
African countries in particular, justified by the sole real reason of their reserves in
diverse natural resources; oil comes first because France does not has any. That is why
the leaders of those African countries often are former officials in France’s public
service or ex-non-commissioned officers in the French military, or else they came to
live and to study in France in their youth. The perfect yet unofficial French political
power over those countries is the mission of one of the largest directorates of the DGSE
(African Affairs), which never appears on the organizational charts this agency leaks on
the Internet. I am unable to say more about the latter because, again, I have never been
concerned with African affairs—nor even have been personally interested in this area,
anyway. Therefore, I shift now to tactics and methods serving the takeover of foreign
countries, largely relevant to a particular field, the English-speaking reader use to name
“psychological warfare”.
 The aim of conventional warfare is to conquer, of course, but the method and the
means it entails are so costly that they often drain out of financial resources and of
workforce at home the country that ventures in it. Most of the time, throwing into a war
is dicey, even to the mightiest military power. There is absolutely no guarantee that the
gain will compensate for the losses, if ever there is any gain in the end. In the two
world wars, Germany the attacker went back home once they were over, with much
losses and no gain whatsoever. Today, in Western countries, conventional warfare
seems to be a thing of the past for the latter reason acquired through experience,
failures, and pain. In the past decades, an overwhelming majority of gears and
equipment invented, designed, mass-manufactured, and built for military purposes
actually have been serving employment, the domestic economy, and researches in a
large number of areas. In other words, these useless ventures are however needed to
maintain an operational military-industrial complex in case of war, as Alexander
Hamilton thought and proposed to the American people in the early 19th century.
Most weapons manufactured in large quantities and built in the World for the past
fifty years never were used on any battlefield, and never will they be. Nonetheless, an
escalating competition in advanced technologies in the military sector gave birth to
arms that are so complex, so delicate to handle properly, and so expensive that using
them in real situation on a battlefield often is a tricky question among military. The
gear of a single U.S. infantryman commonly costs several thousand dollars, and this
amount can go up to $100,000 in the Special Forces.
As a relevant aside, the latter remarks actually are integral to a trend of our time in
general and not to a military oddity. Reciprocally, we are currently building civilian
automobiles that are so complex that it is impossible to reach 100,000 miles on their
odometers without spending a fortune in repairs in the meantime, generally caused by
electronic glitches and faulty anti-pollution valves that cost a few cents. It is become a
known fact that modern cars are much less reliable today than they were fifty years
ago, in spite of tremendous progresses made in this sector—but also because of this,
precisely. The same remark applies to countless other goods.
In third-world countries where conventional warfare is still waged, soldiers use
weapons that were designed more than fifty years ago. They would be unable to use
properly modern weapons and military technology anyway because the trainings that
go along with them are costly and claim brainier soldiers than those of half a century
ago. Yet it seems to come as a surprise that there is no guarantee for a Western super-
equipped military force to win over such an underequipped band of third-world
fighters, as we have seen repeatedly in Afghanistan, for example. This relatively new
way to wage war, we call, “asymmetric warfare,” or “the war for the have-nots,” is
born from this unbalance in technology and financial capacities. However, there is no
reason in the absolute for a rich country not to adopt asymmetric warfare, as a way to
increase dramatically its effectiveness in aggression for a same cost or even for a much
inferior cost. Additionally, we notice, international rules and regulations on warfare and
the UNO are less and less respected, and they are ineffective against asymmetric
warfare. This is especially true since most of the time, soldiers who partake in
asymmetric warfare are mercenaries, proxies, and true believers. They all are acting
under the command of no clearly identified party because they no longer go to war for
a country, but for a myth invented out of the whole cloth serving real aims they ignore
completely, or would even not understand anyway.
Psychological warfare, or influence, disinformation, propaganda, and agitprop, is a
form of asymmetric warfare, as terrorism is another, likewise. Psychological warfare
can be costly either, but it is inexpensive most of the time. As in armed assymetric
warfare, soldiers who involve in psychological warfare not only are even not paid, but
they wage war at their own expenses, up to acquiring their gears with their own money.
Moreover, advanced researches in psychological warfare limit to the fields of
behavioral sciences, social studies, and marketing, which once more are inexpensive by
comparison with hard science, technology, and heavy industry. Psychological warfare
proves highly effective repeatedly, especially against the richest and most advanced
countries where people are the most exposed to media, and the most receptive to
abstract discourses simultaneously, due their higher level of education.
From Russia and France’s viewpoint, focusing one’s efforts on psychological
warfare implies the adoption of the doctrine of active measures to be fully effective.
Thus, a whole nation is called to take part in the war effort, consciously or
unconsciously, and willingly or unwillingly regardless, at the image of the French
Levée en masse. Spies and not military lead psychological warfare, and the role of the
latter limits to come in support to the former and their tactics, exactly as in COMINT,
and as it has been exemplified in the chapter 22 on this other specialty. Additionally,
the reader has seen in the previous chapter that today in France, even senior civil
servants up to the rank of Prime Minister can be called in support to spies to become
field agents themselves, sent on missions abroad, indeed. This is a complete reversal of
roles consequential to the doctrine of active measures by comparison with conventional
warfare in which spies are called in support to the military under the command of
elected civilian politicians.
Once a strategy in psychological warfare, qualifying as “black” or “shadow
operation” in English-speaking countries.[598] is decided, then waging war limits to the
following rules and set of fundamentals, methods and tactics.
As surprising as it may seem, in its principles, the unfolding of an attack against a
foreign country by relying on the French and Russian methods in psychological
warfare is the same as that of a mission of social elimination executed against a single
individual. Still metaphorically, it is a “bullfight” organized slightly differently, in
which “the crowd in the arena” figuring the masses of ignorant people and the public
opinion are called to play a greater role, not to say a major role because political
leaders and governments are democratically elected. The ruling elite of the attacked
country are collectively tormented in diverse fashions that all aim to overwhelm,
weaken morally, and demonize them in the nations they lead for justifying their
“elimination” in the end. The methods are not numbered to stress a chronology in their
uses, but only to make them easier to understand and to find them out when I will cite
and comment them eventually.
1. All the following methods must be used in manners allowing their plausible
denial at any time. This concern claims the rallying of third parties that must be
individuals fit to act as opinion leaders, yet unaware of the real aims they serve.
They and their actions must be promoted from distance through conventional and
other more exotic media. The methods are
2. rallying the masses around causes designed to arouse passionate feelings, by
opposition to discourses calling for reason. For causes based on a call for reason
are poorly energetic, harder to promote with simple and easy-to-understand
arguments, and difficult, therefore, to spread among the masses with a rapidity
suitable to the action. Then as the nature of the cause may be either positive
(“for”) or negative (“against”), the preference must be given to the latter because it
thus calls for a violence necessary for the expected commitment to occur.
Arousing thoughtless feelings of passion among the masses expected to turn
against their elite is a cardinal rule in influence, agitprop, and disinformation.
3. The facts of the negative cause may be very various, either true or false, or
mixing the two possibilities, extracted from biographies, political or economic
records of the targeted elite, regardless. When the facts are truths, their importance
 must be highlighted enough to appear as greater than they objectively are.
Therefore, the facts can be found down to trivialities that did not arouse interest
hitherto, such as common inclinations and little vices, slips of the tongue, selected
excerpts in speeches and published papers, and so on. Using fallacies must be
avoided preferably yet not altogether, and in any case, they must be alluded or
presented as “highly probable” only and not as certainties since they can be
disproved. As the premises supporting them are missing or flimsy, their promotion
must be more intense than if they were facts, so that their repetition alone instills
doubt in the mind of the masses. This is an alternative, whose second option
consists in spreading largely and a fast frequency a score of humiliating fallacies
and unflattering facts, which each may be of minor importance in truth since they
are common in everybody. As the triviality of such negative messages in itself
questions the effort that must be done to check the validity of each, their
multiplication and frequency come as a potent additional deterrent. Likewise, the
attacked party is quickly overwhelmed in its possible attempt to disprove them all
one by one. Additionally, the method relies on the popular byword and fallacy
saying, “there cannot be smoke without fire,” owing to the credit accorded to the
sole repetition of a message—to which, as a matter of fact, ordinary advertising
owes its effectiveness.
4. Strong emphases added on negative facts transform them into strong arguments.
Indeed, the effort in a campaign of disinformation must focus on the added
emphasis rather than on the facts themselves, since their real importance often
would be minor enough to be disproportionate to the claims, if presented in a
neutral fashion. In this endeavor, the more popular the media that spread the facts
are, the greater the emphasis given to their negative nature is, and the lesser the
masses doubt their validity.
5. All positive facts about the attacked party must be ignored / dismissed rather
than challenged. Challenging positive facts is also making them better known than
they are already, thus promoting their authors by the same occasion.
6. Creating toxic” friends and allies to the attacked party by finding out for this
third parties having images and notorieties the masses perceive negatively; or else
finding out such third parties claiming closeness in values, opinions, and ideas
with the attacked party (i.e. demonization by association). Treating the result with
the method 4.
7. Arranging and recording “toxic meetings” with the attacked party in order to
produce from them material evidences supporting either a fact or a fallacy
regardless. The evidences that may be pictures, videos, audio records, or even
mails must be authentic and even not just falsified; yet the true cause of their
existence may be changed for another, if it is not similarly evidenced. In any case,
the purpose of this type of material evidence is to arouse doubt and / or to support
rumors about anything is clashing with the scale of values of the masses, ranging
from sex, corruption, collusion, exotic political or religious ideas or beliefs,
disputable statements or stance, posture with respect to moral, and similar.
Treating the result with the method 4.
8. Driving morally the targeted party into “a corner” or creating a situation aiming
to elicit a fast response, therefore likely not to have been weighed enough to suffer
ulterior criticisms, in order to transform it into an evidence supporting either a fact
or a fallacy, regardless, and then treating it with the method 4.
The objective of the methods above obviously is to bring about political changes in a
target country. The next methods 9. to 18. are relevant to information warfare and to
cultural influence in particular, whose common objective limits to an aggression that
can be described in short as “war of emotional attrition”. For it comes generally as an
initiatory stage setting ground for the ulterior use of the methods 1. to 8. above.
Notwithstanding, as the use of the methods 9. to 18. resumes advantageously in support
to the latter, the reverse is not true because this would prove fruitless in a country
where the masses have not been morally weakened enough to be receptive to a call for
a political change / takeover. Formally speaking, the set of methods 1. to 8. serves the
attack, and the methods 9. to 18. are subsumed in a type of mission again named
sensibilisation, in French, or “awareness raising”.
9. Overall, the main objective of this second set of methods limits to sowing and
breeding doubt in the minds of the masses about everything they perceive
positively about their country and its scale of values, yet not necessarily about
their feelings for their elite. Therefore, it is not yet about making the masses
endorsing a cause against their elite, but undermining their confidence about their
country and its core values up to the point of making them feeling less safe and
comfortable than they were heretofore. In turn, the ill feelings must gradually
evolve toward incredulity and then doubt, with a focus on the latter assumptions
since the goal is to prepare them to the acceptance of new values.
10. Challenging and questioning the scale of values of the masses of the target
country through persistent and various actions of cultural influence—largely
explained in their principles in this book and in the next chapter in particular.
11. Breeding doubt among the masses about facts and news by insisting on the
negative perception anyone may have of them when so. Putting an emphasis on
true negative news or hyping or publishing those that are poorly or not at all
reported in the attacked country (i.e. awareness raising). Doing the same with
positive facts and news about other countries, their cultures, and scales of values,
all having in common to challenging those of the target country (i.e. importing
foreign white propaganda). Overt black propaganda must be avoided altogether
because success with the method largely relies on subtle disinformation,
information dosage, and fuzzy logic.
12. Sowing discord among the masses by dividing them into minorities over latent
or still inchoate issues, and designing others, suitable to the objective of the
operation (i.e. awareness raising). The issues may be of minor importance or even
imagined, regardless, because here the objective limits to question the core
national and cultural values that together bring about a feeling of unity among the
masses. Preferably, however, the worrying issues must have in common to be or to
appear to be caused passively or actively by the ruling elite, its current politics,
rules, and regulations. Thus, each of the minorities and their respective claims
breed inescapably together a common discontent toward the elite and its current
politics, rules, and regulations, pointed out as the only responsible for it.
Implicitly, the recurrent characteristic transforms into a rallying call uniting all
minorities into a new majority or influential minority at least.
13. Infiltrating permanently the political parties of the attacked country with a
focus on the most popular and on those whose popularities are rising. The political
colors of the parties to be infiltrated are unimportant because the goal is to secure
in it a capacity in influence over politics, public services, and the military, once
one of them will be in power or is already in power. “Moderately extremist”
parties (i.e. far-right and far-left) are of particular interest due to their greater
dynamism, and because of the easy reversibility of their programs and of the
stances of their grass rooters. Far-extremist parties and their hardliners are of poor
interest because they attract small minorities only, whose typical idiosyncratic
members are intrinsically unable to access positions of responsibilities and power.
14. Whenever possible, founding new political parties, associations, labor unions,
and liberal masonic grand lodges and lodges in the attacked country by recruiting
its citizens having profiles suitable to the objective of the operation. Recruiting or
helping discreetly leaders of minority parties, associations, and labor unions
already established and having views that are clashing with the dominant values of
the attacked country. Herein the goal is to use them as media / proxies voicing
messages consistent with the objective of the operation, and relaying an action of
disinformation similar in its form to this earlier described in the methods 1. to 8.
Whenever possible, a particular attention must be accorded to women because
they are statistically more receptive (more than 50% in all countries) than men are
to the call for passion when the myth and its narrative preach progressive values.
15. Spotting public servants whose views / stances may serve the attack and help
them rise in their respective hierarchies whenever possible. Doing the same with
others having positions and professional notorieties because those are natural
opinion leaders (e.g. experts, politicians, senior officials, religious leaders,
scientists, journalists, artists, etc.). The main characteristics of interest to be
considered in those people are consistency and strength in their beliefs. In this
respect, women preferably young and handsome are recruits of greater interest due
to their superior ability to seduce—as advertising demonstrates this regularly,
actually. Moreover, when committing to a cause, women often prove more
pugnacious than men are. Independently of genre, looking for an additional
minority of recruits who are visibly native of third-world countries or their
descendants because of their natural capacity to inhibit indigenous opponents in
Western countries—lest of accusations of racism or xenophobia that always prove
potent means of defense causing further inhibition / inaction in their opponents
(i.e. enforced political correctness).
16. In universities, spotting talents whose views / stances may serve the attack,
and helping those accessing positions of interest with respect to the objective.
When possible and generally, penetrating and influencing the educational system
of the target country with a focus on the schools and universities the elite favor.
17. Note that the types of individuals mentioned in the methods 1., 14., 15., and
16. must not be recruited as conscious agents, but only helped unbeknownst to
them in all ways serving the objective, in order to shelter them against suspicions
of collusion, espionage, and foreign interference. Therefore, interactions with
them must never be direct (i.e. working them through screens) and must limit, in
detail, to manipulations, anonymous helps, promotions in the media and by other
means. Moreover, influencing them must be avoided because they must be
shortlisted according to the quality and strength of their natural opinions,
precisely. For the record, (1) the best agent is someone who ignores he is one; (2)
one must never try to change the ideas and beliefs of someone shortlisted for this
type of mission, and must find instead how to put them in the service of the
objective.
18. In general, arousing doubt among the masses about the dominant scale of
values, and resentment among already existing minorities toward the elite /
establishment, to thus making them natural allies in the attack to come
(materializing as the methods 1. to 8.). The silent frustrations of minorities must
be aroused enough to give rise to spoken claims (i.e. awareness raising). In this
goal, identifying all natural social and cultural minorities, and influencing them
into turning their identities and characteristics into myths and corresponding
narratives and claims, which together must constitute the formal aims of the attack
to come. For the record, all societies are made of minorities, and arousing
resentment in each against the scale of values of the majority makes them together
 a new majority, as explained in the method 12., yet all along unaware of the real
aims they thus serve.
Special operations of the kind and scale presented above focus on influencing the
masses by manipulating an actually limited number of individuals serving the objective
as unconscious agents. In their understanding, the latter serve a cause that is no more
than formal aims in the ongoing operation, and the enthusiasm they display is spurred
by the support and praise they receive in return. The reward system in the brains of
those agents is thus simulated up to a point at which it takes over the thoughtful process
of their beliefs and commitments, as the intelligence agency expects it. Thus, they enter
a stage in which their motives and the will they invest in them actually become
irrational, since they truly are incommensurate to the reality of their worries; yet all
along unbeknownst to the level of consciousness of their brains. That is how the
opinion and the belief that spurred them initially to act evolve to commitment first, and
then to a drive demanded by the reward system. All along, the cause of the repeated
actions is never unselfish in truth, as explained earlier in the chapter 9; the less so at the
final stage of this evolution, whose inner workings actually are the same, exactly, as
these explained in detail in a previous chapter while taking the other example of
someone watching a sport game. The experts in the DGSE who are supervising the
handling of those unconscious agents put the motive (that is not really one) in the ego
category. The reader remembers an agent must have a motive to be it.
For the very high stakes and sensitivity of such operations forbid the explicit
recruitment of citizens in the attacked country as conscious agents. The exception to
the rule concerns journalists because (1) they are legally allowed to investigate on
sensitive matters, (2) the strong alibis of freedom of speech and freedom of the press
shield them against all accusation of influence and propaganda, and (3) the two latter
points put them in capacity to serve consciously the interests of a foreign power as
agents or sources, without running the risk to fall under the accusation of intelligence
with a foreign power—except when in certain authoritarian regimes. About the
unconscious agents, on the contrary, nothing and no pattern in their biographies,
records, and investigations led on them, and their possible interrogations by the local
counterintelligence must result in avowals and evidences of collusion or recruitment by
a foreign intelligence agency. The help, support, and promotion alluded in the methods
1. and 14. to 17. consist essentially in mentioning their names and existences in a
variety of media ranging from social networks to classic media in which we find indeed
the conscious agents. However, by conscious agents, I mean people act wittingly in the
service of an organization that is not the DGSE or the Russian SVR RF, since they are
preferably recruited under a false flag that is not necessarily presented to them as a
foreign country. Therefore, they do not know the real aims of the cause they serve
either.
The need for secrecy in the operation thus sets a wall between the unconscious
agents and the others who act consciously in the service of some real front organization
or who believe they are doing so in the service of another that is a false flag and
imaginary. Additionally, the latter are instructed in a way suitable to the introduction of
dosage in the promotion they make for the former, in order not to transform the help
into a pattern obvious enough to support an accusation of complicity between a
politician and a journalist in particular. In case the counterintelligence agency of the
attacked country exposes one or several such patterns pointing out the highly likely
action of the DGSE or its agents, the rule says it must be denied flatly with further
vehemence. The latter must oppose to this by posing as “victim of a slanderous
accusation,” and stick to an alibi even when confronted with overwhelming evidences
until a stalemate or a complete reversal of situation is reached. Indeed, the more
obvious the evidence supporting the accusation is, the more vigorous, indignant, and
persistent the denial must be. For what matters is not what the counterintelligence
understood and knows, but what the public opinion says about it since the incident
itself may be used advantageously as an opportunity to further arouse in the minds of
the public the desired feeling of doubt.
Having presented the forms of attacks, I explain how the substance or message is
developed to bring the actions of influence and disinformation to success. Note,
beforehand, that the followings are defined in the DGSE to serve the common objective
of the methods 1. to 9. in particular. These fundamentals are taught to agents of
influence and to activists spotted and recruited abroad, unbeknownst to their being
conscious to be thus trained by this agency. They often are complementary to the action
of minority influence, earlier explained.
Establishing an action of influence claims the three following elements, plus a fourth
when the circumstances are favorable.
1. The context, which is the political / social / economic / cultural situation(s) of
the target country.
2. The expectation, which is the need / claim or object of the discontent of the
minority or majority.
3. The message of influence, which are the myth and its narrative that the
specialists of the intelligence agency design according to what 2. specifies, and
to the actions chosen for spreading / voicing them.
4. The echo chamber, which, of course, consists in making other media relaying
the action defined in 3.
Then the action of influence must include the following steps.
A. Victimization of the minority or majority, which must be presented in terms
chosen to arouse passionate feelings in the masses.
B. “Culpabilization” (labelling as the culprit) of the elite / establishment or
assimilated to it, which is the first goal of the action to be reached.
C. Call for redemption, addressing the elite / establishment or assimilated to it,
which is the second goal of the action to be reached.
D. Mending / reparation, which must be elicited from the elite / establishment or
assimilated to it, which is the final goal of the action.
It is understood that the action in four steps above actually is a manipulation of the
masses because it is not formally relevant to influence. Its objective is to force the elite
/ establishment or assimilated to it to comply with the demand of the minority. The elite
/ establishment understand they are truly attacked by a foreign country, simply because
the tactic, methods, and their planning by the demanding minority are too sophisticated
to be the works of independent activists; thoughtful, in a word. Yet denouncing the
demand as formal aims covering the interference and real aims of a foreign power is
not an option because it is impossible to substantiate with convincing evidences, and
easy, therefore, to denounce as a conspiracy theory. Moreover, the passion that
overwhelms the minds of the minority at this stage of the operation dismisses any calls
for reason, typically. Indeed, the action is all about arousing passion to reach
successively and successfully each of its four steps. Winning so the minds of the
masses in itself is an action that unfolds along three successive objectives / stages
called “battles,” explained below.
a. The battle of ideas or logos is about over-simplifying or reformulating the cause
/ claims. It is designed by the experts in influence of the intelligence agency to be
assimilated easily by masses of people. Therefore, the messages supporting this
 action are slogans, by opposition to their elaborate forms that would claim long
sentences or even an entire paragraph, unsuitable to an action aiming to arouse
passionate feelings. In other words, the battle of ideas is about caricaturing an
issue rather than just putting a strong emphasis to it. The targeted elite /
establishment or / and their actions are criminalized instead of being simply
questioned, and the issue the minority called initially a “concerning situation” is
transformed into an “emergency”.
b. The battle of emotions or pathos aims to arouse feelings or moods among the
masses such as anger, shame, and joy. The emotions are triggered with meta-
communication messages such as crying or expressing sorrow in a convincing
manner when presenting the narrative. Music and songs conveying the narrative,
associated with pictures in a video, theatrical demonstrations, shows, and use of
art and symbols trigger the expected emotions either. Of late in 2018-2019, actions
of influence and disinformation are done by manipulating or indoctrinating young
teenagers or even preteens in order to soften morale resilience supported by
thoughtful arguments, and to elicit the same emotions. In other words, the battle of
emotions is about transforming a worry into a dramatic situation and substituting
concern for hysteria.
c. The battle of values or theos consists in doing acts showing to the masses that
the cause / aims do not limit to spoken and written words, pictures, songs,
demonstrations, and shows, and that commitment to the myth and its narrative
indeed extends to physical realities. Therefore, those acts can be striking
physically against anti-riot police forces, throwing eggs against a politician,
burning one’s voting card or a flag before a journalist cameraman, destroying a
statue before a crowd, suing the State or a president, etc. All such acts that consist
in transforming the thought into action in the sense of motion are also forms of
meta-communication, and they call for physical action by relying on meme. The
involvement of people in the battle of values is the ultimate form of commitment
to the cause / aims, and it is an important stage, needed when the masses who
committed to the cause / aims start at some point to tire of words and are
expecting real effects. In other words, it is about pushing the masses to
“excommunicate” the elite / establishment instead of just asking for a change in
attitude / the rules.
All sets of methods presented up to this point in this chapter are complementary to
the method of minority influence and other notions earlier presented in the chapter 18,
and they are completed by the explanations of the next chapter 26. Now I assume the
reader is curious to known whether the DGSE has been able to quantify in some way
their effects. The answer is “yes,” and I develop it, below.
To begin, in recent years, there has been an evolution in this agency about the
definition of disinformation in general and when it serves political influence in pre-
election and election periods in targeted countries in particular. This observation
applies likewise to the Russian intelligence community, since the DGSE and the SVR
RF share methods and discoveries in this field because they are integral to the doctrine
of active measures. Until the early 2000s, disinformation consisted largely in
fabricating lies. From this period and due to costly failures, it slightly evolved to
alluding only to hypotheses that are the lies. Thus, the lie is no longer presented as a
fact, but as a likely or even highly likely possibility or theory supported by a gathering
of facts and realities that truly are irrelevant. Metaphorically, it consists in building a
“wall” or “bridge,” figuring the campaign of disinformation, connecting two remote
“towers,” one figuring a fact, and the other a lie or fallacy, in order to bring about the
deductive reasoning, “therefore, the latter is a fact either”. Of course, not all this can
transform a lie into a fact, but it breeds doubt successfully in the minds of the masses,
which results in about the same effect as attempting to assert a lie indeed is a fact. The
advantage to the deceiver is that he does not formally accuse, but just brings upon “a
hypothesis deserving to be checked,” thus sheltering himself against all ulterior
accusations of deception and defamation. Therefore, from inception to end, the action
of disinformation is breeding doubt in the minds of the public instead of a temporary
belief.
Since then, the DGSE, and the SVR RF due to the above explained, have quantified
the impact of this new type of disinformation on an electoral period with the following
data that all are variables and estimates—though relatively accurate. A successful
campaign of disinformation fostering doubt about the integrity of a candidate results in
a shift of stance in 7 to 10% of the population. Then the effect produced by the action
varies according to two first variables, which are, (1) between 20% at worst and 80% at
best of the population being in capacity to vote participate in the electoral process, and
(2) candidates to elections in Western countries are elected with between 51% or so and
70% or so of votes at best. Therefrom, with between 7 and 10% of influence, the action
of disinformation can be indeed decisive in a significant number of instances, and
deserves to be endowed relevant means. This is especially true when the percentage of
participation in the election is low and the winner “badly elected,” wherefrom the
additional interest in undermining the confidence of the masses in their elite /
establishment.
Now, I present pell-mell a number of other fundamentals, principles, and methods in
French influence, for I did not find any logical order for their classification beyond
their pertaining to the subjects of influence and disinformation when associated with
hostile actions in intelligence, which characterize active measures.
Deception is a recurrent theme in training courses in the DGSE, with a claimed
purport to make it a mindset elevated to a cardinal virtue meant to clash with the
morality commonly accepted in the society of regular people, described in this agency
as “naive and bourgeois”. Late in my career, I learned a successful deception strikes an
opponent in two successive ways: (1) tricking the opponent, and (2) challenging his
scale of values to place him in a state evolving from awkwardness, powerlessness, and
inhibition. The succession implies the deception must be made obvious to the
counterintelligence service and to the ruling elite of the targeted country at some point,
in the aim to instill in their minds a belief in the “unchallengeable superiority” of their
adversary. Their loss of self-confidence and morale withdrawal is expected as combat
fatigue comes up in the mind of the soldier on the battlefield. It gains momentum when
the masses they must shield against foreign influence not only are unable to identify the
attack, but also deny its existence by opposing arguments of paranoia, delusion,
conspiracy theories, or even to be deceived by the establishment of their country. At
this point, the DGSE counts on a phenomenon in mass psychology, its concerned
specialists sum up with the aphorism, “To be wrong with everybody is a more
comfortable position than to be right against everybody”. It is also the principle on
which the method of minority influence relies. This comes to explain the recurrence in
my explanations of the idiom “thumb one’s nose,” actually a Russian import in French
intelligence that is integral to this approach of information warfare and psychological
warfare; somehow, I go as far as to say, as Muslim terrorists turn the phrase “Allāhu
akbar” into a war cry. Its goal is to taunt and to distraught the adversary; the battle of
wills must be asymmetric either and not a “bourgeois game” opposing gentlemen
sharing a same perception of warfare. It comes indeed as a fundamental not only in
French and Russian intelligence, but also in diplomacy, foreign affairs, and business
because it is integral to active measures. If this perception still seems weird or childish
to the reader, then he must learn the followings.
 The French and Russian tactic in information warfare is to contrive attacks and
schemes that only its targets can identify as such, and not all other people around who
must stay ignorant of the realities of the happening. The goal has the practical
dimensions of fulfilling the need to spare the masses of the targeted country the reality
of an attack and a bad perception of its author since their heart and souls must be won,
of course, while the mindset of the agents who partake in it however must be shaped
according to the Clausewitzian trinity; in French intelligence specifically and as earlier
explained. On the contrary, the target is expected to mistake this as unnecessary,
stupid, and childish cynicism and sneakiness, to arouse in his mind the feelings of
being merely taunted and distraught. Sometimes, it may go as far as to sending to the
target an anonymous hostile message on the Internet or smartphone to which the
apparently inappropriate smiley ;-), :-), or ☺; be it just a single foreign spy,
counterintelligence agency, public service, or business regardless. It must come again
as thumb one’s nose anyway.
The DGSE uses to communicate non-cooperatively with countries this agency
targets, exactly as it does systematically with a single spy and while executing a
mission of social elimination. Of course, the communication must be crafted to locate
on a limit beyond which the target might not interpret it correctly, or else it may be
thought to deceive on one’s intention or even to have no meaning at all and to be only
taken as an evidence that “what just happened was not an act of God”. In all cases, any
party other than the enlightened recipient would not understand it and dismiss it as
meaningless; exactly as earlier explained in detail about the other case of anonymous
threats. We have seen what those clues may be with the examples of the Farewell affair
and the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, this other time deliberately released publicly
to stress that “the public would never understand nor even admit their true meanings
anyway”.
Deception, according to French and Russian intelligence consists in “moving the
goalposts” beside the place where the target would expect to find them, and not farther,
even if the target harbors the advantages of intellectual superiority and greater means.
On one hand, in any competition, challenge, fight, battle, and war, to be aware of this
premium breeds stamina. On the other hand, of course, indulging in this perception
may become a weakness. In the DGSE, the Biblical tale of David and Goliath is an
unexpected yet recurrent metaphor in this respect, when a coach or teacher explains
how it is possible to conquer the United States. This exceptional recourse to a Christian
reference this agency antagonizes owes to an all-rational and particular reason, I
explain, below.
France, painted as the weak “David,” has nothing but a “sling” to strike the United
States that is “Goliath”. The weapon, typical of asymmetric warfare, here must be
understood symbolically as deception. David hurls a stone from his sling and hits
Goliath in the center of his forehead; that is to say, his mind. Goliath falls on his face to
the ground, and David cuts off Goliath’s “head,” which is symbolically figuring both
the American ruling elite and the U.S. intelligence community. Then David shows the
“decapitated head” to the bemused opposing forces that metaphorically are the
American public.
The Biblical origin of the tale of David and Goliath must be seen as the additional
psychological “thumb one’s nose effect,” again—which makes the idea devilish, to
choose an adjective that best suits the circumstance. The Bible does not say David
laughed while he was showing the decapitated head of Goliath to his followers, but this
is a part the DGSE adds to the story to further arouse the desired moral effect. In other
words, and this time by resorting to an imaginary example of mine, if the DGSE were
offered the magic opportunity to crush in one shot the headquarters of the CIA, the
NSA, the Capitol, or the White House with the imaginary weapon of its choice, then it
would probably and logically pick up a giant and heavy Bible. Choosing a Biblical
interpretation to the action of deception aims to strike the target with greater force
because Christianity is a pillar of its scale of values and Constitution, and the unifying
force of its nation, precisely. Questioning successfully Christian religion in the United
States would necessary call for a secular doctrine in replacement, since all nations
cannot exist without a common belief defining their collective identity and fulfilling
the need for belonging present in the mind of each of its citizens. It comes as a general
principle, the DGSE further teaches, that the cynicism added to the attack must be
found in the adversary and in his own actions, passions, mores, scale of values,
creations, inventions, vices, or anything else for the maximum psychological effect to
occur, and at the same time to deceive all those who are witnesses only. To put it
simply, attacking a country under its own banner is far more effective psychologically
than attacking it under a foreign one because it sows doubt in the minds of its
population that thus is inhibited.
At this moment in 2019, the greatest danger the United States are facing, as a
country and as a society, is not so that some of its politicians, thinkers, activists, true
believers, and journalists are promoting secularism by questioning the validity of
religion, but that teachers and professors in schools, colleges, and universities do the
same in their workplaces. Regardless how those scholars are educated and intelligent,
yet they do not seem insightful enough to understand they are unwittingly working in
the service of the foes of their country. As former spy of the DGSE and partner to
Russia, I have been in the right position to say that if I were an American, then I would
be a staunch exponent of Christian religion while being an agnostic. Again, I have the
advantage over the majority unenlightened in spycraft to know that domestic
propaganda is not necessarily a bad thing, and even praiseworthy when used to bring
about peace, competitiveness, and the well-being of everyone in a country. Today, state
propaganda continues to save a number of countries from noxious foreign influence,
and thus from their downfalls and subsequent situations of serfdoms. Everyone can see
today that France did suicide successfully when she undertook to eradicate religion
among her population 150 years ago.
Again as a general principle, the DGSE further teaches that the cynicism to be added
to the attack, tantamount to taunting, must be found in the adversary and in its / his own
actions, passions, mores, scale of values, creations, inventions, vices, or anything else,
for the maximum psychological effect to occur, and at the same time to deceive all
those who are witnesses only. To put it simply, attacking a country under its own
banner is far more effective psychologically than attacking it under a foreign one,
because it sows doubt in the minds of its population that thus is inhibited.
French agents of influence meant to attack the United States learn the other biblical
parable of the “Trumpets of Jericho,” whose symbolical allusion to the power of
influence of propaganda is obvious to everyone. The French interpretations of this tale
is, “Strike the mind of the opponent with fallacies relying on the magic-like power of
persuasion,” and “Keep on repeating a lie over and over again is enough to make it a
truth everyone will believe in the end”. Justice works with material evidences; the
masses never wait for such things. “The crowd judges only from appearances and
results; the whole World is just a crowd and thinks as a crowd. The isolated, able to
think and to understand will rest silent, or they will be silenced”.[599]
Here is a method formally called “procès de rupture,” I translate as “breakage
action”. French lawyer Jacques Vergès is attributed this invention summing up as a
trial in which the defendant or accused denies the judge or the court any legitimacy to
judge them—as opposed to “defense of connivance,” where the defense consists
mainly in answering not on the legal ground, but on the political terrain. Actually,
French communist lawyer Marcel Willard explained breakage action much earlier
1938, and he even specified, “Lenin had fixed this course of action in 1905 for all
Bolsheviks brought to justice: ʻDefend his cause and not his person, ensure his own
political defense, attack the accusing regime, address himself to the masses over the
head of the judge … ʼ”. The defense of rupture only has meaning in very specific
contexts: a situation of major social and political crisis, even a civil war, which
mobilizes militants ready to sacrifice their freedom or their life for their camp, and
who, when they appear before the courts, far from worrying about their fate, do not
hesitate to stand up and shout at the judges, as Karl Liebknecht did in Berlin in 1916: “I
am here to accuse, not to defend myself!” The DGSE teaches flying agents to resort to
the method, very simple, but claiming much moral strength and a good nerve to his
practitioner, in case they would be captured and brought to the justice of the foreign
country where they operate. Then those agents teach it to the activists they recruit, not
only in case they might be brought to justice in their own countries, but also as a
general principle in agitprop because it is the continuation of a defiance toward the law
considered as a creation of a bourgeois establishment.
As true, relevant, relatively recent, but extreme example of the use of breakage
action in justice, in 1977, in Italy, arrested Red Brigades’ communist terrorists
challenged their lawyers, whom they accused of being the accomplices of the
magistrates. As the president of the bar Fulvio Croce committed them to office, which
the law required, they had him murdered and claimed responsibility for this crime,
thereby signifying their complete break with the judicial system. As other example,
inspired by true stories that reproduce regularly and more relevant to our time, it is
possible to rally the support of a large number of people around vandalizing luxury
vehicles by claiming one’s responsibility for it instead of denying it, on the ground that
the owners of the vehicles “endanger conspicuously and shamelessly the health of
people by excessive air pollution”. Thus, the accusation of vandalism is turned upside
down to be newly presented as “unselfish commitment to public health safety”. Even if
a majority finds the argument excessive, gross, or farfetched, there always will be a
minority to approve the wrongdoing once presented under this new angle. This is a
tremendous change by comparison with not using breakage action because otherwise
the culprit would rally the support of no one, as a sure thing. The method, the reader
notices exploits the same psychological phenomenon counted on in the method of
minority influence.
The theory supporting breakage action, as the DGSE sees it and no longer as Lenin
and lawyers Willard and Vergès did, bases on the distinction of three classes of agents
in psychological warfare, regardless whether they are conscious agents or not, which
are
1. the militant or “white agent,” whose actions remain “legal” in the country
where he is operating;
2. the activist, or “grey agent,” whose actions stay “non-illegal” in the country
where he is operating because they locate on an edge beyond which we enter
illegality. The activist otherwise is a true believer who belongs to the “Robin
Hood” or “social vigilante” category, and who braves the law on the fringe of
illegality. Therefore, he often crosses the limits of moral values of the country
where he is operating, by pretending to defend stronger political values. His
typical tactics are civil disobedience, passive-aggressive behavior, strikes,
demonstrations in streets, justifying the transgression of moral values by
attributing to his actions a legitimacy that would override transgression i.e.
breakage action, and seeking the support of politicians, the involvement of the
police, the law, and the media often through provocation; and
 3. the terrorist or “black agent,” whose actions are all “illegal” in the country
where he is operating. The terrorist is very similar to the activist in about all
respects, except he considers entering illegality is the only way to reach the aims
of the cause in which he is committed. His additional objective that the activist
does not have is to question the illegality of his actions by arguing of a cause that
is above the law and all moral values, he perceives as expressions of inhibition
and submission to an illegitimate and abusive power. This explains why the
terrorist frets, “I am not a criminal; I am a fighter”.
The following method will ring a bell to the reader who is a Go game player,
although the name formally given to it, irrelevant, is “consensus par assentiments
successifs,” or “consensus by successive assents”. In its principle, it consists in setting
gradually a situational context around an opponent in the aim to force him ultimately
into accepting a deal he would otherwise refuse. It can be used against an individual,
but France—and Russia even more—resorts to the method when deceiving the
government of a foreign country or its diplomatic apparatus in particular. The slow and
gradual building of the context, which the opponent must perceive as a “situation” or
even as a “crisis” at some point, is the installment of a number of events and constraints
that each is of minor importance and do not connect to the others, apparently. The
timing and choices of those events and constraints are defined precisely for the
misperception to occur along the first stages of the action. This method therefore is a
manipulation.
As the stratagem takes place slowly and gradually, the odds that suspicion arises in
the mind of the target are growing accordingly. However, this risk if of a relative
importance because if the target realizes that “something must be wrong” when two or
three first events and constraints only on a number of six initially planned have been
set, then it is already too late to recede. In the context of diplomatic exchanges and
relations between two countries, the events and constraints typically are issues and
corresponding agreements, each being of minor importance. The goal is the target must
not see that all of the latter actually partake in a scheme, whose scale and implications
are much greater and will prove costly to him. This type of manipulation is also named
“ratchet method” because the target must engage enough in its processing to be in a
near-impossibility to renege on his commitments otherwise by creating a diplomatic
incident. Even if his backtracking does not result in consequences of the latter gravity,
his reputation and the image of the country he represents will be tarnished. Of late, the
well-known case of U.S. President Donald Trump who went back successively on the
Paris Agreement on climate change in June 2017, and then on the Iran Nuclear Deal in
May 2018, exemplifies not to say epitomizes the difficulty. In Europe, accusation of
“dishonesty,” “unreliability,” “irresponsibility,” and what not followed.
Now, I explain the French strategy, tactics, and methods for sending spies abroad,
and for organizing networks of agents and contacts in foreign countries.
To begin, owing to the doctrine of active measures, each French national working in
embassies and consulates are cooperating in the intelligence effort, though to an extent
that not all of them can fathom. I mean it is not about determining who exactly in a
French embassy belongs to its “rezidentura,” since the whole staff except indigenous
employees recruited in the host country is the “rezidentura,” each of its staffers being
entrusted a particular responsibility and an awareness degree. Those officials were
shortlisted to occupy their positions based on their known dependability, patriotism,
and political orthodoxy; some, who are actively concerned with intelligence activities,
have a higher awareness degree, logically. The others, who nonetheless remain
passively concerned with intelligence activities, are granted a need-to-know along basic
teachings and training on safety measures, security, spycraft, and even
counterintelligence. While working in a consulate or embassy, the latter must stay alert,
lookout for everything might be specious, and remain ready to help at any time their
colleagues actively concerned with security and intelligence activities. Remarkably, the
particular situation of a diplomatic staff sheltered together in a building in a foreign
country breeds in them the real esprit de corps that does not really exist in the DGSE.
There may be internal rivalries, inescapably, yet they stick together aboard “their boat”
floating in not-so-friendly waters, imbued with a sense of purpose and a spirit of
authentic Gallic patriotism. They live and work literally immersed and secluded in a
spot of dense French culture with its symbols present in all offices, rooms, and
corridors shielding them in thought as crucifix and pious pictures do to other people in
churches and monasteries. They feel more “in France” in this particular place than in
the actual country.
Consuls and ambassadors attend summary training courses in intelligence and
counterintelligence, and they even have been trained in various safety and security
countermeasures against foreign intelligence. For the DGSE trains them so and the
DRSD vouches them for their sensitive positions. French ambassadors and consuls
indeed are spies in addition to their diplomatic duties, at least because they know as
much as a French field agent does in spycraft. Ambassadors correspond with senior
executives of the DGSE on a regular basis, under pretenses of friendships with ordinary
French citizens. Sensitive matters are simplified and alluded with passing references,
double entendres, and cryptic words only the two concerned parties can understand.
Therefore, not everything is sensitive in embassies and consulates go through their le
Chiffre service tasked to encrypt and to send diplomatic cables to Paris. Before their
sending abroad, all diplomatic staffs are warned that their personal offices in
consulates, embassies, and private quarters must be considered by default as sonorisés
(bugged) by the local counterespionage agency. They are instructed to behave
accordingly, therefore, which implies they can talk aloud about unimportant matters,
and about things meant to deceive the local counterespionage whenever needed or
instructed to.
The French expatriate who happens to go to his consulate for ordinary matters of
administrative order ignores completely that each of those times he must confer with an
official who has been made an agent de facto, and who will report forthwith on
anything he deems suspicious or pertaining to the French national interest. French
nationals working in diplomatic representations with a position in security (checking
entries and visitors) are ex-military in elite units, typically. The latter quality does not
necessarily make them more knowledgeable in intelligence or counterintelligence than
the other employees are because their duty is about security and dealing physically with
hazards of all sorts. However, as the DRSD supervises their ordinary and official
missions abroad, this fact makes them spies either.
I can say that each time I went to a French consulate, I understood every French
official working therein had an awareness degree,simply by observing attentively the
demeanor of those wandering in the place and talking with me. This awareness surges
as a feeling all spies breed along years of daily contact with their colleagues. As
example of the opposite, in the early 2000s, at the French consulate in Boston,
Massachusetts, I spotted a security guard in uniform and a woman at the reception who
both did not appear to be “enlightened people,” very possibly because they were
French-speaking U.S. workers or immigrants from other countries hired in this city.
Officials in French consulates are always attentive with French expatriates who
come to see them for red tape such as updating their passports. On each of those
occasions, the visitors are asked whether they “registered” already, which “registration”
is formally called Inscription consulaire, or “Consular registration”. When the answer
is negative, the official presses on “the need to register,” although this administrative
step is not mandatory. The argument put forward is, “If you do not register, you cannot
fully enjoy the service and assistance of France ʻin case of troubleʼ”. The statement
sounds as a friendly and complicit warning, though nothing of the sort is told explicitly.
When the visitor asks, “What kind of trouble?” the diplomatic clerk answers things
such as, “We never know, an incident of any kind may happen in this country; a
catastrophe, an impending war or anything else that would prompt us to warn you in
emergency. This is a normal service France renders to all her nationals in her concern
with guaranteeing their safety abroad”. The talk sounds unusually considerate to the
ordinary French who uses to deal with other public services in continental France. All
of a sudden, he may even feel flattered to enjoy a care for his safety that only important
persons are entitled, for this is not magnanimous, but calculated. The official incentive
put forward for Consular registration is the following, verbatim.
“If you live abroad, you can register in the Registre des Français établis hors de
France [Register of French nationals established outside of France] at your consulate.
This is more simply called consular registration. This registration facilitates your
efforts abroad, especially for registration on consular electoral lists. The registration in
the Register of French people established outside France addresses any French who
settles more than six consecutive months in a foreign country. The registration
facilitates the fulfillment of the [following] formalities.
“Request for identity documents (passport, national identity card, etc.), scholarship
application for children enrolled in a French institution in Europe or outside of Europe,
registration on the consular list, census for the Defense and Citizenship Day,[601] and
reduced tariffs for legalizations and certified copies.
“With this registration, the consular services can provide you with information
(elections, security, and events), and contact you and your relatives as well in case of
emergency”.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs further specifies, “Every adult [in a same family
living abroad] must have their own accounts”. When registering, one is asked many
personal information, especially landline telephone, cellphone numbers, and email
addresses. The reader guesses the DGSE is much interested in the computer database of
the Register of French nationals established outside of France (RFEHF cards database,
chapter 17), and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs grants full access to it to this agency,
and to the Ministry for the Economy and Finance either. Half only of the French living
abroad registers however (145,000 French residents out of 300,000 in the United States
in early 2018).
Therefrom, DGSE employees and intelligence officers who are looking for French
nationals living abroad, and who might be “potentially interesting individuals,” can
proceed to information crosschecking on them. Then they establish their full pedigrees
in view to recruit a small number of them as sources, contacts, under-agents, or agents.
Implicitly, the provision makes any innocent French expatriate a potential spy, since he
can be recruited either through a soft recruiting process or through a hostile recruiting
process implying threats on relatives who remained in France, or else by other means
and accordingly.[602] He may also be recruited unbeknownst to him; that is to say, by
befriending someone he believes he met by happenstance, a fellow citizen who
expatriated, too, or even a foreigner who work for the DGSE as under-agent or agent.
In its proceedings, the approach has been earlier explained as opening a contact. Then
the “friend” may pose as “committed to a cause,” whatever it is, in view to build a
motive for the future source, under-agent, agent, or contact. An intelligence officer
plans the approach and its pretext from France because he may very possibly enjoy the
knowledge of the opinions, beliefs, scale of values, and tastes of this French national
about to be recruited. All those specifics are easier to obtain if he lived in a small town
than in a city, of course.
 Nonetheless, even when a French national living abroad does not register to a
consulate, soon or late he will be asked to give a telephone number and an email
address to this diplomatic body, upon his demand for a passport update or for any other
formality. The need to inform him when his new passport or else will be available for
retrieval justifies the demand, and the diplomatic official has a know-how for worming
out the useful data. A refusal to surrender it would rise questions and concerns and
possibly evolve to a denial of service, or to the threat of an investigation of
administrative nature.
In the DGSE, knowing the whereabouts of French expatriates and watching their
moves has a dual purpose. The first has just been explained; the second is part of a
tactic in deception in human intelligence, which is to inducing local counterespionage
agencies into admitting, “Any French expatriate can possibly be a spy”. Given the high
numbers of French expatriates in certain countries, local counterespionage sleuths
cannot seriously envisage investigating each of them, “just in case”. Thereof, the reader
understands the double entendre British politician Boris Johnson seemed to introduce
intentionally in his speech in 2013, when he was so insisting on the word “joke”. If the
British MI5 expects to look for who the French spies are among a population of a
quarter of million French immigrants in London, this is tantamount to looking for
needles in a whole load of haystacks, all the while being fooled by those that are “red-
painted” to further overwhelm this agency with red herrings, and to unhinge its spy
hunters if possible.
As a particular contrivance, the DGSE manipulates regular French expatriates who
live and work in a target country to make them popping up on the radar of the local
counterespionage service. Thus, those unlucky immigrants become decoys and red
herrings unbeknownst to them for the sake of diverting the attention of local spy
hunters from the real spies. The stratagem aims to deceive the local counterespionage
service about the real French intelligence objectives and number of spies on the
moment. Occasionally, this may aim to transform a shortlisted immigrant into a
“chèvre” (“goat” in French intelligence jargon and in this particular case) in the
expectation the local counterespionage believes he is a spy and “tamponne” (“bump
into” or approach) him. The goal may be several, starting with testing the capacity and
rapidity of the local counterintelligence in general or in a particular place; somehow, at
the image of the entrenched soldier who puts his helmet on his rifle and lift it slightly
above the trench to see whether some sniper is going to confuse it with the actual head
of an enemy and shoot it. Therefrom, the local counterintelligence may coerce the
ignorant individual into becoming an informant tasked to spy on the local French
immigrant minority, which will allow the DGSE not only to know who the snitch is,
but also to feed him with bogus information aiming to “enfume” (“intoxicate,” or
deceive) his handlers.
Precipitating so someone in spycraft is easy to do and inexpensive. The unwilling
recruit may be shortlisted because of some particularity in his character, pedigree, or
else that may easily support a fabricated rumor and a few arranged patterns suggesting
he “might be” a spy, a drug dealer, or a terrorist. As the reader has seen earlier, due to
the psychological phenomenon of confirmation bias, as all counterspies are prone and
quick to transform a specious event into a hypothesis deserving to be probed. That is
how an ordinary and innocent immigrant may be recruited as agent against his will, and
find himself entangled in a situation from which his chances of escaping are about nil,
as it is become increasingly difficult to regain one’s freedom under a false identity in
some other country. For the DGSE thus recruited him, too, and it will not leave him
alone upon his return to France because his unfortunate experience is tantamount to an
actual and highly valued training in spycraft in real situation. Therefrom, for those who
by chance have no close relatives, suicide comes as the sole way to put an end to a life
of eternal bondage and frustration; which issue indeed may be expected when the
recruit strikes back at some point by making himself a permanent liability. The method
is similar in its principle to the fictitious story of Roger Thornhill aka “George Kaplan”
in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, except the party to be deceived is a foreign
counterintelligence service. More often than not, the DGSE does all this not with the
intent to deceive a foreign counterintelligence service, but for recruiting an individual
having characteristics of interest against his own will; therefore, assimilated to a hostile
recruitment.[603]
French expatriates tend to flock together because it is an easy way not to feel alone
abroad, as people from all other countries do. In certain countries, such as Switzerland,
for example, the indigenous population is encouraged to be wary of French expatriates
and to keep away from them, which fosters the social phenomenon and the emergence
of immigrant communities sticking together and of French quarters. The herd instinct is
accountable for all this, and the reader enlightened in counterintelligence knows it
assuredly. Consequently, many of those French expatriates are highly unlikely to adapt
in the host country and to assimilate its culture and mores someday. On one hand, this
makes things easier to local counterespionage services for monitoring the activities of
those foreigners. On the other hand, the apparent advantage is double-edged because
for a number of reasons the French Ministry of Foreign affairs, and the DGSE alike,
often intervene discreetly in many ways to favor the emergence of those French
quarters abroad.
The latter ministry and agency may begin with arranging or just encouraging the
settling of a French real estate company and of small associations in the area, typically.
Those who partake in the undertakings are not agents, but contacts and unconscious
agents, generally. In many instances, they act out of a French patriotism further aroused
by their difficulties to integrate in the host country. The local counterintelligence
service or even just the local police recruit a few of those French immigrants as regular
informants, exactly as gendarmes in France build a network of regular sources sources
in the similar context of proximity intelligence; that is to say, with no ambitious scheme
in mind. However, local police and counterintelligence services seldom can afford an
absolute certainty about the allegiance of those foreign sources. For the latter are
motivated opportunistically by a need for greater safety, and some feel true love for the
host country. In both cases, many become sources in exchange for the promise that
their statuses of permanent residents will not be abruptly terminated. Thenceforth, a
silent conspiracy and an atmosphere of mutual suspicions arise, until a point at which a
stability in the situation is reached. As example, I remember of a French travel agent in
the Massachusetts who was both a local police informant and a contact of the French
Ministry of Foreign Affair.
In the meantime, and along a period that may span a generation, the French Ministry
of Foreign Affairs helps in the creation of associations, exotic shops, restaurants, and
even French day nurseries and primary schools. This is done via a handful of other
French public bodies and associations. Thus, this ministry builds steadily its own
contacts network from which the DGSE can benefit. The goal of the ministry is to
preserve patriotism and attachment to French roots and culture among those minorities,
in view to keep doing cultural influence abroad and to serve the francophonie. France is
one among the rare countries that does this in a so organized way. Additionally, this
French presence abroad thus made conspicuous must entice indigenous populations.
This other ambition is the main purport of Alliance française franchises abroad, with
110 representations in the World in 2017.
The Organisation Internationale de la francophonie–OIF today “comprises 57
member states and governments, three associate members, and twenty observers. The
word francophonie, with a lowercase ʻfʼ but often-capitalized in English, aka
ʻfrancosphere,ʼ refers to the World community of French-speaking people. It comprises
a network of private and public organizations that promotes ties among countries where
French people played a significant historical role, culturally, militarily or politically.
The motto of the francophonie is, ʻégalité, complémentarité, solidaritéʼ (ʻequality,
complementarity, solidarityʼ)”[604] which draws from the motto of France, “liberté,
égalité, fraternité” (“liberty, equality, fraternity”). However, no one in the DGSE
understands the francophonie as simply as just summed up because it profits this
agency as a dependable influence network abroad. Indeed, the francophonie associates
unofficially yet closely with the World liberal Freemasonic network led by the Grand
Orient of France–GOdF. Together, they aim to make a profit of French cultural values
and references in support to actions of political influence abroad. In this endeavor, a
reciprocity in exchanges takes place between French minorities abroad and a task force
reuniting the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture, the GOdF, and the
DGSE.
The francophonie is called to play an important role in what the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs calls diplomatie culturelle (cultural diplomacy), which simultaneously is an
action and a large network of correspondents abroad acting formally and informally as
contacts, agents, and under-agents in the World, who each are not necessarily spies yet
are called to help occasionally in intelligence. The activities of this network may go on
smoothly thanks to a sub-network, whose members are all liberal Freemasons who
belong to local masonic lodges and are influential in French-speaking countries. The
latter explanations should come to no surprise to the reader, as spies all over the World
regard the UNESCO as a spy nest with an overwhelming presence and historical record
of agents acting in the service of France and of Russia, already. Wherefrom, we also
find close connections between the UNESCO and this intricate French network.
All along my career in intelligence, I heard repeatedly worries and angry comments
about a World cultural dominion of the United States through an international and
overwhelming use of the English language. From the viewpoint of the DGSE, the rise
of the Internet has been nothing but a potent means to secure and to aggrandize the
power of the United States in the World. Today, this worry is largely accountable for
championing the francophonie as a progressive alternative to the capitalist American
soft power and public diplomacy worldwide. However, the reader must not lose sight
that the effort comes to serve the Russian interest in the end, since the special
relationship between France and Russia always prevails in all French activities abroad.
The francophonie has been created in Niamey, Niger, first under the name Agence de
Coopération Culturelle et Technique–ACCT (Agency for Cultural and Technical
Cooperation), officially on an initiative of Hamani Diori then acting President of Niger,
and in presence of André Malraux who had just stepped down from his position of
French Minister of Culture, in 1969. Diori actually was a front man of France who had
been educated and trained under French supervision in Africa and in Paris before he
became a French public servant. The use of the francophonie as a means of cultural and
political influence really began in 1987, in the wake of its first Summit of 1986 in
Versailles. Since then, the event has become biennial and takes place in French-
speaking regions and countries throughout the World. In November 1997, at the 7th
Summit of the francophonie in Hanoi, Vietnam, the organization created a post of
Secretary General of Francophonie. Thereupon, on November 16, Boutros Boutros-
Ghali, who had stepped down as Secretary General of the United Nations one year
earlier, was elected to occupy the function. This event, of course, was a major success
in publicity for France and a thumb one’s nose to certain countries, but it also raised
concerns abroad over the past impartiality of Boutros-Ghali and of the UNO between
the years 1992 and 1996.
 In 1996, the AACT mentioned above changed its name for Agence
Intergouvernementale de la Francophonie, and in 2005, the adoption of a new Charter
of the francophonie changed this name for Organisation Internationale de la
francophonie (International Organization of the francophonie).”[605] The latter
organization relies on five operating agencies to carry out its mandate, which are
Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie–AUF (University Agency of francophonie),
TV5Monde television channel, Association Internationale des Maires Francophones–
AIMF (International Association of French-speaking Mayors), Association des
Fonctionnaires Francophones des Organisations Internationales–AFFOI (Association of
French-speaking Officials in International Organizations), and the Université Senghor
d’Alexandrie (Senghor University of Alexandria), in Egypt. France has more or less
officially created all these bodies, of course. Therefore, the francophonie is definitively
not the mere quality of speaking French, but a large and powerful tool of international
cultural and political influence actually acting under the leadership of the French
Government. Additionally, France garnered for herself all means and implicit authority
in French culture through language and media, without any real reciprocity in all other
French-speaking countries and regions. Below, I present some facts exemplifying the
unbalance.
France has more or less officially created all bodies named above, of course.
Therefore, the francophonie is definitively not the mere quality of speaking French, but
a large and powerful tool of international cultural and political influence, truly acting
under the leadership of the French Government via the Ministry of Culture and the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and with a strong presence in its midst of the French
liberal Freemasonry. Additionally, France garnered for herself all means and implicit
authority in French culture through language and media, without any real reciprocity in
all other French-speaking countries and regions. Below, I present some facts
exemplifying the latter unbalance.
The obvious reference source for any language is a dictionary, but contrary to what
happens in English-speaking countries that each or thereabout has its own dictionary—
e.g. Merriam Webster in the U.S., and Oxford in Britain—, France holds an implicit
authority over the French tongue since she, alone, authors and publishes all French
dictionaries in the World. Therefrom, France decides from its exclusive authority of
new and obsolete words in all French-speaking regions and countries in the World, with
the exception of French-speaking Canada, however, because she holds to a number of
spoken words and idioms that are not in use and are even completely unknown in
continental France. It should be said that the French-speaking Canadian province of
Quebec keeps strong cultural and identity claims that ever came in opposition to
France’s attempts of cultural influence, to date. Yet it remains true that France
successfully fuelled Quebec’s claims of secessionism from English-speaking Canada
since about 1958-59, and penetrated the government of this Canadian province with a
number of agents actually serving Russian interests in Northern America. Additionally,
the other objective of the latter action is to exert political influence in the whole Canada
by championing first the use of French language in the public affairs of the other
English-speaking Canadian provinces, and by attempting to pose Quebec as the capital-
province where the political power could be eventually centralized.
Then come the roots and references of the French tongue, all coined by famous
French novelists and scholars also approved by France through particular mechanisms
of domestic influence, which I explained with a focus on historians, at the beginning of
the chapter 19. Perhaps more importantly, then come naturally French thinkers and
philosophers who remain posthumously instrumental in the exact meaning and purports
of French words and idioms. Finally, comes the media power of France, again
unchallenged and unchallengeable in all French-speaking countries and regions to date,
except in Canada still at the moment. For the immediate geographical proximity of the
United States is accountable for a hardly challengeable cultural influence of natural
origin, visible everywhere and in many aspects of daily life in Canada.
Thus, the francophonie is the alibi of France for exporting her own perception and
interpretation of news and events in the World, along with the opinions and viewpoints
of her political, cultural, and scientific elite. The opposite is never true, as France’s
political and cultural powers have always been centralized in Paris, and as all books in
French language are published in this city in an overwhelming number of instances.
Still from the latter city are praised and discredited all would-be-authors and artists, in
accordance with French political orthodoxy and through the special provisions, I
described in the chapter 19. As the reader has seen, the same proceedings apply to
music, movies, fashion dress and accessories, up to sports and leisure activities,
whenever possible. Ultimately, the masses of all those French-speaking countries,
flooded with a plethoric French culture coined in the much Gallic capital, foster willy-
nilly a feeling of French belongingness that comes to overshadow their own. In the
French linguistic regions of Switzerland and Belgium today, as other examples, a
majority speaks with a French Parisian accent, beginning with television presenters
who thus support the trend as echo chambers, and their opinions in many things are
coined in Paris either. In the chapter 16, I presented in detail a true example about
politics and Freemasonry in Switzerland that epitomizes the French interference, and
the chapter 28 will provide the reader with the full extent of it, reproducing in the
French-speaking region of Belgium.
With all these characteristics, we notice, the francophonie is similar in many ways to
what pan-germanism was in the first half of the 20th century.
As I said earlier, although the French-speaking province of Canada Quebec opposes
natural resistance against Paris’s influence, of late in 2015, the Organisation
Internationale de la Francophonie elected as its Secretary General Michaëlle Jean,
former Governor General of Canada from 2005 to 2010, thus implicitly making this
Canadian politician a French agent of influence, from authority. Then France keeps on
multiplying cultural events and very various ideas of cultural relations with Quebec in
this endeavor while filtering carefully all Quebec attempts to export reciprocally her
culture. With respect to the same action, and as other example, for long, the U.S. State
of Louisiana has been culturally targeted with an interest about equal as for Quebec’s,
until the United States finally started to take prophylactic measures in counter-
interference under the presidential mandate of George Bush Jr. in the early 2000s.
In the context of their usual and normal partnership, the French Ministry of Foreign
Affairs and the DGSE are constantly looking for famous foreigners and decision
makers to whom it seems opportune to award a French distinction, as conspicuously as
possible. Thus, each year, the French Government awards a number of foreigners one
of its four orders fitting the purpose, which by order of prestige are the medals of
Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, of the Ordre National du Mérite, of Chevalier des
Arts et des Lettres, and the Palmes Académiques. As a high-ranking official or
sometimes the President himself gives these awards on much official ceremonies, the
bond with France the special events engender aims to be strong, close to a feeling of
second citizenship. Of course, those foreigners happen sometimes to take it more as an
embarrassment than good news, a “poison pill,” some may rightly go as far as saying.
Yet few dares refuse the honor and embarrassing someone is the true purpose of it
sometimes. Thus, France very often awards foreign ambassadors with one such medal,
and even sometimes the intelligence Chief of Station of a foreign country, as the
mission of those so particular officials includes a cooperation with the French
intelligence community in joint efforts to fight terrorism, drug trafficking, and white-
collar criminality. The most embarrassing is the rewarding of an expatriate gone in a
foreign country for good, where he became a successful entrepreneur or, worse to the
disturbance, a senior executive in a leading foreign company or public service. For
people of this category often are imbued with a sincere loyalty for their new
homelands. Those recipients may feel caught off guard, therefore, as if the French
Government had been chasing them, and caught them up at last. There are little they
can do beyond denying they deserve the attention of their former country; thus,
suspicion falls on them in their countries of adoption, as expected. The early and
simplified version of the scheme was to send flowers anonymously to a female
employee in a consulate or embassy, with the expectation she be suspected of collusion
and be sent back to her country. The trick is known, but it is still working well.
The DGSE arranges the rewarding of French expatriates of lesser notoriety who, one
way, or another and sometimes unwillingly, promoted French culture and values in
their new countries. Recipients belonging to the category may be book publishers, arts
gallery or private museum owners, or anything else connecting with culture and
economy at some point, even when very remotely. Either the gift is a reward for
services wittingly rendered to France along a number of years or it can be an incentive
to do so. Then there are countless other forms of awards, rewards, and flattery used as
baits, incentives, collusion attempts, or deceptions aiming a local counterintelligence
service and coming as a sanction for a refusal to “cooperate”.
Evidences of France’s tactics in business abroad can be found in the enormous
amounts of money that some of her CEOs and banks invest abroad continuously, often
to buy companies that may prove to be too big to handle on the long run, as the reader
as seen in the previous chapter with the case of Universal Pictures. The real aim is to
control activities that cannot yield anything but political influence via a publication, an
advertising agency, a publishing house, a radio station, a television channel, or a
company of the motion picture or music industry. This explains why those other
examples often remind to foreigners of the tale of The Frog that Wished to be Bigger
than the Ox, who naturally tend to see other’s behavior and aims as theirs by virtue of
the psychological phenomenon of the false consensus effect. Especially, they miss to
ask to themselves why a shrewd and influential businessman would spend so much
money in so unprofitable activities. They are unable to see the real aims because they
have been raised in a society different of France’s, which taught them the purpose of
life is the pursuit of happiness, therefore, success and profit. They ignore that sovereign
funds often disguise as venture capital, and they never heard of secret fund collectors
and providers in intelligence.
 26. Influence.
I n May 1958, in France, President De Gaulle commissioned André Malraux to create an Under-
secretary of State for Culture, with the mission to bring a new blood into French arts. Theretofore,
everything related to art and culture limited to a task of secondary importance relinquished to the
Ministry of National Education. So, Malraux went in the search for a star of contemporary art for
France. He first met sculptor Jean Tinguely and offered to him to embody contemporary French art.
Tinguely is quoted as replying, “But, Sir … I am a Swiss citizen!” Malraux turned to Spanish
painter Picasso who accepted forthwith.[606]
The political decision to associate influence and propaganda with art, and to create an
organization in charge of this, actually was an action of counterinfluence against the United States.
The Ministry of Defense had informed De Gaulle the latter country was developing considerably its
image in the World through art, and more particularly with the abstract expressionism movement
that had erupted in the aftermaths of the WWII. Moscow had alerted the French Ministry of Defense
via the French Communist Party–PCF. Indeed, in March 1958, the U.S. International Council of the
Museum of Modern Art–MoMa had launched a large exhibition christened New American Painting,
leaving for a yearlong European tour. The event was due to begin on April 19 in the Kunsthalle Art
Museum of Basel, Switzerland, and featured American painters William Baziotes, James Brooks,
Sam Francis, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Grace Hartigan, Franz Kline, Willem
de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock,[607] Mark Rothko, Theodore
Stamos, Clyfford Still, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Jack Tworkov. France and the Soviet Union saw
the initiative of the MoMa as evidence of an American strategy in influence through art and culture,
and the latter country even spotted connections with the CIA in it.
Today, the Ministry of Culture is the mainstay of French influence and counterinfluence at home
as abroad, and its connections with the DGSE are multiple, numerous, and close. In point of fact,
the Ministry of Culture shelters a particular service that is the unofficial branch of the DGSE
responsible for carrying on this particular activity, whose official name is Direction Générale des
Médias et des Industries Culturelles–DGMIC (General Directorate of the Media and of Cultural
Industries), unbeknownst to the French public to date. The body, created in 2010, is an evolution
and merge of the Direction du Développement des Médias (Directorate of Media Development) of
the Prime Minister’s Office, and of the Direction du Livre et de la Lecture (Directorate for Book and
Reading). Formerly, it was a department of the Ministry of Culture, with the same dual mission of
culture and influence. The merge came to fulfill a need for better organization and growth, seen as
overdue at that time. The DGMIC is a strategic and sensitive department, therefore, whose secret
activities existed in the 1990s already, scattered at that time in a number of buildings and bureaus,
with a concentration in a large geographical area in Paris covering the old building of the Ministry
of Culture itself, the Louvre Museum, and the Place des Vosges. It also had a unit in the new
Bibliotèque Nationale de France (France’s National Library) that stays active in supervising
counterinfluence in literature and the preservation of France’s literary heritage, running for this a
network of agents and zealous committed citizens. For wants of available space, some full-time
employees of the rank-and-file sort were working in tiny building huts installed next to the Louvre
Museum, in full view to the ignorant countless tourists and Parisian passerby.
The general mission of the DGMIC covers domestic influence, preventive counterinfluence, and
information warfare that itself subsumes cultural warfare abroad. These activities have the support
of other cells and units of the DGSE acting under various covers in the wider and integrating
context of active measures. Those are, pell-mell and between others, a particular service of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, French telephone and Internet providers, the Centre National de la
Cinématographie–CNC (National Centre for the Movie Industry), and a number of front SMEs.
Surprisingly, the overhauled service does not make much effort to shelter its activities from possible
public scrutiny, as it officially describes itself in the not so ambiguous terms that follow.
“Defines, coordinates, and evaluates the state policy for the development of media pluralism, the
advertising industry, and all electronic communication services for the public, the phonographic
industry, books, reading, and cultural economics.”
The use of the word “pluralism” is restrictive, of course. Then the services and units of this
directorate are (my verbatim translation from French),
1. Book and Reading Service (Topical / Book and Reading),
 2. Media Service, which subsumes
a. Sub-Directorate of the Written Press and Professions in Information (Topical / News),
b. Sub-Directorate of Audiovisual Media (Topical / Audiovisual) [television broadcasting,
films, video, videogames, online interactive contents, etc.],
3. Sub-Directorate for the Development of the Cultural Economy (Topical / Cultural
Industries), and
4. Department of Financial and General Affairs.

Some of the main general and official missions of the latter department, relevant to cultural
influence in France and abroad, are
1. to contribute to the definition, implementation, and evaluation of the development and
framework of cultural content broadcasting and audiovisual production industries,
2. to partake in the development and implementation of the policy of the State in audiovisual
action abroad,
3. to contributes to the study and economic evaluation and researches, as well as to monitor
and to assess the evolution of digital technologies in the field of activities of the General
Directorate,
4. to ensure balance between various actors involved in the field of book publishing, and as
such, the development of the book industry in France and abroad,
5. to promotes the development of reading and to evaluates policies in the field of public
reading,
6. in conjunction with the General Secretary, to contribute to the development of the French
position in European and international negotiations on the regulation of the media, cultural
industries, books, and online services,
7. to provide secretariat to the joint committee on publications and press agencies, which
monitors the activities of organizations in the media sector and the collection of information
subject to special status or relating to the State by convention,
8. to propose measures favoring the development of the art market and its sponsorship /
patronage, and to coordinates the implementation of both,
9. in its field of competency, to take care
a. of the collection, production, and dissemination of scientific documents and data, especially
in digital form, and
b. of the development of European and international actions,
10. on behalf of the Prime Minister, to manage the financial means devoted to the external
[abroad] audiovisual action.
The official location of the DGMIC headquarter is 182 Rue Saint-Honoré, Paris. However, many
of its employees are still working nearby in offices of the Louvre Museum and in the French
National Library.[610] Even, many are working at home in buildings located nearby, and under
covers activities of private businesses in several training centers in media and communication
technologies, also located nearby for most. For close to four years between 1993 and 1997, I taught
and trained in the largest of those training centers close to 800 officials, journalists, and employees
in advertising and communication, among whom many were intelligence staffers and spies.
Most employees of the DGMIC are working packed in small offices and are cheaply paid. In the
early 2000s, their perks were a card granting them free access to movie theaters of the Gaumont-
Pathé network, and another one granting free and quick access to French public museums. Many of
them need the latter pass-card to stay in physical touch with their colleagues, whose workplaces are
in the huge Louvre Museum. Actually, the Louvre Museum in Paris is an informal intelligence hub
of a sort where employees, agents, and contacts working in universities for most, often come to
meet together under informal pretenses[611] and for cultural / recreational activities in the frame of
the continuous learning program of the DGSE.
 The same remark applies to the Maison de la Radio (House of Radio Broadcasting),[612] which in
the 1990s, and still today possibly, was used on certain evenings as formal meeting place for DGSE
employees having a specialty in communication and computer technology. Those belong to a same
service of the DGSE, but they are working in separate places and offices in Paris downtown and
suburbs.
Experts in influence remain exterior consultants. I present Bruno Lussato, who has been regarded
as the best until 2009 when he died. Lussato, who was known publicly as a French thinker and
scientist, indeed was the best specialist in propaganda and disinformation the DGSE had, and the
Russians appreciated and rewarded him well. In the 1990s, with Charles-Henri de Pardieu my ex-
director, Bruno Lussato headed a cell of specialists with the codename Cercle Wagner (Wagner
Circle), thus named after Richard Wagner because Lussato was an enthusiastic admirer of the
composer. Today, I notice, a “Cercle Wagner” with an associated Website has been recently (2018 or
a bit earlier) and officially created in Paris, but I do not know if it is relevant to the one I am talking
about. The hypothesis is likely because the DGSE does not necessarily make disappear a company,
an association, or similar cover activity when it estimates its true activities may be compromised.
Instead, it transmits it to a contact or agent who thenceforth runs a normal activity with it, as a
means of deception again.
Circa the years 1995-96, the Cercle Wagner, with thirty or so intelligence figures and scholars
from France and Germany, admitted in its midst famous writer Umberto Eco as specialist in
influence. In my opinion, Eco was one among the best possible minds in France to devise influence
and important deception operations, and he had the right mindset for this.[613] Eco made a mistake at
some point however, and still in my own opinion, when in 1989 he endorsed under his true name the
Basic English of Charles Kay Ogden. For the record, the latter language inspired George Orwell
when he renamed it “Newspeak,” the official simplified language that kills thought in the
totalitarian regime of Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Eco even went as far as to write and sign under his real
name an introduction to the book of Ogden, The Meaning of Meaning (Mariner Books, June 26,
1989).
Lussato was a polymath who introduced himself under eclectic activities ranging from scientist,
to artist, poet, writer, consultant in computer engineering and inventor. Born in Tunis, Tunisia, in
1932, he was one of those top brains the DGSE never hires as full-time employees. At the same
time, he was a highly respected agent of the Russians in Europe in the other context of active
measures. Russian billionaire Sergei Pugachev paid Lussato for his works, but he was also paid via
large French companies L’Oréal and the retail store chain Auchan through arranged consulting fees
and some other pretenses—as Renault-Nissan carmaker does to with other experts and agents of the
exclusive sort. For the record, in the early 1990s, Pugachev now a French citizen was a member of
the inner circle of the first President of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin, and one of the leaders
of his campaign staff in 1996. In 1991, Pugachev established the Northern Commercial Bank, one of
the first cooperative banks in Russia.[614]
On one hand, the French Government dismissed Lussato as a “crackpot”. On the other hand, the
French Minister of National Education awarded him personally the medal of Knight of the Legion
of Honor. Then the Minister of Economy and Finance awarded him the higher order of Officer of
the Legion of Honor. In July 2007, President Nicolas Sarkozy in person awarded Lussato the rare
medal of Commander of the Legion of Honor for the official but vague reason of “scientific
research and university education”. Nicolas Sarkozy was freshly elected President of France when
the latter event took place, remarkably enough with respect to a number of other anecdotes of this
book in which his name arises.
Lussato authored some books on propaganda and disinformation, which however are unimportant
from the viewpoint of concerned specialists. On the Internet website of Lussato,[615] it is alleged
that the essays on the same topics former counterintelligence officer of the SDECE Vladimir
Volkoff[616] authored are of lesser interest, on the ground that the former would be of the “popular”
sort. As former specialist on the matter, I feel qualified enough to say that Volkoff’s essays on
disinformation tell more than Lussato’s, even though they address a larger audience, it is true. I
explain why, below.
Overall, the French intelligence community expresses little interest in literary prose, obscure
metaphysic considerations, personal thoughts, and introspections in the vein of those Lussato
commonly added to his papers written for public release. Herein I mean no more than this agency is
interested in first drafts its analysts write. The DGSE can work from syntheses of such works only,
similar in style to Vladimir Volkoff’s essays. Volkoff was eventually dismissed for his anti-Soviet
stance, and that is how and why he reconverted as novelist in the espionage genre. This does not
mean Lussato’s books are of no real value, quite on the contrary. My point simply is they are
nothing but raw material and some fundamentals, not enough to guide a disinformation action, nor
even to identify one or to explain it. I suspect, Lussato published papers that the DGSE and the
Russians previously rejected just not to trash them because they were indeed of interest from his
personal viewpoint. The best argument I find to support this hypothesis is no attempt was ever made
to censor these works or dismiss their value.
In fact, Lussato was very good in giving ideas, concepts and food for thought, and at stumbling
on breakthroughs possibly useful in information warfare, mostly on informal conversations; all
things he could not help himself mix with completely irrelevant matters and improbable metaphors.
Working with this brilliant yet constantly ebullient and wandering mind consisted in separating the
chaff from the wheat.
Lussato’s death from “complications related to a hospital infection” on January 10, 2009, then
aged 76, strongly suggests a physical elimination by poisoning, despite his age. Lussato “knew
much,” and he knew many influential people in France and in Russia at the highest levels in both
instances. On the day of his death, France Soir was first to publish his short obituary, as this French
national daily newspaper had just been purchased by Russian billionaire Alexander Pugachev,[617]
son of longtime “generous benefactor” of Lussato, Sergei Pugachev. On January 24, 2010, the
Embassy of Russia in France shelled out for a socialite evening party presided by Ambassador
Alexander Orlov to honor the memory of “Professor Bruno Lussato”.
In the light of all this, a counterespionage specialist would formulate the idea saying Lussato was
a Russian agent feeding the DGSE with ideas actually devised by the SVR RF. This is a likely
hypothesis, in my opinion, because recruiting individuals skilled enough to pass for inventors of
ideas that truly are suggested to them is a recurrent pattern in joint French-Russian operations
against the United States, as we shall see in detail in the next chapter.
The unenlightened public uses to call improperly “active measures” the matter I am going to
explain theoretically in this chapter and with true examples in the next ones. For the record, active
measures is a doctrine aiming to camouflage one’s real aims and means, which generally results, it
is true, in influence, persuasion, agitprop, disinformation, deception, manipulation … and even
assassination, also as a means to deceive, hence the confusion. Those fundamentals are thought to
trick the mind—which helps the reader understand why I reduced its title to the single word
“influence”. In my time with the DGSE and until the early 2000s, there was no handbooks on all
this, and I doubt the situation changed since. There were only one-to-one courses and others given
in small and improvised classrooms, with an attendance of a dozen, typically—those I gave never
reunited more than seven students in a same session. All documents projected on a screen, found
there and there to support explanations, were not classified because the fundamentals supporting
theories in influence and deception are selected scientific knowledge and breakthrough found by
scientists and experts who do not work in intelligence. The latter particulars come to explain why
most of what I tell in this chapter is my own, formerly taught my own way to agents and specialists
of the DGSE. Nonetheless, most are tricks, principles, and methods I learned with the DGSE along
two decades; I designed a few only that are still in use today, even in marketing since, as I could
notice.
I must warn the reader, learning those fundamentals claims the prior assimilation of others I
explained in certain previous chapters; just in case the reader has not been reading this book from
beginning to end—I organized its specifics by chapters to offer this possibility, precisely. Therefore,
I add footnotes referring to the pages where the indispensable notions are explained. In any case,
this explains to the reader why, sometimes, I seem to wander a little too far from the matter at hand
in generalist explanations, comments, and examples; I do not, actually. Besides, without this
complementary knowledge, the many things I explain could easily be taken as personal contentions,
I dreaded. Learning methods and techniques the trivial way and in simple words as French spies do
is okay; learning why and how they work exactly is better, even if the reader may find the reading of
this book tedious at times; I am aware of this.
Fundamentals in influence closely connect to the notions of culture and kultur again, simply
because influence, as seen from the viewpoint of an intelligence agency, aims to changing durably
the values, beliefs, and assumptions of bodies of people. The approach is different of advertising’s
in which the goal limits to convincing people to buy a good or service and to favor one brand over
others. In advertising, the comparison limits to the sub-genre of propaganda in influence; one
publishes, prints, and broadcasts messages, whose aims are clear to everyone. If it is about a product
or service sold by a private business, the method qualifies as advertising; it is propaganda each time
it is about something else, period.
Influence purports to alter the beliefs and attitudes of people about something or someone without
clearly stating it, and even without claiming the authorship of the message, as when one wants to
manipulate someone. At the simplest, very commonly nowadays, and still by comparison with
advertising, a journalist is doing influence each time he publishes a paper on a new good of
consumption or service without stating honestly that he actually is promoting it. Of course,
advertising is far more effective when it does not resemble advertising, and when a third party that
falsely claims to be objective and independent does it. On a moral plane, influence indeed is
insidious, dishonest.
We find white cultural propaganda that, at the simplest and metaphorically, is “shining one’s
furniture and curios in one’s home;” they all must “shine,” whereas black cultural propaganda or
disinformation is the “rotten egg” thrown from a distance against “the facade of the bad neighbor’s
house,” anonymously. The latter action must be done from “the garden of another house and not
one’s own,” preferably, i.e. from another country that is a third and unconcerned party, to blur one’s
tracks a little. Black propaganda can also be an “ugly tag bomb-painted by a moonless night”.
Herein I mean overall in influence, a recurrent pattern is to attack a target country from a
neighboring and neutral other, preferably—not from territorial France and still less from Russia.
Thus, many case officers who are handling agents in the United States, and propagandists sent to do
influence in the United States, are living and working in Canada and in Mexico, and even much
farther in the World, thanks to the Internet today. The provision offers the advantages to shelter from
the physical surveillance of the U.S. counterintelligence, all the while enjoying the possibility to do
sudden and quick trips to this country, in order not to leave time enough to FBI agents to react with
all required effectiveness.
Then cultural disinformation is analogous to questioning the authenticity of a painting or its
provenance, and cultural deception is analogous to a rumor saying, “Worms infest the furniture,”
and so, “new ones” must replace them, therefore, all presented as “better”. The “old ones” will be
thrown away or destroyed; they may be used to make a big bonfire on a revolution or a scaffold for
“the former household”. Let’s make a truce with metaphors: the reader grasps well enough the
basics on modern propaganda at this point. Now, I can talk straight by using real-world notions.
Painting and sculpture, to which architecture must be added, can be turned into powerful media of
influence aiming the cultural and non-governing elite of a target country, for they cannot but address
a public receptive to abstraction having a decent educational background and being brainier than the
average. Altogether, the rest of the masses can barely express more than the binary judgment
“beautiful” and “ugly” about art. In passing, C.S. Lewis wrote pertinent and interesting things in
Study in Criticism at a time, in 1961, political correctness did not yet oblige scholars to self-censor,
and that, therefore, constitutes an excellent preliminary on the subject of influence. I highly
recommend this short yet dense book to anyone wants to assess the extent of cultural influence in
the Western society today and reset his compass. Are not the masses dependent on the elite, who
alone can tell them what is “beautiful” and what is not? This is what we call aesthetics i.e. defining
beauty, tastes, and genres; notions that science can hardly explain and rationally categorize, as we
have seen in the chapter 19, about music. In cultural influence and disinformation, the other field of
epistemology much mingles with aesthetics because the latter can hardly support its arguments with
definite and invariable premises. To put it simply, what is beautiful in my opinion very possibly is
not in that of the reader, and reciprocally.
Take as example the simplest case of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Mona Lisa. The masses admit
it is “the most beautiful painting in the World,” only because opinion leaders of the cultural elite
repeat it again and again to them. Otherwise, people of “the average” would be embarrassed when
asked, “Which is the most beautiful painting in the World?” Well, they would probably name a
painting by Van Gogh or Picasso, not to pass for idiots, even though they truly appreciate none of
these two other artists—I am probably an idiot, too, therefore. The latter statement is valid because
these two other painters are over-hyped by complicit and passive media either. Remember the
Ministry of Culture has been created to define what is beautiful in art, and to instruct the media to
tell its conclusions to the masses. It worked well with Picasso, seemingly. This explains why people
of the multitudes do not name Rembrandt, Botticelli, Arcimboldo, Kandinsky, Turner, or Vermeer.
Art, as the computer, automobile, and fashion industries must move on because it is not available
for free, and even not for all wealthy people anyway; it objectively is a business activity of the
luxury sector addressing a small minority. In point of fact, we notice, the definitions of what is
beautiful, and of what is not, change tremendously over time, according to fashions that, again, are
defined by ruling elite and their agents.
Mostly, the masses do not understand abstraction past a certain degree, still less what subjectivity
is exactly; these notions put them in a quandary from which discomfort arises because the unknown
affrays them and makes them fleeing toward certainties. They are waiting for the advice of “the
expert” or for that of anyone claiming, “I know about it”. It does not really matter anyway because
they can hardly escape the dilemma of having to express a sincere opinion on something that is
presented to them as “the best” already, but which they do not understand since they cannot know
what the person who states it has in mind, exactly.
The masses need to be advised on everything because they are unable to make up their minds by
their own, not only about aesthetics, but also about everything, ranging from the latest smartphone
to a shirt, the best career orientation, candidates at the election, and so on. When there is no expert
in sight, then they look at what “everybody” choses because the majority seems to be as right as the
expert is. For the record, “To be wrong with everybody makes people feel more comfortable than to
be right against everybody”. The reader has seen in the earlier chapters where and how the majority
find its ideas, opinions, and beliefs in France. More surprising, people actually rely more on the
choices of an unenlightened majority than on those of people introduced as experts; thereof, the
following phenomenon arises.
Ask to a Nobel Prize and to a pop star to explain in two minutes on television on which criteria
they chose their smartphones. The Nobel Prize is going to formulate sound arguments of the
practical order, predictably full of good sense. The pop star is going to give groundless arguments
such as, “I find it has a cool looking, and it is fun to use”. A majority will follow the advice of the
pop star because they (rightly) assume that “everybody” will choose this cellphone, even though a
good of this kind is filled with high technology that only the Nobel Prize could correctly appraise.
The odd discrepancy is about reason vs. passion, again. In reality, the pop star acted unwittingly as a
proxy to the majority, exactly as a popular television channel, website, or newspaper does, though
slightly differently. A pop star is more popular than a Nobel Prize because he has the advantage over
the latter to address passion, to which the masses are more receptive, as we have seen all along this
book.
When a popular medium titles, “This businessman actually is a bad person,” then people who
read this sentence do not think a single second that one unknown person only wrote it. Instead, they
assume this medium is reporting the opinion of masses of people; that is to say, themselves. This is
all about herd instinct, again. Even if the media were largely publishing and broadcasting the
explanations of this chapter to teach the masses how simple-minded they actually are when they
reason collectively, and take decisions based on what they assume “the others” think, this would not
change anything. Even if the explanations were solidly argued by the best scientists and supported
by true examples and unquestionable experiments, the stubborn persistence in irrationality would
persist stubbornly. There is no way to get the masses back to reason simply because they never
reason as long as they behave collectively. Instead, they “obey” to the innate drive for survival i.e.
need to being. In passing, however importantly, if the media were publishing exactly and only what
the masses want collectively, then this would result in publications for preteens because, as I said
earlier, this is what their mental age indeed is when they “reason” collectively—they do not reason,
but act, actually, since they cannot reason collectively. In the facts yet “theoretically to some
extent,” the media are the “mirror” of the masses in which they see themselves; hence, a feedback
effect installs because the media mirror the collective mind of the masses reciprocally. Note that this
observation applies to entertainment, advertising, recently to video games, and even to art either.
However, the masses would be dissatisfied, of course, if ever the media indeed were publishing and
broadcasting content tailored for their collective mental age.
As a matter of fact, in the United States, when Ford carmaker attempted to create the brand Edsel
in 1956, and for this designed automobiles according to the results of a poll asking to the masses,
“what the ideal car ought to be,” the experiment resulted in the biggest and costliest failure in the
history of the U.S. automobile industry—and in the disappearance of Edsel only three years later to
the day. As opposite example, it should come as a disturbing fact that the Beetle, created by
Ferdinand Porsche on specifications decided by Adolf Hitler, under the brand’s name Volkswagen,
or “people’s car,” is the most enduring success in World automotive history, spanning the years
1938 to 2003. From these two facts, what to do with the media, entertainment, video games, and art
to make them successful seems as obvious as tyranny. Not that so, however, because as this other
example comes to contradict the conclusion, people on the right read papers and watch television
channels on the right, and people on the left read papers and watch television channels on the right.
This other fact is absurd either because it would be more thoughtful for people on the right to read
and watch leftist papers and television programs, to enquire on “what the leftists are doing and
planning,” to see “how wrong they are,” and reciprocally. Then why people still do not behave
rationally with that either, as they use to read the papers and watch television alone with the small
groups of their families, and not collectively in stadiums? Because, on the contrary, this time, they
want to read and to watch what they think is right, In other words, and more correctly, they want to
be reassured because, unconsciously, they dread to be wrong in their assumptions and beliefs. Their
unconscious, or id, tells them permanently that to be wrong is dangerous, since to be wrong is to
move away from the flock.
That is why the media, entertainment, video game publishers, and artists too, actually publish,
broadcast, make, and create what they want, yet according to what they think people want, since all
these activities are businesses and must be profitable to last. Then this conclusion may be either
true, false, or lying somewhere between these two absolutes, depending on to which extent the State
controls, instructs, or influence all these activities and their actors, and on whether it resorts to the
methods of influencing demand for imposing supply and of the self-fulfilling prophecy, I explained
in a previous chapter.
This is how and why the masses tacitly agree with saying: only one painting is “more beautiful
than all the others in the World”. They actually follow the opinion of a few they mistakenly hold as
all the others; that is to say, themselves. Why don’t all those people hang a poster of Da Vinci’s
Mona Lisa in their living rooms, and choose instead that of a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado convertible,
then? Such hypocrisy; don’t you think so? Joke, of course. Yet I agree on the latter choice because
“this car indisputably is an outstanding piece of art, and it does not much matter in the absolute it
has been chain manufactured,” in my personal and true opinion. So, scarcity and fashion—that is to
say, influence—and not aesthetics actually decide the value of art, alone or so.
Therefore, the dilemma in aesthetics is rigged because we each truly like things according to our
own kultur and culture; that is to say, our own past and knowledge that together make each of us
different of the others. The clarification helps the reader understand it is possible to install an
intellectual dictatorship in art, as Hitler did with automobile, without anybody being the least
indignant of it, nor even notices it! Therefore, in reality, or objectively, there cannot possibly be
such a thing as, “the most beautiful in the World,” even not a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado convertible.
This truth applies to Miss Universe, by the way; she is not always the one I would have chosen, and
the reader too, I assume. Then I bet everything I have on the table your dream car is not the same as
mine—it is not a Cadillac, and I am still hesitating between four!
Three types of behavior and answers actually may arise, according to the earlier explanations on
the three fundamental drives of Man, since not everybody think and say the same, fortunately. The
individual with the character of a fighter will say, “The most beautiful! Are you kidding me?” The
fugitive will say, “I don’t know yet; I’m must consult my wife about it,” to get rid of the problem.
The inhibited will say, “It’s obviously beautiful, since you put it in prominent display. Now, just
explain why, and I’ll do love it right away, too”.
Propaganda experts concerned with the questions of political and social profits that can be
derived from art have historically influenced art itself. Today, in France, they often are specialized
psychoanalysts and semioticians, and not experts in art, which means the artistic value remains true,
but it has been brought to the background of some myth. It does not really matter because once a
new myth will overthrow the conservative one, then the artistic value will naturally become the
forefront; unless the new myth will order the destruction of the older, of course. Muslim
fundamentalists who destroy exquisite ancient statues in Syria exemplify the latter possibility.
French revolutionaries of 1789 beheaded statues of Saints adorning the frontispieces of the churches
either. Noseless statues of ancient Egypt testify of an early political practice of defacing, as a way to
destroy representations of the former ruling elite. Today, in the United States, teenagers and even
scholars—how come? —remove old statues on claims they historically connect to slavery at some
point or in some way. On that account, they could raze all antebellum Southern American
architecture and the White House either while they are at it. That is interesting, as seen from a
political and Manichaean angle; don’t you think so? It is all about cultural influence turning culture
warfare, power games, the next election campaign, formal aims for real aims, of course, and not at
all a question of past slavery or racism in reality. So, keep in mind once again that art expresses for
the masses the meanings and values their elite of the moment want to associate with it for
themselves only, yet temporarily. Therefrom, it is easy to divert the meaning the artist intended for
his work, implicitly if not explicitly. Doing this is to take advantage of the bandwagon effect aka
peer pressure.
Since the 1950s, and in a number of countries, the relationship between artists and political power
strengthened and became intimate to a point of complicity. Thus, many artists became institutional
propagandists, while some others specialized in the more uncertain trade of black propaganda. The
former are touting the image of their countries and of their elite to the attention of the World, just
because of their citizenship or countries of origin. The latter associate their works with political
claims and other various causes, explicitly. In both cases, some ruling elite, rigged auctions, and
other contrivances artificially create the values and recognition the masses attribute to the names of
those artists and their works. The two practices also resulted in a speculative phenomenon that
transformed artistic works in investments in no way different of shares on the stock market. Today,
there is an art market continuously fed by individuals presented as artists, who truly are designers
and craftsmen in the facts. Their works, whose claimed artistic values actually do not exceed those
we may find in any craftwork of decent quality, are presented to the public in pomp and
circumstances suitable to the raise of their subjective values. They are issued, exactly as coins and
banknotes have a face value that is much superior to their real value. Henceforth, the speculative
phenomenon may increase the subjective value to amounts that by far may exceed those attributed
to other works, whose makings indeed claimed exceptional talent and a slew of reflection, work,
patience, and dedication.
In 1961, Italian artist Piero Manzoni thus took advantage of the reputation he made for himself,
by putting on display and for sale in an art gallery a collection of tin cans in which he had
previously defecated. The tin cans bore labels on which was written in four languages and verbatim,
“Shit of Artist”. Manzoni had originally set the price of those tins of 30 grams of poop to that of 30
grams (1.06 oz.) of gold at the current price. Arrived in 2013, the value of a 30 grams tin of shit of
artist by Manzoni was estimated in the surroundings of $37,000 while the same weight in gold was
worth about $1,700. In August 2016, at an art auction in Milan, one of the tins sold for $300,000.
Picasso did about the same by inviting pre-teens to paint paintings in his studio in La Ruche,
Paris; thereupon he signed and put them on sale, and they sold well.[618] So, in a sense, those
paintings were shit of artist either. Picasso also introduced politics into his art in 1951, when he
painted Massacre in Korea, thus joining the Maoist propaganda of that time claiming the Korean
War was nothing but the massacre of its civilian population by American troops. The artist sincerely
believed it, and although he claimed to be a communist and was recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize
some years later, he is said to have found himself just as sincerely confused when he finally learned
the realities of the conflict.
First, the aforesaid demonstrates the superiority of passion over reason again, and how far it may
bring people to behave irrationally, regardless of their education and intelligence. Second, the
mental process that makes people giving a value to a painting is the same that makes them giving
credit to a statement; it does not really matter if both are fake or objectively worthless, since what
the others state about it is what truly matters to us. In other words, most of us truly like what the
others like. More exactly, most of us truly like what we believe the others like, because we need to
be with the others and are afraid to be against the others, as our reptilian brain instructs us,
unbeknownst to our consciousness.
Note the latter remarks define public opinion, which in reality is what we believe the others think,
and not what a majority of them truly think in the depth of themselves. Political correctness works
thanks to this characteristic of our mind, only. In truth, a few people decide nearly everything for us
via the media, including rumor since it also is a medium, which override our thinking process about
all things we cannot know firsthand. In the courses I gave, I described metaphorically this mental
setting as a movie set, whose fake buildings and blinding spots deny the masses seeing the film
director and his crew, and whose actors include a few extras acting as their underlings—the film The
Truman Show and the series Westworld accurately pictured the description since. By extension, each
time we buy a Rolex watch, a Louis Vuitton bag, a Levis’s blue jean, a BMW car, and a Burberry
scarf, we truly are looking for being still more with the others than we already are; that is to say, we
even want the others love us to feel still safer. This is a thoughtless urge, yet it is not irrational nor
stupid as long as the empathy it elicits from the others in return is real. This reality explains why we
follow trends in aesthetic, and why we remain very attentive to what those trends in our society are;
I mean those of the society in which we live, exclusively. Indeed, as the Beatles sung, insightfully
and seriously indeed, “All you Need is Love”; read the lyrics of this song again, more attentively
this time.[619]
Look attentively at the drawing on the next page, which the DGSE actually uses as example in its
training courses, in addition to well-known images by Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher. With
respect to influence, we are talking about “dual meaning” or “dual message,” which principle must
be kept in mind, henceforth. It is used regularly in advertising, and increasingly in films. For the
record, a “second reading” in a picture is relevant to meta-communication, meaning a second
message included in a first, called “subtext” in the present instance. We have seen, a subtext may
have a meaning very different of that of the other that carries it, I will name “first reading,” to the
point of irrelevance. The subtext may even twist or contradict the meaning of the first reading, as
an oxymoron, more interestingly. For the method, when applied to influence and propaganda, offers
to its author the argument of a harmless message that is a formal aim or alibi, in order to deny the
promotion of the subtext serving the real aim of the action, generally harmful to public order
because it is all about agitprop. The case of the letter “Z” and of the car Renault Zoe I presented the
chapter 18 were true examples of the stratagem; and the method of breakage action, we have seen in
the previous chapter, belongs to the same class of tricks.
When someone identifies correctly the subtext and its real aims in a dual-meaning message, and
accuses its author to do propaganda in disguise, the latter has already provisioned the resource to
disprove readily the accusation with excuses fabricated in advance, such as: “It was unintentional
and accidental,” “This is dishonest exaggeration,” “You are a conspiracy theorist,” and “You are a
paranoid”.

In the case of the picture above, I am saying to the reader there are indeed two interwoven
sketches of women in it. Then if my intention were dishonest, I would state disingenuously
something as, “Uh, excuse me, Sir; but how in Hell can you see a young woman in this picture?
Look; it only shows an old lady!” Moreover, I would firmly stand on my position, as the agent of
influence does, and I would boldly accuse the reader to be “delusional,” with further force and effect
if ever I enjoy the help of one or more accomplices to resort to the other trick of groupthink.[620] At
some point, with renewed persuasion, I could even force the reader to retreat miserably in his claim
“there would be” a young woman on this picture. Thus, persistent denial and persuasion when
coupled with groupthink whenever possible together has the power to relegate a reality to the degree
of mere personal viewpoint, exactly as George Orwell wanted to show in Nineteen-Eighty-Four
with the sequence, “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?” In other words, the second
stratagem would aim to inhibit the reader until he would feel forced to submit to my will; willy-nilly
regardless, since all that would matter to me would be to impose a tacit consensus serving my real
aims.
Previously, I said meta-communication could come in several forms when in the service of
influence, propaganda, disinformation, and agitprop; now, I exemplify my point by presenting true
cases that daily reproduce on television today because the reader may possibly not figure out the
large range in variety serving these actions.
The formal message of my example is a neutral and objective spoken presentation of a foreign
leader or prominent businessman. The second message in it is expressed this time with
“paralanguage,” another component of meta-communication that is an equivalent to subtext,
denoting prosody, pitch, volume, and intonation in a speech, I presented in the chapter 18 when
applying to influencing people with accent. Herein I mean the latter variables change considerably
according to the subject we are talking about because we actually all do it consciously, most of the
time. Take two opposite and extreme examples, independently of the formal meaning of our talk,
our paralanguage can communicate joy or sadness, depending whether we are talking about a
wedding or a funeral. Then we can thus communicate a large variety of nuances around other
feelings such as mockery, irony, dislike, hatred, envy, and even objectivity and neutrality. As
paralanguage can be mastered consciously and easily, contrary to body language, then we may opt
for presenting objectively a person all the while using a paralanguage that clearly communicates
either a favorable or unfavorable perception, opinion, or stance because our intent is to introduce a
bias in our speech. In particular and often, we do this when do not want to express explicitly our
opinion for reasons ranging from dodging in advance an accusation of bias, dreading a libel action
from the person we accuse, or an accusation of political incorrectness, typically nowadays. When
we are saying much good about someone while frowning all along, then frowning also is a
paralanguage we are resorting to for telling an opposing and sincere appreciation; therefore, those
who are listening to us will only consider what we say quietly with our face.
The contrast between two styles of paralanguage will be the more striking if we are talking in a
same speech about two different persons alternatively; that is to say, by being neutral and objective
in the syntax, sentences, and words of our talk in both cases, yet by changing our paralanguage each
time we are talking about the second person. Therefrom, those who are listening to us will easily
notice the change and understand the first of these two persons is “a good guy” and that the other “a
bad guy”. Once more, we all do this about every day while talking with colleagues, acquaintances,
friends, and relatives, sometimes consciously and on purpose, sometimes not. It is natural and
normal because it may also come as an additional means we enjoy to make our talks more
expressive when we communicate an idea, our perception of someone, or of something. However,
the practice is no longer natural and normal, if we do this as television presenter, journalist, or
expert because, in this other case, it aims to influence the audience, of course.
That is not yet all because we enjoy a second means of meta-communication named “kinesics,”
which is a similarly large choice of facial expressions and gestures communicating about as many
feelings and their nuances. The additional use of kinesics can greatly reinforce the things we already
communicate through paralanguage, especially when we have a stake in not talking straight. When
we are saying much good about someone while frowning all along, then those who are listening to
us will only consider what we are communicating with our face, of course. Many French television
hosts, journalists, and experts, resort to paralanguage and kinesics when they present news involving
French and foreign political leaders, senior public servants, businessmen, etc. This is a highly
effective way to spread propaganda and disinformation on television openly, all the while remaining
in capacity to deny the indisputable reality by arguing boldly the explicit content of the spoken
speech is indisputably neutral and objective.
A relatively recent other practice, still in French television broadcasting, is to present a prominent
personality or an event by using a neutral and objective spoken speech, but with a paralanguage that
all along is quizzical instead of incriminating. Note, in this instance, the speech is that of an
anonymous voiceover because it is an additional provision in the denial in advance of the bias; the
viewers are already denied to know who is the voiceover. Furthermore, viewers cannot even know
whether the voiceover introduced the bias on his personal initiative, did it at the behest of the chief
editor of the news journal, or of the broadcasting company. At best, the most perceptive viewers can
conclude arbitrarily “the television channel collectively is biased in its manner to present news”.
Note again, changing accusing paralanguage for quizzical paralanguage follows the shift from
accusing explicitly someone to arousing doubt about the integrity and seriousness of this person, I
explained in the previous chapter while detailing methods in influence, disinformation, and
agitprop. In point of fact, not only this new method is very frequently used in French television
broadcasting for the last ten years, but also the circumstance justified the use of a particular accent
oddly similar to the one actor Tom Hanks took when he played Forrest Gump in the eponymous
film. As describing in words the desired contrast would be difficult, the reader may figure which
feeling, between incredulity, defiance, and annoyance, he would draw from watching on television a
dramatic event or an important meeting between heads of states, however commented by a
voiceover having a speech style strikingly similar to that of the latter film hero. Again, the cunning
method is exclusively used anonymously in voiceover, and always successful for besmirching
someone, a country, a business, or any organization, by arousing a feeling of doubt in the audience.
This is 21st century open propaganda, beyond subtle influence and manipulation.
What is likewise noteworthy in all examples of meta-communication above is, not only never the
message of influence or propaganda is stated explicitly, but also it is difficult to viewers to relay it
explicitly in words, since nothing is ever clearly stated. Actually, it is not as new as it seems because
these forms and uses of implicit communication are analogous in their principles and similar in their
effects to the applauses, boos, and cheers, that generally are requested to guests from behind the
stage in TV shows. They are just more subtle and elaborate for an identical effect to occur in the
minds of viewers, since applauses, boos, and cheers still are explicit forms of approval and
disapprovals.
The reader having learned the specifics of the latter stratagem in influence, disinformation,
propaganda, and agitprop, he may see its large use in videos broadcast on the Internet, which is still
a surer means to their authors to shroud themselves in a thick veil of anonymity. As those are
unknown and change regularly their fictitious identities, then it is impossible to know who they are.
Thus, viewers are left with the last option to conclude they represent “the public opinion,” or
themselves, again.
My second example of influence, illustrated on the next page, relies simultaneously on
abstraction, suggestion, and symbolism. If we look at a photo of a bottle of Champagne at the exact
instant, its cork is popped, and a shower of foam is springing from it, we obtain a symbolic
representation of an erect penis ejaculating. When the scene is actual, but now subliminal because it
lasts a fraction of a second, it strikes again our unconscious or id inescapably, and our conscious,
possibly. The effect on the mind, tantamount to the salivating of Pavlov’s dog when the animal
heard the bell ring, will be the most striking if a woman pops the bottle, as shown on my sketch; and
it will gain further potency, if ever the context and setting have been set on purpose. Even if there is
no handsome woman to pop the bottle in front of us, the sole word “Champaign” will cause in our
mind the recollection of the bubbles’ noise and all details shown on the picture, still for a fraction of
a second that is enough for stimulating the brain accordingly. In passing, the reader understands the
systematic consumption of Champaign in French (unofficial) brothels is not solely motivated by a
concern for larger profits on alcohols sales; even if those who resort to it ignore why exactly, most
of the time. They learned the trick empirically, the same way as the common field agent does.
As weird as the latter explanations may come to the incredulous reader, I specify I am now
explaining a way to communicate directly with the unconscious, which the conscious may interpret
very differently of fail to see completely. In an earlier chapter, I explained this by using the other
and entirely different example of witnessing someone’s death that yet very often results in the same
effect, exactly. Herein it actually is a manipulation intending to arouse a sexual urge, which deep in
ourselves is our drive for preserving our species, as previously explained in the chapter 9.
 As other example pertaining to the same type of communication and aiming the same objective,
the drive for preserving our species that is in each of us can be stimulated in the season of spring,
while smelling a strong ambient odor spread by the beautiful five-petal white flowers of an
ornamental pear tree named Pyrus calleryana Chanticlear aka Callery aka Bradford pear tree. For
this odor is the same as human semen, unambiguously, and it confuses and even embarrasses most
people, obviously. Its deliberate use easily results in the same effect as with the bottle of Champaign
that pops.
Since Sigmund Freud made his discoveries about sex,[621] we know our primary drive for
preserving our species much influences us in many other respects, though a priori unrelated to each
other. Advertisers largely took over the discovery since then, and as other example, it is particularly
obvious in the case of ads for ice cream in France, with pictures of beautiful women glamorously
slurping and gushing cones and bars. Spikes, spears, sword, daggers, and other halberds come as
many other symbols closely associating phallus and manhood, though such representations of power
are a little more ambiguous than a bottle of Champaign in most of us. In men who fancy those
weapons, this may be indicative of a repressed homosexuality.
On one hand, communicating, influencing, and deceiving by communicating with the
unconscious is as effective as sophisticated, since it can fool as many people as those who ignore the
method and its codes; that is to say, an overwhelming majority. On the other hand, its weakness is to
offer an extremely limited range of messages to the expert in communication warfare because it
addresses a part of the brain that cannot process thoughts, precisely.
Things are similarly sophisticated with the so-called modern, contemporary, and abstract genres
in art, and at this point, we are entering pure subjectivity, with very few reference marks when there
are some. That is what the DGSE wants the most to manipulate its targets, and that is why these
purely spiritual notions are even more helpful to the specialist in cultural influence; for they are a
stealthy mix of subjectivity and abstraction that gives a hard time to specialists in counterinfluence
and censors. Often not to say always, when art, a picture, or an object is used to influence the
masses, symbolism is added to the recipe. This is a form of communication and influence in which
meta-communication overwhelms the first reading and the formal meaning, if ever there is such a
thing as a first reading. The alibi of the agent of influence therefore must change accordingly.
The most direct and simplest way to explain how the interpretation of abstract art unfolds in us is
to remind of the existence of the Rorschach test in psychology, of which I present a sample, below.
At the simplest, we can see a butterfly, some flying insect, or a mask in this ink stain on a sheet that
was folded before it dried, as in all pictures of the Rorschach test. Then, by cudgeling a little more
our mind, we can claim to recognize “a bat,” “a kite,” or any other shape characterized by
symmetry. This is only a test for a psychologist to assess our intellectual capacity for abstraction in
the case of an IQ test, and the more often for inquiring on associations of ideas and possible
obsessions in someone suspected to have a mental disorder.
 In any case, we could try to deceive the psychologist by avoiding saying we hardly see more than
a butterfly in reality, lest we do not like to pass for a simpleton. On one hand, we do our best to win
the highest IQ score we can. On the other hand, we do not want to pass for a weird guy either. The
two latter concerns come to show our ego aka pride, as we always fall for it. Remember when, in
the chapter 9, I explained ego is a powerful leverage in manipulation, and how it works, and
remember how Tom Sawyer cleverly persuaded his friends to whitewash the fence. In influence as
in other contexts, the DGSE counts on this oft-encountered psychological characteristic in Man to
turn it into a vulnerability; the “fissure in the cuirass,” as this agency uses to call it. An agent can
introduce “the tip of a screwdriver” or something as a lever in someone’s “cuirass,” and enlarge it to
put a second and “bigger screwdriver,” and so on; as seen under this angle, fooling someone is a
housebreaker job. Keep on going, the whole brain is just behind the door, and you will get the soul
with it. I said “Man,” but here we are talking about millions of them, since they all but very few
have the same fissure at the same place, more or less wide. To be repeatedly fooled with various
hoaxes; this is how begins the training of the agent of the DGSE, and it ends when the recruit does
no longer takes anything at its face value.
For example, possibly, the reader believes human activities together are the sole cause of global
warming. Sorry, but I still do not; first, because the DGSE trained me for two decades never to
believe in anything as long as there is no conclusive and unquestionable evidence of it. Second,
because this agency, precisely, has been instrumental in relaying and spreading the theory on the
anthropogenic cause of the global warming, initially designed by the Service A of the KGB in the
1970s, for the record. In this earlier time, the real aims of the myth and its narrative, completely
unrelated to the common good, were of a strategic order, only and strictly. Today, the “global
warming” of anthropogenic nature is the latest evolution of the “Zero Growth” Soviet action of
disinformation, I explained earlier.
Therefore, regardless whether human activities indeed cause the climate change at some point,
the theory has the terrible flaw to be the brainchild of strategist and expert in communication
warfare Georgy Arbatov. More to the annoyance of the followers of the theory, none of them dwell
much on the causes of all previous and successive warmings and ice ages that other scientists
evidenced for a long time already; that is to say, in times there were no coal plants, no cars, and
even no men. Neither is there any mention of the meteors that caused some of those changes, nor of
the magnetic pole that did tremendous moves several hundred times in the history of Earth, without
Man ever being the least accountable for it, alike. Very few scientists believe the dinosaurs that once
crowded the Earth killed themselves simply by farting in proportion to their sizes. All those theories
actually are tales for the nine-year-old giant the masses collectively are, of course. Today, while
reading the news, I see that some among those scientists are beginning to recede cautiously. Basing
on their recorded data and subsequent forecasts, they say now that even if Man today had the power
to stop at once and entirely to pollute the World in all possible ways, yet the climate would continue
to warm up for the decades to come and possibly more anyway, with only a slight change due to the
laudable effort.
This objective of the Cold War era, integral to the Zero growth disinformation, was to set up the
masses worldwide against the industrialism and economic superiority of the United States and its
allies, in order for the Soviet Union to resume its conquest of the World with the subsequent
advantage. This explains in passing why Russia since then never bothered much about the theory of
the global warming that yet she continues to promote via her proxies, and resumed her own
industrial activities without concern for any pollution of any sort. The irony in the story is that
believing in the anthropogenic cause of the global warming is become since one of the largest
industrial sectors in the World, especially in the United States, and it is even bound to be the largest.
Spreading the belief is now a highly profitable activity offering a living to hundreds of thousands of
workers who are manufacturing “green products” of all sorts. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of
scientists, tens of thousands of engineers, and others, are well paid for working on it, tripping and
vacationing in exotic spots, publishing countless books, writing papers, editing publications,
producing TV documentaries and films. Indeed, venturing in this industrial sector and making big
money in it is possible to anyone who yet claims to commit to the fight against polluting,
industrialism, and capitalism, for not to be right against everybody.
How could we daresay we do not understand what is saying the author of such or such bestselling
essay “everyone read and understood,” and even “vouched”? “Of course, we do understand, and we
do approve, too!” are we always eager to answer cowardly. This attitude also is an expression of the
peer pressure effect, but as it is closely associated with ego, it is commonly used in French domestic
influence to elicit from the masses their passive approval of many things. Some fooled the greatest
minds beyond all expectations with this trick, as American scientist Alan Sokal brilliantly did it in
1996 with a clever plot known since as the “Sokal affair”.[622] More recently in 2013, France fooled
hundreds of thousands of Americans with Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First
Century, a literary works of political influence owing entirely to a mix of call for passion, mastered
public relation, media hype, and to the subsequent psychological effect today known as pluralistic
ignorance. The term pluralistic ignorance, it is timely to say, is a short path for summing up how
minority influence works. Anybody including the most intelligent is fooled easily only by
someone’s name and reputation, and the DGSE holds an expertise on fabricating brilliance and
fame, as it will be shown in the next chapter with true examples I know firsthand. The meaning of
the old epigram, “One only lends to the rich,” extends to fame, for the record.
The observer of a work of abstract art does the same intellectual step, exactly, unless its author,
presented as a renowned artist, suggests his own idea already etched in full on a small plate next to
it. In this case, the observer is forced to accept the interpretation, since being that of its creator, it
can hardly be challenged. Therefrom, we can formally say the artist is thus influencing the observer,
even when there is no malice in his intent, for it is exactly as if the inkblot of the Rorschach test
were formally presented in this book as “Batman” and nothing else, from authority. The degree of
abstraction to be expected from the observer can be even greater when the author of the work
presents it as a physical representation of a feeling or mood. As examples, “This painting or
sculpture represents ʻfullness,ʼ ʻlove,ʼ ʻdeath,ʼ” or whatever similar. Here the reader understands the
art gallery is the medium, the piece of art is the first reading conveying the formal aim, and the
small descriptive plate next to it is the subtext conveying the real aim. This is the simplest manner to
explain how art can be used to make influence and propaganda.
Usually, a piece of art claims a symbolical meaning. Very rarely an artist says, “I made it that way
because I found it beautiful” because this would not please art critics, and art lovers do not buy
abstract paintings to hang them above their sofas, obviously. Art also is business because artists
need to pay for their food and housing, as everybody else, for the record. Nowadays, in many
instances, we notice, the meaning of the piece or art is political at some point, and so it is influence
and propaganda in truth, no more valuable than an ad in a newsmagazine, objectively. Before the
19th century, art was used for centuries as medium for promoting religion and even anti-secularism;
since the late 20th century, it is regularly used in Western societies for promoting secularism and
even anti-religiousness.
Political influence and propaganda in art was revived at the dawn of the 20th century, when
political ideas were flourishing; therefore, not by mere happenstance. It appeared in France with the
Dadaist movement in particular, essentially political and anti-establishment, with subtexts that were
never “pro,” but “con”. Quest for excellence and mastery in painting was no longer the goal.
Salvador Dali epitomized the continuity of a quest for excellence not motivated by influence and
propaganda, adapted to modern times in which nearly everything in art had a political significance
at one point or another. In this respect, still today, Dali is showing to us posthumously how to make
the difference between true and honest art, and influence and propaganda hiding behind pretenses of
art. Dali was both talented and a hard worker who did not count his time. Modern industry and
marketing shaped the new art of the 20th and 21st centuries that had to be profitable, fast-produced
in large quantities, and valued with public relations; no longer valued by quality of the painstaking
sort. In sum, and once more, the value given to everything is a matter of consensus: peer pressure,
more exactly.
A sickle and a hammer when crossed together make a symbol universally recognized as that of
Communism, yet this is nothing more than a view of the mind, as it could also be the logo of a
blacksmith, without any political meaning associated with it. The same remark applies to the
swastika as symbol of Nazism, whose counterclockwise version is much older and lasted much
longer as a symbol of divinity and spirituality in Indian religions. Green is accepted as a rallying
color of green activism while it is also associated with paradise in the Quran, hope in Catholicism,
youth, Ireland, the dollar in the United States, the military in about all countries, and to war by
extension. Therefore, which of the latter meanings is true? They all are, since it is only a question of
kultur, culture, and beliefs. Actually, the color green has the particularities to have the largest
number of symbolical meanings and to offer the most eclectic choice of possibilities. How easy it is
to dupe the would-be-recruit and the future source on one’s stance and intent with green, by
resorting to cryptic statements, elliptical phrases, and other double entendres! What would the
reader understand, as my recruit, if I allude, “You will be compensated in green for your service”? It
is the same as les lendemains qui chantent (“the singing tomorrows”) of the French communists,
also related to the Great Leap Forward of Maoist China, little known in the United States other than
as “Worker’s Paradise,” secular equivalent to the 72 houries of Islam; all pies in the sky or virtual
carrot for the true believer. Wherefrom, the political analogy that right-leaning people and even
spies of some countries give to watermelons, since the creation of the Zero growth movement:
“Green outside, red inside”. We are talking about “reversible meaning,” whose sole function is
deception.
For long, in Roman Catholic Europe, it was disputable to paint or to sculpt anything other than
saints and biblical scenes, and a majority disregarded the first artists who painted landscapes. Van
Gogh could hardly do more than what he did, due to the physiological effects of absinthe he drank
more than reason and to his poverty. Did the reader ever go to visit a psychiatric hospital to see the
pictures some patients draw in it? They happen to be surprisingly beautiful, by today’s standards.
The fact is that if they are crazy by comparison with the norm, it does not preclude that certain areas
of their brain can develop as well as those of talented artists.
The reader notices the recurring characteristics of art imposed by contemporary and authoritarian
regimes, German National Socialist, Italian Fascist, Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean communist,
all are identical. They belong to the realist genre, and they all communicate a mood of heroism and
sacrifice of the individual for the collective, a message exclusively political conveyed by art, itself
reduced to a medium as a billboard poster is. That is why political factions in the process of taking
over a country attack its artistic genres hitherto defined and promoted by the old elite, by
publicizing new ones obviously questioning their conservative value. Abstraction vs. realism is a
recurrent fight in cultural warfare. The “real” artistic values of both are thus confirmed or dismissed
at will, since the masses always submit to the first tyranny of the number.
The reader notices the recurring characteristics of art imposed by contemporary and authoritarian
regimes, German National Socialist, Italian Fascist, Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean communist,
all are identical. They belong to the realist genre, and they all communicate a mood of heroism and
sacrifice of the individual for the collective, a message exclusively political conveyed by art, itself
reduced to a medium as a billboard poster is. That is why political factions in the process of taking
over a country attack its artistic genres hitherto defined and promoted by the old elite, by
publicizing new ones obviously questioning their conservative value. Abstraction vs. realism is a
recurrent fight in cultural warfare. The “real” artistic values of both are thus confirmed or dismissed
at will, since the masses always submit to the first tyranny of the number. Would the reader be
courageous enough to say bluntly, on an evening party, “Van Gogh and Picasso’s paintings are
definitely overrated?” Probably not, although many craftsmen in China paint decent copies of Van
Gogh’s paintings by the dozens every day, then sold for cheap prices to Westerners. Meanwhile, it is
hard to find someone able to make only one similarly decent copy of a painting by Turner, Raphael
or Dali, no matter how much time he is given for this. As for Picasso’s paintings, copies of them are
still easier and faster to do, yet they are rare only because they sell too poorly to make a profitable
activity of reproducing them.
Some decades ago, Apple Inc. in its debut published an advertisement that fully exploited
identification symbols by dress code, showing a photo of two pairs of shoes. The first pair,
underscored with the letters “PC,” was in black shiny leather and of a dressed and sober style. The
second, underlined with the name “Apple,” was skin-casual and moccasin-style with laces poorly
knotted. So much was said with just two pairs of shoes! Thus, Apple deliberately associated itself
with a particular social middle, with a cultural identity, and even with a liberal-progressive stance,
although the retail prices of all goods this company manufactures intend them for the wealthy
clientele of the capitalist world, exclusively.
Some decades ago, Apple Inc. in its debut published an advertisement that fully exploited
identification symbols by dress code, showing a photo of two pairs of shoes. The first pair,
underscored with the letters “PC,” was in black shiny leather and of a dressed and sober style. The
second, underlined with the name “Apple,” was skin-casual and moccasin-style with laces poorly
knotted. So much was said with just two pairs of shoes! Thus, Apple deliberately associated itself
with a particular social middle, with a cultural identity, and even with a liberal-progressive stance,
although the retail prices of all goods this company manufactures intend them for the wealthy
clientele of the capitalist world, exclusively. The political intent in business is just as striking with
the two rival doll’s brands Barbie and Bratz. Parents of the left buy Bratz dolls to their children,
almost “instinctively”. Note the letter “Z” conspicuously added in replacement to the “S” in the
brand, whose presence would be hard to justify by any other argument, or else as a formal aim
excusing the real one. Those who feel on the right of the political spectrum offer Barbie dolls to
their children, preferably. However, of late in early 2018, maker of the Barbie doll Mattel took an
odd decision that cannot be purely coincidental, when it announced a line of dolls based on
“inspiring women,” I quote, including Frida Kahlo. For the record, Frida Kahlo distinguished
herself as a member of the Mexican Communist Party, and mistress of former Soviet leader Leon
Trotsky. Since the 1990s, Chicanos, the Feminism movement, and even the LGBTQ movement took
up Frida Kahlo as their icon, although the logical connection is hard to see for the two latter, beyond
the would-be-rallying anti-establishment and leftist stance that often goes along with them, I
explained in the previous chapter. Probably, the reader did not notice that earlier in 2008, British
band Coldplay did much for promoting the name and image of Kahlo with its successful song Viva
La Vida. Not coincidentally, Coldplay associated the personage with Liberty Leading the People, as
sleeve for its eponymous album, a French painting by Delacroix on the Revolution of 1830, the
French Government, and its Ministry of Culture revived at the same time to make it an appealing
symbol of all French revolutions and associated jabobinist-secularist values. I mean one does not
need to be an enlightened spy to understand this gathering of facts can hardly owe to mere
happenstance.
Anyway, all this makes much of a burden to the pre-teen who is offered a Barbie turned Kahlo,
and it newly leaves Bratz politically lagging far behind it. Since I do not know what Mattel has in
mind with this initiative, exactly, I limit my comment to remind the reader that political influence
does not limit to adults, regretfully. Today, we can see the same with thousands of children
influenced and embarked by unconcerned adults in rallies and protest movements of all sorts. My
daughter once explained to me how teachers do this in schools, from her viewpoint of target of the
stratagem, and in her opinion, it was just fun to shout with her classmates together in street and to be
suddenly granted the power to stop the traffic, much exciting to most teenagers. Well, I draw the
attention of the reader on the strong (not so) symbolical implication of the doll’s story above.
Someday, if ever the parents of a little girl are brought to make a much-restricted choice between
the Bratz liberal doll and its far-leftist Barbie Kahlo challenger, then they might find themselves
stuck in the middle with French people who regularly have to face the same restricted choice on
presidential elections in their country. Yes, this is a global warning to the Americans.
 Communists and Socialists, historically the most active in influence, propaganda, disinformation,
and manipulation, made a particular use of suggestion through symbolism, remarkable enough to be
presented and described in this chapter. Its first version, designed in France in the first half of the
20th century, was the pictorial representation of a handshake on a double hemisphere map; I
sketched on the next page from recollection because I could not find it on the Internet. The easy
reading of it means “union between people,” of course. Additionally, it intended to convey the
notion of “universal brotherhood,” as the French liberal Freemasonry associated with Socialists to
design it.[623] The flaw of this symbol, which justified its rapid abandonment, was to be too easily
recognizable to the taste of its creators. It offered no formal aim and stated openly the real one, and
so it was vulnerable to detractors of the message, whose authors could not see their struggle
otherwise than as a conspiracy. That is why French socialists, still associating with French liberal
Freemasonry, imagined eventually an evolution of it, relying this time on pure abstraction.
The new symbol had the advantage to exist for long already in large numbers in the World, to
offer the opportunity of a dual meaning easy to acknowledge once explained, and to provide their
authors with the expected opportunity to deny easily and at any time the subtext of its real aims. It
simply is an arch, in whatever style and setting one could see or imagine; even, just saying or
writing the word “arch” is good enough since. According to the creators of the concept, the arch, no
matter what it spans, supports, or does not, and whichever its architecture and its time may be, must
be understood as a cryptic symbol meaning, “All people in the World joining each other
fraternally”. The clever abstract symbolism therefore includes bridges because it is a practical
means to connect people divided by a river or cañon. Then the two bodies of people can be two
countries separated by a physical border, two races or ethnics masses separated by racial prejudices,
or two opposing political minorities that thus reconcile, regardless. All this would be well
intentioned and inspired, if the message would not imply the concerned parties “joining each other
fraternally” couldn’t do so otherwise than by embracing the progressive values defined once and for
all by their authors. The old narrative of the Soviet Union is decidedly remarkably close to this new
one, and passion is called upon, again.
Still from the standpoint of the authors, as I was explained circa 1995, the longer and the taller
the bridge and the more spectacular its architecture is, the more it strikes the minds, as the three
engravings show it, below. The concept further provisions that as things gain respect and value with
age, then doubt about the origin of the arch as symbol of fraternity would be supported.

Ultimately, came the true and untold meaning of the huge Grande Arche de la Défense (The Great
Arch of La Defense) in the Western suburb of Paris, shown below, whose construction was ordered
by François Mitterrand as soon as he was elected President in 1981. In fact, the more explicit, but
less known, second name of this 351 feet tall and square-shaped arch is Grande Arche de la
Fraternité (Great Arch of Fraternity). Thus, there are two names for the two aims, formal and real.
The gigantic size of this example of French brutalist architecture was meant to strike the minds, and
to overwhelm the tall and modern glass’ buildings of the Paris’s business district where the
headquarters of most French major groups and companies were regrouped.

The Grande Arche also is aligned in the Avenue of the Champs Élysées that symbolically ends on
the ancient Egyptian obelisk, with the Arc de Triomphe in between.[624] As the Grande Arche de la
Défense is impossible to miss from the artery, it obviously aims to suggest an evolution of the
meaning of the Arc de Triomphe, even though the architects of this other monument actually found
their inspiration in Roman Empire architecture.
The Grande Arche de la Défense exemplifies the application of the earlier theoretical explanation
of the two women interwoven in a single image, and how far-reaching it is once applied to abstract
concepts conveying a political message.
Wherefrom, the real aims of the sketches printed on all Euro banknotes that features arches and
bridges exclusively, with two interwoven meanings either. It visibly confused the authors of the
Wikipedia page on the Euro banknotes, who explain, “The bridges, doors and windows of the [euro]
banknotes symbolize the opening of Europe to the rest of the World and the links between peoples”.
The explanation tells the formal aims, essentially; I already explained the real socialist ones of the
origins with the previous example of the handshake on a double hemisphere map, its earliest
version.
The Grande Arche de la Défense nonetheless remains a part of a grandiose project, still little
known to the French public today, whose liberal masonic inspiration and meaning bear surprising
mystic and pagan dimensions. The latter mix a supernatural belief in dowsing and in the existence
of an underground network of “telluric lines of force in France, associated with some would-be-
secret knowledge originating in ancient Egypt. Constituents of the grand project are the Egyptian
obelisk of the Place de la Concorde, the Grande Arch of La Défense, the Arc de Triomphe, the glass
Pyramid of the Louvre Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Great National Library),
and the much lesser known Axe Majeur. The latter is a strange and still more mystic monument
built in Cergy, whose costly construction also began in 1980. The list above is not yet exhaustive, as
similar symbolic and odd monuments and sculptures exist on several turnarounds in the country,
about all suggesting dowsing and relating to the telluric lines. The costly enterprise is meant to
support unstated beliefs and activities of the supernatural branch in the formal aims of the liberal
Freemasonry, as visible part of a particular but unclear neo-pagan myth that in the facts is a grab bag
of pseudo-sciences and irrational beliefs. The only other branch, for the record, is a permanent study
of the socialism thought renamed “humanism,” presented as a philosophy to make it more
acceptable and easier to swallow.
The latter explanations should not come that much as an oddity to the reader because, as other
similar example, the Nazis, too, at some point introduced supernatural beliefs and quests in their
own myth and narrative mixing Norse mythology and the Celt people, which composer Richard
Wagner had previously exalted in 1848 in his epic drama Der Ring des Nibelungen.
 Loading thusly a practical necessity in architecture with a political meaning is hijacking more
than recycling, obviously. This is a practice that French specialists in influence use to call
“récuperation,” translating imperfectly as “recycling,” coming as an additional example to the
reader of a recurring pattern in French politics and culture warfare. In other words, the goal is to
take what is left unintended, wanton and inconsequential, as readily available medium, whose form,
type, genre, or style, suits opportunely and by pure happenstance a message of influence. In the
earlier chapter, I presented the borrowing of the biblical tales of David and Goliath and of the
Trumpets of Jericho, to exemplify the use in a different context.
When we are reaching this point in symbolism and abstraction to spread influence and
propaganda, and to do disinformation, the reader understands at the same time the credit the author
of a painting, drawing, or sculpture is granted depends entirely on the public recognition he acquired
previously. For example, if you, my reader, are not an artist publicly acknowledged as such or even
only known to a small cultural elite, and are claiming a set of blots you painted on a canvas
expresses a particular notion or a mood, few people will take you seriously. Things will be entirely
different, if ever your name appeared at least once in an authoritative art review because, in this
other case, even if the observer of your painting fails to agree with your claim, then he will be
challenged not to seriously consider it. The observer will take you very seriously, simply because
reputedly “qualified experts” said and even wrote in the latter publication that you are indeed
talented and serious. Then what if the qualified experts in question actually are your accomplices as
members of a ring of agents of influence? The scheme indeed happens, and the DGSE commonly
resorts to it in a variety of contexts and needs ranging from cultural domestic influence, cultural
warfare, to building a cover activity of artist for an agent.
To the agent sent on a long mission abroad, a cover activity of artist grants several advantages. As
first good example, the status of artist offers to him the opportunity to settle legally and durably in
the United States with an “O-1B visa” for “Persons with extraordinary abilities”. Then the
professional activity of artist grants much free time, enough to conduct an intelligence mission.
Additionally, the particular situation of this agent provides him with opportunities to build a
network of acquaintances that may easily and naturally includes people of the middle and upper
classes having positions and responsibilities of interest to an intelligence service.
To the DGSE, three people only suffice to build from scratch a légende and cover activity for an
agent. First, there is the future agent who is expected to pose as “a talented artist”. In second comes
the director or owner of an art gallery, who may be an agent undercover himself or a contact in the
target country. In third, there must be a journalist with a specialty of art critic, who may be an
unconscious source, under-agent, or agent. The scheme is the director or owner of the art gallery
will organize a vernissage for the future agent, and the art critic journalist will author thereupon a
praiseful article on the future agent. Thenceforth, the agent acquires a true and unquestionable
record of his cover activity of artist, suitable to the easy creation of other credentials and of sound
résumé and reputation. As a premium, the successful making of a légende of artist for the agent
grants him a status of opinion leader.
The making of a good légende and cover activity of this type claims no more than a couple of
years, which is fast according to standards in intelligence. Moreover, the necessary income of the
agent is easy to camouflage as sales of paintings to people who generally are contacts, under-agents,
agents, or even couriers and screens all acting as intermediaries of the intelligence agency that
sends the money under and through various pretenses and contrivances serving as alibis. Indeed, it
even happens that a true talented, yet unknown, artist helps the con one by painting for him.
Talented artists who however live miserably are legion, and the agent may recruit one exactly as if
he were an under-agent, and then handle him as a case officer would do. In the 1990s, DGSE
intelligence officer Guido Gualandi, with who I worked for some years, thus fooled the New York
Times by posing as a painter when he was sent on a mission in New York City.[625]
The basic principle of the scheme I just described is one of the very first lessons the DGSE
teaches to all its flying agents and agents of influence. It says, “Two people are needed to transform
a story into a reality: one who tells the story, and another who believes it, for two people who
believe in a same story can easily convince many others of its reality”.
Everything has been explained theretofore in this chapter adapts perfectly to the powerful media
of influence motion picture and television broadcasting are. Influence, propaganda, disinformation,
and even agitprop using the latter media are common and well-known practices. Countless books
and television programs have been made on the subject, recently explained romantically as a well-
done TV series adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Last Tycoon. Since the WWI, in
France, many film-directors, actors, and workers in motion picture were first recruited, trained, and
vetted during their drafts in the military. From 1969, they were so either by the Service
d’Informations et de Relations Publiques des Armées–SIRPA (Armed Forces Information and
Public Relations Service) or by the Établissement de Communication et de Production
Audiovisuelle de la Défense–ECPAD (Center for Communication and Audiovisual Production of
the Ministry of Defense).[626]
As an historical aside, the forerunners of the SIRPA and of the ECPAD both were created in
1915, under the names Sections Photographiques et Cinématographiques des Armées–SPCA
(Photography and Motion Picture Section of the Armies) for the former, Section Photographique des
Armées–SPA (Photography Section of the Armies), and Section Cinématographique de l’Armée
française–SCA (Motion Picture Section of the French Army) for the latter. During the WWI, the
SCA and the SPA in particular were also responsible of propaganda by photography and motion
picture. In 1917, the SCA and the SPA merged to become the Section Photographique et
Cinématographique des Armées–SPCA (Photography and Motion Picture Section of the Armies).
This situation lasted until the end of conscription in France in 1998, but the DGSE again took care
of the shortlisting and trainings since. Most young people selected to enter the realm of the motion
picture industry belong to the liberal French affluent society. Since 1999, but long before this year
already, the SDECE and then the DGSE often decided the choice of the future leading figures of the
French audiovisual landscape and of the entertainment industry.
Not only certain specialized employees of the DGSE are the first to watch in private sessions new
movies bound to be released, as I once did, but this agency also monitors carefully their makings,
and is anxious to approve discreetly their scenarios. The rule applying to books and to the press
does the more so to all audiovisual contents, due to their superior power of influence.
Most people stay unable to identify correctly and accurately influence actions and messages
hidden in motion picture as subtexts. The following facts are accountable for the discrepancy. In the
first instance, ordinary people who are attentive to biases in motion picture are looking for the only
types of influence they know, learned from explanations in documentaries on war propaganda,
whereas influence in motion picture today is rather about diversions of advanced methods in
advertising. Second, there are enormous differences in the ability of the masses to identify influence
from one country to another. The French have become excellent in spotting influence in films,
television programs, and news, essentially because they have been too much and too often deceived
by those means. This explains why French influence and disinformation are cutting-edge and
effective in the most advanced countries. The same remarks apply to a number of other Western
countries, but for different reasons. I see a number of countries where gross and old-fashioned
propaganda is still in use, and crafty influence unneeded. Domestic influence in North Korea is
archaic to the point of making Westerners laugh aloud or wondering about how it comes that the
masses of this country are so naïve still in the 21st century. In many such instances, people actually
are not so ignorant; they just are given no choice. Then linguistic barriers alone may suffice to filter
foreign culture. Until the 1990s, in France, The Clockwork Orange by Stanly Kubrick was available
in a few stores sold for a higher-than-the-average price as VHS cassette “import,” and it was a
Swedish-dubbed version with English subtitles. British espionage film The Ipcress File (1965) by
Sidney J. Furie was never broadcast on French television, nor French dubbed or subtitled, nor
imported on VHS and DVD until the 2010s, all oddities actually being censorship in disguise.[627]
Despite all this, French and French-style cinema filed with leftist influence did not much change
since the 1980s, in actuality. The word “comedy” to name the genre is the welcome excuse, and to
downplay it at the Cannes Festival can ruin a career; it is about self-censorship and peer pressure,
essentially. Although French people for long did sincerely appreciate second-degree humor, wit, and
litotes, there is no longer much room for such things in French films today—as in France altogether
since the same period—or rather there is no room for such kind of humor if it fails to extend beyond
pure entertainment. Instead, the passing reference comes under the form of an untold conclusion to
the plot of the revenge of the “have-nots” against the “haves,”[628] always fraught with complicit
irony, winks, and nods, to please some fictitious average person. The opinion leader is no longer a
person, but a film, virtual and imaginary. Chronologically since about 1980, passing references
became claims, and claims multiplied and grew in importance up to a point at which they became
movies themes made by “committed film directors,” as it is said today. The claims are all sub-
categories of a unique leftist crusade aiming to rallying all possible minorities under a common anti-
establishment banner—we have seen the pattern earlier. Today, Palmes d’Or at the Cannes festival
largely reward activists, conscious and unconscious agents of influence, and their followers and
sympathizers. The fact is in no way a secret but is never said openly, under threat to be accused in
the media to be far-rightist, “dangerously intolerant,” and worse. Talent and quality are pointless, if
they do not serve a cause in the eyes of the juries, and the cause always serves the same real aims, I
just explained, in fine. In many cases and increasingly often, the film does not convey an action of
influence in its subtext because its first reading is unambiguous propaganda implicitly presented as
“the norm,” from authority.
One among the best-known examples of the genre, I can cite, is Le Dîner de cons (Dinner for
Schmucks), released in 1998. The reader knowledgeable in cinema will possibly remark the theme
of this film by Francis Veber actually is both far-leftist propaganda and French state propaganda for
the internal revenue service. In point of fact, the reader may notice Veber introduces the plot of the
revenge of the “have-nots” against the “haves” in about all his films and scenarios, each time under
a pretense of innocuous humor.[629] Indeed, specialists in influence in the DGSE regard
unanimously Veber as one among the cleverest filmmakers and scenarists for spreading socialist
ideology through cinema, and for being the inventor of a French pattern and particular happy
conclusion in movies. Together, the lines can be summed up as a class struggle symbolically
represented by humorous yet resigned reconciliations between two clashing personalities to the
prejudice of the better favored, who loses everything in the end although rallying the viewpoint of
the other.[630] Everything is implicit, but clear to everyone; yet it would be daring to accuse the
author to be a socialist propagandist because “it obviously is all about mere entertainment,” the
formal aim says.
In 1988, American filmmaker Gary Ross made Pleasantville, a film whose interest is to
underscore straightforwardly and precisely the connection between art and politics, as I explained
earlier. However, this film itself is politically biased in a clever fashion by exposing its viewers to a
rigged dilemma leaving no other alternative than to take side in favor of liberal values, staunchest
American conservatives included! In Pleasantville, American conservatism is a caricature of itself
painted as fascist, bigot, intolerant, and as a violent dominant lifestyle, while leftism is softened
enough to make it pass for a savior of freedom. This unique particularity makes Pleasantville a film
twice more interesting to watch than any other dealing with the subjects of influence and
propaganda, ironically. It comes opportunely to exemplify how everything is explained in this
chapter is transferable to all forms of art and entertainment.
Now, I present French latest and most advanced techniques for spreading influence and
propaganda in cinema abroad, an evolution addressing the American public in particular. The
techniques focus on two fronts, both laying on a tactic aiming to sow ill feelings among the
American people toward its own kultur and heimat, explained in another chapter as the methods 10.
to 19. For the record, and in short, the objective is to question the core values around which people
find a common and unifying cultural identity, in order to divide them into minorities ultimately
expected to rally together around an anti-establishment stance. Anyway, instilling doubt in the
minds of the masses about the conservative scale of values stands as the guiding principle.
1. The first front, to be understood as a set of methods, aims essentially to shatter social
conventions by questioning them or even by turning them upside down. Actually, the
transformation of the social conventions into their opposite versions takes up the method of
breakage action in its principle, as earlier exemplified in this specific application by the film
Santa Claus is a Stinker. Therefore, it consists in loading a film with crude language, sexual
mores challenging the moral accepted by the majority, wanton physical and verbal violence,
shocking and condemned practices trivialized and presented as normalcy, and so on.
2. The techniques of the second front are to take side for minorities openly, one by one
separately due to their number and diversity, and to arouse in them ill feelings of injustice and
oppression aiming the establishment / ruling elite. More precisely, it is about breeding the
belief in the minds of those minorities that a society behaving under the influence of the
establishment hates them for what they are or just for their opinions and stances. The technique
actually is an alternative, whose first option, below,
a. consists in transforming the claims of those minorities into a fait accompli that not only is
“already accepted by the society and by the establishment itself,” but also encouraged and
defended by a faction of dissenters among the establishment. In short, it is the presentation of
the cause of a minority at the advanced stage of victory, when it is rallying the approval of the
 majority including that of a lukewarm or already divided and weakened establishment. The
second option, below
b. is a variant of a. in which the majority comes to support the minority against a still resisting
establishment. Typically, the plot of the film features a trial, or repeated trials in a justice court,
or their social and informal equivalents. The heroes are a particularly hurt individual presented
as one example among countless others, and his lawyer who commits to his cause. The
expected effect of the method on the viewers can be summed up as “groupthink per proxy”.
The first front 1. offers to producers, film directors, and actors, partaking in the influence action
the advantage of a plausible denial of subversion and of corrupting the moral of the people, again by
claiming a pretense of “trendy entertainment”. On the contrary, the second front 2. dangerously
exposes those participants to the likely consequence of their being pointed out together as a
propaganda mill in disguise of entertainment, which is obviously hard to question. In thechapter 9, I
explained how those film directors, actors, and related when native of the target country are
corrupted and recruited as conscious and unconscious agents, which methods are analogous or even
the same in the present context.
From a technical standpoint, the techniques presented above have in common to rely essentially
on the method of minority influence. Although the minorities and their claims are fictional and are
played in films, film producers and filmmakers together must do their best to suggest to the viewers
they are representations of actual minorities and claims. Herein we are touching a limit separating
entertainment and documentary, fiction and reality, the first in both alternative offering the
advantages to present pretenses of realities that actually are their exaggerations in all respects. The
effect comes in support of a global action of political influence for winning the battle of emotions,
as previously explained in the point b.; that is say, “transforming a worry into a dramatic situation
and concern into hysteria in the minds of the minorities under influence / manipulated”.
In motion picture, the effectiveness of the action of influence depends largely on the strength of
the promotion given to a film, exactly as in the case of a real minority of dissenters who resort to
demonstrations to collect the attention of the media and of prominent people. The more awards and
publicity are given to a film of this kind, the more force it gives to the cause it supports. The
stratagem aims to drive the public to endorse the cause by yielding to the peer pressure effect rather
than by sincere conviction, i.e. pluralistic ignorance effect. For a successful or apparently
successful film confirms deceptively the validity of its plot or cause via the same effect occurring in
minority influence. Obviously, the already existing fames of the film director and of the actors come
to give desired momentum to the effect, as explained earlier in the chapter 19, since they naturally
are potent opinion leaders committed from the start.
Finally, the film’s score, when well done, not only adds considerable emphasis to the message the
formal aims of the plot supports, but it acts as a potent reminder of it eventually. Taking the neutral
example of the film Star Wars, each time one hears the first notes and chords of the score of this
film, one sees in thought for a few seconds one or even several of its sequences, and the values /
conclusion he drawn from it. For the record, music acts as a potent reminder of an event or idea that
has been closely associated with it, coincidentally or on purpose regardless, as underscored in a
previous chapter.
When all these conditions are reunited, then influence via motion picture, essentially used to win
the battle of emotions in a broader action of influence, disinformation, or agitprop, can be more
effective than news printed and broadcast by the mainstream media, even though a film remains a
fiction, remarkably. For, in that case, the fiction actually has the same value of a myth supporting a
political struggle because both do not need to be historically true to be believed.
Now, “Which are the examples of films loaded with such influence or propaganda against the
United States and its scales of values, typically?” the reader would probably ask.
I do not have such list of films of this category in mind, although I could name a number of them
that truly were made for the sole reason to influence masses of people politically, and I know of
much more of a subtler sort. However, it is delicate to name them without running the risk for me to
seem excessive in my choices and explanations. Additionally, we must also take into account a
number of politically loaded films that were not part of a foreign action of political influence, but
were isolated and personal actions of film makers, who at times attempt to thus rally their fans to
their own opinions on such or such issue. Unless I have been mistaken, it seems to me that Black
American actor Eddie Murphy exemplified the latter case, when at some point in his career he alone
ventured in film making to go in an all-personal crusade against racial prejudice—which resulted in
excesses followed by unintended consequences in the end.
So, I name films whose makers ran the risk to be exposed as propagandists without real concerns
for their reputations, apparently. These are Shrek, The Matrix trilogy, Mars Attacks!, Dances with
Wolves, and even Contact, between others whose titles escape my mind at the moment. Then I name
some others, whose intents, more ambiguous, were rather to sow doubt about the American scale of
values. Of late, Demolition (2015) seems to be one among the most striking in the latter “genre,”
and then I can name About Schmidt (2002). Overall, I add about the latter that actor Jack Nicholson,
who holds the leading role in it, indeed distinguished himself by involving repeatedly at some point
in his career in leftist and anti-American influence in motion picture, helped by France in this effort.
Then there is the interesting case of Trainspotting, which aimed a British viewership specifically,
despite a worldwide diffusion.
Now, I draw the attention of the reader to the fact that many films that are unmistakable anti-
American propaganda or those, much more numerous, that are open black propaganda against the
U.S. Government in particular—regardless who the acting President was at the time of their
makings. Remarkably, many of those films do not suggest at the same time alternative forms of
society such as socialism or communism. Instead, they limit to question the core values of the
United States and of its establishment, thus following the guidelines of the methods of influence 10,
12, and 19 presented in another chapter.
I know U.S. specialists in counterinfluence have ideas and criteria of their own to identify foreign
influence in arts and entertainment in their country, and I seize the opportunity of this subject to say
I found them excessive or disputable at times, in my opinion. Then I can only assume this “zero
tolerance” actually translates a fear to fail to see the serious threat, or else a concern with preventing
the appearance of drifts of indigenous and natural origin via emulation. On one hand, those
specialists are right because influence can be sophisticated and elusive when it aims long-term
goals, exactly as the method of consensus by successive assents is in its principle and unfolding. On
the other hand, a tolerance threshold must set to give people opportunities to express their
discontent i.e. freedom of speech.
Today, making a film for the largest possible audience implies a considerable investment.
Successful exceptions to this rule exist, but they are very rare and can hardly turn round the
additional cost of promotion anyway, which happens sometimes to exceed that of the film itself. The
latter point explains why France is struggling to access a leading position in American motion
picture, as we have seen in the chapter 24, and to recruit American talents in priority, previously
selected and trained according to all-American criteria. The latter stratagem means to turn the values
of this country against itself, again as I explained in the previous chapter with the example of the
tale of David and Goliath.
Specialists in influence must put all this in the balance, knowing an action of influence with a
film is a one-shot operation that can hardly be self-sufficient, and which may easily end into a costly
failure for one unforeseen reason or another. The latter risk tends to encourage French specialists in
influence to outbid by relying more on the fame of film directors, actors, means allocated to
settings, special effects, music, etc., for there is an obvious stake in self-financing influence through
motion picture. The action of counter-interference from the target country where the film is made is
the remaining risk. Counterintelligence agencies abroad counter this kind of foreign influence by
resorting to methods similar in discretion such as, and mainly, the unofficial blacklisting of the
producers, film director, and actors who partook in it. When this happens, since it happens indeed, it
invariably comes as an unpleasant surprise to those people because they deceptively felt sheltered
by their sole fame, seeing themselves as “untouchable people”. Moreover, agents—French agents,
for that matter—tasked to lure them into involving in action of influence of this kind abstain from
warning them of the risks they run indeed for their reputations and careers. At best, those people
who stray and betray their country are promised helps in case of trouble, which will never really
make up for their losses in the end, simply because the American film industry has no real
competitor in the World.
I have in mind the names of a number of them who repeatedly did so before those excesses
precipitated their demises, predictably. Not to frustrate the reader, I can say some were rewarded by
being invited as guests of honor or jury members on one or several editions of the Cannes film
festival, and by being invited to meet Vladimir Putin in person in Russia. In the 2010s, one such
famous film actor in particular was paid as featured actor in an advertising campaign in Europe for
an apparently Italian multinational company owning a number of French brands, which is quite a
downfall from Oscars and other red carpets.
My explanations focus on films for the sake of simplification, but they apply similarly to TV
series. Today, as far as I can see, U.S. media service provider Netflix often produces series relevant
to this kind of action of influence, for a reason I could not explain because this company expanded
its activities after I left the DGSE.
I feel obliged to give my opinion on subliminal images, a particular technique of manipulation
that consists in adding a twenty-fifth image to the twenty-fourth in a film’s second, for the record.
For much I was explained on the practice, it actually never really went beyond experiments because
of poor or inconclusive results. Notwithstanding, in 1988, in France, a subliminal image to promote
the re-election of outgoing president François Mitterrand indeed was slipped into the credits of the
news magazine on France 2 TV channel, publicly owned. The known results of it say the
contrivance could certainly not influence voters in a significant way. Moreover, as some people
were able to spot the treachery, it transformed into a scandal eventually; since then, the reader can
find some press articles in French language on the Internet about it, and a video on YouTube
showing the incriminating sequence in slow motion.
For some decades, France has been doing a large use of comic books to spread cultural influence
and propaganda in French-speaking countries. France thus acquired a real and effective expertise
with this, to the point the DGSE indeed hires employees, and pays contractors specialized in adult
comic books. On several occasions, I met with such specialists who also were highly knowledgeable
in interactive contents for children—on CD-ROMs at that time. The Ministry of Culture hires most
of those specialists as officials, and private companies pay the others in the context of the
privatization of the services. As an aside, the reader might be surprised to know certain intelligence
specialists are concerned with editing French fables and traditional music on CD-ROM for kids.
However, those works are rather made to be sold or given to expatriates having children, lest they
forget French culture. Actually, the purpose of those small “core French patriotic values businesses”
essentially is to sustain the existence of official activities and incomes for agents and contacts, or
cover activities.
In a comic book, it is easy to make resemble a fictional character to a well-known actual person,
and to make him assume the role of the “bad guy” or of the “good guy” in a fiction, without ever
naming him. The method, relevant to meta-communication again, is centuries old, but it is still
effective even when the trick is obvious. It is generally used in propaganda to reveal an
embarrassing truth or the full version of a genuine political, financial, or espionage, affair of which
the masses know only a truncated version, yet without running the risk of a suit for libel or
defamation. The effect of this particular propaganda is beliefs, whose origins are apparently
unknown or very difficult to find out, as the believers quickly forget them themselves. Occasionally,
the DGSE resorts to certain comic books and personages of fiction to indoctrinate field agents of
minor importance this agency sends to the United States, such as the French comic book series titled
XIII. To the reader who, perhaps, is a skilled specialist in the field of counterespionage, he would
easily recognize in XIII particular patterns often used to run (young) spies by resorting to symbolism
and fantasy narratives. As for the reader ignorant of such particular practices in intelligence, the
patterns I am alluding are to be found in films such as Indiana Jones, The Matrix, V for Vendetta,
The Lathe of Heaven (TV film), and 12 Monkeys. It is noteworthy the two latter were inspired by
the other short film La Jetée (The Jetty), made in 1962 by French far-leftist activist and Russian
agent Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve aka Chris Marker.
The following explanation pinpoints and exemplifies some other patterns specifically relevant to
subtext and symbolism in motion picture.
When I watched The Matrix for the first time, first I noticed the passing reference to “mandatory
misery” in the trade of intelligence in the field (field agents and flying agents), since the plot indeed
is about intelligence as seen from a leftist / Russian perception of the trade. To say, the heroes in
The Matrix dress conspicuously with threadbare and dirty clothes, and they work and conspire
packed in shabby and submarine-like premises filled with recycled equipment. They are “have-nots”
directly inspired by the tale of Robin Hood.
These patterns purport to oppose contradictory views to a capitalistic and consumerist culture
focusing on the hedonism of the “haves,” in which everything must be brand new, clean, and
shining, conspicuously too, for highlighting a contrast between two classes and worlds. In The
Matrix, the real world of the “haves” is presented as “virtual,” artificial, and fake, in which every
day is a sunny day, while the virtual world of the “have-nots” is introduced as “the real world” in
which there is no sunlight—as in an actual telecommunication interception station, coincidentally or
not. Contrasts between the two worlds, recurring conspicuously all along the film, reaches their
climax with the ever-impeccable suit of “Agent Smith,” who alone poses as a cliché of all FBI
agents, unambiguously. I find categorically in all details, I just presented, an imported Russian anti-
American Internet-troll culture of the most explicit sort ever.
No less remarkably, immediately following the release of The Matrix or even at the same time,
French and Russian trolls spread largely on the Internet a misleading description of its subtext, said-
to-be based “on the Christian Trinity”. The plausible denial indeed gained some officiality in spite
of its complete irrelevancy. The motive was to deny by all means the accusation of Russian anti-
American and Internet-hacking proselytism that had become obvious to a majority. Meanwhile, in
Russia, The Matrix and its sequels are symbolically elevated to a Soviet-era-style heroic and epic
journey of fight against American leadership in the computer industry, the Internet, and materialism,
together introduced as “the machine”. As far as I could see, and to my surprise, the American public
up to film critics seemed to swallow the so big pill of the “Christian Trinity” to be found in The
Matrix, and even the U.S. intelligence community did not raise an eyebrow, apparently.
Books conveying influence and propaganda are not necessarily authored by agents of influence
and spies, and even they seldom are, actually. The reason is their authors are ordinary individuals
the DGSE spotted and helped, unbeknownst to them, exactly as activists and true believers are, and
through contrivances of a kind, I explained in detail in the chapter 20. Writers wrongly suspected to
be conscious agents of influence run by France or by the Soviet Union abound in the history of
literature. Those who have been censored, and who still are today, truly did not do any other
wrongdoing than giving free rein to their imaginations or political stance, or else to their very
personal feelings in echo to events and issues of their times. Some others among them were, and
still are, the first surprised to be awarded prestigious prizes and to see their career taking the fast
track for no reason that they could fathom. Cases of the latter sort explain why France creates from
scratch certain festivals and awards and struggle to take over the juries of others, especially when
they have international recognition, of course. In this, the stakes are much higher than most figure.
Today, how many films and literary works, out of ten, are awarded for the sole reason of their
activist substance, at the expense of the others that yet are far superior in term of artistic qualities?
Not long ago in the 2000s, the DGSE successfully created in the United States a guild of a sort
for scenarists. In the 2010s, this body associated with Chinese producers to make a large budget sci-
fi film that cost in the surroundings of 100 million dollars, with a political subtext, since it was the
goal from the start. An agent of the DGSE, who hitherto had worked in Hong Kong for a French
bank, was involved in the operation. The American scenarist for this film actually was no scenarist
at all, and his professional experience in motion picture truly limited to extra, for the scenario
actually had been stolen to an unknown French novelist, and then hastily arranged to fit the subtext
and to turn round the risk of a possible claim for copyright infringement. The French and Chinese
makers of this montage managed to hire American actor Johnny Depp, yet for a result in the end
that was one of the biggest flops in the history of American cinema!
While talking about China occasionally associating with France, I am still wondering, in passing,
what to make of the singular case of the Tatlin’s Tower by artist Ai Weiwei, featured as a central
piece of art at the inauguration of the Louvre Abu Dhabi in November 2017. Coincidence makes
that the Tatlin’s Tower is an important Soviet communist political symbol, and a recently revived
“Monument to the Third International 1919” about which the reader will find further information on
the Internet. Ai Weiwei renamed the symbol “Working Progress,” of which he even made another
“issue” now in display in the Albert Dock of Liverpool, United Kingdom. From the viewpoint of a
French specialist in influence, this would never be taken as an artist’s fancy, but very seriously as a
conscious and unmistakable act of political propaganda done under the pretense of art, even if the
artist claims it is “a satire,” since it is promotion to the symbol in the end anyway. Never forget
symbols are operative.
 27. French Intelligence Activities in the United States.
I explained many theoretical notions on the DGSE and the French intelligence community, and
even on the French Government, as objectively as I could, yet through the lens of my personal
perception, inescapably. Things are going to be different in this chapter because I have been actively
and particularly concerned with its subject, though not only for the sole latter reason as I have been
either with other types of missions, I explained elsewhere in this book. Because I decided to address
an American readership in particular, I believe it might interest the reader to see how French spies
experience France’s enmity with the United States, and how I did it through my own perception of
it. Of course, I could not see things as my colleagues did, since I fled France where I will never have
to go back; I hope. I even wrote this book, second of this kind only since Philippe Thyraud de
Vosjoly published the first forty-nine years ago. Indeed, we are a few to do all this, to my surprise
and even incredulity while contemplating so much French submission and moral suffering.
Along the course of my activities in French intelligence, I had to cope with a trade-off between
my will to serve my country and a dislike for the United States that I could never feel sincerely. I
failed definitively to see the point with all this when realizing, in the end, that actually I served
Russian interests. Had these interests be German, Japanese or Italian in the WWII, the perception
would have been the same. As all Frenchmen, I listened for decades to France’s pride and scale of
values, who were France’s friends and allies and who were not, to discover that all this was an
enormous lie. Lying to everybody including myself, understanding that everything is fake,
pretenses, and formal aims, always. Being forced to consider honesty and moral with contempt, to
praise indecency and hypocrisy, to trivialize suffering and even to laugh about it, to get along well
with people who, I knew, had antisocial disorder, and what not. It was harder and harder to me to
cope with all this and to act as if I did not see anything, every day. Intelligence that should have
been an interesting activity had become an absurdity. At some point, I couldn’t help but rebel
without even realizing it, trapped by my own mind. Even writing this book has been a painful
experience at times, asking to myself, Should I write this or not? People will never believe it. There
are a few things I did not write exactly as they were for the latter reason. Later, maybe.
In a country such as France, attempting to blow the whistle was a sure way to “fall accidentally
from my window while closing my shutters by a windy night,” even before I would have had the
time to say anything to anyone. Besides, I do not see things the way Edward Snowden does, and I
could not possibly enjoy the consideration of the media, as I had nothing of detrimental to reveal on
the U.S. intelligence community: the only kind of revelations on espionage that interests journalists,
seemingly. In point of fact, my earlier two books on intelligence never collected the interest of any
publication or journalist, thus proving that the latter assumption is no exaggeration.
In passing about Snowden because I believe my take might possibly interest the reader. I read in
the media that he claims he did not give any information to the Russian intelligence community
because, he said, he did not bring any sensitive file with him when he tripped to Russia. I am ready
to believe it is true because what for, since Snowden gave the files he had on the U.S. intelligence
community to journalists who shared them with several leftist media, including Le Monde
newspaper. Inescapably, therefore, the Russians were reading the Snowden files even before he
landed in Moscow, and they were striving assessing their values while he was stranded in Moscow
airport. Yet I am not accusing Snowden to having knowingly colluded with the SVR because I
spotted in his public statements a number of clues saying that his knowledge in human intelligence,
and in realpolitik more especially, does not match at all his expertise in COMINT and computer
technology. On one hand, Snowden clearly is ignorant of certain important facts, which the Russians
obviously transformed into advantages to trick him. On the other hand, he cannot be that naive
either, or he indulged necessarily in willful blindness when, at some point, he understood that he
could not recede—still in my opinion. I would willingly elaborate about these interesting points,
but this would make me wandering too far from the purport of this book. So, I stop short of saying
more on Snowden, but not on the Russians, as they star in this chapter.
Since I left the DGSE and resigned not to stand by France anymore because of the realities I
presented, I often wondered about the exact origin of this difficulty that is not to my ex-colleagues.
Racking my mind for years and filtering what I found in it whenever I had the necessary rest and
mindset, at last, I identified a particular pattern that, I assume, is obsessional enough to catch the
attention of a psychoanalyst. For it is the Apollo 11 Mission to the Moon in July 1969. Why this and
not McDonald, Harley Davidson, some American cars, or movies, all things I appreciate as
countless French do, too? I explain.
On July 20, 1969, in the surroundings of 2:00 am, my mother popped in my bedroom to wake me
up in the middle of the night. There and at that exact moment, she said to me, in substance because I
am unable to quote her verbatim, “Wake up; wake up, and come to watch the TV. That’s it; they are
landing on the Moon!” For days, weeks, and months, at home, at school, and everywhere,
conversations often had been about this mission to the Moon. There had been much hype about it on
French screen. To help the reader figure how far the nightly intrusion of my mother could strike me,
I was a kid who just turned nine at that time. I remember perfectly: still in my pajamas, I cross-
legged on the carpet of the living room, less than ten feet away from the black and white screen, but
I could not say how long I stood there, not yet awakened, but already mesmerized by the nasal
voices punctuated with beeps, talking from a faraway spot, I held as another planet.
From the latter event on and ever until today, Apollo 11 has been something in my mind I could
not possibly dismiss and still less erase; I only figured out this lastly. I persist holding it as the
greatest news the media ever reported, since it is the greatest event in the history of humanity.
Eventually, on my teenage years, I assembled models of the Apollo 11 lunar module and of the
command module. At some point, even, when I was about fifteen, I built painstakingly a four-feet-
high model of the Saturn V rocket, using and tinkering scraped pieces of plastic and metal, I had
found there and there, with its engines, fuel tanks, and everything else inside. I am a kind of
perfectionist in everything I do. Today, I note that the star-spangled banner was about everywhere
on that so special rocket, in addition to the words united states of america painted black on white.
Then come the countless press articles, pictures, books, and TV programs, I read and watched on
the Apollo 11 mission, with a fascination that never faded, always as if it happened yesterday, as if I
got stuck there in time. All other American space missions never much interested me although the
feat was no less extraordinary.
Anyway, that is how I was brought to understand that everything I know and like about the
United States and the American people connect to Apollo 11 at one point or another, and to that
night of July 1969. It is etched in my kultur, and I could do nothing against it. In addition, since the
age of twelve, I watched the film 2001: A Space Odyssey more than thirty times certainly because it
struck me about the same way, as if it were a sequel to Apollo 11. I know the sequences and
dialogues of this film by heart due to the excessive repetition. That is why, I believe, it has always
been difficult to me to do harm in whatever way against “the guys who went to the Moon”. How to
dismiss the achievement or to downplay it just because those who did it believe in God?
What, if the Soviets had been the first, then? I really have no idea, but I must honestly admit I
could be a Communist, consequently, since Apollo 11 thus became the myth of my all-personal
religion. Then what about it, during my interviews with the psychiatrists of the DGSE? Well, I never
brought the Apollo 11 story upon because I always held it as inconsequential until not long ago, and
because It still was a thing buried in my mind among countless others. No one in the DGSE ever
shown me a photography of the lunar module and asked, “What do you think of this picture?” The
psychiatrist with whom I spent the most time focused too much on tests, and on drawing my
attention on four general subjects in particular: psychiatry and psychoanalysis with a focus on
Freud, J.S. Bach music, the symbolic value of arches, plants, trees, flowers, and vegetables. Well, I
did not much care about the latter because I spent a great deal of my youth in the poorest region of
France, the district of Creuse where vegetation overwhelms you; you walk on it all day long until
you crave seeing anything else. With no other kids around, the only things I could do was reading
the old books that Grandfather Augustin Renaudet had left, watching the only two TV channels in
black and white, and wandering alone in the woods. I had more than my share with vegetation and
loneliness. That is why I love crowded, lively, noisy, and large cities illuminated at night. Noise
makes me feel safer and no longer lonely. When I once tripped to New York, at some point by a
night I stopped next to the main entrance of Pennsylvania Station, just watching the traffic and
reveling at hearing the deafening police and ambulance sirens. I enjoyed the moment to an orgasmic
point, and I prolonged it for about one hour and certainly more; a whole day would not have
bothered me—it must be said that domestic influence designed to convince people that wandering in
the countryside, eating vegetables, and focusing on “saving the planet” has reached the suffocating
degree of North Korean-style propaganda in the last years in Europe, including in Switzerland. I felt
as if I just discovered what life really is, born again and marveling at light and motion all around
me. “Un-inhibition” was everywhere. Wandering in New York City overwhelmed me to an
unprecedented point, stopping my thoughts and taking my soul as the wind does to a small leaf.
 I must tell the reader that everything is explained in this chapter is a testimony about events as
seen from inside the DGSE in Paris, as I have never physically carried out any intelligence activity
on the American soil. I never was a field agent anyway but for a couple of month or so in Beirut and
in wartime, although my first training courses in the early 1980s were all about clandestine and
hostile activities in the field. Actually, I could hardly become a field agent for a few but very good
reasons. I would be unable to sell a radiator to an Eskimo and I am half-deaf.
I can locate my beginnings in intelligence on the U.S. computer industry in October 1990. That
month, the DGSE sent me in some town of Paris’ suburbs to a training course on computer software
that lasted a few days. Five years earlier, circa 1984, the Centrale had just made my brother a
wealthy and influential person. It had happened within a couple of years, thanks to an arranged
contract with French truck builder Renault Véhicules Industriels–RVI, which had made him owner
and head of a plant manufacturing truck’s coach parts, with more than a hundred employees. He had
purchased the premises of his factory, fifty miles south of Paris, thanks to a loan he had obtained at
advantageous conditions from a credit company named Locabail, I seem to remember.
My brother was in state of grace, covered with honors and fortune overnight. He was aware of
the odd nature of his becoming, but he resorted to another cryptic jargon from the Eastern side of
Europe to say he was “born under a good star”. The good star actually was the North Star, standing
for the Red Star, its second and real name. Since the day my brother had been made a successful
entrepreneur, green had become his preferred color, and it went without saying that the logo of the
company he had thus founded, Acrymat, be green, too; darker than the green I of the cover of this
book, but not enough to be military green. He gave no more than a silent quizzing smile in response
to those who sometimes asked to him why he had chosen this color for the logo of his company; at
first glance, it strongly suggested gardening activities. French spies learn to have fun with
conspicuously exposing in public display secret symbols that only they can understand, and
Russians too, apparently. With time, it seems they cannot help themselves with it. It is integral to a
secret culture I never enjoyed because I found it pointless and disturbingly childish. My professional
experience has accustomed me to be wary of symbols, logos, flags, seals and all these things,
because I think I am more aware than most people of their power to deceive.
By the grace of his “good star,” my brother also had become a secret “funds collector and
provider” for intelligence activities. That is why and how, in late 1984, the DGSE asked to him to
invest heavily in the creation of another company, whose object had no relevance at all with trucks.
For the mission was to design and to manufacture individual satellite television antennas, and to sell
them on the French market. The reasons justifying this, of which my brother and I were completely
ignorant at the inception, owed to the following events.
Earlier on April 26, 1982, Connor Baskey, a British businessman, had created a company named
Satellite Television Ltd that launched Sky One across Europe, the first non-terrestrial television
channel in the United Kingdom. More precisely, Sky One was Europe’s first ever cable and satellite
television channel, originally broadcasting from the Orbital Test Satellite for cable operators all over
continental Europe. However, this company came rapidly to struggle financially due to
disappointing ratings in the countries where the television programs that Sky One broadcast were
available. The advertising revenues by far did not cover high transmission costs. Besides, in the first
half of the 1980s, the retail price of a personal satellite TV antenna and demodulator set, about the
same as that of a mid-range car, made it an exclusive toy for the affluent society. On June 27, 1983,
the shareholders of Satellite Television Ltd agreed a £5 million offer to give 65% of this company to
Rupert Murdoch’s group, News International.[631] The first thing Murdoch did with it was to extend
the broadcast hours and the number of countries to which Sky One was available. On January 16,
1984, Murdoch renamed Sky One, Sky Channel. Additionally, the television channel incorporated a
large number of American imports in its schedules, and it increased the quantity of homegrown
programs with a focus on music. This justified hiring famous English broadcasters, disk jockeys,
and presenters, such as Gary Davies, Tony Blackburn, Linda de Mol, Pat Sharp, David “Kid”
Jensen, and Anthea Turner. That’s how Euro Top 40 and UK Top 50 Chart were launched.
The Soviets, and the DGSE subsequently, saw a concerning Anglo-American cultural threat in the
attractive music programs that Sky Channel broadcast, especially since they held Murdoch, its main
shareholder, as “Ronald Reagan’s buddy” and “an agent of the CIA,” I was explained at some point.
Very possibly, the creation of the Minitel videotext online service in France, in 1980, ancestor of the
Internet in this country, truly was motivated by a concern of the Soviets and of the French about a
possible American cultural invasion to come as a similar telecommunication standard. In the 1970s,
Canada and the United States had worked jointly on a system that had inspired the French Minitel in
its principle. The American-Canadian equivalent to the French Minitel had been launched shortly
after in 1983, with a participation of AT&T Corporation under the name North American
Presentation Level Protocol Syntax–NAPLPS.
Circa 1986, my brother asked to me to partake in the creation of this new company he had named
Stratispace, in part because he felt uncomfortable with media and electronic stuffs. The sole word
“satellite” had the virtue to make him run away. However, he did not want to hire me officially.
Instead, he offered me a financial aid to create my own advertising agency, which had to act as a
detached supplier of Stratispace. Additionally, the offices of my company, christened Agence 5,
with no cryptic meaning in it, would be located next to those of Stratispace, themselves sheltered in
the facilities of Acrymat.
Contrary to my brother, the twenty-five old young man I was felt enthusiastic about having a part
to play in the creation of something that directly connected to space and high technology. So, I
worked feverously days and nights for Stratispace. However, as my brother and I knew next to
nothing about satellite television broadcasting, we were introduced to two electronic engineers he
had been instructed to hire full-time. Of course, they were DGSE agents, and one of them had just
come back to France from Hong Kong where he had married a Chinese. Together we had to create
from scratch and in a hurry no less than a range of TV satellite antennas, and another one of
compatible “demodulators,” equivalents to today’s cable television boxes. My share of the job was
to give a good looking to all this, with the additional constraint to having to introduce in it a bit of
freemasonic symbolism! So, our satellite TV dishes had to be vaguely triangular-shaped and not just
circular, as all others usually are. I was also responsible of advertising for Stratispace, although I
had no previous experience in this activity. Despite the unpreparedness, our tiny crew did the
performance to make it all ready to be launched on the market within a single year!
My brother did not do much partake in our activities beyond feeding us with as much money as
we needed, thanks to his profitable company, Acrymat, which itself was fed financially by Renault
Véhicules Industriels–RVI. At some point, we had had to hire more engineers because designing
and manufacturing satellite television demodulator was a much trickier job than it had been with
parabolic antennas. In the meantime, my brother had received additional instructions from his secret
hierarchy. The British-American cultural threat with satellite television broadcasting was becoming
preoccupying. Soon, the retail price of individual satellite television sets would inescapably go
down enough to make them affordable to the middle and lower classes. France was working hard on
launching her own television satellites and channels in the framework of a European partnership. In
1983, European Telecommunications Satellite Organization–EuTelSat had launched its first satellite
for telecommunications and TV distribution. Seventeen European countries had founded EuTelSat
in 1977 as an intergovernmental organization, with as mission to develop and to operate a satellite-
based telecommunications infrastructure for Europe. However, the body did not enter into force
before September 1, 1985; that is to say, at about the same time my brother had been instructed to
create Stratispace.
France attempted to launch alone her own telecommunication satellites, Telecom 1 first, and then
Telecom 1B, but both resulted in failures, and this country did not really make it until 1988, with the
launch of satellite Telecom 1C. In 1986, the DGSE told us the more powerful Astra 1A satellite,
scheduled to be operational in 1988 and operated by European company Société Européenne des
Satellites–SES, was bound “to turn the tables in favor of France” in Europe against the British and
the Americans. However, we were also informed that we were not alone in France to be instructed
to create satellite TV antennas and demodulators and to launch them on the French market. Our
main “unofficial partner” yet real competitor was a company named Portenseigne SA, which by
then was either a subsidiary of Dutch technology company Philips or discreetly ran by this other
company, I do not remember exactly. Portenseigne SA had to be the leading French company on the
market of individual satellite TV antennas anyway, and Stratispace our company had been created to
be no more than stooge of it, actually. For the grand strategy of the DGSE was to create from
scratch a French market in the field of satellite television, with one or two leaders and several minor
and struggling competitors as us. A national specialized exhibition had to be founded to arouse the
interest of the public for satellite television broadcasting, and thus to launch a trend in the country.
In this endeavor, the first objective to reach was to draw the interest of electrical retailing companies
and hypermarket chains in the country, since they were the only actors in capacity to launch a
popular trend and to shape the demand.
For much I could know, a particularity of the grand strategy was to limit deliberately, not to say
censor, the reception of U.S. and U.K. satellite television programs in France through a contrivance.
The trick was for France to adopt and to impose in the country a satellite signals frequency of 12
GHz as a standard, simply because Britain and the United States had set theirs on 11 GHz. Thus, the
provision would imply for the public the extra cost of purchasing an additional receiving head, and
a second satellite dish directed lower towards the terrestrial horizon, if ever they wanted to watch
British and American TV programs. A more practical yet much costlier solution was to invest in a
mobile and programmable motorized satellite dish with two receiving heads, and a remote-
controlled demodulator. Raising the cost of something is a simple way to deny its access to public;
to censor it in this instance. Earlier in 1982, the Soviets had chosen for themselves a particularly low
frequency of 4 GHz to broadcast the satellite television channel Program 4 in the entire USSR.
Thus, the Soviets had sheltered their population against all Western media intrusions.
Ironically, in our company’s offices and in private, the engineers and I much enjoyed watching
Murdoch’s Sky Channel and MTV, which for some years remained the most entertaining satellite
television programs. We had also manufactured a few larger dishes of 6 feet to receive the 4GHz
frequency of the Soviets. That is how we discovered in our spare time what television was like
behind the Iron Curtain, on live. By 1987, we had built a programmable motorized satellite
television receiver set with a remote control that granted close to 20 satellite television channels, but
the retail price of the high-end model was more than 50,000 French francs, the same price as that of
a mid-range car.
By 1990, as our mission was accomplished, our company Stratispace was dismantled, to the relief
of my brother who all along never watched any satellite television program because indeed he never
did care about.
In the meantime, in late 1987, my brother had instructed me to create a new and bigger
advertising agency in Paris, in partnership with an agent of influence who taught me much on the
specialty. A little earlier, I had been introduced to a woman who previously worked as Product
Manager for Procter & Gamble, and who taught me on marketing. This time, the DGSE chose Polen
as the name of my agency, and its customers alike, starting with Mercedes to make a good debut and
a reputation of seriousness and quality for myself. Indeed, everybody listen to you attentively when
you do advertising for Mercedes, regardless of the nonsense you may say. Three years later, in 1991,
I sold this company to Group 4D, an industrial group and contractor of the Ministry of Defense that
manufactured missile’s parts. My brother sold his company to the same group, and that is how he
“retired” early in age at 46, bought a castle, and a range of high-end cars for his family. As I did not
get any money from the sale of mine because my brother owned fifty percent of its shares, I was
hired by a small unit of 26 staffers specialized in domestic influence, officially owned by JCDecaux
multinational corporation. There, I worked with all French political parties from right to far-left
simultaneously, sometimes meeting with representatives of the two latter on a same day.
By 1992, I was introduced to the responsible of a small clandestine cell of the DGSE that had no
official cover, and whose sole task was to collect all U.S. Apple compatible software, including
prototypes called “Alpha” and “Beta” versions. The cell was located in an all-ordinary house in
Villiers-sur-Marne, near the École Supérieure d’Ingénieurs en Électrotechnique et Électronique–
ESIEE (Higher School of Engineers in Electrical Engineering and Electronics), and the Université
Paris-Est Marne la Vallée–UPEM (University of Eastern Paris and Marne-la-Vallée). For the record,
many employees of the DGSE are trained on computer technology, signal intelligence, and
economic intelligence in these school and university. At the same time, the DGSE introduced me to
Frédéric de Pardieu and his father Charles Henri de Pardieu. Thenceforward, I gradually stopped
working in domestic influence.
Circa 1994, I was invited to visit another cell similar to the first however a little bigger and more
active, located a few miles hence in Pontault-Combault, with a specialty on PC compatible software.
The responsible of the Apple cell was officially hired by France Television as lighting engineer (the
French public national television broadcaster), and the responsible of the PC-Windows cell was IT
Manager in the building of the Ministry of Defense, in Paris. The Apple and Windows-PC cells were
fed continuously with all new U.S. computer software and their latest updates, of which many were
unstable versions, as they were still on development. There were two “mirror-cells” in Lyon, with
which these of Noisy-le-Grand and Pontault-Combault were in permanent touch for “software
collection update and intelligence pooling”. On the long run, I learned Lyon is “a second center” of
the DGSE in France.
The Internet did not yet really exist at that time in France, and that is why many (but not all) of
those software were physically and monthly “retrieved” by “bunches,” stored on removable
cartridge hard disk drives (SyQuest 44 MB 5¼-inch),[632] on secret meetings that took place late at
night in the Maison de la Radio,[633] in Paris. Skilled specialists “cracked” systematically and in a
few days all computer software protected by serial code numbers or physical “dongles”. Copies of
all collected software were dispatched for evaluation to specialists, who were analysts in the formal
sense of the word. At some point in the mid-1990s, I was reputedly the best analyst in Apple
compatible graphic design software. I wrote press articles on my subject for several French print
magazines, as many DGSE analysts in other fields do customarily. This activity provided me with a
part of my income, free of taxes.
Several members of the Apple cell of Villiers-sur-Marne were in close touch with Apple France,
the French subsidiary of Apple Inc. that by then was in Velizy, and some of them even were its full-
time employees. That is how we could buy those expensive Apple computers, screens, and printers
at a bargain, and how I learned that the DGSE had deeply penetrated Apple Inc. up to the
headquarters of this company, in the United States. However, the goal of this infiltration was not
really to know Apple’s secrets, but a mission integral to an ambition of this agency to overtake PC
compatible computers someday. For Microsoft was a priority target of the French and Russian
intelligence communities because they held it as a “front company of the CIA”. Indeed, internally in
the DGSE, Microsoft and his CEO Bill Gates were seen as “evils to be destroyed by all means”.
Eventually, I learned the Russian intelligence community and the DGSE jointly worked for years
on developing PC compatible computer viruses, while they spread much black propaganda
simultaneously through rumor essentially, saying “all Microsoft operating software were poorly
performing, outdated, unpractical, and vulnerable to viruses”. On the contrary, the ignorant public
could notice, Apple computers were much more user friendly than PC-Windows were, and viruses
on Apple Macintosh software were a rare disturbance. All this comes to explain why the DGSE did
much efforts to penetrate other U.S, computer companies that developed graphic design and
professional software, such as Adobe Systems and Macromedia, but Microsoft Corporation still
stood as our prime target. Anecdotally, I learned at some point that other cells of the DGSE focused
their efforts on attacking Monsanto, the well-known American multinational agrochemical and
agricultural biotechnology corporation, which Germany of late purchased.
As far as I know, the DGSE had a hard time in its attempts to penetrate Quark Inc., developer of
QuarkXPress, which all along the 1990s was the leading desktop publishing software for creating
and editing professional page layouts. In all advertising agencies, print media groups, and
publishing houses in the World, QuarkXPress was unchallenged and apparently unchallengeable.
Therefore, penetrating and eventually taking over Quark Inc. was also a stake said-to-be of
paramount importance. However, at some point in the second half of the 1990s, as all penetration
attempts against Quark Inc. had failed, the DGSE changed its tactic and began to attack this
company in the goal to destroy it instead. No one in the DGSE ever said Quark Inc. would be a front
of the CIA, but the perception this agency had of this other U.S. company was nearly the same as
for Microsoft. This comes to explain to the reader why we discreetly helped Adobe Systems
promote its software PageMaker, still a weak challenger of QuarkXPress at that time. QuarkXPress
was superior to PageMaker in many respects, and professionals who had invested much time in
learning QuarkXPress found no logical rational in shifting to PageMaker.
We had a penetration agent in the staff of the French subsidiary of Adobe Systems, with whom I
was in touch, and we did as much as we could to help him raise the ladder by awarding him good
contracts with French businesses, and by making a good promotion of Adobe products in the media.
These efforts at last were rewarded when our agent was appointed Marketing Manager at the
European headquarters of Adobe Systems—in Ireland, I seem to recollect. The next step was to
continue help this man until he would be promoted again, and finally access a senior executive
position at Adobe Systems World headquarters in the United States. I have the following funny
anecdote to tell about our agent in Adobe Systems.
He once introduced me to an American man named Bryan Lamkin, who was tripping for a
fortnight in Europe. At that time, Lamkin was Marketing Manager for Photoshop in Adobe Systems
at the World’s headquarters, and he could not possibly know, of course, his subordinate in France
and I were spies. Our agent, whom I will name Tanguy, introduced me to Lamkin as “one of the
most knowledgeable persons in France on Adobe Photoshop,” which was not false at that time.
Likewise, Lamkin could not possibly know I was giving a hand in the making of a French
competitor of Photoshop, branded Live Picture, another mission I shall explain soon. Actually,
Lamkin had come in France in the aim to inquiring on what could be done to improve Photoshop, in
order to securing the leading position of this software on the European market. Tanguy introduced
Lamkin to five other French skilled practitioners of Photoshop, among whom I knew personally two
as my contacts. Therefore, everything Lamkin could tell to us about the next version of Photoshop
would be collected as intelligence for the sake of helping Live Picture Inc., developer and publisher
of Live Picture graphic software, a business we had settled in California.
During our meeting with Lamkin, Tanguy acted as translator because the former did not know
even a single word in French, and me alike in English at that time. Very kindly, Lamkin had
transformed the meeting into a lunch at Le Doyen, one of the oldest and finest restaurants in Paris,
at Adobe Systems’ expense. Much for our disappointment, Lamkin did not let slip anything about
the next version of Photoshop. On the contrary, he asked to us what could be done to improve this
software, period. Indeed, each French guest including myself had ideas of our own about the latter
question. Although it was my duty to focus on helping Live Picture Inc. first, I honestly formulated
my suggestion to Lamkin. In detail, I recommended to add the same rulers and guides
functionalities to Photoshop, which already existed in other software Adobe Illustrator. In spite of
the difficulty Lamkin and I had to talk together through Tanguy our translator, I recollect he seemed
to be interested in what I was saying, even if my idea could not be a major update to Photoshop.
Some months later, in November 1996, Adobe Systems indeed added rulers and guides
functionalities in the new 4.0 version of Photoshop, but none of the other ideas that my five other
fellow citizens and partners had suggested. I confess I felt honored to have given a little hand in an
update to Photoshop, even though it was a minor one.
In the mid-1990s, 3D and animation software working on desktop computers were beginning to
spread on the market; the trend aimed to satisfy in a near future a logical need in the motion picture
industry. Therefore, the DGSE attempted to penetrate and to help other U.S. companies that were
focusing their efforts on developing Apple compatible software doing 3D modeling, synthesis
imaging, animation, and video editing; all still inchoate branches at that time. Ultimately, the idea to
France and Russia was to take over the U.S. motion picture industry, and to secure their future
dominant position in this sector in all possible ways. That is why the DGSE successfully penetrated
major American companies in the latter sector, with specialties in animated 3D, synthesis imaging,
and special effects. However, we understood PC compatible software 3D Studio, and some similar
others to come on the market would much likely win the competition against their Apple-
compatible competitors. This evolution worried us because PC meant Microsoft, and Apple had
always been the winner in the communication and media market hitherto because of the simplicity
and user-friendliness of its operating system. Until the 2000s, PC computers poorly adapted to
graphic design and related activities. Therefore, Apple had a more that 90% market shares in
advertising and communication agencies, graphic design, media, and even in music, sound
processing and editing, previously held by Atari computers.
Meanwhile, my colleague Frédéric de Pardieu focused much of his efforts on a British computer
software startup named M’Tropolis, with the expectation to make this company and its eponymous
software a challenger of Macromind Director animation software, then still edited by Macromedia.
However, De Pardieu’s hard work proved fruitless, and M’Tropolis disappeared in the early 2000s,
when Macromedia merged with Adobe Systems.
From 1994 to 1997, I trained on media and communication numerous officials and employees of
a score of state-owned companies, leading advertising agencies, media groups, people who worked
in a number of Ministries, and in the DGSE, of course. That was for me another “part-time” job
from which I obtained much of my official income. I was well paid for this, enough to afford the
luxury of the latest Porsche 928. The remaining part was entirely devoted to intelligence activities,
such as these I told about in the earlier chapters and in this one. As expert analyst in a certain
category of computer software, I was directly involved in two French attempts to create companies
with a specialty in software editing in the United States. In California, more precisely, because it
was the state where everything related to the computer industry was supposed to be created,
invented, patented, exist, and grow up. As California was also the hub of the U.S. motion picture
industry, the convergence of the computer industry with filmmaking to come soon was the more
obvious.
I would not go as far as saying that the two young men the DGSE managed to settle in California
were conscious agents, for when I met them for the first time, I understood they had no skill at all in
spycraft, and still less an awareness degree. It was my job to help and advise them for a while. The
first was a pure geek with very high skills in 3D computer software development, and more
especially with procedural mapping textures, lights, and rendering. With him, the DGSE previously
attempted to launch a new genre in graphic design computer software for visual arts, for which this
man did a great job. Our task was to make this man famous in the synthesis-imaging branch of the
U.S. computer industry; that is to say, to build a légende for him. American companies were
customarily looking for talented people everywhere in the World. That is why we trained young
specialists in animated 3D and synthesis imaging at the École des Gobelins in Paris, to plant them
eventually in the animated picture branch of the American motion picture industry; with much
success, for much I know. Most of those agents were not conscious at the inception; they were
awakened or formally recruited once they settled successfully and accessed positions of interest in
the United States. Therefore, the DGSE was constantly looking for young talents with no previous
training and indoctrination in intelligence. With this profile, they could hardly be framed as spies.
Once the Centrale spotted such talents and gifted people, we improved their skills and gave to them
a knowledge that would normally claim years of uncertain attempts and repeated failures to anyone
making his way on his own. As American talent spotters hired those agents and offered worker’s
visas to them, they were goats, as seen from the viewpoint of French intelligence.
Back to the two agents I knew and helped, once the légende of the first was about built, he made
by his own a 3D modeling and rendering software conceived to create hyper-realistic landscapes.
He even chose the name for it, Bryce, after the name of the place Bryce Canyon National Park that
had deeply impressed on him, he said. The photographic realism of the landscapes one could make
with Bryce indeed was a breakthrough in 3D computer imaging, especially when considering this
software was Apple compatible, and not programmed to work on a powerful computer station such
as Silicon Graphics. If Bryce was full of bright perspectives, its creator was completely
incompatible with the other realm of business, however. That is why he was driven toward a
German national named Kai Krause, who had been successful in the United States as graphic design
computer programmer, and as charismatic businessman, showman, and evangelist, of the kind the
American public likes.
I know neither why nor how the partnership between our 3D computer programmer and Kai
Krause failed to develop further eventually, for at some point, I was steered to other activities, yet
still in the field of computer industry. I only know the former abandoned computer-generated
landscapes for the entirely different field of computer-generated electronic music, and Krause at
last renounced to his business in the United States and returned to Germany as a rich man, where he
bought a medieval castle to take an early retirement in it.
The second of our field agents in the United States was an entirely different person. He was good
in computer programming, and he had the right mindset to venture in business by his own or
thereabout. Yet he was a little too young and not strong enough to pit against tough American
businessmen. As other particularity, he was the son of Alain Deléan, by then acting head of
American automaker Ford of Europe in France, which was a very good point for his légende.
Anecdotally, Alain Deléan had a personal chauffeur who happened to be Stéphane Jah, an agent of
the DST, I came to know a few years later, in an entirely different framework and story, to be
presented soon in this chapter. Yet it was half a coincidence because Jah worked in
counterintelligence against the Americans at that time, and later he was stirred to
counterintelligence and disinformation against the United States. As head of an important U.S.
subsidiary, Alain Deléan and his family were under the permanent monitoring of the French
intelligence community, logically. Later in 2000, Jah told me his job with Alain Deléan was to
watchdog him and to know whom he met when outside of Ford of France’s headquarters. Therefore,
the fact that Alain Deléan’s son, Bruno Deléan, was involved in a mission of the DGSE in the
United States could not be happenstance.
Was Bruno Deléan involved in the DGSE operation also for another reason beyond launching
Live Pictures Inc. in the United States, which would further explain the coincidence? This I do not
know. In any case, I understood at some point that the U.S. counterespionage—the FBI, I assume—
framed Bruno Deléan as a French spy and began to take prophylactic measures against him and his
company. Likewise, I know that no one in the United States seriously meant to give a hand to this
young French inventor on his late twenties. On one of his trips to France, Deléan explained to me
how he ran Live Picture Inc. in the United States, and what was going on in this company. From the
latter specifics, I understood the U.S. counterespionage had targeted him, which implied he was
under surveillance over there. Thenceforth, his chances to go further in business in this country were
much uncertain. To explain in a few words what was happening without infringing upon Deléan’s
privacy, he let himself be caught naively into a cunning honey trap that eventually resulted in the
questioning of his authority in his own company. For, at some point, the lover in question posed as
the ex-wife of Deléan’s Marketing Manager, and she claimed she had reconciled with her husband
in the meantime! I remember that while Deléan and I were drinking a coffee together after a lunch
in a good restaurant, I thought, Well, Buddy, it’s over for you. You’ll soon come back to France;
penniless, possibly.
I did not tell him anything of the latter thought. Deléan’s eyes were still full of stars, though not
of the same region of the sky as my brother’s, I think. We spent the remaining afternoon together
chatting about his “international success,” for coincidence had made that on that day, Libération
socialist daily newspaper had published an article on Deléan on its front page. We were on April 14,
1995, and the article titled, “Bruno Deléan, CEO of Live Pictures, this French Software that Makes
Kodak and John Sculley Dreaming”.[634] Coincidentally or not, I could not say, Sculley had been
CEO of Apple Inc. earlier. However, that this American businessman by then was interested into
doing business with our agent on behalf of Kodak could hardly be coincidental, given the close ties
between Apple and the DGSE at that time. However, I do not recollect having ever being told
anything particular about Sculley, and I never had the personal curiosity to investigate on him.
Anyway, Deléan indeed was forced to throw the towel in the United States and to return to
France, where he reconverted in inventing and selling software and electronic devices for entirely
different and very particular applications. Since then, from the Principality of Andorra, he develops
and sales computer-controlled systems in high-security controlled accesses, intrusion detection,
peer-to-peer cellular network, breach of security detection, and vision-based system for detecting
distress behavior.
Previously in 1993 or 1994, Frédéric de Pardieu and his father Charles Henri de Pardieu had
introduced me to another of our agents or source who was an American businessman by then on his
50s or 60s, I seem to recollect. At that time, we met together in the frame of a project of video game
that had to be done in California either. The wealthy American had the particularity to be an ex-pilot
of the U.S. Navy on F-4 Phantom jet fighter. The meeting happened by an evening in Hotel Marriott
in Paris, where he had been offered a suite for the few days of his stay. That this man had been an
American military pilot did impress on me, but he hardly spoke French and Frédéric de Pardieu
acted as our translator. He claimed he loved France, and he had an unexpected fondness for French
luxury ocean liner SS Normandie. This ship has a particular story, worthy to be summarily
explained because it had something to do with the motive of this American to be a French source
and to betray his country. Moreover, the video game of our mission directly related to it in a
surprising way.
“The SS Normandie was a 980 ft. ocean liner built in Saint-Nazaire, France, for the French Line
Compagnie Générale Transatlantique–CGT. She entered service in 1935 as the largest and fastest
passenger ship afloat; she still is the most powerful steam turbo-electric-propelled passenger ship
ever built. Her advanced design and lavish interiors led many to consider her as the greatest of
ocean liners. Despite this, SS Normandie never was a commercial success, and relied partly on
government subsidy to operate. During service as flagship of the CGT, she made 139 westbound
transatlantic crossings from her home port of Le Havre to New York. SS Normandie held the Blue
Ribbon for the fastest transatlantic crossing at several points in her service career during which the
RMS Queen Mary was her main rival.
“During the Second World War, SS Normandie was seized by U.S. authorities in New York, and
was rechristened USS Lafayette because France had become a German-ruled country. In 1942, the
liner caught fire while being converted to a troopship. She capsized onto her port side and came to
rest on the mud of the Hudson River at Pier 88, the site of the current New York Passenger Ship
Terminal. Although salvaged at great expense, restoration was considered too costly and she was
scrapped in October 1946”.[635]
Eventually, some French historians claimed the fire aboard the SS Normandie was of criminal
origin, set by the Italian-American mafia on order of the FBI for some unclear reasons. Frédéric de
Pardieu told me that our American source was an avid collector of items and souvenirs relating to
the SS Normandie and other French liners, including rare and expensive pieces of French Art Deco
style furniture, lamps, chandeliers, and tableware, all specially designed for this ship. The ex-pilot
was rewarded for his services with such pricey collectibles. On another of his trips to France, by
boat obviously, he even bought to a French customs officer the pullover of his uniform, as a
collectible, again!
I remember I seized the opportunity of this meeting to ask to this agent, just for the sake of my
personal curiosity because I once happened to pilot small civilian planes, how difficult it was to land
a jet fighter on an airship carrier. The man kindly explained all this to me. As I was reveling while
listening, I understood at the same time that he had derived a resentment for his country from a
grudge he bore on the U.S. Navy for a personal and very particular reason. He had been discharged
from the Navy for having crashed twice his plane while landing on an airship carrier, although
damages had been only material. This story was the true cause of his new loyalty for France, yet I
never had the specifics about the connection between his discharge from the U.S. Navy and serving
the French interest. Had the disgruntled early retiree been bumped into at the opportune moment of
his annoyance? Was France acting as a proxy for Russia, which first spotted and approached him? I
could not say.
There was something more about our project to create a video game, which oddly connected to
another indea in the United States, much more ambitious. As I was only told bits of information and
hints about it, I can barely tell more today than what I was brought to understand years later. The
other project, in the words I was told, was the making of a film in the United States on the tragedy
of the better-known RMS Titanic, and much more money would be involved in it. Then what the
connection could be with respect to intelligence activities between a movie project around the RMS
Titanic and the making of a video game featuring the SS Normandie, beyond the fact that both were
luxury ocean liners that ended tragically?
Frédéric de Pardieu told me more about the latter conundrum a month later, when he explained to
me that “someone in the DGSE” had written the scenario for the video game already. Later, I
guessed the “someone” in question was specialist in influence Bruno Lussato, who by then was in
frequent touch with Frédéric’s father, Charles Henri de Pardieu. The genre of the video game to be
produced was a thriller, and the plot was a criminal investigation following a tip about someone
who was going to set fire aboard the SS Normandie. Of course, the culprit to be found was expected
to be a member of the Italian-American mafia acting under the secret authority of John Edgar
Hoover, head of the FBI. Indeed, telling a story supposedly true about a partnership between the
mafia and the FBI was good anti-American propaganda and disinformation. The DGSE had planned
the video game would be released at about the same time as the movie Titanic, circa 1997. Then
why not a video game on the Titanic, as a way to create a synergy between the two projects, I
thought? Was the theme of the SS Normandie expected to change for that of the RMS Titanic in the
meantime? A third hypothesis says that I had no need to know at that time that my work and
researches on 3D modeling and synthesis imaging on the video game would be all for the film at
some point, in reality.
As additional clues, it was hinted I had to go to the United States to supervise the making of the
video game, where I would work with our American agent acting as official producer of the project.
Therefore, my trip in the United States would last more than one year, certainly. At first glance and
from a strictly personal viewpoint, all this sounded attractive to me, not to say exciting. Never had I
tripped to the United States at that time, and going there to make an American-made video game
indeed was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; my state of grace, perhaps.
The DGSE found for me a complete set of the original plans of the SS Normandie and an
amazing batch of photos, arts sketches, old advertisings, and many other documents relating to the
inside of the ship, backing to the time of its building. The colleague who brought this file to me
formally insisted that I had to handle its content with great care because its documents were unique
and priceless. I would not have been surprised to learn they actually belonged to a public museum
or even to the archive of CGT its builder.
From the abundant and detailed documentation, I was expected to make a first appraisal of the
feasibility of the project; that is to say, making a three-dimensional modeling, texturing, and
rendering of the entire ship, with a focus on the inside. At that time, I was in frequent touch with a
very good analyst with a specialty in synthesis imaging and computer-generated special effect in
motion picture. Naturally, I asked to him for help, as the DGSE probably expected, since I did not
meet him coincidentally. He was not working at the DGSE headquarters, but his office and the
apartment where he lived with his wife were located nearby. His wife was a full-time employee of
the Centrale, too, with a specialty in illustration for influence and propaganda. Together, the couple
also worked for some French publishing companies and for German company Agfa-Gevaert in
particular, from which they draw their official income. With them, I spent a number of evenings on
studying the plans of the SS Normandie and on making in synthesis imaging a short animated
sequence of one of her most spectacular features, the first-class dining room. Alone, the
tridimensional modelling of the huge room, with all its tables, chairs, plates, silverware, lights, and
decoration, took us more than one month of hard work. On one hand, computers were awfully slow
in the mid-1990s with rendering a single picture of the dining room at a size of 640 x 480 pixels,
which could take a whole night, due to the richness in details and number of lights. On the other
hand, I had insisted on using a rendering technology called “ray tracing” to obtain a photographic-
like quality of it. Yet we succeeded to make an animated sequence of less than ten seconds of it in
25 frames per second.
That is how my colleague and I came to realize that the tridimensional modeling of the inside of
SS Normandie was a colossal task claiming the work full time of a large crew for more than one
year, certainly. In sum, the DGSE had been unrealistic in its expectations, but those who had the
idea of this video game had little knowledge in computer imaging, of course. Later in late 1998, I
was invited to witness the maximum performances in three-dimensional virtual reality of the biggest
and latest Silicon Graphic supercomputer, whose size was that of a large-sized refrigerator. On this
occasion, I understood we would never have succeeded with bringing to its end the video game
project using Apple desktop computers. For the exceptional capacities of this Silicon Graphic
supercomputer were even not yet satisfying enough to offer the quality we had expected five years
earlier.
Notwithstanding, how and why the DGSE was so knowledgeable about the making of the film
Titanic by James Cameron, several years ahead, still puzzles me today; the more so, this film
strikingly and unambiguously puts the emphasis not on the sinking of the RMS Titanic in itself, but
on an openly politicized class struggle insisting on a contrast between first class and third class
passengers onboard. Came to add to the political message, a sub plot about an expensive piece of
jewelry justifying a narrative on the evil of money and materialism. In Titanic, viewers find the
other partisan depiction of the relation between Britain and Ireland, with the American affluent
society leading the role in the class struggle plot. In lieu of conclusion to the plot, the old lady who
survived the sinking throws absurdly the millions-dollar-worth jewel in the cold waters of the
Atlantic, as a pretense of posthumous gift to her beloved departed. All this loads Titanic with a
strong and unambiguous political subtext supported by spectacular special effects and an enormous
promotion budget. In point of fact, the conscious intent of film director James Cameron was
confirmed years later in 2009, on the release of his second blockbuster Avatar. This other time, I
saw that a number of film critics openly denounced the political bias of Cameron.
As about our American agent, I never met him again upon my conclusion that the project of a
video game on the SS Normandie would be an uncertain venture. However, I know he resumed his
cooperation with the DGSE, and Charles Henri de Pardieu handled him personally. On important
meetings, De Pardieu brought him for several days’ sojourns to Oleron, an island off the Atlantic
coast of France, in a quiet and secluded spot around which no stranger can wander without being
spotted.
From 1997 to 1999, I was hired by a startup christened Ziggourat Communications. It was a
cover activity for an intelligence cell located in Paris downtown, which did not much effort to self-
finance. Money came monthly from Jet Multimedia, a rich company that for years had been the
French leading host of sexual classified on Minitel. Jet Multimedia disappeared a few years later by
merging with Neuf Cegetel, which French telecommunications service provider merged in 2009
with French telecommunications group SFR and thus fell into oblivion. The father of the woman
who posed as CEO of Jet Multimedia was a Luxembourger who had been a top Russian spy and a
committed Communist, burned a decade or two earlier in the context of an important affair of
Soviet espionage. Earlier in 1992, another of my ex-colleagues, a bright young man of Jewish origin
who finally was sent to the United States to work in a company that designed and built flight
simulators, told me he worked for a while with Jet Multimedia. There, he said, he had fun because
his mission was to pose online as an easygoing girl for luring customers looking for sexual
encounters. He confirmed from this company, sexual entrapments for ulterior blackmail were
carried out commonly. It came to me as a surprising coincidence that the personal secretary of the
CEO of Jet Multimedia had been mine when I ran an advertising agency in Paris, from 1988 to
1991.
With Ziggourat Communications, I began to work daily with Russian spies, unbeknownst to me
at first, and I was formally introduced to an intelligence officer of the German BND who had to
become my correspondent for this agency. Additionally, I came to be acquainted with a number of
new colleagues and agents of varied seniorities, and even various nationalities. Although our
variable-geometry staff was less than ten people, we were in capacity together to read and to write
in English, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, Romanian, Arabic, and German. Not all DGSE
employees are fluent in English, contrary to what seem to assume the U.S. intelligence community,
be it said in passing. Anyway, our intelligence cell was the most cosmopolitan body that I had ever
seen. My position in it was deputy director, and with this quality I learned that several people in our
staff introduced themselves under false identities (called identité fictives–IF in French DGSE
jargon), and even under assumed nationalities. Some of them truly were Russians agents, and I
understood eventually that one of them was an intelligence officer of the Russian SVR, and that two
others were Romanians agents. Two posed as Italians, one as a Luxembourger. One seemed to be a
true Algerian, and another, we hired for a short while, was Israeli, plus an exterior consultant with
expertise on U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence who was a Canadian national.
Later only, I understood the Russians had trained our director Guido Gualandi, and he was not as
Italian as he claimed, very possibly, due to his particular authority over our Romanian employees
and correspondents, and to his intimate knowledge of Russian foreign and military affairs. More
especially, his particular demeanor appeared strikingly similar to that of two Russian intelligence
officers I was acquainted to eventually. Gualandi was the man I alluded to in the chapter 23, so
proud of future Russian submarine Moskva (Moscow).
Our offices were located down the inner courtyard of an old and typically Parisian building, 11
Rue du Perche, in the Marais quarter. We all worked in the ground floor, and the cellars
underground had been converted into additional offices and conference rooms where the most
sensitive matters were debated. Such underground rooms are customary in the most sensitive
premises of the DGSE, and in the directorates and headquarters of this agency likewise. Ours had
the additional particularity of an interior in all ways similar to that of the headquarters of the DGSE
and certain of its services elsewhere in the Paris’s area. Therefore, the reader who watched some
episodes of the French TV series The Bureau can figure out our work environment and its
atmosphere accurately. To the description, I add that the place was cold in both sense of the
adjective, and poorly lighted, which obliged us to come to work in warm clothes in winter. The
premises were discreetly monitored round the clock by a security service located in the same area,
and two of our staffers were members of the Security Service of the DGSE, despite the small
number of our employees. One had the official status of gendarme, and he had made his debut in a
security staff of the Gendarmerie that guarded an atomic bomb shelter. Our cell and its cover
activity no longer exist in 2018, and the place is become an art gallery.
During this new and very particular experience in intelligence, I was enlightened on the Linux
operating system and compatible software, today standards in the DGSE. The Linux computer
environment was quite a change to me, as I had been used for several years to that of Apple, warm
and user-friendly. However, I was not formally asked to take some distance with Apple.
Our supervisor Gualandi had lived in France for less than ten years, and he had been a field agent
in Jamaica, and then in New York City.[636] He also had lived for some months or perhaps a year in
Syria, his last experience before he came to work in France. We were only three French nationals
working full time in the place, the two others being the security officers. Most of our exterior
consultants and visitors from other units of the DGSE were French nationals, however.
All the specifics above allow me to explain to the reader professional in intelligence that the
French rule Special France, equivalent to NOFORN (No Foreign Nationals) in the United States,
does not always apply to employees of the DGSE who are first generation foreign nationals. This is
logically explainable in some way and as follow. The Russians won France during the Cold War,
and now they must be wary not to let this conquest slip in other hands as it already happened in
1940. That is why they are cautious with French nationals, at times, as if the latter were under
suspicion to be hostile foreign spies! From this attitude, I deduce obviously the Russians do not
exclude the likelihood that some French in the DGSE and in other public services might be tempted
to strike back against them.
Gualandi, for example, had a daily access to FLASH-stamped highly sensitive documents, but
this was “normal” because he was a Russian spy, and this quality granted him other exceptional
privileges. He had permanent access from his office to the “telephone tapping and spy microphone
center” of the DGSE, which he often consulted. To do this, he just had to make a call using a
particular phone number on an all-ordinary telephone set, and then, from his desk, he often listened
to telephone and spy microphone records for hours. I would not be able to say whether he first asked
to someone for a particular record or rather dialed a telephone number and then a particular access
code, as nobody including myself was authorized to enter his office when he was thus quietly
eavesdropping.
I do not keep a bad remembrance of my relationships with those Russians spies, contrary to other
experiences with many DGSE and DST employees and agents, who, by comparison, were too often
boring brainwashed knaves and fanatical ideologues. Together, my team and I did many things, but
most were relevant to the computer industry and focused on hostile activities against the United
States. One of us, a stern and young would-be-Luxembourger under fictitious identity, distinguished
himself by focusing his efforts on matters in connection with Japan. Therefore, he often received
small parcels that contained things coming from this country, which did not seem to be of sensitive
nature at first glance, unless Japanese Tamagotchi toys were used as secret digital data carriers, of
course. He had lived in Japan for some time, and he had a source in this country: a female Japanese
national with whom he had had an affair. I never knew his real name; I strongly suspect he actually
was of Romanian origin.
Djamila Bourai, our female secretary of Algerian origin, had another particular job of her own.
She sometimes happened to ask me for advises because she was investigating on certain French
politicians and executives in public services, and attempted to discredit some of them in their
workplaces and publicly. For this, she obtained the publishing in the mainstream media of articles
on some of those VIPs, with as result to put them under an unfavorable light, to put it mildly.
Actually, the goal was no more than to make those officials removed from office in order to freeing
their positions for more cooperative people or agents. Besides those activities of the peculiar sort,
she spent much time translating and typing technical documents from English to French for me. For
weeks, she typed the doctoral thesis of Gualandi, who at that time needed a PhD. For the graduation
would automatically grant him an A official rank, necessary for him to access an executive position
in the DGSE. An assistant professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales,[637] a
French national, had given to Gualandi the draft of his thesis, which provisions had to guarantee he
would obtain his PhD. through an apparently normal and ordinary educational process. The subject
of Gualandi’s thesis, the “glyptic of Terqa,” was an obscure archeological feature of ancient Syria, a
country he knew well at least. On a casual conversation, he once told me he still enjoyed in Syria
the help of the Orthodox Church, an influential but unexpected network in such country. The
remaining part of the job to him was a thorough reading of “his thesis,” since he would have to
comment it on his examination day before a jury.[638] That was doable because he made tremendous
progresses in French language, and he was a bright person.
In the latter expectation, Gualandi enjoyed the help of Jean-Claude Gardin, influential veteran of
the former SDECE,[639] otherwise known as a French renowned scientist with a specialty in
epistemology, between other disciplines. Gardin’s other particularity was he married Josephine
Chaplin, daughter of famous filmmaker and actor Charles Chaplin aka Charlie Chaplin. Gardin had
considerable influence in the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, which university was
expected to grant Gualandi his PhD. Remarkably, Gardin expressed visible respect for the much
younger Gualandi for no explained reason, whereas anyone would expect the contrary.
Gualandi married Debra, a British American woman about his age, and a quiet, pretty, and well-
to-do woman on her thirties working for the DGSE, too. Her cover activity was teacher in a public
primary school in Paris that had a specialty in children of foreign diplomats due to her fluency in
English and excellent manners suggesting the British upper class. Debra had about the same
problem as her husband with her official status, but she needed no more than her tenure as B
category official, she once said. However, I knew her as a chronically sad person, with
unexplainable bouts of depression that could make her cry unexpectedly at times. I remember of
Debra as an authentically kind and morally honest person, which qualities are very rare in French
intelligence, the more so in a woman.
Very possibly, I think, the latter particularities in Debra owed to the fact that her first encounter
with her husband actually had been arranged as a setup, with the complicity of an old lady posing as
an ordinary passenger on a trip in an airliner, truly an agent. For the DGSE, or rather the Russians,
more exactly, were interested in this woman because her father held a senior position in either the
British or U.S. military, I do not remember exactly today. Anyway, I know Debra had family
connections with people holding executive positions in the British and American military. Debra’s
father was acquainted with a psychiatrist of the U.S. Air Force, or else he was a relative of him.
Gualandi did not hide his pride to having married this woman because, he said, he had been lucky
she was pretty and well educated, and their union had led to a success in intelligence against the
United States, of which he never told me the specifics. He just boasted having once legally entered a
U.S. Air Force base, thanks to his father-in-law.
In this intelligence cell, I learned how the DGSE and the Russians shortlist and train field agents
of a particular category, expected to be sent to the United States. I explain the proceedings, which
actually I developed in part earlier in this chapter.
 By the end of a working day, Gualandi introduced me to “André,” a Romanian national in his
early thirties, and he explained to me in clear talk we had to provide this man with fame in the field
of computer programming. As about André’s pedigree, this agent had come in France from
Romania some years earlier. In the latter country, André had been a gifted computer geek, which
claim appeared to be true eventually. Remarkably, upon André’s arrival in France, the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs had taken care of him entirely and paid for him a two- or three-years course in
computer programming. When I met him, he claimed he had created a fully functional 3D synthesis
imaging software, Apple compatible, entirely by his own and without any exterior help, which
prowess made him a “turnkey project,” if I may say so. The rest of the work to be done to create a
légende for him was only a matter of communication and public relations, an easy task to me at that
time. “All right, then we can go on,” I said to Gualandi, in substance.
So, the following weeks, I spent much of my time with “André the Romanian genius,” learning
how his software worked, and in which areas it could challenge others similar computer programs.
On one hand, André’s software had several advantages over many others of its category. On the
other hand, it had worrying flaws, partly inherent to its vast modeling capabilities. In a few words,
the software was anything but user-friendly, and working with it was complicated and even
unsettling because it did not respect certain standards commonly found in all similar computer
programs. I was experienced in helping computer programmers and inventors adapt their software
to the expectations of their future users, and I had learned how to deal and to behave with geeks, as
this could claim a bit of forbearance at times.
As I was encouraging André to do some changes on his software to make it user-friendly, it did
not take long before he felt cornered, and confessed he did not write its source code, actually, even
not a single line. At least, he claimed the authorship of its user interface, and specified the source
code had been stolen to an American computer genius. Stolen to whom, and in which company,
exactly? This he would not say, except the American inventor was handicapped due to polio and
crippled in a wheel chair. So, he knew his name either.
Previously, André had explained the source code was written in Pascal computer programming
language, which was very unusual because most computer programmers use the more advanced
C++ programming language. In any case, the source code was too complex to handle to André. If he
was unquestionably skilled in computer programming and in mathematics, that was not all it claims
to invent or even simply to modify the source code of a highly sophisticated three-dimensional
modeling software. Still less the rest of it that included image rendering, lighting, animation, and
video picture processing. Working on all this simultaneously could not but be the job of a crew of
computer programmers; each highly specialized in a particular field.
When André said all this to me, I remembered of my experiences with other geniuses Bruno
Deléan and Eric Wenger, who had invented and programed software with similarly amazing
performances, single-handedly either. I asked to myself, What about them, then?
As I was not supposed to know what André had just explained to me, I told him we were going to
resume our cooperation normally, as if nothing ever happened, but by other means we had to find
out. I added, he would be better not to talk about this again to anyone, and André agreed with a
visible relief. Thereupon, however, I withdraw gently and cautiously from the project, partly
because my personal interest for this software and my admiration for his inventor had vanished, and
partly because I did not want to be officially involved under my real name in their promotion, if
ever. I considered the risk of a claim for copyright infringement was elevated, and lawsuits about it
can go very far in the computer industry, once a product has been launched on the market and is
selling.
I advised Gualandi the software was great, but its over-complicated user interface would
discourage many. On one hand, I wanted to see how Gualandi would react to this, as I was still
wondering whether he knew what André had confessed. On the other hand, I thought that since
André and “his” software was all a mission arranged by the DGSE or the Russians, some lawyer
had probably estimated for some reason that the likelihood of a claim for copyright infringement
was nil. Another hypothesis of mine said that André possibly was given the source code of this
software after some other computer engineers had rewritten it, in order to make it unrecognizable.
For each 3D computer software renders pictures with a particular style, sort of a signature-like,
which good specialists in this field can instantly recognize.
In the meantime, I noticed accidentally that André had been trained in counter-surveillance and
precautionary measures in security, as agent or else, I could not say. He could possibly be an
intelligence officer, yet he was lacking the Russian behavioral features I summarily described at the
end of the chapter 23. The discrepancies left me with a last hypothesis saying that André actually
was a Romanian agent serving Russia. He was far from stupid, but more of the streetwise type than
a man coming from a decent middle is, and he was not at all of the ingenuous type frequently
encountered in most geeks. These other patterns suggested he did his debut in intelligence in
computer hacking in Romania, indeed.
Notwithstanding, Gualandi instructed everybody in our cell to help André in all possible ways
and at our expense, which included advertising, packaging, editing on CD-ROM, user manual, and
tutorial. Indeed, the entire cell worked on it for a while. André christened “his” software Aleph 3D,
and we even arranged for the French Fnac[640] retail chain store to boast it had an exclusivity with
launching it on the French market. Yet Aleph 3D made poor sales in spite of a cheap retail price, and
nothing was done to export it to the United States. In the meantime, Gualandi had been informed
about the unclear origin of the source code of André’s software, and he, too, had decided to move
with extreme caution with its promotion. No one in the DGSE nor André was willing to tell more on
the exact origin of the source code. Gualandi was only said at some point that we could do whatever
we wanted with it, except attempting to export it to the United States.
Therefore, no special provisions were taken to help André expatriate to the United States and to
launch a startup in the Silicon Valley, unlike what had been done with our other geniuses.
Eventually, a second Romanian about the same age as André, by the name of “Nicolas,” popped in
our cell out of the blue. I was not explained who this other man of the same ilk of André was, nor
where he came from exactly. He was here only to give a hand to André with promoting his software.
Nicolas even created with Aleph 3D a short animation film for the Direction Général de
l’Armement–DGA (Directorate General of Armaments).[641] As he proved talented in using the
software, he also designed an impressive high-end photorealistic watch set with rubies, and
attempted to sell it to professionals in the watchmaking industry. Fred high-end jewelry was the first
to buy a copy of Aleph 3D and some training courses on it, but, it must be said, the DGSE has a
particular relationship with the latter company, as it shelters a secret technical cell of this agency
designing spy gears and gadgets.
Thenceforward, I began to lose sight of “André” and “Nicolas,” and Gualandi asked me to
refocus on the promotion of Linux and compatible software, which other task had to prove
expensive and time-consuming on the long run. Clearly, the DGSE and the Russians were ready to
go far in this other venture, and even the German BND contributed significantly to it.
First, the DGSE wanted to abandon the use of Microsoft Windows definitively in favor of the
Linux operating system. Overall, the DGSE was looking in all possible ways for any other computer
hardware and software solutions than American-made ones. I understood on the occasion it was the
same for the BND, as I had just been introduced to Thorsten Bernhardt, thenceforth my
correspondent in this other intelligence agency.[642] That is also how I learned that not only the BND
had worked hard on Linux, but that the German intelligence service had done a great job with the
programming of a perfect Linux-Windows dual-compatible copy of Microsoft Office Suite. When
Bernhardt shown it to me for the first time, it had even a professional-looking packaging with a
symbolical butterfly sketched on the box, yet anonymously christened “Office Suite,” with no
reference to any company. In the eyes of the DGSE, and certainly of the BND, therefore, the
butterfly was a passing reference in a double-meaning picture to flying agents, as it is cryptic jargon
to name them.[643]
“BND Office Suite” was bound to be introduced as a standard in both the DGSE and the BND. At
that time in 1998, the DGSE internally used largely the HTML file format for its archives filing
system already.[644] That is why it is no exaggeration to say that the new central filing system of the
DGSE was a “Wikipedia ahead of its time,” all written in HTML language. The DGSE was eager to
create more Linux compatible software, expected to be as performing as their best American-made
PC-Windows and Apple equivalents, or close to at least. For example, there was Gimp already, a
stern and less performing replica of Photoshop, and for a short while we expected to design a Linux
compatible copy of Adobe Illustrator, too.
The interest of the DGSE for Linux fared farther than what I just explained, toward espionage
activities. With Linux, the agency endeavored no less than to toppling the U.S. computer software
industry by spreading free products. However, one of the major problems the DGSE encountered in
this new ambition was not only the United States owned all the best computer software, but also all
companies, public services, and government agencies in the World had been used to work with them
for years. It is extremely difficult to challenge a computer software that attained the status of
standard. The downfall of QuarkXPress is a good contrary example of it, but it owed entirely to a
series of big mistakes its publisher did all by its own, and not really to our effort to help Adobe
PageMaker its challenger.
As my responsibilities were evolving toward strategic thinking, I was given as much time and
resources I needed to find out ideas about how to promote Linux, with the challenging objective to
make it popularly attractive. The first thing I said about this was, “Such an ambition will never
materialize as long as we will persist looking exclusively for true-believer-geeks ready to work for
free”. This was the way the DGSE saw things, precisely: finding, recruiting, and training geeks and
gifted individuals to make them working as nerds with no compensation of any sort in exchange,
exactly as this agency runs agents. However, I must admit it was how the DGSE—and probably the
Russians, therefore—had been successful theretofore with spreading the use of Linux worldwide. I
understood this policy relied on the psychological phenomenon of the unselfish commitment of the
grass-rooter in politics. For the record, the politically committed individual sacrifices himself
because he is not paid, precisely, self-deluding in his assumption that any job that is not paid
therefore is a noble and praiseworthy task akin to a divine mission. This is all about ego again, when
digging the topic to find out the real motive deep in the mind.
My counter-argument was, “Regardless of what the final aim of Linux is, it still is computer
technology and business in the end, and not a political doctrine. Any balanced individual is brought
to realize this as a fact soon or late. All those geeks who collectively created Linux and its software
were never paid even a penny for their efforts, and the most-talented in particular, moved on at some
point for this obvious reason”. They had to make a living with their skills and time, since there was
no such a thing as a “Foundation for Free Housing and Meal”.
The particular success of Linux Apache HTTP Server[645] software was an exception in this
promotion because it offered better guarantees against viruses, Trojan horses, and ever-possible
“back-doors”. Most of all, Apache aimed only a clientele of computer engineers and geeks, and not
the large public that was our core target.
Gualandi had asked to me to develop a relationship with Stéphane Fermigier, representative in
France of the Linux World community. By then, Fermigier was a French national in his thirties who
made his living as assistant professor in a renowned university in Paris. I remember I found in this
man all qualities reunited that I most appreciate in people. He was balanced, smart and pondered in
his talk, well mannered, open-minded, and always ready at any time to listen to suggestions and to
weigh them with suitable objectivity. Fermigier clearly understood that in spite of what the
miserableness of the premises of our company could suggest, I was endowed with certain influence
he needed reciprocally. I would not be surprised to learn the DGSE toyed with the idea to recruit
him, if this was not already underway when Gualandi instructed me to meet him.
My meetings and talks with Fermigier proved fruitful because he, too, was endowed with certain
power, first as French official representative of a large community of geeks, and second as professor
assistant in a respected university. I told him my opinion on what to do to promote Linux in the
terms I just posited. Less than one year after that, Gualandi or someone else—I do not remember
exactly—told me, “You should go to the Paris Fnac store of the Les Halles mall [the most popular in
Paris] and to the Eyrolles bookstore of Boulevard Saint-Germain,” in Paris.[646] “You will see in
these two places something that might please you”. I did it, and the thing that was expected to
please me was the two stores had organized special sales of freshly released books on Linux and
compatibles software user manuals, and even of books with Linux software included on CD-ROMs.
Thereupon, I was introduced to the manager of a new computer store located near the Porte Maillot,
in the Western and rich suburb of Paris, who had made for himself a specialty in hardware
associated with the Linux operating system. Thus, the idea of making business and profits with
Linux had “miraculously materialized by itself,” out of the blue, as “a new trend”.
In the meantime, our cell, backed by a number of our contacts and Fermigier and his own
network, had literally hijacked the next edition of the COMDEX to come.[647] The event took place
in the Paris expo Porte de Versailles exhibition center, the largest in France.
For years, the French Ministry of Defense and the DGSE were customers of Silicon Graphics,
Inc. and of Barco NV, and they had friendly relations with representatives of the latter companies, as
far as I could understand. That is why Silicon Graphics involved in the event and lent to us a super-
computer at no expense, and Barco did the same with its upscale video projector at the same
advantageous conditions. With this movie theater-sized screen, Ziggourat Communication, our
cover activity, was the star of the show. No one among the thousands of visitors of this edition of the
COMDEX could possibly know that we were both the DGSE and Russian spies.
As best and much unexpected premium, the DGSE had discreetly intervened at the Élysée Palace
to ask for the President—Jacques Chirac at that time—to come to honor the exhibition by his visit
on the opening day. The event was scheduled for February 9, 1999, and I was warned the President
would probably come to shake hands with me because I was asked to make public speeches, and to
guest the CEOs of several companies and other figures of the French computer industry.
On the opening day of the COMDEX, I had the feeling our small intelligence cell literally owned
the exhibition. When at some point I expressed my concerns about the daylight in the huge hall
because it badly interacted with films and pictures on our large screen, someone next to me at once
asked on his walkie-talkie to shut all its giant metal shutters. Electrically powered, they were so
without any objection less than five minutes later, no matter what all other exhibitors could object
about. Then the bad news came to me by word. In Jordan, King Hussein bin Talal had just died, and
President Chirac would not pay visit to us because he had to go to his funeral. At least, the
exhibition that ended on February 12 or 13 was a complete success, especially for all Linux
specialized merchants and start-ups that partook in it. A few days later, someone in our cell popped
in my office to tell me I should look at the following text that Fermigier had written on behalf of the
French speaking Free Software Users’ Association.
“The week ended with a semi-improvised but totally successful initiative: a presentation of Linux
and free software around a giant screen, led by Dominique Poirier of Ziggourat Communication,
with interventions by Fabien Penso (LinuxFR), Michael Micaletti (Energy Computer) Denis Bodor
(Linux Magazine France), [added February 17] Jérôme le Tanou and myself. A big thank you,
Dominique Poirier, for opening this forum.”[648]
The DGSE and the Russian SVR RF had other ideas about what else could be done with Linux,
as I discovered it incidentally a few years later. As I said, the DGSE wanted to use Linux because it
was not “Made in USA” and granted free access to its source code, so with no risk of the possible
existence of a secret “back door to which the U.S. intelligence community could be privy of”.
Therefrom, it was said, “Why not teaching the use of Linux to flying agents sent on missions to the
United States and to all other countries?” Thus, spies could execute secret tasks abroad on their
personal computers without having to worry about possible computer tampering by the U.S.
intelligence community, and more especially by the NSA and the FBI. Then, just in case the FBI
would come to know it one way or another, there was a need to conceal the existence of a Linux
operating system and its compatible “intelligence software suite” in a computer to be used by flying
agents. The best and logical way to do so would be to install two different operating systems on a
same computer, a laptop preferably, just for concerns of a practical nature. Thus, a flying agent
could normally use Microsoft Windows and its compatible software for the sole purports of
deception and ordinary tasks, and he could shift at any time to Linux, thanks to a particular secret
command, and upon a restart of his computer. Additionally, similar secret provisions could be taken
to make invisible and unavailable all files created with Linux programs, as long as the computer
would run on Microsoft Windows. Ideally, the idea called for a laptop computer with two internal
hard disks. However, this was not as simple as with any desktop computer because a compact
computer of this type does not offer any space for an additional hard disk. The other option could be
to partition its unique hard disk in two virtual ones: one visible and running Microsoft Windows and
some ordinary compatible software, and the othermade invisible, running Linux and programs
dedicated to cyphering and deciphering secret messages.
By the year 2000, several computer manufacturers had built laptop computers that befitted a so
particular need. For all I could know eventually, from 2009 on, the Russian SVR RF shortlisted the
brand Asus and its laptop computer Asus Eee PC1005HA-P.[649] Very possibly, DGSE and BND
flying agents used this portable computer at that time either, at least until 2011 when the FBI
famously arrested several members of a Russian spy ring who used this laptop, previously
overhauled by the SVR RF in Russia. With the Asus laptop and the contrivance of two different
operating systems, Russian spies in the United States established quick wireless communications
with their couriers, and with Moscow Center that put at their disposal on the Internet pictures
carrying secret messages encrypted with a Linux compatible steganography software.[650] Since the
happening of the latter event, any individual suspected to be a spy would draw additional suspicion
on him, if using this laptop computer in particular.
 Since then, Linux made an additional fame for itself by being the favored operating system of
several intelligence agencies hostile to the United States, and of hackers and trolls, of course. From
firsthand knowledge and personal experience as target, I can say that trusting Linux for browsing on
the Internet from France does not at all prevent unfriendly intrusions, nor DGSE eavesdropping.[651]
As an aside, from the early 1990s and until today uninterrupted, the DGSE was influential in the
spread of pirated software, simply because they all were made in the United States. This activity
extended to films and music from the early 2000s on. The reader may find the latter initiative
surprising or even childish, but the DGSE takes it very seriously because this agency sees in this an
additional way to undermine the economy of the United States. However, still in the late 1990s,
some people in this agency were convinced that the U.S. intelligence community itself had a hand in
the spread of pirated American computer software because they saw in it a contrivance to promote
their uses worldwide. The clue supporting the theory was few U.S. software-publishing companies
made real efforts to protect their software against illegal copy, while their French competitors often
did the exact opposite. Nonetheless, French computer programs often were under-achievers by
comparison with their American challengers. This explains why the DGSE had a large hand in the
settling of French software publishing companies in the United States, in the frame of joint
intelligence operations with the SVR RF and the BND. The tactic actually took up that of doing
French and Russian films in the United States with American film makers and actors ; the cases of
filmmaker James Cameron and Canadian born actor Keanu Reeves exemplify the practice since.
Sometimes in the second half of the 1990s, the DGSE began to understand that all its attempts to
make for France a place for herself in software publishing had been a waste of time and money. The
agency resigned to consider two remaining options: either throwing the towel and doing nothing in
this field anymore or taking the supposed U.S. strategy at its own word by further fueling the
practice of copying and spreading American software illegally. That is to say, to an extent that could
no longer serve the interests of the U.S. companies in the Silicon Valley. The reader guesses the
DGSE chose the second option, even if it was double-edged. This was the starting point of a war in
the war. The DGSE would never give up with it, at least to prevent the risk of a rumor saying this
agency could possibly retreat and leave its targets alone at some point.
Before telling what happened eventually, I must say that circa 1995, already, the DGSE had asked
to me to work on the question of the software publishing industry in general, seen from a social and
cultural standpoint. I expressed my conclusions and recommendations in a first report, and in a
second one, I wrote some months later. The reader will possibly be surprised to learn I based my
observations and conclusion on those of Howard P. Becker, an American sociologist and
criminologist I named earlier. In a nutshell, I concluded in both reports that as long as the U.S.
computer software industry would sell its products at prices that reached a certain “elevated
threshold,” while it did not really protect them against illegal copy simultaneously, then even the
most law-abiding citizens would break the law without any scruple. My point was, we live in a
society used for centuries to make a clear difference between “goods” and “services,” and to
consider that a “good” necessarily is a material thing that has a weight. Therefore, one had to wait
for a long time before people would agree to pay a substantial amount of money for a weightless
and immaterial good, especially since they know that a computer software can be duplicated in
infinite quantities at nearly no cost, contrary to all material goods of consumption. Herein a
computer software neither is a good nor a service, but something else between these two notions,
akin or similar to a copyright whose correct average retail price was not yet clearly defined. In point
of fact, I even invented on this occasion a marketing technique for improving the sales of certain
services, consisting of selling them in packaging that customers could pick up in a shelf, as if they
were material goods. It is used since to sell insurance contracts, organized trips, and Internet
subscriptions in France.
As an aside, some years later, the music industry took a serious blow with the coming of the .mp3
file format due to the same problem. For there is a “psychological price” or threshold above which a
majority refuses to pay for something that is immaterial. Today, the paradigm applies in France to
Kindle books. Many people are ready to pay $25 for a printed book; very few for its immaterial
copy sold for $15 because it makes them feel fooled. That is why from October 6, 2011, all French
publishing houses were discreetly given the word to price tag the Kindle version of their books the
same as their hardcover versions—or even higher!—as an effective contrivance to sabotaging the
coming of Amazon Kindle in this country.[652]
Back to the 1990s, the U.S. computer software industry attempted something against the wild
copying of its products, under the tutelage of Microsoft Corporation. The event caused the
following dirty operation our small intelligence cell executed against the United States and the
latter company in particular, successfully. In 1988, Microsoft established a trade group named
Business Software Alliance–BSA,[653] member of the International Intellectual Property Alliance–
IIPA that represented a number of the World’s largest software publishing companies, all American.
In the eyes of the DGSE and of the Russians, this event put additional oil on the fire of their
Clausewitzian hatred against Microsoft, which they still regarded as a front of the CIA in
information warfare; especially when BSA opened a bureau in Paris because this was seen as a
provocation. Thereupon, the DGSE and the Russians did everything they could to infiltrate, corrupt,
and destroy the BSA in Europe in general and in France in particular. I have to confess, our cell was
instructed not only to take an active part in those attacks, but also to resort to dirty tricks, without
restraint.
In my understanding and due to the following reason, one lawyer at least among those the BSA
hired in France was our agent: a Russian agent more precisely, owing to his Romanian origin. Our
cell received FLASH-graded detailed intelligence on the activities of BSA, and that is how my
work against this American association took a turn relevant to offensive counterespionage. When I
requested further information on who worked with and for the BSA bureau in Paris, Gualandi asked
me to “leave alone” the lawyer of Romania origin.
First, some of the legal actions the BSA took against French companies for “copyright
infringement” were doomed to failure from the inception. For the BEFTI, a special French police
service of the SDAEF responsible in France for investigating on such matters and proceeding to
seizures and indictments, discreetly cooperated with the DGSE. As a matter of fact, the head of this
police service had to become an acquaintance of mine. For Jean Guisnel,[654] one of our agents who
worked under the cover of press reporter, and regarded as the best journalist expert on the subject of
intelligence for this reason, had introduced me to the head of the BEFTI. Thereupon, I had managed
to make this police officer “understand” I worked with the DGSE. Now, I tell what we did to scuttle
for some time the reputation of BSA in France.
In April 1998, we sent Safia, one of our agents of Israeli origin, to pay visit to the Paris bureau of
the BSA. Safia was instructed to act as if she wanted to report about a French company working
with illegal copies of American software. The woman that Safia met in the BSA was bold enough in
her approach to instruct her on how to come back with a physical evidence of a copyright
infringement. The BSA was unwilling to venture itself into a lawsuit action on the sole basis of a
testimony, and we knew this already. As we expected, the employee of the BSA gave to Safia a
particular 1.4 MB 3½ inches floppy disk, and she instructed her to introduce it discreetly for a short
while in as many desktop computers as possible in her company. Then Safia just had to bring back
the thus loaded floppy disk to the BSA, where its content would be analyzed.
We at once sent the floppy disk to one of our specialists because our expectations about what its
analysis could yield were much greater than what the reader might imagine. Gualandi had told me
those BSA floppy disks actually were loaded with a spy computer program of the CIA, whose
object was entirely different of collecting evidences of frauds.
A few days later, a member of the technical unit of the DGSE came back with the floppy disk,
and he told us it contained only a particular and small computer program that could not do more
harm than collecting data on certain brands of computer software, whose creators and publishers all
were members of BSA. Gualandi, bemused, just did not believe it, to the point he ordered the man
to go back to analyze the floppy disk again, “more thoroughly” this time.
The confused computer engineer complied, again to no avail. So, Gualandi resigned to accept this
conclusion as the truth, but his disappointment was visible. His only flaw as intelligence officer was
pride. He was constantly looking for praise and honors about anything was compatible with his
particular position, and he had much counted on catching the BSA red-handed to draw further
consideration from his superiors. That is why he was not yet ready to throw the towel with BSA; he
would “get the skin of the American association, one way, or another”. The other way he was
mulling over, already, simply was a BSA’s official sticker on the floppy disk, on which was printed,
verbatim,
“CHECK UP FOR BSA. Launch Microsoft Windows, introduce the floppy disk in the disk A,
chose Execute in the program manager, type A:BSA and press Enter.”
Gualandi asked for assistance to a specialized lawyer of the DGSE, to know which harm could be
possibly done against BSA with this floppy disk. The answer came a few days later, and said in
substance, “Not much, because attempting to know whether an individual or a company is using a
pirated software is not a fault punishable by law, even if the means used for this resemble espionage.
The French legal definition of invasion of privacy or industrial espionage does not cover a so
particular case”. However, the lawyer added, verbatim this time, “Of late in Belgium, on November
25, 1997, the Judge of the Commercial Court of Brussels pronounced a judicial decision against the
BSA, by reminding that ʻsuch a method [of denouncing] is not new, and has proved its perversity on
another scale, it is true, in a past that is not so distantʼ [i.e. turning in of Jews to the Gestapo during
the WWII]”. The lawyer even supplied us a complete record of the Belgian judgment, whose
syntax, I noticed, was much partisan and spirited with harsh anti-Americanism. Therefore, for want
of a valuable reason to force the Paris bureau of BSA to be dismantled, Gualandi decided to resort
to a black operation, as a last chance.
So, our company and cover activity Ziggourat Communication claimed there had been a break-in
in its premises and that “on a morning, one of its employees found a BSA floppy disk left stuck in
her computer”. Truly, this was impossible, since the premises were under discreet surveillance
round-the-clock, but we were the only ones to know this.
I do not remember what went on eventually with our legal action against the BSA, at least
because Gualandi alone handled the proceedings, but I do remember well we transformed our hoax
into a disinformation campaign because it was my job, relevant to my specialty. As we owned a
monthly magazine,[655] of which I was officially the Chief Editor, first I wrote a full-page article on
the “affair,” illustrated with a photo of the incriminating floppy disk, “we had found in one of our
computers”. In its principle, the plot was the same as that of Le Canard enchaîné newspaper, years
earlier. At the same time, Gualandi and I gave phone calls and sent numerous emails to the media to
report about it, in the expectation to transform it into a scandal of national importance.
The French bureau of BSA indeed was shut down eventually, but I do not know when exactly, as
we moved on quickly and resumed our activities on other tasks, as usual in the DGSE. However,
Safia, our agent who had obtained the BSA floppy disk for us, got into serious troubles for I do not
know which reason. Gualandi said he strongly suspected her to be working for the Israeli
intelligence service. My personal opinion about this was the DGSE had hired her as an expendable
agent, and now the agency wanted to get rid of her on the ground that she was an embarrassing
witness to our black operation against BSA. She was the only one among us who had been in
physical contact with someone in this NGO; ditching her for this sole reason was a safety provision
consistent with the doctrine of active measures. The clue supporting the latter assumption was,
Gualandi started to claim “Safia did the break in in our company to the benefit of the BSA, as
penetration agent in a joint mission between Israel and the United States against the DGSE”. In any
case, the DGSE indeed ordered a mission of social elimination against Safia, and I never heard of
her anymore after Gualandi told me he attempted to make her interned in a psychiatric hospital in
order to discredit her definitively.
Indeed, Gualandi had given to me a particular phone number associated with the short acronym
“HPU,” meaning Hospitalisation Psychiatrique d’Urgence (Psychiatric Emergency Internment). As
I was deputy director, he had instructed me to use this telephone number in case someone in our cell
“breaks a fuse” and enters a bout of violence or threatens to reveal sensitive matters. Gualandi had
added, “If ever, then an ambulance will come in minutes”.I had seen the ambulance, hidden in the
unique parking box of a street-fight training center of the DGSE, rue Sainte-Anne in Paris
downtown. The premise was only fifty yards from a firefighter station up in the same street, where
two agents or perhaps more working under the cover activity of firefighters were ready to go at any
time to handle the sinister task. Yet I do not know where people who are thus abducted are brought,
then. Fortunately, I never had to give the terrible telephone call, and I have never seen nor heard of
anyone who did it.
Earlier, I said we thought all our efforts to create a successful French software publishing industry
were a waste of time, and our attempts to create French companies in this field in the United States
proved to be trickier than the DGSE and the Russians had assumed. However, we had been
successful with penetrating Sun Microsystems Inc., to the point that the DGSE, in a joint operation
with the BND, had a total control over the activities of this company. For the record, Sun
Microsystems Inc. was a large U.S. company based in California, which designed and built
computers and computer components, developed computer software, and supplied information
technology services.
 Two or three employees of our cell in Ziggourat Communication were directly concerned with
intelligence activities in Sun Microsystems Inc., and more particularly with Java, which by then was
a new and trendy computer-programming language this company had developed. There was
something in particular that closely connected our spying activities with Java, about which some
people in the DGSE and Russian agents were especially boastful. I would be unable to explain what
it was exactly because I am not a computer engineer, and I had no need to know this, therefore. All I
can say is I saw batches of sensitive documents on the desks of our cell, which all concerned Sun
Microsystems and the computer network systems this company designed. Then I know other
specialists in the DGSE, or Russians possibly, even had jointly worked with Sun Microsystems on
the development of Java. In any case, Java clearly was both an enormous asset and stake to the
DGSE and to the Russians.
Our activities with Sun Microsystems were so important that by 1998-1999, Thorsten Bernhard
came in from Germany to entrust me sealed envelopes of sensitive documents coming from the
headquarters of the latter company. Thorsten asked me to transmit forthwith the envelopes to
Charles-Henri de Pardieu personally, at the Directorate of Financial and Economic Intelligence,
Avenue d’Iéna. I understood the documents were of financial and legal nature, therefore, and this
directorate was giving a hand to Sun Microsystems on legal matters.
In the last months of 1999, Gualandi and I had several telephone conferences about a WTO round
scheduled to take place on next November in Seattle, United States. The matter was about helping
French officials in negotiations on the legal duration of copyright on computer software. As
surprising as it may seem, our small cell was asked to propose a revised length for it. The demand
caught me by surprise, but as I had been asked to write reports on the question of computer software
and copyright, precisely, why not, then? I explain the context surrounding the event.
We were still helping promoting and spreading the Linux operating system and compatible
software, as part of our attempts to fight Microsoft Inc, and so we also were active in helping
numerous Linux software programmers by using for this all we could steal and learn from U.S.-
made computer programs. Our shortlisting and recruitment of geeks had begun with Linux
conferences that took place in universities, organized by recruiters of the DGSE who posed as
“evangelists”.[656] Yet the Grail we were still chasing still was the source code of Windows, the
operating system of Microsoft. In this view, we endeavored to make a profit for ourselves of the
functionalities that American software companies invented by negotiating at the next WTO summit
on the legal duration of the copyrights that protected them. To discuss the matter with politicians
and senior officials, Gualandi and I customarily went to one of our windowless meeting rooms
underground, and only from this safe place, we organized sensitive telephone conferences: so, not
exactly the way the TV series The Bureau shows to unenlightened viewers. We delivered our
advices and answered technical questions, but our faceless correspondents never obliged in keeping
us abreast about the results of those brainstorming. We learned about all this or thereabout a few
days later on television or in newspapers, as anyone else.
The main and even sole expectation of our cooperation about the WTO round was to win the
shortening of the duration of copyrights of computer software to two years and a half. Why two
years “and a half,” and not simply two or three? Our argument, of which I actually was the author,
was to convince U.S. lawmakers that about all computer software underwent periodical updates
every two years and a half on average. In other words, past this time-lapse, a computer software
“falls into obsolescence,” to that effect, as I had said, all-arbitrarily.
On one hand, my argument was gross, of course, and the American companies that created and
published computer software had everything to lose if ever U.S. lawmakers agreed on France’s
claims and demand at the WTO. On the other hand, I believed—though not too much—France’s
negotiators could possibly obtain this concession in exchange for another of similar value that the
Americans would demand. Doubtless, the Russian interest overwhelmed that of France in the
negotiation, but Gualandi was certainly not ready to tell this to me, if ever he knew something about
it. Anyway, the French negotiators at Seattle indeed followed my recommendation of “two years
and a half,” and failed to reach on an agreement about it with the United States. This came as
unsurprising to me.
By the end of 1999, Gualandi, several of our subordinates, and I left our cell and gave the keys of
Ziggourat Communication to other people, whom I saw for the first time. Gualandi and his wife
were instructed to leave France for the Tuscan region of Montespertoli, near Florence in Italy. It was
no longer question to them to be appointed with an executive position and a tenure at the DGSE’s
headquarters. Yet Gualandi had gotten much better with this than anything he could have as official
French spy, and he was unambiguously happy. For, in Montespertoli, he became official owner of an
old mansion perched atop a hill in a nice landscape, where he reconverted as Italian fine wines and
olive oil producer. Was this a new cover activity to him? He would not say, of course. Still in 2017,
Gualandi was still resuming his agricultural activities at the same place, and I found ironical to learn
he exported a part of his production to the United States. Perhaps this change in his career was a
reward and an early retirement, I mean as far as appearances suggest it.
Things were entirely different for me, as I was instructed to send my application to study at the
École Nationale d’Administration–ENA, and to work simultaneously on several ventures in
intelligence. One was the creation of a webzine on intelligence, whose real aim was to woo recruits
for the DGSE. Another was my partaking in the creation of an international French TV channel,
whose real aim was to offer in North Africa and in the Middle East a French alternative to U.S. and
Qatari television channels CNN and Al Jazeera.
The two missions and my studies in view to study at the ENA were much enough to busy my
days, weekend included, but that was not yet all. When Gualandi left France for Italy, he introduced
me to Francois Cellier, a man who had to be my new chief below Charles-Henri de Pardieu in my
hierarchy. I was left completely ignorant of what would be my future job in the DGSE, but I had
some hints about it because the first thing that Cellier did was to teach me on the movie industry in
general, and about the expectations of France in the United States in this field in particular.
Coincidentally or not, Régis Poubelle, another of my ex-colleagues with whom I was in frequent
touch since the mid-1990s, was working on the takeover of Universal Pictures in the United States.
The surprising intermediary step to succeed in this endeavor, Poubelle told me, was the purchase of
Canadian beverage group Seagram then the largest owner of alcoholic beverage lines in the World.
Why not, after all, since France also endeavored to be World leading alcohol producer, especially in
whisky and by-then-trendy vodka. The stratagem chosen to use American people to drink vodka
was to create new beverages mixing the Russian alcohol with fruit juices and other exotic flavors;
the recipe proved successful in the early 2000s. It was all about cultural warfare ultimately; that is to
say, to change the perception American people had of Russia by enticing them with Russian culture
and mores. To blur the Russian tracks a little and to set a plausible denial to the latter aim, the
additional contrivance was to make France appear as the World-leading producer of Vodka, instead
of Russia. If the reader wants to spare a little of his time on enquiring a little on vodka and whiskey
brands, he will learn an overwhelming majority of them either are owned by French companies or
by others in which French people and companies are majority shareholders.
All on the contrary to Gualandi, Cellier was much older than I was, and his past and ongoing
activities made him much of a personage, if I may say so. To begin, Cellier joined the SDECE when
he was in the Commando Cobra during the Algerian War. This special and small military unit was
dismantled and fell into complete oblivion in the aftermath of this war because it had made for itself
the embarrassing reputation of a deadly special squad, with expertise in dirty missions, torture, and
arbitrary executions. Thereupon, in the 1960-1970s, Cellier was sent again to Africa under the cover
of protestant pastor. There, he told me, he did false flag recruitments by posing as a U.S. CIA
operative. Doubtless, Cellier fooled a score of locals, as the personage indeed got the gift of the gab.
Still in the early 1960s, he also had been chauffeur and bodyguard of high-ranking officials at the
Élysée Palace.
At some point, when he took me in his tiny apartment in Paris, Cellier shown me some photos on
which he appeared under various and extraordinary circumstances, which actually was a manner of
his introduction to me. On one of the pictures, he was posing nonchalantly as driver and bodyguard
next to a black limousine Citroën DS in the courtyard of the Élysée Palace. On another, he seemed
to co-preside a conference next to Jacques Soustelle, creator of the DGSS and of the DGER between
1944 and 1945, and former Ministry of Propaganda. On another, backing in time to the 1980s,
Cellier appeared in a one-to-one meeting with former President of Israel Shimon Peres.
Cellier was one of those French spies who often say, “It takes to have a good nerve to be a good
agent”. Indeed, he was a streetwise and sly character while in no way a bright mind. Brazenly, he
did his best to show up as an educated person, but his education was an easy-to-scratch varnish
hiding the character of a dishonest car-salesman. Everything in him seemed specious, even when he
could prove his claims. My relationship with this man quickly turned odd and I dearly expected it to
be transient because, indeed, we had nothing in common. In exchange for my displeasure in the
relation, he taught me everything I did not know on filmmaking, from scenario to script writing,
how video cameras and video editing work, and what not. He once took me to attend a meeting of
the Syndicat National des Auteurs et des Compositeurs–SNAC (National Union of Authors and
Composers), and there he introduced me to Jean-Claude Carrière, a renowned French writer and
film scenarist and close friend of writer Umberto Eco, I noticed in passing. By a gray morning, he
took me on a film shoot where I was asked on the spot and without further notice to play a role of
figuration as a spectator in a staged boxing tournament. I did not even know the title of the film nor
who was its director, for it was not the point anyway.
On another occasion, he took me to the UNESCO in Paris to meet Albanian film director and
screenwriter Kujtim Çashku. There, this sympathetic and kind man was giving a private release of
his film Kolonel Bunker (1996). We were in 1998, and this film had just received the UNESCO
Award of the Venice Film Festival. I enjoyed watching it, too, and I think anyone enjoyed watching
The Lives of Others (2006) would appreciate Kolonel Bunker, little known today, despite of its real
interest. On that day, François Cellier entered into serious discussion with Çashku in view to import
his film in France. This surprised me at first because Kolonel Bunker is a political drama heavily
loaded with anti-communism. The explanation for the enigma simply was, “stay close to your
enemy”. Indeed, a few months later, as we had entered 1999, I learned incidentally that a French
subtitled version of Çashku’s film had been released in the country, thanks to Unifrance.[657]
However, one could watch it only in few small movie theaters in Paris, and the mainstream media
did not say a word about it. To put it otherwise, Cellier had nipped in the bud the possible success of
Kolonel Bunker in France by resorting to a common trick in counterinfluence.
Cellier seemed to know everybody in the French movie industry, and even to be endowed with
certain influence in this middle. However, I found difficult to figure out the real extent of his
influence due to his constant bragging about too many things. The pre-release versions of the
French-made movies, he shown me on VHS and presented as “good cinematographic examples,”
actually were poorly done and would all rank “one star” on IMDb.
However, he did not take me with him to the Deauville American Film Festival in September
1999. For he went to the event on a serious and delicate mission, whose objective was to entice
personalities of the U.S. movie industry, and film director Irvin Kershner was his priority target.
When he came back, Cellier boasted with delight about his first approach with the American film
director. He held him as a potential asset already.
Cellier was the first to brief me on a project to create a French eBook reader, at the same time
someone else had instructed me to enter in a relationship with Jacques Attali, former personal
adviser to President François Mitterrand from 1981 to 1991. Cellier asked to me to think about what
could make a new electronic device of this kind a medium challenging an ordinary book printed on
paper.
The project to create an international French TV channel was an entirely different thing, partly
because Cellier was not at all involved in it. Reda Aired, a middle-ranking executive about my age
and of Algerian origin who worked at the DGSE headquarters, was briefing me about it. He
entrusted me a thick file of 400 or 500 pages on the project code-named “Darna TV,” to be studied
in depth. This other task oddly reminded me of my early experience with my brother and
Stratispace, when we created satellite television antennas and receivers, but I could not say whether
this was purely coincidental. We were in 1999, Aired wanted me to look for anything I could find
wrong in the Darna TV project, and what could be done to improve it. The file was clearly a first
draft, and the objectives it described were to create a French satellite TV channel broadcasting a mix
of news and cultural and entertainment programs aiming the Northeastern part of continental Africa
and the Arabian Peninsula. The file went on explaining that a large library of about 1,400 TV
documentaries had been selected for the latter purport already.
The future television channel had to be broadcast in several languages, but behind an appearance
of objectivity in its programming, it aimed to promote the francophonie, and to influence its
audience in a way favorable to France’s interest in the regions I just named. The file further said the
television channel had also to address the minority of North-African immigrants living along the
Mediterranean French coast, but not the entire French population. In the file were mentioned some
French people, whose names indicated origins in North African countries and who had to occupy
key positions in the future television channel, the names of telecommunication satellites that
covered parts of the targeted large region, plus the name of a telecommunication satellite scheduled
to be launched the next year. More precisely, Aired wanted me to give my take on the organizational
charts of the project because, he said, the DGSE found them “unsatisfactory or bizarre”. In addition,
he expected me to make suggestions about the planned technical means and staff. The reason
justifying the latter scrutiny and demands was, French politicians, obviously concerned by the
project, expected to introduce a bit of cronyism in it, as usual. Indeed, working in the audiovisual
media and motion picture in France is 99% about good connections and only 1% about skills and
talent. A “coincidence” made I also was given courses on human resources and management in the
DGSE headquarters, at the same period.
The Darna TV project often mentioned CNN International and Al Jazeera, but there was no
intelligence at all on the organizational charts, and way the two television channels worked
internally. Aired enlightened me at length about the strategic stakes of the project in the more
general context of information and cultural warfare against U.S. influence through television
broadcasting in Arabic-speaking countries.
On one hand, I found all this exciting. On the other hand, I felt it challenged my knowledge and
skills, as I was not experienced enough in television broadcasting to handle such a demanding task.
I had some acquaintances and contacts in this realm, but no experience as employee in television
broadcasting, and I thought I dearly missed this to formulate any pertinent remark. That is why I
began with reading everything I could find out on this activity, including on the history of French
television broadcasting. Additionally, I talked about it to Jacques Attali who, I knew, had been
consulted in the early 1980s for the creation of at least one French national television channel. Attali
had no prior experience in television broadcasting when he did it either. Of course, I had asked for
the authorization to talk to Attali about this, and, to my relief, Aired granted me the right forthwith.
However, Attali seemed to be much less interested in this project than in a future eBook reading
device, and in another idea of mine to create an online virtual currency convertible in hard
currencies. All he did was to ask me a few questions about it, but he never even commented my
ideas.
In the years following my resignation from the DGSE, I learned incidentally while reading the
news that a project of French international television channel similar in all ways to the Darna TV
project was about to materialize. One more year later, I learned the television channel in question
had been launched under the name France 24. Today, I have the feeling I did not formulate any real
advice on the project, but I had been busy with too many other things to be able to do so anyway.
Perhaps the reader would like to know what else happened about this project at the time I was
working on it, and on its origins.
 “In 1987, Prime Minister Jacques Chirac entrusted Michel Pericard MP a study mission on the
audiovisual policy of France. The report concluded the disorganization, lack of efficiency, and
dispersion of the actors of the external audiovisual, which counted RFI since 1975 and TV5 Monde
and RFO since 1982. After a change of majority in the parliament in 1988, new Prime Minister
Michel Rocard ordered a new report to historian Alain Decaux, which led to the creation of Canal
France International–CFI, a bank of French language programs intended for foreign countries and
Africa in particular, dubbed by another television channel for a while.
“The Gulf War of 1990-1991, covered live by CNN International, had revealed the power of this
American channel created ten years earlier, for it had shown that a 24 / 7 news channel can
influence the public and political opinion. From the latter observation was coined the expression
ʻCNN effectʼ. That is why ʻFrench politiciansʼ [i.e. the DGSE] called for the creation of a ʻCNN à la
françaiseʼ. MP Philippe Séguin recalled that the WWII led to the creation of Agence France-Presse–
AFP in 1944 [successor of Havas]. Several projects to create this French international television
channel emerged. In 1993, the European Broadcasting Union–EBU launched its multilingual
European news channel called, Euronews. The following year, TF1 group launched the first 24 / 7
news channel in France, called, La Chaîne Info–LCI.
“In 1997, after 24 reports in ten years, RFI President Jean-Paul Cluzel and journalist Michel
Meyer drafted a new report to Prime Minister Alain Juppé. They proposed to set up a holding
company called, Telefi, bringing together the actors of the outside audiovisual sector (TV5 Monde,
RFI and CFI), as well as the creation of a French channel of international news. However, the
project was abandoned with the return of the left in power following the parliamentary elections of
1997. The new Minister of Foreign Affairs Hubert Védrine preferred to develop television channels
already in existence, including TV5 Monde.
“In 2002, President Jacques Chirac, who was coming out of a period of cohabitation, restarted the
project of a French international news channel. He made it one of his priorities, it is said, spurred by
the news of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and later by the Iraq War. This was deemed all the
more crucial since France opposed the United States in this war”.[658]
My personal contribution to this information is the DGSE was largely concerned with this
project. Based on what I knew about the way this agency handled it, it necessarily had a large hand
in the final creation of France 24. As I know, as an aside, the DGSE was influential in the creation
of French TV channel BFM TV because this other idea was already in the air in this agency in 2000-
2001. My personal contribution to this information is the DGSE was largely concerned with this
project. Based on what I knew about the way this agency handled it, it necessarily had a large hand
in the final creation of France 24. As I know, as an aside, the DGSE was influential in the creation
of French TV channel BFM TV because this other idea was already in the air in this agency in
2000-2001. Coincidentally again, I learned the DGSE indeed made an official use of the code-name
Darna TV when circa 2010 I once discovered incidentally the existence of a French web-TV
channel with the same name. This audiovisual medium even released an interview of my ex-
colleague and whistleblower Maurice Dufresse aka Pierre Siramy, which disappeared from the
Internet soon after.
Now, I am going to present, explain, and debunk one among the biggest and most effective
French-Russian operation of disinformation against the United States to date. I knew well almost all
agents and intelligence officers who took part in it, as I worked with them from 2000 to early 2001.
Doubtless, the reader heard about this story at some point, because it quickly became an affair
largely reported by all media worldwide. The additional interest of my debunking of it is its
connections with other lesser known facts and operations of disinformation against the United
States.
On March 8, 2002, Éditions Carnot, a small and unknown French publishing house in Chatou,
near Paris, released a book titled L’Effroyable imposture (9/11: The Big Lie). Its author was Thierry
Meyssan, a French national, whom I succinctly presented earlier in the chapter 21 as founder and
head of the still active news website Réseau Voltaire. For long, Meyssan introduces himself as
“independent journalist,” but he is above all an agent of influence run by Russia, strongly
committed and very active against the United States and its allies. Meyssan is the grandson of
Colonel Pierre Gaïsset, who was UN military observer and chairman of the Israel-Lebanon
Armistice Commission, and he is the son of Michel Meyssan, former councilor of Bordeaux and
longtime close acquaintance to prominent liberal politician Jacques Chaban-Delmas.
 In 240 pages or so, Meyssan claims in his book that during the attacks of September 11, 2001, the
Pentagon had not been hit by a plane, but by a guided missile fired “on orders of far right-wingers
inside the United States Government”. Further, he says, associates of Osama bin Laden actually did
not flight the two airliners that struck the World Trade Center because they were “programmed” by
the same American conspirators. At first glance, all this sounds absurd and poorly credible since
Éditions Carnot made for itself a reputation of publisher of books on similar conspiracy theories and
hoaxes, mixed with literary works of the popular genre. The odd association of genres actually is a
provision aiming for this business not to fall under the accusation to be a front of an intelligence
agency, a simple trick I earlier explained under the name “dosage”. I knew well Éditions Carnot,
and more particularly its founder and manager Patrick Pasin because he was one of my associates in
a disinformation ring I shall present soon.[659]
One week later, on March 16, Meyssan was invited to present his book on France 2, one of the
most viewed TV channels in France, on prime time on the stage of the then popular TV show Tout
le monde en parle (Everybody Talks about It), hosted by presenter and television producer Thierry
Ardisson. It is noteworthy that Ardisson’s career in television was launched in the early 1980s, in
the wake of the election of François Mitterrand as President of France; I will have more to say about
him later. On that evening, Meyssan was given a lengthy 27 minutes to present his book, 9/11: The
Big Lie. Against all expectations, Ardisson and other French celebrities sitting next to him on stage
took very seriously everything Meyssan said about his theory. Indeed, Meyssan was doing a
convincing performance in his show.
Therefore, the U.S. Government would have blown up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
deliberately, all by itself and under the lead of right-wing military and of the CIA. Everybody on
stage that evening seemed to be convinced of all this for a peer pressure effect by proxy to occur, in
reality, since the show itself was all staged to spread this disinformation. Several hundreds of
thousands of French people and possibly a million were watching. The audience around the stage
was alternatively cheering, booing, and applauding, on demand from someone who never appeared
on screen, as usual in about all TV shows for decades, and it had been selected and instructed to
thus cooperating because that is how things are organized either. I learned the trick in real situation
when I went to the broadcasting Studios of Brie-sur-Marne, presented as an additional and very
effective way to shape the public opinion on popular issues. The expected effect of it, which I now
add to my explanation, is the same as when someone applauds loudly in a room to make the whole
attendance applauding, too. The slight difference when done in a broadcast show is that viewers
quietly mimic the applauses, cheering, and booing, and thus follow the opinion of a small score of
people they see and hear on television, not knowing those actually are influencing the population on
order while believing themselves they are just having a moment of fun. This relies on herd instinct,
again, and so it is a manipulation. End of aside.
Everything Meyssan said seemed to defy all rationales, yet no one really challenged him on stage.
That is why, the next day, there was a rush in French bookstores to buy 9/11: The Big Lie, and that is
how Meyssan became an instant celebrity in France and in all French-speaking countries where
France 2 broadcasts; francophonie obliges.
Thirteen days later, on March 29, Livre Hebdo weekly print magazine titled, “Meyssan sells
100,000 copies in a week”.[660] For the record, Livre Hebdo is regarded as the reference magazine to
the French book publishing industry. It is owned by Cercle de la librairie (The Bookseller Circle),
which also is the much-respected French employers’ union of the book industry, created in 1847.
Therefore, all French bookstores ordered quantities of Meyssan’s book to Carnot publishing to
feature them in their windows, thus making still publicity for it.
Meanwhile, protests and indignations from the U.S. Embassy in France and from numerous
Americans who lived in this country were loud and louder. The French Government was summoned
to provide explanations for the enormous and gross slander campaign, as its authority and control
over the mainstream media is known to be strict and effective. How such a diplomatic blunder was
made possible? The French Government addressed its apologies to its American counterpart. Of
course, it had no play in the regrettable incident; things certainly went out of control at some point,
and the matter would be cleared up forthwith. Right now, the trouble seemed to stem from Thierry
Ardisson alone, a television presenter known as an unruly iconoclast who does not always know
exactly what he is doing, nor which matter he is dealing with exactly. As a way to prove its good
faith, the French Government was going to help fix the problem right away.
 So, Jean Guisnel, my ex-colleague I named earlier in this chapter, and Guillaume Dasquié, two
agents working under covers of journalist-reporters, traveled to Washington DC at the unofficial
behest of the French Government to see by themselves the facts of the attack of September 11. Jean
Guisnel is highly knowledgeable in information warfare, and he wrote several essays on intelligence
including one he co-authored with former Director of the DGSE Claude Silberzahn. As about
Guillaume Dasquié, though young and an unknown journalist at that time, he was in near-permanent
touch with the DST (now DGSI). In the United States, Dasquié and Guisnel interviewed eighteen
witnesses in all to the Pentagon crash and returned to France thereupon. Thenceforward, things
unfolded quickly; though not fast enough.
On June 8, 2002, Thierry Ardisson invited Dasquié, but not renowned and experienced journalist
Guisnel, remarkably, to give his account on the Attack of last September 11 on the same TV show.
There Dasquié calmly explained why everything Meyssan said was nothing but an absurd
conspiracy theory. The young journalist appeared to be awkward in his explanations however, and
Ardisson behaved unconvinced and noncommittal, accordingly. So, the other guests and the
audience in the room obviously mirrored the attitude by obeying the hidden man who instructs when
applauding, cheering, and booing. Dasquié talked a little about the counter-conspiracy theory he co-
authored with Jean Guisnel, not yet available in bookstores, unfortunately.
The other book actually was released five days later, on June 13, 2002, under the title L
´Effroyable mensonge: Thèse et foutaises sur les attentats du 11 septembre (The Dreadful Lie:
Thesis and Hogwash on the Attacks of September 11st). Meyssan had published 9/11: The Big Lie
three months earlier already, which since had sold more than 200,000 copies in France alone. It had
been at the top of the best-seller lists in the country for several weeks. Foreign rights had been sold
in sixteen countries, and a Spanish version was already on sale by then. Last April, Meyssan had
even traveled to Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, to present his conspiracy theory and more
arguments to support it at a local university. For the record, the UAE is a long-time partner of
France in intelligence, particularly in telecommunications interception in the Arabic Peninsula since
2008. The interest with sending Meyssan presenting his theory in the latter country was to spread it
in Arabic-speaking countries, in the aim to suggest the idea that the U.S. Government was being
turning Saudi Arabia a scapegoat accountable for Muslim terrorism worldwide. For the record
again, for long, France and Russia are trying to break the good relations between Saudi Arabia and
the United States because the French-Russian strategy in the Arabic Peninsula says, “If we win
Saudi-Arabia, then winning the whole Arabian Peninsula will naturally follow”. Since then, Iran is
playing an important role for Russia in the entire region by fueling unrest, creating religious
minorities, and warmongering factions.
That was not yet all, for Éditions Carnot, publisher of Meyssan for his book, stated it would
release an English version of 9/11: The Big Lie—under this same title exactly—in the United States
by next July. All this was done in spite of the would-be-consistent efforts of the French Government
to make the publishing of the book stop, and to instruct the French mainstream media to launch a
smear campaign against Meyssan and his conspiracy theory. Indeed, Le Monde and Liberation
newspapers were the first to attack Meyssan, and they did it very quickly, a few days only after
Meyssan had shown up on prime time on France 2; to no avail, alas. For worse, Guisnel and
Dasquié’s counter-theory sold poorly. Nonetheless, the book of the two journalists by far did not
benefit of the media hype Meyssan had enjoyed. On June 22, 2002, as Meyssan had reached
worldwide renown and his book was just published in the United States, journalist Alan Riding
remarked in The New York Times,
“ … Still, even if some French are susceptible to conspiracy theories, few had heard of the book
until March 16, when Mr. Meyssan appeared on a popular Saturday evening television program on
France 2, a government-owned but independently run channel. In the program, Mr. Meyssan was
allowed to expound his theory without being challenged by the host. In the two weeks that followed,
his book sold 100,000 copies.…
“The book has proved to be a windfall for Mr. Meyssan’s publisher. More accustomed to
publishing marginal books on subjects like the ‘false’ American Moon landing in 1969 and the
latest ‘truth’ about U.F.O.’s, Éditions Carnot can now boast of its first best seller.
“Further, confident that this conspiracy theory will endure, Mr. Meyssan and Carnot have just
published a 192-page annex, with new documents, photographs, and theories. They call it Le
‘Pentagate’.”
 Yes, Mr. Riding, if by chance you read me, not all this can normally happen in France, for all the
reasons I explained hitherto, and for others that follow; neither this could happen in any other
country just because of good common sense at least, to begin with. You are now living and
resuming your activity in journalism in France, and so you understand all this today, doubtless.
Not only I know who Mr. Patrick Pasin is in addition to being manager of Editions Carnot, but I
also knew, met, and worked with several other members of the disinformation ring to which he
belongs. Pasin and Meyssan are in no way naive individuals. Pasin does not at all believe in the
UFO’s stories and other conspiracy theories his company yet publishes because he actually is a
specialist in influence and disinformation, and a man who poses in private as a far-leftist hardliner,
fierce anti-capitalist, and anti-American, as Meyssan his partner in the plot does openly.
The New York Times’s columnist Riding wrote the second excerpt, below, because at that time
what French newspapers Le Monde and Liberation said about Meyssan and his book lured him and
many other American journalists into cautiously writing the same remarks.
“A Pentagon spokesman said, ‘There was no official reaction because we figured it was so
stupid.’”
Riding went on,
“Edwy Plenel, news editor at Le Monde, wrote: ‘It is very grave to encourage the idea that
something which is real is in fact fictional. It is the beginning of totalitarianism’”.
Had Riding read books Edwy Plenel wrote, and more particularly his essay on French political
power, La Part d’Ombre (The Shadow Part),[661] then he would have seen his French counterpart
was enlightened enough in French intelligence to know who Meyssan truly is. As he would know
what this man was doing at that time, let alone what I earlier explained about Le Monde newspaper
in mine. Unlike The New York Times, Le Monde and Liberation together act on instructions of the
French Government, under the monitoring of the DGSE. As the Pentagon’s spokesman Riding
quoted, Plenel “figured it was so stupid”. That was the point, precisely: plausible denial supported
by a pretense of irresponsibility, a policy more than a method in the DGSE, I explained all along
this book. Meyssan, Plenel, and other people I am going to present soon, and above all the French
Government, all counted dearly on this trivialization because after that, Meyssan and Pasin were left
free to continue, since they wrote and published things “too stupid to be taken seriously”. Actually,
that is exactly what they did eventually.
Not all this is “so stupid,” quite on the contrary because sixteen years later and today, millions of
people remember perfectly the “stupid” things Meyssan wrote and Pasin published, since countless
media that acted as echo chamber relayed them consistently. Many among the thus lured people still
take it very seriously. As example, I publish the following excerpt of an interview of French actress
Marion Cotillard, published in The Daily Telegraph in 2008 when she won an Oscar in Hollywood,
and seven years after Meyssan published his book.
“Oscar-winning Marion Cotillard was facing embarrassment with her new American public last
night after it emerged that she doubted the official account of the September 11 attacks.
“… the actress faces a potential backlash in the US over comments she made in an interview in
France. Footage which surfaced on the internet showed her questioning the New York terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001, and the 1969 Moon landing.
“… ‘I think we’re lied to about a number of things,’ she said, singling out September 11.
“… Miss Cotillard suggested that the towers, planned in the early 1960s, were an outdated
‘money sucker’ which would have cost so much to modernize that it was easier to destroy them.
“… Turning to America’s space program, she said: ‘Did a man really walk on the Moon? I saw
plenty of documentaries on it, and I really wondered. And in any case I don’t believe all they tell
me, that’s for sure.’”
“… Miss Cotillard, who was born and brought up in Paris, made the comments on Paris
Première–Paris Dernière, a program first broadcast a year ago [2007].”[662]
With respect to reverse psychology, this psychological phenomenon I explained in the chapter 18
and exemplified thereafter in another with the Affair of Le Canard enchaîné, what must strike the
reader in the excerpt is Cotillard is quoted as saying she doubts “the official account of the
September 11 attacks”. Additionally, she does not “believe all … a man [did] really walk on the
Moon”. How coincidental is the latter opinion because publishing house Éditions Carnot also is the
publisher in France of the book saying the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon was a hoax, staged by
the U.S. Government again.[663]
The other coincidence for me is I happened to talk about this other book with Stéphane Jah[664]
when he was an agent of the DST ran by General of the French Army and counterintelligence
officer Jean Guyaux, whom I shall present soon either. Jah was the agent who introduced me to
Pasin of Éditions Carnot publishing house, and to some other members of the disinformation ring of
the DST. Moreover, Jah intervened on instruction of his hierarchy to help Pasin promote the other
book that presents the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon as a hoax. All this obliges me to introduce
the long yet enlightening aside that follows.
Given the profile of Cotillard, her statement does not make her a French agent of influence,
however; I hold this as a certainty for some good reasons I shall explain. I mean no more than
French singer and actress Vanessa Paradis then in a relationship with Johnny Depp since 1998—I
name her because of a pattern in intelligence she shares with Cotillard—could possibly bump into
this American actor by happenstance when she met him for the first time. I am even not inclined to
think Cotillard ever read the two books Éditions Carnot published yet she quoted because she said
she “saw plenty of documentaries on” the conspiracy theory on the Apollo 11 Mission.
I was concerned with French influence and intelligence operations against the United States from
the mid-1990s, and a part of my work was to meet agents the DGSE sent to this country, as I earlier
explained. That is why and how I know that provided Cotillard’s position as French actress working
in the United States, and given her character, the DGSE was wary not to ever talk about spycraft to
her, doubtless. I even go as far as to assume Cotillard did not know what the DGSE is, exactly.
However, from the moment Cotillard became a French national endowed with much power as
opinion leader in the United States and in the World, due to her quality of famous actress and Oscar
winner, there was no room for the slightest doubt she was in close touch with one “good friend” or
“confident” of her at least. Herein I mean a third party who indeed is an agent of the DGSE,
unbeknownst to Cotillard. In passing, the same remark applies to other French actress Vanessa
Paradis, for the same good reason at least. Remarkably, Cotillard made for herself a concern with
two different anti-American conspiracy theories, actually crafted by Russian specialists in influence
and disinformation and both spread in France by publishing house Éditions Carnot. In my
understanding, the incriminating coincidence is also an unmistakable pattern of the typical political
indoctrination the DGSE gives to ordinary people this agency shortlists before it helps them
discreetly go make a career abroad. For I can tell the reader that ordinary French who feel as
concerned as Cotillard was with the two conspiracy theories, and at the same time, are in no way
numerous; they are even very rare birds.
With absolute and firsthand certainty, I can add there is not a single chance that the DGSE would
not be interested in connections and opportunities Cotillard and Paradis would inescapably enjoy
while evolving in the U.S. movie industry. For there is not a single chance either that this agency
leaves alone a French national who set foot in the American motion picture industry at a high level.
For the record, one of the regular mission of François Cellier my ex-chief was to establish
relationships between French agents and people working in the U.S. movie industry, precisely, and
neither was he executing this mission alone, nor on a personal initiative. Implicitly and inescapably,
therefore, Cotillard and Paradis were unconscious and occasional protagonists of a DGSE’s long-
lasting grand strategy in intelligence in the American movie industry, whose specifics and extent
they could not possibly know themselves, however. End of aside.
Back to Meyssan’s book, in the years 2000-2001, the DGSE entrusted me new tasks under a new
hierarchy. At that time, this agency put me in touch with two new colleagues and well-known
figures of the French intelligence community; I name Éric Denécé and Jean-Jacques Cécile aka
“Roger de St-Sorlint”. Additionally, I was enlightened on a joint mission of disinformation of the
DGSE and the DST in cooperation with the Russian SVR RF, against the United States. That is how
I was brought to work with several other persons involved in this mission, whom I all met for the
first time in 2000. I was told the real identities of most of these persons, though not all I reasonably
assume, given the sensitivity of the work. Some of these persons were not conscious agents, but
contacts who only knew they were helping French spies, and not much more beyond this, certainly.
The mission was of a general nature, since it concerned several tasks and operations executed
simultaneously, all or almost concerning disinformation against the United States of America.
For the record, the conscious agents and others in the ring were Patrick Pasin, manager of the
French publishing company Éditions Carnot; DST agent Stéphane Jah then webmaster under the
name “Sébastien Janvier” of an Internet website on intelligence titled dgse.org; DST agent Jean Paul
Ney, who introduced himself as “independent journalist”665]; General of the French Army Jean
Guyaux, a renowned intelligence officer of the DST and of the DGSE with a consistent background
in counterintelligence and deception operations; Commandant of the Russian SVR RF Sergei Jirnov
aka “Sergei Jakov” aka “Schtirlitz” (and several other aliases and nationalities) then on a mission in
France with a specialty in information warfare; and Commandant Pierre-Henri Bunel, French
military intelligence officer and former member of the French delegation to NATO’s military
committee at the headquarters in Brussels, by then already handled as Russian agent via Serbia, as
we shall see later in detail. Additionally, there was DGSE counterintelligence officer Phillipe Raggi,
who acted as interface between Eric Denécé and me, and with whom I was in daily touch for this
reason.
General Jean Guyaux stood out and occupied a special position in this ring for the following
reasons. This high-ranking officer had held an influential position in the DST as special advisor to
Yves Bonnet when he was appointed Director of this counterespionage agency in November 1982;
but “not before 1984,” General Guyaux rectified. Ex-DST Director Bonnet remains vague in his
autobiography[666] about the exact date and circumstances of the coming of General Guyaux in the
French counterespionage agency at a time the latter was still Colonel. Sometimes, Bonnet says he
asked Guyaux to join the DST; sometimes, he implies Defense Minister Charles Hernu imposed this
man as his “military advisor”. Some other times, Bonnet says Guyaux had asked for joining the
DST himself.[667] Nonetheless, Bonnet repeats and confirms Hernu was instrumental in Guyaux’s
appointment in the latter agency, which makes ex-Minister of Defense Hernu a man of particular
interest justifying the few following particulars in his biography.
With a consistent background as civilian in politics, Hernu was picked up as Minister of Defense
by François Mitterrand on Mai 22, 1981; that is to say, immediately after the latter was elected
President. Hernu held the position until September 1985. Seven more years later, and three years
after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1992, Hernu was burned by a senior officer of the Romanian
intelligence agency, who revealed he had been a Russian agent via Romania for decades under the
code-name Дина (Dean).[668] Hernu joined the French liberal freemasonry (GLdF aka GLF) in
1947, and he formally joined the GOdF in 1955. Hernu died from a heart attack three years after he
was exposed as a Soviet submarine inside the French Government, then aged 66.
The latter specifics call for further questions about the choice of Guyaux as advisor to the
Director of the DST from 1982, or 1984 regardless. Furthermore, the position of military advisor
that did not yet exist in the French counterespionage agency hitherto, and its creation and the
official appointment to it of a senior military officer formalized the complete takeover of the
intelligence community by the military. This coincides with the implementation in France of the
doctrine of active measures, should my own estimate of the date of the latter event is correct.
Additionally, we notice, Yves Bonnet the newly appointed Director of the DST at that time was not
held in the DGSE as a brilliant and experienced specialist in intelligence, all on the contrary to
Guyaux.[669]
When I met him for the first time in the last months of 2000, Guyaux claimed he no longer
worked in the DST since 1996. At that time, to be precise, he also gave classified courses on
deception in intelligence to staffers of several intelligence agencies including the DGSE. I attended
one of his courses that took place by an afternoon in a small classroom of the École des Mines at
Paris, with a small attendance of a dozen. That is how and when he came over me to talk about
entirely different matters, in presence of DST agent Stéphane Jah who knew him in a friendly way
already, as he was under his command from 2000 to 2001, and earlier certainly.
In the DST, Guyaux was known under the unflattering nickname “La Baleine” (The Whale),
owing to his physical features. Actually, Guyaux was not a fat man, but tall and stout as a wrestler,
which contrasted with his humility, outstanding intelligence, and culture. To say, when I shook
hands with Guyaux for the first time, I could not fail to notice his hand could literally contain mine,
larger than the average already. As an amusing aside, this left me with the belief that all French
generals have special physical features because when I once met General Jacques Massu in the early
1980s, I concluded that this other senior Army officer had the longest nose I had ever seen!
The other particularity of Guyaux was his scientific background and an intelligence I deem both
unparalleled in the whole French intelligence community until his passing away. Actually, the latter
characteristic was the official reason given for Guyaux’s particular appointment in the DST, and that
is why he was also nicknamed “L’Espion des sciences” (The Sciences’ Spy). Guyaux is said to
having sent synthesis notes written in Latin to the DGSE, as a way to snub the brightest minds this
agency had, and thus to impose his intellectual authority in certain fields—I am sure he did. I knew
Guyaux as a man highly knowledgeable in the uncommon field of chaos theory, a branch of
mathematics I was interested in for a while and was taught by Professor Bernard Caillaud, another
scientist and expert in the DGSE in the general context of active measures.[670] For chaos theory,
along fuzzy logic and epistemology, are important fundamentals in deception and active measures.
Commandant Bunel, a French military intelligence officer, became publicly known after he
leaked sensitive NATO documents to a Serb spy in Brussels during the Yugoslavian War. For this,
Bunel served a prison sentence in 2001-2002, just after I lost contact with him. However, the media
did not reveal that if Bunel’s handler Colonel Jovan Milanovic was Serb, he actually acted in the
interest of Russia. In 1995, Milanovic was tasked to build an intelligence network as intelligence
officer in Brussels’s NATO headquarters while holding the position of Minister-Adviser in this
organization. Milanovic and Bunel revealed to Russia sensitive plans of the Alliance, thus resuming
the Soviet activity and interest that defector to the United States Golitsyn first exposed in December
1961. Previously in 1990-1991, Bunel had been General Michel Roquejoffre’s aide-de-camp and
liaison officer with the U.S. military forces in the Operation Daguet, the codename for French
operations during the Gulf War in 1991.
More by naiveté than by anything else, in my personal opinion, Bunel indulged in his being
recruited as foreign agent through some plot contrivance; in which the DRSD involved, according to
Bunel himself. Then, from the late 1990s on, Russia used Bunel via Milanovic or a new handler to
spread anti-American disinformation, in collaboration with Pasin of Carnot publishing, as we are
going to see. Bunel is not exactly a man one would call a bright mind, if I may put it that way, and
he rather has the typical profile of a lower mid-ranking civil servant. He is a man hard to figure as
commissioned officer with this rank, unless as military intelligence analyst given his character and
skills. In fact, he had been indeed intelligence officer in the DRM.
My relationship with Commandant Serguei Jirnov of the Russian SVR RF allowed me to define
him as a committed Soviet communist and anti-capitalist, with a personal admiration for Lenin. He
even had a bust of Lenin in display in his apartment in France. Today, the reader may find many
things about Jirnov on the Internet, but on this occasion, if ever, he will notice a number of
inconsistencies and discrepancies in his biography as he states it. To the least, we may infer that
Jirnov entered Soviet spycraft much earlier than what he says, when he was aged 20 circa 1981-82.
He learned French language at the latter period or earlier and was stirred to media and
communication eventually. Jirnov began to work in communication in the framework of the French-
Russian cooperation in intelligence upon the takeover of the Socialist Party in 1981. In this context,
he was already on the payroll of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, officially as head and
producer of television program France Économie & Cooperation, created by this public body.
Actually, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs hired Jirnov when President François Mitterrand
was boasting with his expelling of 47 Soviet diplomats from the Soviet Embassy in Paris upon their
denunciation by KGB officer and would-be-French submarine Vladimir Vetrov aka “Farewell”.
Apparently, Jirnov worked for a number of years at the French Embassy in Moscow, and in
television broadcasting for the Soviet Government in the context of French language teaching in
Soviet satellite countries. Circa 1987, he became commissioned officer with rank of lieutenant of
the First Directorate of the KGB, Directorate S, and Geographic Directorate 4; that is to say, the
reader notices, continental America. Thereupon, he came to live in France where he was admitted as
if it was normal at the École National d’Administration–ENA, which indeed graduated him in 1991.
Since the latter year, Jirnov justifies all the aforesaid by claiming he “resigned from the KGB” when
his country became the Russian Federation. Thereupon, he says he obtained in France the status of
political refugee! All this makes no sense, obviously, but it is good enough for the French public and
compliant journalists because since then Jirnov is making regular appearances on French television
with the quality of “ex-KGB and ex-SVR intelligence officer”. As in 2019, Jirnov indeed had been
on the payroll of the French public service for 38 years! Today, he poses as a French official
working in the Eastern part of France and living in Anemasse near the Swiss border.
Should my recollections be good, Jirnov and I never talked together about the United States, nor
on the CIA and the NSA and related topics. On online conversations with him, I was surprised to
learn incidentally he despises Russian folklore and things such as the balalaika. Jirnov elaborated at
length on his training in the KGB, talking about it in 2001 in a strange French simultaneously rich
and typical of a scholar, yet sprinkled with minor syntax faults. In Russia, and certainly later and
certainly later upon his settling in France, he was even taught French body language, gestures, and
facial expressions typical in French natives—which details of his training I found impressive. Some
years after that, he mastered so well French spoken language, colloquial expressions, slang words,
and common jokes, without the slightest trace of Russian accent, that I believe no French who does
not know his name could ever guess he is a Russian.
Jirnov also learned several other languages including English, as he is gifted with languages;
indeed, he is a gifted individual altogether. However, he seemed unable to free his mind of his
mission as spy even temporarily, as if he were a programmed robot unable to attach to anyone and
anything but to a Soviet perception of Russia. He uses to deceive his interlocutors about his claimed
dislike for the new Russian regime and Vladimir Putin, which, I understood at some point, is untrue.
Jirnov is openly proud to be a Russian intelligence officer, and behind a façade of refined
intellectual, I sensed the tough Russian spy ready to do anything. I had no difficulty to close the
contact with him, simply by proposing to him “to create a profitable business activity”. Should my
recollections be good, his stern refusal contained a reference to “the evil of the Coca-Cola culture”.
Other members of our ring I was only given the names were Mathieu Dupart aka “Matthieu
Dupart,” who acted at that time as DST’s other handler of Stéphane Jah, and Christophe
Dechavanne, by then famous TV presenter of Ciel, mon Mardi! (Heaven, My Tuesday!) popular
weekly talk show.[671] I hold, Dechavanne was unaware of our mission and objectives, as his role
limited to guest agents of influence in his talk show that the DST (or the DGSE) sent to him.
Dechavanne, we notice however, made his debut in French television broadcasting upon his
cooptation by a Russian-born French national. Several times, Jah told me the DST could manage to
make anyone and at any time a guest in Dechavanne’s talk show. In point of fact, I seem to
recollect, Dechavanne also invited Commandant Bunel once in his talk show to present one of his
books.
I formally knew Bunel was in frequent touch with Jah, Pasin, Dechavanne, and Meyssan. The
role of Dupart in particular was to instruct Jah daily about the next contents of the intelligence
webzine dgse.org, which medium knew certain popularity in France in 2000 because it posed as a
publication of the DGSE, though without ever stating it explicitly. However, in early 2001, Jah was
instructed to “kill” the reputation and credibility of dgse.org because the latter agency complained—
General Guyaux told me—“things with this online publication began to get out of control,” and “to
go too far” at times.
During my meetings with my hierarchy in the DGSE, Éric Denécé naturally imposed himself as
head for the French party in the series of missions, and Jean-Jacques Cécile supplied us regularly
with technical assistance about certain matters. Cécile was fluent in Russian, and he was
unambiguous about his experience as French official interlocutor between the French and Russian
intelligence agencies since the Cold War. Additionally, he said he had enjoyed friendly relations
with both the East-German State Security Service (Staatssicherheitsdienst–SSD)—he is fluent in
German either—and with the Soviet KGB, when the SDECE had sent him to East Berlin in the
early 1980s, with the official position of Gendarmerie officer. In addition to be highly
knowledgeable in military matters, and more especially about special military units, Cécile
specialized in counterintelligence with the DGSE. However, he was sent to work at the SGDSN
eventually, along with Denécé who formerly worked as analyst specialist of Southern Asia in the
DGSE, following a debut in an elite military unit—the Commandos Marine, it seem to me.
Cécile knew about my personal fancy for the intellectual intricacies in counterespionage and my
love for Le Carré’s novels, which probably explains the following to some extent. By an early
afternoon, as he and I were heading toward a subway station near the Invalides, he left me
speechless when he abruptly asked to me, “Why wouldn’t you ask for joining the DST?” The
question was serious, obviously, since I was in touch with General Guyaux, already.
When Jirnov spontaneously came over me in November 2000, Cécile gave me the “green light”
to develop a relationship with this Russian spy, possibly in part because I knew a bit of Russian
language, and in part because Jirnov holds a specialty in communication and media. In any case, I
understood I was the only person in our ring to be in direct contact with Jirnov, except for Cécile,
very possibly.
Thierry Ardisson, the TV presenter and producer who invited Meyssan to make the promotion of
his book, was possibly a conscious agent in our ring, yet I never heard his name associated with this
quality. A few years earlier, however, circa 1996, it seems to me, I had heard some others of my
colleagues in the DGSE talking of Ardisson as a praiseworthy person, without further specifics.
Then some details of the peculiar kind in Ardisson’s pedigree strongly suggest he worked for long
with this agency, and even very possibly for the Russians. For, it would seem, he was recruited for
sexual entrapments very early in age when he was seventeen. At that time, in the 1960s, he was
hired by Le Whisky à Gogo, a nightclub in Nice that also existed under the same name in Paris. For
the record, at the same earlier period, the SDECE used Le Whisky à Gogo to entrap youngsters of
the French upper class with compromising sex photos. Coincidence makes that my elder brother did
the same for Le Whisky à Gogo in Paris, in the 1960s either, which explains why and how I hazard
the latter guess. Furthermore, Ardisson would have been a boyfriend of opera singer Maria Callas
for a while. If true, this would tell more on the motives of Ardisson because Maria Callas connects
to a number of other possibilities due to her relationship with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle
Onassis. Onassis was a target of the French and Soviet intelligence agencies until his death in 1975.
I seem to recollect, Onassis owned a company in France by the name of Onatra, which was a prime
target of the French counterintelligence in the 1970s; and his life with Jackie Kennedy after the
death of John F. Kennedy certainly comforted the French and the Soviets in their opinion he was an
asset of the CIA.
Journalist Jean Guisnel was not named as member of our ring, in spite of his status of agent of the
DGSE and of my relationship with him for a short while circa the years 1994-1995. Anyhow, I think
Guisnel is unlikely to have partaken in our activities, by virtue of a simple rule I will explain shortly
in a suitable context. As about other journalist Guillaume Dasquié with whom Guisnel authored the
book contradicting the theory of Meyssan on order of the French Government, neither was he
presented to me as a member of our ring. Yet I had been shortly in touch with him too in late 2000,
in the context of the website on intelligence that the DGSE instructed me to create under the name
Confidentiel-Defense.com. At that time, I posed as Chief Editor of this webzine under the fictitious
identity of “Gilbert Haas”. I seem to recollect, Dasquié had been hired as Chief Editor for the well-
known website on intelligence IntelligenceOnline.com, which also is a front of the DGSE.[672]
At some point during this period, Dasquié claimed “he was in trouble with the DST” about
classified matters he had publicly released as journalist. In reality, the secrets he revealed to the
public came from the DGSE, but were of little importance, and they even were bogus very possibly
because the latter agency wanted them to be “accidental leaks,” as the scheme happens regularly
either for deception or are red herring to divert the attention of public from a true and grave
incident. Then the choice to leak or not the classified note depended entirely on Dasquié because his
loyalty thus was put to the test unbeknownst to him, and his career path was to depend on what he
would do with it. Anyway, Dasquié’s leakage and subsequent interrogation by the DST was media-
hyped, possibly in the aim to create a légende for him in the context of a mission of deception. The
facts that Dasquié eventually trained young recruits on sensitive matters, such as the privatization of
the services and foreign intelligence, and that, previously, he was picked up to co-author with
Guisnel the counter-theory of Meyssan, at least confirms he was given precise instructions on what
he had to write on the attack against the World Trade Center. Most certainly, Guisnel instructed
Dasquié so.
Quite logically in the context of Meyssan’s operation of Russian disinformation about the attack
of September 11, Guisnel and Dasquié could not be in direct touch with our ring, since they were
given the role of the “good guys”. As I explained earlier, this use of reverse psychology must
proceed with the disinformation action on one side, and with the official denial of its authorship on
the other. Mixing agents involved in both the theory and its counter-theory would inescapably entail
a scandal in case of accidental exposure. The latter precaution derives from basics of the need-to-
know rule, and it was ruled by the doctrine of active measures anyway. Then as a knowledgeable
individual on the matter of intelligence and trusted agent, Guisnel certainly understood what was
going on with Meyssan’s book and the role of Pasin as head of Carnot publishing, but not much
more, I assume.
Commandant and Army intelligence officer Pierre-Henri Bunel resumed his activities in Russian
disinformation against the United States from 2000 to 2016, at least. He did it under his real name
all along, and his rank and past activity in the DRM, and other positions he held in the NATO, gives
him suitable credit for this.
In 2000, Bunel authored a first disinformation book against the United States under the explicit
title Crimes de guerre à l’OTAN (War crimes at the NATO).[673] The book first was published by
Édition n° 1 publishing, another small publishing house, which happened to be purchased the same
year by Hachette publishing, a subsidiary of Lagardère Group that itself has close connections with
the French Ministry of Defense. The publishing contract between Édition n° 1 and Bunel was
canceled shortly after in 2001, precisely and logically because of the merger of the latter company
with Hachette publishing. For, given the close connections between Hachette and the Lagardère
Group with the Ministry of Defense, it would have been embarrassing to these bodies to be
publisher of disinformation against the United States and the NATO. The more so, since Bunel was
a commissioned officer of the French Army with past and known activities in military intelligence.
That is why Bunel signed a new literary contract with Pasin of Editions Carnot publishing, and the
publishing of War crimes at the NATO resumed with this company[674] from 2001 onward.
Wholesome, in this book, Bunel introduces himself as a whistleblower who denounces U.S.
bombings in Kosovo and the use by the U.S. troops of anti-tank impoverished uranium shells. For,
Bunel says, the latter weapons caused an abnormally elevated rate of cancers in the civilian Kosovar
population.
Remarkably, Bunel had earlier signed another literary contract with Flammarion publishing,
fourth largest publishing group in France. However, the contract limited to the publishing of Bunel’s
biography as military intelligence officer,[675] as the goal of it limited to give credentials and
“officiality” to his other works Éditions Carnot publishes. For from 2001 to 2010, Bunel authored a
series of disinformation books still aiming the United States of America in general and the defense
policy of this country in particular. In this context, he joined first with Meyssan and then with David
Ray Griffin, a retired American professor of philosophy of religion and theology, and a political
writer and anti-establishment activist in his home country.[676] As about how and when Griffin
involved in the French-Russian spy ring, this I do not know. The fact is that in 2004, he published
alone his first disinformation book on the attack of September 11 in the United States, which repeats
what Meyssan’s conspiracy theory says.[677] Olive Branch Press, publisher of Griffin, seems to be a
tiny publishing house and a brand of Interlink Publishing, an independent publishing house founded
in 1987 and based in Northampton, MA. Remarkably, the catalogue of Olive Branch Press has a
number of titles authored by other American political activists voicing their stances in favor of
countries such as Iran and Palestine, and against the Bush-Chenney administration in particular.
Interlink Publishing’s founder is Michel S. Moushabeck, an American national claiming Palestinian
origin. Any additional comment about this publishing house seems superfluous, except perhaps that
Iran is a pattern we also find in the life of Meyssan.
Talking about Bunel provides me with an opportunity to explain my role in this ring, but this also
obliges me to make one more aside in this chapter, for which I apologize to the reader.
The year I was introduced to Bunel, I just reached forty and my days were very busy already. I
was expected to join the DGSE headquarters in the course of the year 2001, and that is why I had
just been relocated in an apartment building of the 20th arrondissement of Paris, where all tenants
were employees at the headquarters, one mile hence. I had to follow new training courses focusing
on security and counterespionage, and primarily on the internal organization of the DGSE. In 2000,
the DGSE sent me to the nuclear power plant of Fessenheim, from which I went back to Paris each
weekend. There, I learn in real situation on human resources and interior security. Thereupon, the
same agency sent me to work at the COMINT service of the DGSE, located at that time in
Malakoff, with a menial position of guard of the Exterior Security Service on night shifts. I went to
sleep a little upon my arrival at home in the 20th arrondissement, and I resumed my other multiples
activities from early afternoons on.
First, I had been asked to create and to feed the webzine Confidentiel-Defense.com, on which I
published news and feature articles on subjects ranging from special military units,[678] foreign
intelligence agencies, to history of espionage. At some point, the DGSE instructed me to write
articles on the role of women in intelligence because this agency wanted to woo more such recruits.
Additionally, I had to promote books edited by some publishing houses having close connections
with the French intelligence community. That is why Lavauzelle publishing house[679] sent to me
nearly all new books it published, including promotional books for police recruitment. The other
publishing houses were L’Harmattan,[680] Ellipse,[681] Economica,[682] and La Découverte.[683]
Rapidly, Confidentiel-Defense.com gained a relatively large audience at a time when the Internet
was not yet as popular as it is today—45 to more than 140 visits a day—, and considering the
particular subjects it was tackling. At some point, the bureau of Radio Canada in Paris guested me
for an interview in its studio, still under my fictitious identity of “Gilbert Hass”. Ironically, the staff
of Radio Canada could not know I was mulling over the idea to quit the DGSE and to get away
from France. However, I did not think at all about flying to Canada, because of the potency of
French and Russian intelligence activities in and from this country. I fancied myself and my
situation as these of Soviet “Commandant Marko Ramius,” in the film The Hunt for Red October,
precisely and exactly, for I thought, Would people believe me, if I told who I am and everything I
know? That was not quite sure, since all this was just “unbelievable”.
Frédéric de Pardieu, son of my director Charles-Henri de Pardieu, had instructed me to register to
the École Nationale d’Administration–ENA (National School of Administration). The graduation
was necessary to my accessing B or A-category official upon my hiring full-time at the
headquarters of the DGSE. All along theretofore, I never occupied any official position in the
French intelligence community, and I never had any other particular rank than these of my various
cover activities. I had been an all-ordinary French citizen as many of my colleagues were. Yet none
of all senior military officers I was brought to meet ever talked me in a formal way, but rather
friendly, on the contrary, as if military ranks counted for nothing. To say, I left the Army as 1st class
private, one rank above the lowest in the French military.
In order to pass the admission examination of the National School of Administration, I had to find
the time to study a number of matters such as France’s constitutional law, political science,
geopolitics, macroeconomics, France’s history, and more, all this at the same time and while
working for long days. Ironically, for four years on a row, I held a position of professor in a training
center, and I was sent to do speeches in various places including public high schools for the elite.
Sometimes, I was sent to attend some training courses of various sorts ranging from parsing, arms
exports, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, to history of the French nuclear force of intervention at the
Institut des Hautes Études de Défense Nationale–IHEDN (Institute for Higher National Defense
Studies).
That was not yet all because I had been instructed to work with Jacques Attali, formerly personal
advisor to President François Mitterrand. Not only Attali had warmly welcomed my request to meet
him, but also, he once invited me to an exclusive restaurant of the Place Vendome in Paris, next to
the Ministry of Justice. On one hand, Attali and I built a relationship around topics such as the
future of information and culture by electronic and online means, and my still inchoate idea to
create a virtual electronic currency, both matters that seemed rather remote to intelligence, at first
glance. On the other hand, the DGSE informed me via Francois Cellier that the point of my
relationship with Attali was to create a device that would be called “electronic book” because this
would be an important step in the information warfare that raged between France and the United
States. We were in 2000; Stephen King had just released his novella Riding the Bullet, available
online exclusively, and it thus became the first mass-market eBook, selling 500,000 copies in two
days only. The DGSE did not take the event lightly because it portended the coming of a new war
front. Five years later, Amazon bought Mobipocket, creator of the mobi eBook file format and e-
reader software, forerunner of the Kindle, as we know it today.
I certainly was someone whose opinions and insights on new technologies relating to information
warfare were deemed worthy of some attention. It is true, I often met interesting scholars and
scientists, and the DGSE had organized for me meetings with a score of political personalities.
However, all this did not yet endow me with a capacity to help Attali invent an eBook reading
device from scratch. The down-to-earth reality of my new relationship with this man actually was
that the DGSE fed me with ideas of the breakthrough sort, which I had to present to this man as if I
invented them alone. The scheme was the same as with “André the Romanian genius” and the other
geeks, this time with a reversal of roles for me.
The main problems I met with all this were that the score of new occupational activities and
schedule the DGSE imposed on me was overwhelming, whereof, my puzzlement when Jean-
Jacques Cécile asked me whether I would be interested in joining the DST. I was left too few hours
to sleep, when I could. Moreover, I found as disrupting as absurd to spare my time on an equal stand
with Attali on an extremity of the IQ and education spectrum, and with field agents such as
Stéphane Jah and Jean-Paul Ney on the other, if I may put things that way. Let alone the time I had
to spend on the Darna TV project, the future international French television channel.
As the reader is now enlightened about my personal situation at that time, I can continue on
Commandant Bunel with specifying that in the early 2001, I was instructed to make a promotion of
the second publishing of his book War Crime at the NATO, then recently re-edited by Éditions
Carnot. Bunel and his book were about to receive further promotion, thanks to TV presenter
Christophe Dechavanne on his prime-time weekly talk show, broadcast on TF1 TV channel. Bunel
was entertaining me on the existence of a would-be unofficial censorship the U.S. Department of
Defense imposed on cases of cancer caused by residues of impoverished uranium shells, found in
wrecked Iraqi tanks during the Gulf War of 1991, allegedly. According to him, a score of such cases
concerned veterans of all countries that involved in the conflict.
As those talks on bizarre war casualties went on, the DGSE had arranged for me to meet “by
happenstance” a French veteran of this war who indeed suffered from a terrible disease caused by
exposure to residues of shells that U.S. A-10 “Warthog” planes had fired on Iraqi tanks. This man
by then was honorably discharged Master Sergeant, and his wounds were impressive. All
extremities of his body had been amputated: ears, nose, fingers, toes, and penis. However, doubts
began to arise in my mind as I was dedicatedly listening the account of this military on his war
experience in Kuwait along a series of meetings. For I learned incidentally that EDF energy
provider had hired the non-commissioned officer after the war, and that it had given to him a job in
a nuclear power plant. However, he was unwilling to elaborate about this other professional
experience, unexplainably.
On my training courses at the nuclear power plant of Fessenheim, on one informal occasion, a
nuclear engineer hinted about terrible stories of people who had been sent in emergency doing
repairs in highly radioactive areas. Those EDF employees were described as anonymous heroes for
thus having gravely put at stake their health, and even their lives indeed, for the sake of preventing
grave nuclear accidents. Obviously, it was out of question to make such stories public, and the
subject was classified and highly sensitive anyway.
As far as I could see by my own, the ageless dying veteran, who still lived with his wife and two
children, had been compensated generously. He did not seem to be depressed at all, nor in the least
mentally impaired, in spite of his atrocious physical condition. Most remarkably with respect to my
concern of that moment, he did not bear any grudge against the United States for his terrible disease.
Furthermore, he remained evasive each time I asked to him through which circumstances exactly he
had been exposed to impoverished uranium residues. Did he attempt to get into a tank wreckage, so
that he could tell me of which type and country it was exactly? He was unable to tell, and he was
even unable to tell me what his war experience in Kuwait in 1991 was like! I returned to Paris with
the intimate conviction that uranium shells did not caused the illness of the poor man, were they of
American origin or not. That is why, in February 2001, I limited my job to the publishing on
Confidentiel-Defense.com of a text that Bunel had written alone, titled Uranium et syndrome de la
guerre du Golfe (Uranium and Gulf War Syndrome). I was perfectly aware to publish an anti-
American story entirely fabricated, but most of all I took as a blow that the DGSE did not just tell
me the truth about the wounded veteran, and tried to fool me as if I was part of the ignorant public.
The lie owed to provisions in active measures, of course, but it came to add to the following
demands and expectations I found ominous, precisely.
My involvement in the disinformation ring knew an abrupt end when, at some point, Jirnov asked
to me to establish with him a regular correspondence by Internet and by using PGP.[684] I took the
demand as a setup aiming to entrap me on pretense of “intelligence with a foreign power”.[685] For
this is a recurring scheme in the French intelligence community, I knew well. Very possibly, this
was done on Russian demand because I did not yet know that some members in our disinformation
ring had to be discredited to justify the plausible denial of its running by the DGSE and the DST.
Indeed, upon my getaway from France in the early 2000s, the DGSE used the DST to entrap
Stéphane Jah, Guillaume Dasquié, Jean-Paul Ney, and Commandant Bunel, successfully in their
cases. Similar cunning plot contrivances sent all of them to justice courts, in partnership with Iran
and Russia in three instances, and resulted in prison terms. For the record, PGP is a free nonetheless
effective encryption software that at that time offered the possibility to send mails using encryption
keys larger than 40 bits.[686] In 2001, in France, the sole use of such encryption keys was illegal.
What about an agent of the DGSE thus communicating with a commandant of the Russian SVR RF,
then? In case of my indictment following the latter initiative, I would have been left with no
material evidence in hand proving that the DGSE instructed me so via Jean-Jacques Cécile.
Why did the DGSE attempt to trick me? Simply, I had no “skeleton in my cupboard” while being
the holder of the knowledge I am telling in this book, to begin with. This fact alone justified my
entrapment to guarantee I could not be a credible person, or else a blackmail would follow to
guarantee my silence, just in case, and the incriminating fact would be kept in my own dossier
secret. As a matter of fact, at that time and at some point, Stéphane Jah did the blunder to threaten
me by saying, verbatim, “You know too much, now. In ʻtheirʼ eyes, you are a walking bomb. You
just have been made a Code 53. If you persist not to comply, then you might end up with a Code 55
on you”. With his use of DGSE cryptic jargon, Jah was telling me my social elimination was
already underway, and he was implying that if ever I persisted not to resume my relation with
Commandant Jirnov through PGP encrypted messages, then the sanction would evolve to physical
elimination. The additional mistake that Jah did, more worrying to the DGSE, was to thus
threatening me in presence of my spouse. This detail dismissed all claims that I suffered from
delusion, if ever I decided to strike back by blowing the whistle. Anyway, it was out of question for
me to accept the blackmail, and thus to become a soulless marionette and what not.
With all this, I knew my Internet and telephone communications were monitored 24 / 7, at least in
order to know who was sending emails to me due to my publishing of the webzine Confidential-
defense.com. Additionally, the DGSE had chosen for me my personal email address via Frédéric de
Pardieu, which then ended in “vnu.com”. Using this online identity made me pass for an employee
of VNU Publications, a Dutch media company in which I had never set foot and of which I knew
nothing.
The confirmation of my social elimination came a few days later by the voice of my then ex-
hierarchical superior Guido Gualandi. He told me, in substance and in an elliptic way, “You will
never find a job by yourself anymore, no matter where you will attempt to go; you are a ‘too
qualified’ person, now”. The unambiguous threat proved to be true, and I had to cope with it for the
rest of my life, until today and even though I refuged abroad, indeed. Later, Pole Emploi, the
governmental agency that registers unemployed people and helps them find jobs and provides them
with financial aid, even sent to me a small piece of paper with its header on which was handwritten
I am “too qualified” to work, exactly as Gualandi had said, word for word. I always kept it in my
wallet since that day, because of the absurdity of such a statement, and in case someone would say
“I am a liar” or “a delusional person”.
I never saw Gualandi again after that. Then all my friends, acquaintances, colleagues, up to some
relatives including my brother and his wife began to set some distance with me, one by one. Some
of them seemed to be afraid of me as if I was cursed, but none of them would ever tell me why or
what they were told to behave that odd way; they all were obviously afraid. As my wife owned a
small shop, she began to be harassed and stalked by a large gang of youngsters of the poor Paris’
suburbs, of the kind I described in the chapter 10 on social eliminations. She thus was forced to
renounce to her business a few months later, as both the police and the Gendarmerie would remain
deaf to her calls for help.
Charles-Henri de Pardieu my director summoned me at his office of the Avenue d’Iéna. A few
years earlier, his son Frédéric had told me his father was shortlisted to be appointed “number 2” in
the DGSE, which, I assume, was true because of this very formal call. In his office, De Pardieu
made his talk unusually elliptic, and I instantly noticed he no longer behaved friendly with me.
Today, I can quote him verbatim because I could not possibly forget the watershed moment. First,
he said calmly, “Dominique, you are a smart person; a bit too much, even”. Then, after a lengthy,
but absurd and pointless conversation on the virtue to be naïve that put me in a quandary, he
concluded angrily, as if he bore a personal grudge against me, “I think we do not have anything to
say to each other anymore, henceforth, Dominique. Goodbye”. If the theatrical ending was meant to
impress on me, then it was a success. I was unambiguously “fired” for good, but for no clear reason
except my refusal to establish an encrypted communication with an officer of the Russian SVR RF,
and for my previous denial to accept a full-time position at the headquarters paid a miserable salary,
very possibly either; I find opportune to mention this other fact.
A few weeks later, his son Frédéric was sent to Canada, where he created a startup as his cover
activity, and which he kept active until not long ago, in 2018. Shortly before the latter year, Charles-
Henri de Pardieu went into retirement from his cover activity of head of the law firm De Pardieu,
Brocas, Maffei. It came to no surprise to me that Jacques Attali abruptly severed our relationship
without any explanation. His secretariat sternly answered my calls with pretenses such as, “He is too
busy to answer you, now” and, “He will not be available for several months”. In an angry and stupid
move, I sent to Attali a last email saying the DGSE was fooling him, to which he did not answer,
obviously.
As about the National School of Administration, I had previously been successful at the written
examination. However, on the day of the oral examination, the jury trashed me unambiguously. I
was forty, which was the age beyond which the exclusive school does not accept submissions from
people with no diploma. Besides, I had noticed the DGSE had made disappear all documents that
formally demonstrated my correspondence with important personalities, as well as those that
evidenced my professional skills. Some such letters I had kept at home had mysteriously vanished
either, and Frédéric de Pardieu was the sole person who knew of their existence and place where I
stored them. However, he ignored the latter detail, which directly incriminates him for the
disappearance.
Overall, it seemed that my life indeed was ending, and I had neglected to prepare myself for such
an event to happen someday, even though I had begun to question the real intentions of the DGSE
about me for some months. Anyhow the ordeal and the losses I had to suffer thereafter never made
me change my position, as I had decided to stand firm on it, regardless of the consequences.
Eventually, the DGSE set an entrapment against my mother with a plot contrivance over her
retirement pension as widow of a senior executive of the RG, and thus turned her against me under
threat to cancel her retirement payments. An agent of this agency asked to her to report about any
sensitive matter I could say to her, and even to cooperate with “Captain Guint” in my tricking.
Unbeknownst to my mother and remotely, even my brother partook in several ways in the latter
plot, including against her. A few years later, my brother resumed his relationship with me,
unexpectedly, to propose to me to partake in a profitable venture consisting in exporting by boat
large quantities of sodium chlorate to Iran, a chemical component he innocuously described as
“herbicide”. He went into a tantrum when I answered tongue in cheek, “No, thank you, Daniel. For I
teach you—in case you don’t know—sodium chlorate is a main component in explosive
manufacturing”. Again, my brother did not want to see me anymore upon my declining of his
“generous offer,” as if he took it indeed as a personal offense, thus repeating the odd pattern that
Charles-Henri de Pardieu had initiated years earlier. I never saw him nor heard his voice again until
I learned he passed away in November 2013, five years after my mother did through specious
circumstances, despite her old age. Her social elimination had taken her sanity away, anyhow.
In 2003, the DGSE and the DST tricked Stéphane Jah in a way that cost a four-years term of
prison to him. Remarkably, the plot against Jah involved the complicity of an Iranian diplomat and
of Commandant Bunel, although the latter was a known spy ran by Russia via the Serbs at the time.
Thereupon, the French mainstream media discredited Jah consistently and definitively as a
“mentally disturbed person”. Certainly, Jah was not the brightest and most interesting person I knew
in the French intelligence community, but he was in no way a crackpot and was highly
knowledgeable in spycraft, contrary to what his lawyer and the media said. He seems to have lost
his mind for real since. Jean-Paul Ney knew about the same fate as Jah at about the same period,
and as he was working as guard of the External Security Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Although Ney was an Agent of a similar breed to Jah, he actually was a complete ignorant on
intelligence business who yet could not help himself posing as a Mr. Know-it-all. Eventually, Ney
was repeatedly involved in obscure yet inconsequential would-be-espionage affairs in Africa for
which he was condemned again, including in Ivory Coast where he did a sixteen months prison
term. Somehow, it seems, Ney eventually made for himself a career as “independent spy-for-hire”
with an inclination for gross hoaxes that made him pass for a sort of Marx brother. Today, he
publishes under a pen name a plethora of Kindle booklets on French intelligence, whose appealing
titles hide gatherings of excerpts he finds in newsmagazines, all ranked one star out of five on
Amazon. As I said, Commandant Bunel went to prison too.
Years later, I learned that even Éric Denécé had fallen in disgrace for a few years, for an entirely
different reason of which I know nothing. The books on intelligence he published were no longer
media-hyped and received nasty one-star negative comments on Amazon, instead.
General Guyaux resumed his activities undisturbed, officially as lecturer in intelligence and
counterintelligence at the Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée–UPEM, and as professor in a
military officer school. In 2002, he published his biography as counterintelligence officer,[687] and
later in 2004 an espionage novel.[688] He passed away quietly in May 2016 while everybody had
forgotten him already.
As for SVR RF Commandant Jirnov, his légende evolved to that of a people of some sort, who
since makes regular appearances on TV shows with the quality of “former KGB officer who found
refuge in France after the fall of the Soviet Union”. However, at some point he contradicted himself
by saying he was sent in France to carry on Russian intelligence activities focusing on political
espionage, until he would have “resigned from the SVR and obtained political asylum in this
country in 2004”. He gave hardly believable explanations when a journalist once asked to him how
he could graduate at the National School of Administration–ENA, and thereupon be hired as French
official while still being an intelligence officer of the Russian SVR RF on duty.689] Of course, the
French media and the DGSI remained silent about it.
 Back to 2000-2001, I met another intelligence officer of the SVR RF who worked under the cover
activity of press correspondent at the Paris bureau of the Izvestia Russian press agency. This
Russian declined to elaborate about Jirnov, logically. The reason for this meeting was the DGSE had
instructed me to establish relations with Andrei and Alexei Soldatov, son and father respectively,
who both were influential executives of the Izvestia press agency in Moscow. For wants of further
explanation, I understood I had to establish a cooperation with these two Russians about news
publishing with the website Confidentiel-défense.com I had created earlier. I do not remember the
name of this Russian intelligence officer, except “Igor” his first name, who struck me for his being a
clone-like in all respects of my former supervisor Gualandi. My contact with Soldatov father and
son never happened anyway, as I ran away overnight in March 2001, and left the webzine
Confidentiel-défense.com on an unfinished article on the recent arrest of ex-FBI executive Robert
Philip Hanssen. Years later, my role with this website was taken over by Jean Dominique Merchet, a
French journalist with a specialty on intelligence and military affairs. Apparently, Merchet enjoys
the same kind of connections I had in 2001, and with it he took up the formula I had set to launch a
web blog with the slightly different title, Secret Défense, hosted by L’Opinion web journal.
Thierry Meyssan left France to live partly in Syria and partly in Lebanon, host countries from
which he is resuming his activities in Russian disinformation against the United States, still with his
news website Réseau Voltaire. According to his French Wikipedia page, Meyssan is now close to
Hezbollah and to the Iranian and Syrian governments. He openly claimed his support for the Libyan
Arab Jamahiriya during NATO’s military intervention in 2011, and to the Syrian Government in the
Syrian civil war.
Jean-Jacques Cécile quietly got away with it, and he seems to adopt a low-profile attitude since.
In 2014, he published his autobiography he titled Un Espion français à l’est: 1962-2004 (A French
Spy to the East).
Christophe Dechavanne put an end to his talk show in the early 2000s, which perhaps explains
why Ardisson promoted Meyssan and his book. Dechavanne resumed his activities in television
production, and Ardisson is now doing well too in the fields of television and cinema production.
Mathieu Dupart disappeared by hiding his name on the Internet under several aliases. Today, he
introduces himself as “Consultant in intelligence for EDF” and for other prominent French
companies.
I deliver a short account on Lumières sur la Lune: La NASA a t-elle menti (Lights on the Moon:
did the NASA lie), the other book and disinformation action against the United States that Pasin and
Éditions Carnot his company published on October 16, 2000. A Wikipedia page says, “Various
groups and individuals have made claims since the mid-1970s, that NASA and others knowingly
misled the public into believing the landings happened, by manufacturing, tampering with, or
destroying evidence including photos, telemetry tapes, radio and TV transmissions, Moon rock
samples, and even some key witnesses”.[690] Some of those individuals and groups did consistent
anti-American disinformation about other subjects, for much I could see. Their connections and
some other patterns together suggest that they were acting to the benefit of the KGB, and that they
resumed the cooperation with the SVR since. William Charles Kaysing, an American national today
regarded as the initiator of the “Moon hoax movement” is said to have inspired all authors of this
conspiracy theory, although it truly was a disinformation action launched by the Service A of the
KGB.[691] On one hand, Philippe Lheureux, the French national who wrote the French version of the
latter conspiracy theory for Éditions Carnot publishing, appears to be a true believer who has been
manipulated at some point. On the other hand, I can confirm firsthand that the French intelligence
community played a key role in the publishing of Lheureux’s book because Stéphane Jah partook in
it under the direction of General Guyaux.
Disrespectfully to the chronological order, I tell a very particular idea of the DGSE for which I
was consulted circa 1995-96. I find it worthy to be presented and explained in reason of its
extraordinary and unexpected nature, which will possibly collect the disbelief of the reader, if he has
no experience in the U.S. Secret Service in the fight against money counterfeiting. In the mid-1990s,
I was entrusted a particular need-to-know for the sole reason of my in-depth knowledge on the
technical possibilities of computer software dedicated to photo retouching and photoengraving. As
the subject is a world away from domestic influence and communication warfare, I could not find a
logical place for it in this book, nor in the chronological progression of this chapter.
In passing, it also explains why I know certain particular facts connecting the old SDECE and
money counterfeiting together, and why in 2011 I authored a long press article on money
counterfeiting for the American publication Paper Money, edited by the Society of Paper Money
Collectors Inc.–SPMC, based in Chattanooga, TN. On the latter occasion, I established a friendly
relationship with an American consultant in money counterfeiting who formerly worked with the
U.S. Secret Service, and I even sold to this man a very rare fake banknote, unique in the World
because a former employee of the SDECE who was also a Soviet agent printed it.[692] The banknote
in question and its Soviet-French spy and counterfeiter made alone the subject of this article for
Paper Money, titled “Czeslaw Bojarski, King of Counterfeiters”. A few months later, the Society of
Paper Money Collectors Inc. surprised me by naming me Literary Award of the Year in the foreign
category. I found the attention as unexpected as touching, and I thank again the honorable society
for this. However, the story I tell below is of another kind, even though it involves the successor of
the same intelligence agency and concerns the same subject.
After the Second World War, some intelligence executives in the SDECE had been impressed by
a shadow operation of the German intelligence service Sicherheitsdienst–SD known as “Operation
Bernhard”. In short because the reader will find plenty of information about the Operation Bernhard
on the Internet, the first idea of it, said to have been imagined by a German SS functionary named
Alfred Helmut Naujock, was to create an economic depression in Britain by printing massive
amounts of fake British banknotes. However, as the incredible venture proved much more difficult
than initially thought, the Nazi spies had to limit their production of fake Sterling Pounds of an
outstanding quality to the financing of secret missions abroad. As the end of the war was nearing,
they had a secret factory with a staff of about 300 entirely devoted to the printing of fake money,
and they were just beginning to print fake dollars either.
From the aftermaths of the WWII onward, the SDECE indeed printed counterfeited banknotes,
too; African banknotes more particularly, a police officer specialist of the subject told me in the
mid-1990s. This agency even printed fake U.S.-dollars, as they were relatively easy to counterfeit at
that time and until the 1990s.
The DGSE enlightened me about an idea similar to the Operation Bernhard, but limiting to U.S.
$100 banknotes, exclusively. I was entrusted this need-to-know slowly and gradually for the sole
latter motive, on meetings organized in the building of the Financial Brigade of the police, still
today located 122 Rue du Chateau-des-Rentiers, in Paris downtown. At the same time, and still
because of my expertise in computer photoengraving, I was introduced to several specialists who
worked at the Banque de France (French central bank). I confess honestly, the eerie cooperation was
so intense and fascinating that I even thought about writing a book on the history of money
counterfeiting, which personal work I actually began yet never finished. Eventually, manager of
Carnot publishing Patrick Pasin wanted to publish this book once I would finish it, but I declined
the offer because it was an all-personal work.
At some point, I was explained there was a “laboratory” of the most sensitive sort “located in
Cergy-Pontoise,” in the larger Western suburbs of Paris, whose official activity was to analyze
counterfeited banknotes and official documents. I was said it had been moved in 1995 to another
undisclosed location for its safety and the extreme secrecy of its activities. For, I was explained in
veiled terms, the technicians who worked in the laboratory had a reciprocal expertise in the making
of fakes documents and banknotes of a quality that is out of reach to ordinary criminals. That is how
I gradually understood that the laboratory in question actually was the service of the DGSE in
charge of manufacturing fake documents. That is how things of the most sensitive sort are taught in
the DGSE, each time by associating passing reference with insisting glances and understood smiles.
Eventually, I was more clearly explained that the idea to mass-manufacturing fake U.S. $100 bills
of high quality, colloquially called “superdollars,” was underway already, but not in France. The
enterprise was going on in a secret plant located in the Beqaa Valley, Lebanon, and it was run by
Iranians people and not by Lebanese. It may come as a surprise to the reader that the U.S.
Government itself sold to Iran the specific printing presses used in this plant, shortly before the
Iranian revolution of 1979 broke out. At that time, these machines indeed were the same as those the
U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing used for printing the American money. The reason for the
odd fact was the U.S. Government wanted to help Iran print her own good quality banknotes, when
this country was still ruled by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Moreover, the sale had implied that
the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing trains the employees of the National Bank of Iran in
engraving and printing good-quality banknotes; that is to say, the U.S. standards of quality that
applied to U.S. banknotes, paper and security features included. When the Revolution in Iran broke
out, the new Iranian ruling elite understood the profit they could draw from keeping hiring the
highly skilled printers, since they knew how U.S. banknotes were manufactured.
 The American printing presses, or one at least, would have been moved in the secret and secluded
spot in the Beqaa Valley because this granted Iran a plausible denial of her responsibility in her
printing of counterfeited U.S. banknotes, in case the Americans would find it out. In the 1980s, the
Beqaa Valley was known as a no-man’s land, also used for large-scale drug trafficking.
On one of my meetings with specialists on the subject of money counterfeiting, I was invited to
see some Iranian-made $100 banknotes of the 1990-1996 series, and to compare them with
authentic bills made in the United States. For this special occasion, the meeting took place in the
office of the director of a stockbroker in the Rue Vivienne, in Paris, and not in the building of the
French national bank located nearby; anonymously, therefore. There, sitting behind the desk of this
man, the sole difference I was able to notice between authentic $100 bills and Iranian counterfeits,
using for a 40-x microscope, was in the elliptical line of micro-characters framing the head of
Benjamin Franklin. However, I could make the difference only after I was told where to look for
exactly on these notes. Otherwise, I would have concluded they were identical. The paper with its
red and blue security fibers seemed to be the same either, but they were not in actuality, the director
said. For, he specified, an experienced bank cashier was able to feel a subtle difference between the
two because the typical greasy paper of the dollar banknotes was slightly different in the Iranian
fakes.
Still latter I was further explained that since the early 1990s, Russia was producing huge
quantities of fake U.S. $100 banknotes, but that the overall quality of those other ones was
unsuitable to their export in Western countries. North Korea, too, by then, was printing fake $100
banknotes with a much superior quality in a plant located in Pyongyang, not far from the
presidential palace, allegedly. The good quality of the North Korean supernotes allowed for their
regular sale in Japan, but their small production reduced their use to the financing of intelligence
activities in the latter country, exactly as the Nazis did with their fake Sterling Pounds during the
WWII.
The problem the SDECE had met with counterfeiting fake $100 banknotes had been about the
same because it proved technically impossible to print enough U.S. banknotes to trigger a
significant inflation of the American currency, since this was the idea, initially. Notwithstanding, the
total amount of U.S. $100 notes in circulation in the World was big to a point the U.S. Federal
Reserve would not know it itself. Therefore, even if mass producing fake U.S. $100 banknotes were
possible someday, yet this would not result in a dollar crisis anyway, the more so, a specialist of the
DGSE said, since the U.S. currency was unanimously trusted and regarded as a safe investment
about as gold is, no matter what. The expert went on saying the U.S. CIA and the U.S. Secret
Service actually knew all facts I just explained about the Iranians and the North-Koreans, and that
this was the very reason for long kept secret for which the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing
was designing at that time (1995-96) a new $100 banknote, with improved security features. This
countermeasure asked a question about which I was consulted, precisely: “In which ways the new
technologies in computer photoengraving could help counterfeit the new U.S. $100 banknote to
come?”
Now, I present two cases in which I was not involved. The first relates to French intelligence
activities in the United States “in the field” between the 1990s and the 2000s, and the second
happened at an earlier time that backs in time well before I enlisted in spycraft.
The reader certainly heard about Winchester carbines and rifles or he saw those guns in Western
movies, but he possibly ignores the company that manufactured them is now defunct, and he knows
the less so the DGSE was entirely responsible for its demise through the following circumstances.
Since 1857, Winchester carbines and rifles had been manufactured in New Haven, Connecticut, by a
company named U.S. Repeating Arms Co. In the 1990s, there was even a statue of iconic actor John
Wayne in the arms plant because of the close historical connection between the name Winchester
and cinema, and due to the huge promotion this actor did for the brand, wittingly or not. Anyway,
Winchester rifles and carbines, and the company that manufactured them indeed are parts of the
U.S. historical heritage, as much as Coca Cola and Cadillac are.
Although U.S. Repeating Arms Co. did not limit its production to Western-style guns, and had
expanded its range of products to modern recreational carbines and hunting rifles throughout the
20th century, it made losses from the 1970s through the 1980s. The downfall of Winchester was not
entirely imputable to hard competition with other gun manufacturers, nor to poor decision-making,
but to a long period of repeated labor union claims and strikes, as it happened in the U.S.
automobile sector at the same period likewise. The wages workers asked, and indeed obtained, were
never high enough, and thus they went up to $30 an hour and even more while the retail price of a
standard Winchester carbine model 94 cal. .30-30 made it the cheapest of the firearms market. I
owned several Winchester guns and I had fun shooting with them.
That is through those circumstances that finally, in 1989, U.S. Repeating Arms Co. went
bankrupt. Upon this event, the company was purchased miraculously by Fabrique Nationale de
Herstal–FN aka FN Herstal, the old national Belgian international group that manufactures the rifles
of the Belgian Army. Note that the plant in the United States of this now French-owned company
indeed manufactured for decades innumerable assault rifles and machine guns for the U.S. military.
Then whether the U.S. Department of Defense was aware or not that FN Herstal belonged for a
while to front men of the French Socialist Party in close touch with the Soviet Union, this I do not
know. Notwithstanding, the FBI could not possibly ignore who exactly was the man who came in
the United States to put U.S. Repeating Arms Co. back on its rails. For he was no less than General
René Imbot, former Head of the French Army appointed by Socialist Minister of Defense Charles
Hernu in 1983, and then Director of the DGSE appointed by President Francois Mitterrand in 1985.
That is how the preservation of a significant part of the American historical heritage was oddly
entrusted to a person who combined alone the qualities of being a foreigner, a Socialist in the
service of the Soviet Union, and a top spy whose greatest enemy was the United States of America.
That was not yet all because General Imbot asked to his son Thierry Imbot, himself active
intelligence officer in the same agency, to join him for co-heading U.S. Repeating Arms Co. in the
Connecticut. As an aside, I did some researches on the Internet in the hope to find something in the
media of that time about the management of U.S. Repeating Arms Co. by the former head of the
DGSE, in vain. As I seem to be the first and sole person to report about the latter fact, then the
reader is put in the obligation to trust me on my words. I add that I once read a list of all U.S.
companies owned by France, edited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2001, on which I perfectly
remember seeing the entry “U.S. Repeating Arms Co., New Haven, Conn”. It thus was registered as
a French company, and not as a Belgian one.
The very rare people in France who know about this affair say that General Imbot and his son
enjoyed a good time when they came in the United States to lead U.S. Repeating Arms Co. under
the noses of the FBI. However, some others people in the latter country say the two actually had a
hard time with trade unionists who proved not as cooperative as the DGSE initially expected, and
“the chickens were coming home to roost,” if I may put it thusly. To the point that, arrived in early
2006, the media announced the definitive closure of U.S. Repeating Arms. Browning firearms and
sport equipment resumed the production of Winchester carbines and rifles because this other
company is a subsidiary of FN Herstal in the United States either. Not coincidentally and as an aside
that might further surprise the reader, Browning imports from Russia the barrels of the firearms it
manufactures in the United States, under the discreet benevolence and supervision of the DGSE,
again.
When I investigated the case in 2005-2006, by pure personal interest because I have a fancy for
old guns, I discovered that France and Russia are very interested in the U.S. civilian firearms
market, and that these two countries indeed are playing an influential role in it with other American
firearms companies. In particular, Russia is an important and regular provider of firearms’ barrels
for several gun companies in America, and very possibly of other parts, therefore. Some other clues
strongly suggest France is the true owner of other prominent U.S. firearms companies that are
currently manufacturing popular guns in the United States. All this while France and Russia are
discreetly giving voices in the United States to exponents of bans on firearms and abolition of the
Second Amendment. Maybe, all this comes as an additional reason justifying today’s interest of
Russia in the gun market in the United States and in the National Rifle Association–NRA likewise.
If ever the reader is not yet convinced by all I just explained, understandably, then I invite him to
investigate the matter by himself, as its many evidences are not difficult to find out. Additionally, I
invite him to figure out the interest for the DGSE in about 4,800 French companies and subsidiaries
in the United States that together as of late 2017 hired 575,000 people in this country. Please, do not
trust me on my word; just enquire by yourself; the facts are not classified, available at any time to
whosoever has the courage and a bit of time for gathering and analyzing them, and there is no need
to be a skilled intelligence analyst to find out the truth about all this.
The enlightened reader will not be surprised, probably, by my other saying that French
intelligence activities in the United States are carried on and supervised from Canada in a large
number of instances, and more especially form the French-speaking province of Quebec. This is not
a novelty, to say the least, because French espionage activities in Quebec existed already during the
American War of 1812 against the British, even though Google seems to have difficulties with
finding this other fact.
As far as I know, the Canadian province of Quebec really became a hub of French espionage in
Northern America after the WWII. More particularly from 1967 onward, when De Gaulle
notoriously said “Vive le Québec libre!” (“Long live free Quebec!”) on a speech he delivered on
July 24 of that year during an official visit to Canada he made under the pretense to attending Expo
67 in Montreal. Many in Quebec and in France alike attempted to downplay the outrage by claiming
it was a slip of the tongue of “the good old soldier,” yet everybody knows it was not. My personal
knowledge about French intelligence activities in Quebec does not extend beyond a few little things
that do not even connect each other, even not enough to write an enlightening paragraph. To the
least, the facts I know come to suggest the likelihood of an ongoing existence of consistent French
intelligence activities in the latter region. About the earliest, I know that a close relative of former
French Prime Minister Pierre Messmer—a brother or son—once headed a large French intelligence
ring in Quebec in the 1960s or 1970s, with a specialty in influence and agitprop aiming to facilitate
the happening of an independent and French-speaking Quebec province. For De Gaulle approved
SDECE covert operations in Canada to support and create Quebec separatist movements; a mission
then called “Assistance et Cooperation Technique” aka “Operation Ascot”. Jacques Foccard aka
“Monsieur Afrique” (“Mr. Africa”), another prominent French official, partook in this shadow
operation as specialist in foreign intelligence affairs. At that time, the French Overseas Collectivity
of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Southern part of Newfoundland near Quebec, served as secret rear
base for intelligence operations and shadow diplomacy in Quebec and in the United States. It has
been moved since in Saint-Barthelemy and Saint-Martin French islands, in the Caribbean.
My brother tripped to Quebec with his family circa the late 1980s early 1990s under the pretense
of hunting, to actually meet contacts who also happened to be liberal Freemasons, French or
Canadian nationals, I could not say.
In the late 1990s, I once met an intelligence officer of the DGSE who lived in Quebec on his short
trip back to France for a month. His cover activity over there was journalist, holder of a French
press card, and owner of a small newsmagazine. However, he confessed to me that the Canadian
intelligence community knew well of his secret quality, to the point he was proposed to make a
speech in a conference on intelligence—a provocation, possibly. As he told me he had frequent
relations with the Canadian police, without further specifics, I can only assume he legally
represented the French intelligence community in Canada. Was that the same for my long-time
partner Frédéric de Pardieu, who went to create a startup in Montreal in 2000, and who lived there
for close to twenty years? Again, I can only assume the influential position of his father in the
DGSE sheltered him from the agonies of the common field agent, and I would not be surprised to
learn one day that he has been Chief or Deputy Chief of Station in the French-speaking part of
Canada.
Then I know of the existence of close and regular connections between a network of French
“scholars” and their Canadian colleagues in Quebec working in the field of education. In any case,
the motive is the same for all the latter contacts: far-leftist ideology and ever-closer ties with
socialist France, the country that knows “how things ought to be in Canada”. Their hub, since there
is one, would be the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi.
My ex-colleague Régis Poubelle seemed to know well Canada, and he said he tripped there in the
context of intelligence activities, exclusively. He once told me he had a source in the United States
who was an American national. This happened on an occasion he alluded to the interest of postal
stamps in espionage activities abroad because they could also be used as discreet and anonymous
means of payment, he specified. However, he went on, his source in America he happened to meet
sometimes in Canada sent postal stamps to him either. The short anecdote did not enlighten me
further on the interest of postal stamps in intelligence, and I am not in position to explain the extent
of French intelligence activities in the United States via Canada. At least, I know that French
influence activities in this country aiming to arouse Quebec secessionism ever remained as
consistent as persisting.
Below is my second and last story for this chapter.
The “Panurge syndrome” of the idealized star blindly followed by its thousands of fans and
retinues of groupies may result in catastrophic consequences, not only from the viewpoint of a
government, but also from that of the concerned masses of young men and women. The first
disasters of this kind occurred in the 1960s when just about every major rock star began promoting
discoveries of the peculiar sort that celebrity and wealth had brought to them on a silver plate. I
mean drugs, renouncing the ideas of a single partner and household, “the absurdity of working for a
living,” and political ideas obviously anti-establishment. Fame and wealth when reunited in the
hands of naïve and uneducated young men together is a thing tantamount to a chimpanzee that just
found a matchbox; no one can possibly know how badly it is going to end. The United States were
the country the most affected by such nuisances, mainly because of the high average incomes of its
population, since money made drug consumption an affordable addiction. The now-historic
Woodstock Festival in August 1969 was the detonator. Hard drugs hit hundreds of thousands of
young Americans in one fell swoop, and it killed a few thousand including the rock stars
accountable for the disaster. Let alone demonstrations and riots against the ongoing Vietnam War
that made up for the strongest narrative supporting the myth of a political change in the United
States, leftist obviously. The immature and ignorant minorities revolted against about all dominant
social and cultural values that had guaranteed the social stability of their country theretofore, their
extraordinary privileges, comfort, well-being, up to the freedom of speech that granted them the
right to question all of it.
The KGB had thrown some oil on the fire that much served the agenda of the Soviet Union. It has
been known and even reported in books and media for some years that the Soviet KGB managed to
approach the Beatles and to interest them in India, by then a country passively friendly with the
Soviet Union. The goal was to make a profit of the huge popularity of this band to promote an
existentialist counter-culture opposing American-style individualism and consumerism among the
youth. However, the KGB was not accountable for the unrest. For those social events that shook the
United States, and some other Western countries at the same time actually had arisen largely and
naturally from the conjunction of various social and economic factors, some about logical and
inescapable, some purely random. The reader is certainly wondering whether I am not about to say
that France had a play in the disturbance.
My answer is, “I was too young to know this,” to begin with. I did not join the SDECE until
1980. So, all I know about it comes partly from historical knowledge anyone can find in books and
on the Internet, and partly yet importantly from logical reasoning and much crosschecking based on
a knowledge that has not been made public. By “cross-checking,” I am alluding to names of people
who turned to be either in direct touch with French and Soviet spies at that time, or else who were
subsidized by public or private bodies with known activities in agitprop. The matter is difficult to
clear up because I found names of people who have had a past in U.S. counterinfluence against the
Soviets in France in the 1950s, but who had changed sides arrived in the late 1960s.
As about Soviet disinformation, and most of all agitprop in the United States spanning the late
1950s to the early 1970s, all publicly available archives I read by purely personal interest, and in my
leisure time in that case, are indicating many French involved in it. Moreover, the profiles of a
number of activists and agents include patterns pointing unambiguously toward both the SDECE
and Soviet-French joint operations more particularly. Yes, the French foreign intelligence agency
did involve not only in subversion against the United States in the 1960s, unquestionably, but more
particularly in drug smuggling in this country. I present my premises supporting my statement,
below.
First, the reader will find a Wikipedia page about French drug smuggling in the United States in
the 1960s, whose English title “French Connection” speaks for itself already. However, I notice,
numerous facts among the most striking are missing on this page, although the American
mainstream media reported largely and openly about some and provided relating evidences at the
time of their happenings. That is why I must tell a few facts the authors of this Wikipedia page can
hardly ignore, since they are easily available on the Internet and unquestionably reliable.
In 1974, drug consumption in the United States was at its highest, and the SDECE had exported
heroin to this country for about twenty years already. To do this, this agency enjoyed a large
network of mobsters and barbouzes who all or almost had previously joined the Resistance against
the Germans in the WWII. The network was mainly composed of natives of Corsica and of the
Mediterranean coastline of France—of Marseille in particular—and of Pied-Noirs (Black-Foot); a
minority was native of Paris and Lyon. Notwithstanding, a score of French intelligence officers and
full time employees of the SDECE played a determining role in drug smuggling at that time—and
also in banknotes counterfeiting with small printing companies in the French Riviera that quietly
resumed their activities for this on week-ends and nights.
In the early 1980s, I heard several stories and numerous anecdotes relating to connections
between the French mob and the SDECE in the 1960s. People who thus enlightened me had been
personally involved in three instances. They were two women who had been girlfriends of Jo Attia’s
gang members, notorious in France in the 1950-60 for their violence and close connections with the
SDECE as henchmen executing dirty missions and physical eliminations. The third was a barbouze,
still in connection with the French mob when I met him on several occasions, and whom I
summarily presented as co-head of a prostitution ring in the chapter 3. Not all these people were shy
about their past personal experience with criminality in relation to the SDECE. That is how I was
privy to learn many things about this peculiar subject on moments, I acknowledge, that were as
entertaining as interesting because it was all about the secret history of France one cannot find in
any book. In an additional instance, I learned many other things when I often went to the Brigade
Financière (Financial Brigade) of the police in Paris. Yet I must admit I never heard any of these
people talking about drug smuggling in the United States. Evidences supporting the facts I
discovered were to be found elsewhere, and they were publicly available, actually.
First, there is an interesting and well-documented book titled The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs,
Intelligence & International Fascism,[693] in which everything its authors wrote seems flawlessly
genuine to me, again because of the basic knowledge I have of connections between the French mob
and the SDECE at the concerned periods. Second, on April 5, 1971, there was an affair of drug
smuggling in the United States, in which a proved French intelligence officer of the SDECE
partook. This man was named Roger Xavier Leon Delouette, acting under the codename “Delmas”
and aged 48 at that time. Delouette was arrested in New Jersey for smuggling 96 pounds of pure
heroin. The payload was hidden beneath floorboards and in a water tank of Delouette’s imported
Volkswagen camper Kombi bearing the Parisian license plates 3792 TT 75, to be precise. The media
of that time even specify that U.S. Customs Officer Lynn Pelletier made the discovery. The case
pointed to a certain “Colonel Fournier,” intelligence officer of the SDECE, whose real name was
Paul Ferrer. Previously, Ferrer had been caught while smuggling over $17,000 in counterfeit
American dollars into Italy. The “Delouette affair” became a scandal that cornered the French
Government into disputing incriminating facts supported by overwhelming evidences. First, French
officials denied any responsibility by claiming that Delouette was not a legit SDECE intelligence
officer. Second, they finally acknowledged this man actually was a legit intelligence officer of the
SDECE, but this agency had fired him a year earlier, and he had acted entirely on his own.
However, the second French version of the facts did not still match Delouette’s confession to the
U.S. authorities. So, France gave a third version saying the affair was an attempt to discredit the
SDECE on an initiative of some of its disgruntled officers. Yet this did not still match Delouette’s
version. That is why France gave a fourth and last explanation saying it was a particular CIA-
SDECE joint operation, too sensitive to be publicly revealed. I can clear up the latter sensitivity that
was not at all a “joint operation”.
In truth, until the end of the Indochina War of 1946-1954, France had enjoyed a monopolistic
status over heroin trafficking because Indochina and Northern Laos in particular had been her
colonial possessions. From the latter year on, the U.S. CIA had taken the control over the ongoing
drug trafficking, latter publicly known as the “Air America Affair,” after the name of a U.S. civilian
air company that indeed regularly smuggled the heroin down to Southeastern Asia, first.
Subsequently, the reader understands that the fourth answer of France actually was a threat to
expose the existence of the Air America scheme that did not reach public knowledge until 1976,
five years later. From a general standpoint, drug production in the World cannot be eradicated. In
2000, the DGSE estimated the global GDP of drug trafficking in the World to $400 billion at
minimum, including all connected activities such as, lawyers, corresponding illegal money
laundering, etc. Overall, illegal drug production, trafficking, and by-products would represent
between 1 and 1.5% of the gross World product, and the impossible hypothesis of its complete
eradication overnight is deemed likely to trigger a World economic crisis. That is why it is the job of
intelligence agencies to control drug production and trafficking as much as possible not to let other
countries doing it, using it as a weapon to create havoc among their populations, and to build
networks financing intelligence activities and subversion. Yes, nearly all intelligence services in the
World indeed involve in drug trafficking for the latter reasons.
Anyway, the U.S. Government quickly forgot the “Delouette Affair” and pardoned France again.
For the U.S. Government each time adopts the same attitude when it catches red-handed a French
spy; the culprit is deported quietly to France, unbeknownst to the public. However, I can say I heard
about a small number of French spies in the United States and in Mexico who at last worn out the
leniency of American counterspies, and whose careers in intelligence knew ends of the abrupt and
painful sorts, if I may put it thusly.
 Since as early as 1947, there is a score of French ventures in drug export to the United States,
which the American mainstream media and The New York Time in particular largely reported. I
found out a number of clues pointing out the responsibility of the SDECE and then of the DGSE in
cocaine imports in this country from Colombia. Let alone a number of insisting passing references
and allusions, and the story of a French barbouze turned “cocaine chemist” who worked for some
time in Columbia. Far-leftist politics was also at play in this business, which comes to explain the
political stance of drug baron Pablo Escobar. The DGSE even went as far as to seriously considering
the idea of a discreet promotion of Escobar as a would-be-hero of the fight against capitalism and
political corruption in South-America.
Nonetheless, for much I understood, the hub of the ongoing French drug trafficking toward the
United States locates in the West Indies. In point of fact, below is the latest news about it, and it
does not fail to surprise in its specifics, in an unexpected way.
On March 26, 2013, cocaine worth 60 million dollars were found in the airport of Punta Cana,
Dominican Republic, aboard a French Falcon private jet based in London, owned by French tycoon
Alain Afflelou who was not onboard at the moment of the find. The local customs carried out the
arrest minutes before the plane was due to leave the Caribbean island. In it, they found twenty-six
suitcases together packed with 1500 pounds of class A drug. Four French nationals and several local
police officers were arrested during the seizure, on suspicion of being part of an international drug-
trafficking network. On the day of the bust, a spokesman for Afflelou said, “Alain heard the news
last night through the media, and he’s amazed”.
Among the suspects were French nationals Pascal Fauret and Bruno Odos, co-pilot and pilot
respectively; Nicolas Pisapia and Alain Castany, private jet company bosses; a customs officer; and
other people. Pilot and co-pilots Fauret and Odos were ex-French naval and Air Force fighter pilot,
both with experience in carrying nuclear weapons before making the switch to corporate aviation.
Nicolas Pisapia, ex-firefighter in Marseilles, is working as investor in real estate activities in
Romania. Alain Castany is businessman in civil aviation and private pilot.
One among the other suspects in the affair is a jet-setting businessman named Frank Colin,
married to the wealthy granddaughter of a Romanian former president and living in Romania. He
was once a bodyguard to celebrities including Naomi Campbell, Mike Tyson, and George Clooney.
The recurring pattern of Romania is unmistakably pointing Russia as partner not to say sponsor in
the operation. Last but not the least, another suspect was no less than former French President
Nicolas Sarkozy! For his defense, Sarkozy stated to journalists for Le Journal du Dimanche
newspaper, “What I want to know is what could justify an investigating magistrate taking such
measures solely because I used the same airline. What do they think I did? Fly to Punta Cana with
700kg of cocaine? All this would be just laughable, if it weren’t about a violation of legal principles
that all French people share”. The reader has seen that not all French people share those principles,
in passing, about as former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls venturing in political activism in
Spain does, I mean. That is not yet all.
On October 2015, released “pending their appeal in Dominican Republic,” the two pilots Fauret
and Odos were exfiltrated by Commandos Marine of the Service Action of the DGSE, and brought
first to Saint Martin, and then to Martinique in the same Caribbean region. For the record, Saint
Martin is a French island located about 20 miles Southeast of Saint Barthelemy, hub of DGSE
shadow operations in the United States from the Caribbean. Then on October 24, 2015, from the
latter French island the pilots boarded an airliner that safely brought them to France. The Dominican
Republic obviously addressed claims to France. On October 28, 2015, the French Government
spokesman answered that the two pilots would not be given back to the Dominican justice because
France does not extradite her nationals; but, of course, he added, they would likely be questioned in
the frame of a French investigation in progress.[694] French businessman Afflelou was exonerated.
The official version, as reported by French journalists, says the plane was bound to deliver its
payload of cocaine in Paris, France. There is a Wikipedia page in French language on this affair
titled “Affaire Air Cocaïne” (Air Cocaine Affair), but its updates are carefully monitored and
censored by the team of trolls and counterinfluence agents I summarily presented in the chapter 20.
 28. French Intelligence Activities in Switzerland.
I never involved in French intelligence activities in Switzerland. However, for seven years in
my endless running-away from France, I could refugee in the French-speaking part of the country of
watches, chocolate, cheese, and banks—I address my thanks to Switzerland for this and for many
other things. I mean much enough for a person with a particular knowledge as mine to notice an
abnormally elevated concentration of French spies in a so small area, and to understand what they
are doing there, exactly. Reading and watching the news gradually confirmed my mind was not
tricking me about this.
From 2007 to 2009, whistleblower Edward Snowden came to live and work in this region of the
World, in Geneva more precisely, when he was still working for the U.S. intelligence community. In
March 2015, RTS1 Swiss national television channel interviewed Snowden for about 25 minutes on
live video from Russia. The interview never was broadcast in the United States, as far as I know. At
some point, TV anchor Darius Rochebin, of course, asked Snowden to express his opinions on
espionage activities on the Swiss soil. Below is a transcription of his interesting testimony, I re-
translated because Snowden’s answers in English were covered by a voice over translation in
French.
Rochebin: “You understood many things when you were in Switzerland. You also explained to
which extent Switzerland has been a hub in espionage and for mass monitoring. Is this still the case,
today?”
Snowden: “It is. I don’t have any recent classified intelligence in hand, of course; I don’t work
anymore. But the reason that made Switzerland so interesting and the capital of espionage—Geneva
in particular—did not change. It always is all about international headquarters, the United Nations,
the WHO, the WTO, and the ICRC. There are representations, foreign governments, embassies,
international organizations and NGOs in quantities; all this in a same city. You have exceptional
flows of shares and money in Zurich. You have a hub of bilateral agreements and of international
exchanges in Bern. So, I can say there is always an active presence of the United States in
espionage. Unfortunately, the question is not about whether Switzerland should create stricter laws
or greater powers to monitor the masses. It is not about a problem of relative power; it’s rather about
tracking bad behaviors when there are motives to do so. That would mean to indeed enforcing the
rules that are already in effect. Espionage is illegal in Switzerland, to begin with; you don’t need a
new law and a new authority to say it. It would be enough to investigate the cases you find, to
proceed accordingly, and to continue carrying out investigations in a fair manner, regardless of who
the defendant is in the actions in progress”.
Rochebin: “When you were an agent here in Geneva, did you dread Swiss counterespionage, or
did you work completely freely?”
Snowden: “No, we had no fear. The Swiss services were not seen as a real threat, unlike
French’s, known to be sophisticated and aggressive. The Swiss services are very competent and
very professional, but they are small.”[695]
Except the CIA and the “French services,” Snowden did not mention any other intelligence
agency, remarkably. Officially, the Service de Renseignement de la Confédération–SRC (Swiss
Federal Intelligence Service) aka Nachrichtendienst des Bundes–NDB is small indeed, with an
estimated workforce of 250 to 300 full time employees only. However, Switzerland can also count
on a large network of voluntary informants acting out of patriotism, and certainly on others,
immigrants mostly, who rather “cooperate,” for much I could understand. The Swiss are much more
patriot than French are. To the latter particularities, one must add the Swiss Army, comparable to the
National Guard and its militia system in the United States, somehow. Very commonly in
Switzerland, there is a close yet not much official connection between civilian and military
activities; it is “hush-hush,” as it is seriously taken into account when trying to appraise the extent
of Switzerland self-protection against foreign interference. Then some Swiss are straying, as in any
other country, and their motives are similarly diverse, but opportunism and gullibility rank first in
this country, well ahead of politics. I will underscore some evidences of this.
Given the aggressiveness of the DGSE in the Western French-speaking part of Switzerland that
Snowden alluded to, which I confirm with enough details to fill a chapter in this book, had the
Swiss militia system not exist, then France would be ruling this region for long. Yet the danger for
Switzerland remains clear and present, and a good understanding of the causes of the intense French
intelligence activities in Switzerland is necessary to size up its extent.
In spite of an inescapable and already natural French cultural influence in French and Western
Switzerland, Germanic behavioral patterns are pervading its population, but in a much different way
to that we notice in the French Alsace region bordering Germany, slightly upper to the North.
Another influential factor is the Swiss economy, in much better shape than that of France. Then
Switzerland has her own cultural particularisms and her own history that make her different of
Germany in many respects, as I lived in the latter country for one year, or enough to see the
difference.
As seen from abroad, we tend to perceive Switzerland as a very advanced and modern country,
deceptively because once we live there, we quickly notice the modernity is coexisting and mixing
permanently with an overwhelming rurality in all classes of the society. Then, we notice, this
country, apparently not much affected by Soviet influence during the Cold War, stood attached to its
Christian religious roots about shared likewise between Catholicism and Protestantism. Other
religions have an insignificant presence, mainly because of a tight monitoring of this by both the
Swiss Government and a much cooperative population in this respect.
Indeed, all Swiss citizens who are registered militiamen have a Swiss-made full-auto SIG-550
assault rifle at home. Moreover, all Swiss citizens can buy about as many types of firearms as one
could find in the United States, including machine guns provided they have a special license to.
Buying a Barrett .50 cal. military rifle in Switzerland is no more complicated than for a civilian
semi-auto .22LR. The only restriction about all this is that Swiss people can only shoot in much
military monitored shooting ranges, at 55- and 330-yards regulatory distances (50 and 300 m.). No
way to shoot a pumpkin at 800 yards or to practice steel silhouette; one can only punch holes in
Swiss Army cardboards with ordnance Schmidt-Rubin and SIG bolt-action rifles and assault rifles
—Zzz. There is in this country the amazing number of 3,500 civilian and military shooting ranges
for a population of 8.4 million inhabitants only; that is to say, one for every 240 people, toddlers and
anti-gun protesters included. Swiss official statistics say there are about 3.5 million guns legally
registered in the country, of military origin in an overwhelming number of cases, which means
many more, in reality. Yet there is not a single record of shooting spree in the history of Switzerland,
and all armed aggressions that happened on her soil were facts of foreigners who crossed her
borders with their own guns. Exceptions can be counted on one hand’s fingers for the past twenty
years, at least, and Swiss casualties with firearms largely are suicides.
American culture is rather welcome in Switzerland, overall, though its French-speaking part,
locally called Suisse romande aka romandie—not to be confused with Romansh—is somewhat
shared about that. This is especially true since the event of the Bradley Birkenfeld whistleblowing
case and its dire ensuing consequences for the Swiss banking sector. Swiss bank secrecy was dealt a
severe setback by the revelations of ex-UBS banker Bradley Charles Birkenfeld, who blew the
whistle on UBS providing Americans with a means to hide up to $20 billion in assets to dodge
taxes. Birkenfeld’s revelations to the U.S. Government led to a massive fraud investigation against
UBS. Because of information Birkenfeld gave to U.S. authorities, the DOJ announced it had
reached a Deferred Prosecution Agreement–DPA with UBS, which resulted in a $780 million fine
and in the release of previously privileged information on American tax fraudsters. Swiss media
credit Birkenfeld’s act with affecting a sea change in Swiss banking. Since then, UBS agencies in
Switzerland deny any banking account opening to American citizens and to people with American
relatives or whatever connection with the United States. That is why many Swiss say they remain
“cautiously wary of Americans”. Notwithstanding, the relative rarity of anti-Americanism in
Switzerland makes for a striking contrast with France located just behind its Western border.
In 1793, Switzerland experienced a French armed invasion by Jacobin revolutionary forces,
which eventually transformed into a ruthless Napoleonic occupation lasting until the Congress of
Vienna of 1814–1815. Swiss media, scholars, and writers typically refrain from evocating this dark
period of the history of Switzerland, partly for diplomatic reasons, and partly for political
correctness. Besides, France closely monitors everything is published and said in the Swiss media,
indeed, and she is wont to voice claims of xenophobia each time French bashing arise in the
Helvetic Confederation. There is quiet and general Swiss distrust toward France and French people
in this country, openly expressed only in private for a number of good reasons, I reunited in this
chapter because they manly concern espionage and dirty tricks.
All Swiss cultural particularisms, I just described, together make up for a rather effective passive
defense against France’s persisting ambition to impose her influence in the French-speaking part of
Switzerland; the same way she did in the French-speaking Wallonia region of Belgium, with success
in this other case. France also presses Switzerland into joining the European Community as full
member, unsurprisingly.
The DGSE relies largely and even mainly in this country on methods I explained in the previous
chapters, yet this agency has a hard time with fooling the dispassionate and distrustful Swiss people.
Most Swiss see French as talking heads with an annoying tendency to impose upon others their
opinion on everything, to begin with. About this, there is even an enduring and locally popular
series of funny TV commercials for Appenzeller, a famous Swiss cheese brand. For this ads are
unambiguous satires of an urban French who vainly attempts to lure two rural Swiss, dressed in
traditional costumes, into revealing to him the secret recipe of their cheese. The author of the
commercial introduced a bit of dosage in his creativity by releasing two other dubbed regional
versions, in which the bold and enterprising foreigner is changed for a German and an Austrian—
Switzerland also has common borders with Germany and Austria, in addition to Italy.[696] The Swiss
actually see their numerous French immigrants as barely better folks that the latter do in their
country with African immigrants. For the large majority of French who do not come there for
spying and influencing are looking for jobs they cannot get in France due to a high rate of
unemployment, hard working conditions, and cheap salaries in this other country. In return, Swiss
businesses find in the situation the advantage of a low-cost workforce by comparison with Swiss
wages, very high by European standards. The lowest monthly salary of a Swiss national is around
$3,500 to $4,000 while the French equivalent in France is $1,652 raw. So, the Swiss blue collar
earns more than twice what his French counterpart makes in France.
However, the high cost of living in Switzerland affrays most of the numerous French who come
to work in this country, and that is why the latter remain commuters locally called “frontaliers”
(“border men”) or “pendulaires” (“swinging workers”) who daily go back home to France. This
situation comes ro fuelling an already distant relation between the “so-so immigrant” French and the
Swiss population. Numerous Swiss complain about it, brandishing the justified argument of “French
wage dumping”. In all French-speaking Swiss cantons—local equivalent to states in the U.S.—
having a common border with France, the situation results in a competition between Swiss nationals
and French commuters on the job market, whose conditions are much unfavorable to the former.
Things frequently go political about this, and there have been popular referenda on the question of
restricting conditions to foreigners coming daily from abroad to work in Switzerland.
This is at this point, with respect to this question of full or partial French immigration in
Switzerland, that offensive French intelligence activities in this country come into stage. As
Snowden implied, Switzerland is literally crowded with spies from all countries, and France’s by far
are the more numerous and active in the French-speaking part of this country. Just because France
has a common border with Switzerland? Not that so.
Since the late 1990s, Switzerland is a priority target of the DGSE and of the French Government
in general with regard to politics and economics. Together, the Gallic politicians and spies are so
bold and relentless in their aggressions and interference attempts that even ordinary Swiss see and
understand them, despite the same blatant media self-censorship on both sides of the border, as we
find it in the United States with respect to the same issue. Sometimes, Swiss politicians and media
happen to voice their concerns about it in clear talks when too much indeed is too much. Ordinarily,
the matter is touched upon in veiled terms and with passing references, due to concerns of
diplomatic and economic orders. France is an impressive power compared to Switzerland, and the
former, much aware of the advantage, often often indulges in political and economic bullying.
Switzerland intervenes and sanctions discreetly and softly her citizens who stray, but indeed she
does nothing against foreign spies, as Snowden underscored it in its interview. Passive defense is a
typical and old Swiss characteristic, unique in the World. Swiss journalists and the media focus on
entertaining the population with a capacity that stays limited anyway, and one learns the real and
grave news through gossips in cafés, restaurants, and at home, or else in foreign media. There is no
fake news in Switzerland, simply because there is no news beyond rare train and plane accidents,
thus deceptively suggesting that never anything happens in this country.
French strategic objectives in Switzerland are several, and they range from politics with regard to
E.U. integration, economics, industry, to more obscure ambitions pertaining to a hidden agenda the
reader knows at this point of his reading. In Switzerland, the DGSE resorts to very various means
and tricks, cunning in all instances, outrageously bold at times because its spies know they runs
little risk. French agents, case officers, and intelligence officers do not even bother to hide and
barely cover their tracks, as we shall see. Yet not all Swiss people foresee France’s plot contrivances
early enough to forestall them with suitable effectiveness.
The pundits of the European Council have an agenda about Switzerland, which provides this
country must be an E.U. member by all means, and the sooner the better. Indeed, the European
Council is particularly aggressive and even sneaky with the Swiss Federal Government, and its
strategy lays essentially on isolating Switzerland economically by imposing taxes and restrictions
on Swiss imports. This is at the same time a military-like siege and unambiguous blackmail.
When looking at a map, the situation of small Switzerland stuck in the middle of Europe eerily
reminds West Berlin during the Cold War. On one hand, Switzerland is bereft of any direct access to
the sea. On the other hand, several countries of the E.U. are in dire need of a free and permanent
access to Swiss roads, over-long tunnels, and railways, to import and export goods between
themselves. For Switzerland is located in the middle of the Alps Mountains, a natural and hard-to-
cross barrier that isolates Italy from Germany and several other European countries. The other
problem for Switzerland in this thorny situation is that her political apparatus firmly commits to a
political neutrality her population largely approves. Swiss are not interested at all in being involved
in E.U. political issues, armed interventions, and commitments abroad. This already happened in the
History of Switzerland in the early 19th century when Emperor Napoléon 1st had made mandatory
to Swiss males to go to war abroad against countries with which those people had always had
friendly relations before. The sorry episode in the history of Switzerland ruined her and put her at
odds for long years with her traditional friends. In the eyes of the Swiss, it gave to them a lesson
never to be forgotten.
For a number of years, Switzerland has been politically expecting the European Council to show
magnanimity, while the later sees the former as a stone in its shoe, today more than ever. That is
why the European pundits in Brussels stand firm in their ambition to see coming the unconditional
surrendering of the Swiss people to the idea of a unified and progressive Europe. Pending this
hypothetic victory, the European Union monitors with scrutiny the votes of all new laws in
Switzerland, and the former threatens curmudgeonly the latter with economic sanctions each time
what the Swiss people want for themselves does not fit European regulations. Wherefrom, an ever-
growing Swiss popular resentment toward the E.U., as Switzerland uses to resorts to popular
referenda. The contrast highlights the true enforced collectivism and authoritarianism of the
European Union today, which the populations of the other countries around failed to see… until the
United Kingdom voted for a withdrawal.
Today, a majority of Swiss people perceive the E.U. as a technocratic and despotic oligarchy.
Since 2012, several foreign politicians in Europe independently and openly voiced their
understanding and support to Swiss claims of independence and political neutrality, in Italy and in
Britain in particular. Everywhere in Europe, a growing popular disenchantment with the European
Union is fostering a rise of far-rightist parties, and the staunchest exponents of this multinational
body and of its ideas seem to be proportionally reducing to a small minority of officials, progressive
ideologues, and career technocrats. That France seeks to impose herself as a leading force in the
European Union does little to alleviate the worries.
Remarkably, the situation raises concerns beyond the European political stage over the deemed
possible disappearance of Swiss neutrality, because Switzerland has historically allowed peaceful
resolutions of numerous conflicts, signatures of countless advantageous international agreements,
and treaties. If ever Switzerland were to become a member of the European Union someday, then
she could no longer claim to be a neutral country, of course. In spite of this threat, the European
Council appears ready to sacrifice the need of the World and its common good for its own interests
and agenda. France the more so, of course, because this country truly and clearly is more interested
in the benefits she can reap from the pressures that the European Council is exerting on Switzerland
than in the formal joining of this country to the E.U. From the geographical viewpoint of the
French-speaking part of Switzerland, it is hard to guess to which extent the German BND is
cooperating with the DGSE to help reach this end. As far as I could see from this tiny place, a
gathering of clues and evidences are rather pointing toward a joint French-Russian intelligence
effort that is even not difficult to identify, as we shall see. Of course, I am going to present
evidences of the latter fact, as a compensation for my fruitless attempts to find clues suggesting
consistent German intelligence activities in Switzerland.
French spy-crafted influence in the French-speaking part of Switzerland lays essentially on the
penetration of her information and cultural industries subsuming media, book publishing,
advertising, music, and culture in general. Until today in 2018, the mainstay in the latter effort has
been French tycoon Philippe Hersant and his local media group Éditions Suisses Holding SA–ESH.
Until 2014, French businessman and super-agent Bernard Tapie financially helped Hersant[697] with
money that actually came from the French Government through some arrangements, which finally
resulted in 2016 in a large scandal incriminating Christine Lagarde, at a moment she was acting
head of the IMF in replacement to Dominique Strauss-Kahn.[698] This made obvious to everyone in
Switzerland that Hersant actually is a front man of the French Government. Meanwhile the French
mainstream media depict Hersant as a man “exiled in Switzerland for tax reasons,” truly to give him
a hand in his effort to justify his presence in this country where his would-be-business activities
actually are a running cost to France.
In a previous chapter, I presented the involvements of the Hersant family in intelligence and
influence activities to the benefit of the French Socialist Party and the Communist Party. In
Switzerland, the secrecy surroundings Hersant’s privacy and the inner workings of his business
activities parallels suitably the aggressiveness of his actions in culture warfare. The would-be-
tycoon who truly is a super-agent does his best to conceal the French origins and connections of all
his companies behind disingenuous pretenses of patriotism for his new country. Hersant’s managers
are instructed to claim a Swiss corporate identity; the words “French” and “France” never arise in
their public speeches and interviews, nor on any website he owns. However, it escapes to the
knowledge of no one that his senior staffers are French nationals of the strange bedfellow ilk.
Indeed, I found in the inwards and demeanors of the latter people some patterns that match those,
typically muscular and swaggering, of the barbouze category and other ex-members of France’s
military elite units of the COS.
In 2018, Hersant was newly focusing his investments and efforts in the printing industry in
French-speaking Switzerland, with the avowed ambition to become leader in this sector. One of his
underlings stated on the Swiss TV that Éditions Suisses Holding SA–ESH endeavors to print not
only its own newspapers, but also those of its local challengers. This French national added with a
disarming sincerity, he and his collaborators “are fighting for a free and independent printing
industry in Switzerland”. The boldness, typical in the agent of the rank-and-file category, is one
more pattern supporting my earlier guesses. Actually, this man was doing his best not to say
Hersant’s holding actually is fighting Swiss businessman and rightist politician Christoph Blocher.
For Blocher understood perfectly the French strategy in his country, and he undertook to acquire a
number of leading Swiss regional newspapers in the German-speaking part of Switzerland,
reciprocally. In late 2017, everyone in the country understood that Blocher was interested in media
in the French-speaking part of his country either. Though ageing at 77 in 2018, Blocher nonetheless
remains the iconic figure of the UDC, the powerful anti-E.U. and conservative party of Switzerland,
similar to the Grand Old Party in the United States, a devil in the eyes of France, therefore.
However, against all expectations, certain journalists of RTS1, a publicly owned Swiss television
channel, since then present Blocher’s venture in Swiss media as “a concerning attempt of the Swiss
Right to take over the print press in the goal to make it a propaganda mill”. The surprisingly partisan
accusation is all the bolder and shocking, as those journalists never uttered a word to date on the
much visible French influence in their country, nor about other facts in French unfriendly influence
and intelligence activities, I will soon describe. The American reader perhaps identifies in this
attitude another pattern he is familiar with in his own country.
France also presses her cultural influence in French-speaking Switzerland, thanks to the two
leading chain bookstores Fnac and Payot, and to an already acquired authority in nearly all
publishing houses in the region. However, as for Hersant’s ventures in the local print press and in
television and radio broadcasting, France’s leadership in the French-speaking Swiss book industry
comes at a heavy financial cost to her, for the following reasons.
There is no questioning the French-speaking part of Switzerland is very rich due to several of its
sectors of activity that are particularly dynamic and profitable, such as banking, watchmaking,
micromechanics, electronics, pharmacy, and a number of others. However, the linguistic region is
about the size of the U.S. State of Rhodes Island, and it has a population of 2 million only. The latter
characteristics explain why media and cultural influence cannot self-finance in this area. In the
whole Switzerland, the average price tag of the first printing of a less than 300 pages novel reads
more than $30, and at this price it has even not a hardcover because this would raise it between $40
and $50. Similar elevated costs are affecting tremendously the sales of print magazines, with a price
tag per issue ranging from $7 to $18. In the light of all this, it comes to no surprise that the average
Swiss does not much read anything but local newspapers that have an average circulation of 30,000,
essentially. Contrary to what says a popular belief abroad, not all Swiss people lead a comfortable
life, and by far due to heavy mandatory social charges and Californian-like housing cost. The Swiss
household cannot make the ends meet below $4,000 a month, and doing children is a thorny
question to many of them for this very reason. More than 10% of Swiss live below the poverty
threshold of their country.
Notwithstanding, Swiss book publishers are facing the following implicit dilemma: either to be
truly independent and free to publish anything, but be barred from access to distribution and public
relations on the large French market, or to go by the rule of French progressive orthodoxy and be
granted access to it. As a premium for their zeal and to make examples for the others, those who
best comply are awarded prestigious French medals and literary prizes, and are named jury
members and honorary members of French-led literary associations and guilds, thus engendering a
vicious circle further serving the French interest. The same rule-of-thumb applies to Swiss literary
authors. The latter provisions highlight a pattern well known at the Cannes Festival in the other
realm of motion picture. To the many Swiss who draw their income from the media, arts, and
entertainment, standing by progressive values and to be in good terms with France are matters of
survival.
Certainly, the reader is going to find difficult to believe the following consequences of all this—
well, about everything I say in this book is hard to believe, anyway.
In March 2018 and since about the early 1990s, it is impossible to buy in a bookstore or even
online a book on the history of Switzerland in French language, even not a schoolbook! Actually,
there are two such rare books only: a succinct 128 pages booklet edited in France, and an absurd,
expensive, and badly done set of five small volumes sold as a box set edited in Switzerland. Beyond
this, there is the Dictionnaire Historique de la Suisse (Dictionnary of the History of Switzerland), an
enormous and still more expensive set of 13 volumes of about 900 pages each, sold for about
$4,000. At least, an online version of the latter is freely available for consultation. One can
painstakingly attempt to learn Swiss history this way or with Wikipedia otherwise. Not long ago, a
French “retired journalist,” with a profile about similar to Pasin of Carnot Publishing in France,
attempted to buy the publishing rights of the Dictionnaire Historique de la Suisse, in vain. For the
moment, the bible of Swiss history remains Swiss property, and it is the sole reliable and
comprehensive source on the subject. Indeed, its disappearance would leave French-speaking Swiss
bereft of any possibility to know the history of their own country!
During my first days in Switzerland, I was curious to know more about the tale of William Tell,
but how could I suspect this logical and innocent idea was to drive me to a story of skullduggery,
once more. For the record, the mythic hero William Tell connects intimately to the founding of the
Swiss Confederation, between 1291 and 1308, and the personage is largely represented in the Swiss
governmental palace in Bern, on paintings and as statues for this good reason. However, I would not
find any book in French language on the story of William Tell in Swiss bookstores, nor even on
Amazon. The story of William Tell in French language and in paperback version is now available,
since September 2015 exactly, but only on Amazon and because I took the personal initiative to
publish it again, thanks to Amazon KDP![699] Then, guess why Swiss people who know the story of
William Tell—counterpart of George Washington in the United States, for the record—are very rare
birds?
The DGSE created two small phony far-rightist small groups, a French and a German, whose
members took William Tell as one of their inspiring figures and associated him with the swastika of
the Nazis. The Swiss Government banned the tiny political groups from Switzerland, with good
reasons indeed, since their real aim is a mission of black propaganda aiming to demonize by
association the Swiss national hero and the Swiss rightist and conservative party UDC by the same
occasion. On one or two occasions only, the Swiss population saw the latter groups of less than one
hundred members on television and in local newspapers, yet it proved enough for the expected
demonization of William Tell to materialize. Since then, in Switzerland, William Tell is politically
associated with the far right and even to Nazism, completely politically incorrect. At the same time,
French Emperor Napoléon 1st, on the contrary, is well known and considered by many Swiss as
“one of the founding fathers of contemporary Switzerland,” again thanks to the upper hand France
has over cultural activities in this country.
These latter examples and anecdotes help the reader to understand what exactly culture warfare
is, and how it can indeed transform a country into a foreign occupied territory in the long term,
gradually and insidiously. Herein I am not implying that toy manufacturer Mattel became a front of
this intelligence agency when it decided to launch Barbie Kahlo in the United States, but the effect
is exactly what French specialists in information warfare are looking for.
A few years ago, I saw speaking on the Swiss TV a locally reputed “expert in military and
security matters”—so a member of the Swiss intelligence community, I assume—who was
interviewed in his home. On this occasion, I noticed with surprise that all furniture and decorative
items in the room were overwhelmingly French First Empire style. There is more to the latter point
with the following example.
Renowned Swiss intelligence analyst and strategist Jacques Baud is Colonel of the General Staff
in the Swiss Army, official in the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, and former officer of the
Swiss Intelligence Service–SRS. Baud authored more than a dozen of books on intelligence.
However, we notice, none of these books are published in Baud’s country. Instead, they are all
printed and sold by French publishing houses I once knew well as contacts or partners of the DGSE.
In particular, most books Jacques Baud authored are published by Lavauzelle publishing, an old
company and the closest among all to the French intelligence community.
In the canton of Geneva, there is a military-style fraternal society named Société des Vieux
Grenadiers de Genève (Society of Old Grenadiers of Geneva). This body has a strong company of
about 120 men who parade in French Napoleonic uniforms to the rhythm of Napoleonic music
during big patriotic and historical demonstrations to represents the City, Republic, and Canton of
Geneva outside.
There are two national TV channels in the French part of Switzerland, named RTS1 and RTS2,
both publicly owned via SRG SSR (Swiss Broadcasting Corporation).[700] SRG SSR is
headquartered in Bern, capital of Switzerland, as a non-profit organization funded in principal
through radio and television broadcasting license fees, or 70%. SRG SSR earns the remaining 30%
of its revenues by selling advertising space and sponsorship. Switzerland’s system of direct
democracy and the fact that this country has four official languages, German, French, Italian, and
the Romansh dialect, implies that the structure of Swiss public service broadcasting be rather
complicated. The actual holders of the broadcasting licenses enabling SRG SSR to operate are four
regional and linguistic corporations. To sum it up, because the Swiss Government is linguistically
divided into four linguistic regions, it must finance four different national television channels, each
broadcasting different programs and news, and having their own newsrooms, journalists, locally
famous presenters, people, and so on. All this is costly to run and to manage in a country whose
total population of 8.5 million is about the same as that of New York City.
Notwithstanding, as surprising as it may, the Swiss TV channels of the SRG SSR are qualitatively
superior to their French equivalents, and their presenters and speakers in particular have a
professionalism their French colleagues lost since the late 1970s. The main reason for this is the
staffs of France’s TV channels are recruited on criteria I previously explained. However, Swiss
television is quantitatively inferior for budgetary reasons. The additional handicap for Switzerland
in this situation is an expensive mandatory television-broadcasting fee per household of about $450
a year, coming to add to a minimum expenditure of about $1,200 a year for a cable or ADSL
television and Internet connection. In the French-speaking part of Switzerland, the two national TV
channels RTS1 and RTS2 are challenged by about ten French publicly owned main competitors, plus
a large number of privately owned smaller television channels, French-owned either. The
overwhelming French audiovisual presence alone is largely accountable for the success of French
cultural influence in Switzerland. Even Swiss variety shows broadcast French singers,
overwhelmingly. When added to an equally overwhelming presence of the French print press and
literary choice, the whole of it dwarfs the Swiss media and cultural efforts on its own territory.
However, that is not yet enough to France, and the hand of the DGSE was well visible in the making
of the following other events.
Below is my translation of a Swiss press article in French, on a real example of the French
method for influencing the masses with the spread of a particular accent, as earlier explained in the
chapter 18. It is a testimony of the highest interest because it is unique, recent, and commented by
two Swiss scholars who understood the stratagem from the viewpoint of the target country, coming
to exemplify the potency of this sophisticated method of influence in changing the cultural identity
of people at the scale of a country.[701]
“While hearing youngsters of Neuchâtel speaking to each other, the accent of the same name
would not be what it once was anymore. The typical ‘Qué’ normally punctuating the end of the
sentences is now forgotten. There is no more slowness in the middle of the words, and the rattling
‘R’s’ disappeared. Teenage conversations are edgy and fast. The accent is urbanizing itself when it
is not slumming under the intonations of France’s suburbs with much of the expressions of the kind
‘kiffer’, ‘ziva’, ‘ouèche’ [French slang words whose translation is of little interest]!
“‘… the accent, therefore, is first and foremost linked to the place. It is a strong identity marker,’
explains Raphaël Maître [linguist and dialectologist at the Neuchâtel University]. Nowadays, it
remains that ‘the social aspect takes precedence over the geographical criterion’. This explains why
some would seek to change their accent from authority, especially among young people as opposed
to parents’ language or to give to themselves a gender. ‘We are able to change role according to
what kind of people we are dating. Into his middle, a young academic will tend to speak the
socialite way. Once with his friends, his manner of speech will get more urban’ [i.e. the French
accent of Paris].
“‘… we all are a bit of chameleons,’ laughs Jerome Heim, PhD. student in sociology”.[702]
In the case of French-speaking Switzerland specifically, these identity and cultural conversions by
the spoken accent lay on three main plot contrivances and causes.

1. A French cultural invasion through conventional media and French television

channels and radio stations in particular, which together became an audiovisual
media majority.[703]

2. A massive immigration of French cross-border workers largely called and hired

by French companies having activities in French-speaking Switzerland, which
together take advantage of their important minority to do multiple media actions
and even open political influence supported by varied claims.[704]

3. A spread of discriminatory rumors and bywords relying on humor and satire

aiming to disparage the Swiss accent and the scale of values and cultural mores of
this country. The French accent is presented as “more pleasant to hear” or “more
elegant” than the Swiss accent, on the contrary described as “ridiculously rural”.
The method relies on mere persuasion and calls for passion as no rational argument
calling for reason is invoked in the facts.

In 2012, Le Temps, an old leading Swiss newspaper, experienced financial difficulties—as nearly
all newspapers in the World do nowadays—and was put for sale to avoid bankruptcy and definitive
closure. Le Temps is a Swiss equivalent to The New York Times in the United States, and to Le
Monde in France. It is similarly liberal leaning and artful in its writing style. Unsurprisingly, France
wanted to purchase Le Temps in the aims to transform it into a Swiss version of Le Monde, and to
spread further her political influence with a focus on the intellectual sphere of French-speaking
Switzerland. In vain, however, as the Swiss understood the ulterior consequences of relinquishing
their best-known and venerable national newspaper to France, and to leftist and secular Le Monde
newspaper especially. Reassurances and promises from Le Monde that Le Temps would remain
managed by Swiss nationals met a deaf ear. At some point, France even instructed one of her super-
agents in Switzerland to intervene. The latter man is a Swiss-naturalized foreigner of Luxembourg
origin, well known for his specious pretense of strong Helvetic jingoism, who claimed his will to
save the monument of Swiss cultural heritage from disappearance by purchasing and reviving it at
his own and unselfish expense. Again, the Swiss ignored the emotional play. Even among the
public, nearly everybody understood that this man actually acted as a straw man in the interest of Le
Monde newspaper—thus rising high Switzerland in my personal list of nations the least naive in the
World, in passing.
Finally, in 2013, Ringier, a Swiss leading press group in the German-speaking part of
Switzerland, acquired 95% of the shares of Le Temps. However, as a form of “diplomatic
compensation” for France, perhaps, Ringier appointed a French national as Chief Editor of Le
Temps and agreed on collaborating in news sharing with Le Monde.
In 2017, still in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, some unknown young people coming
out the blue launched successfully a national referendum, whose object was to make the population
vote “No” to the compulsory tax on radio and television sets, and “No” to Swiss publicly owned TV
channels RTS1 and RTS2, consequently. Their arguments were that privately owned television
channels are of better quality and are free from state interference. How and where did the leaders of
this group manage to find 100,000 Swiss citizens supporting such a bold initiative? Very simply and
logically, actually, as a large majority of them were youngsters who do not watch television at home
but videos on smartphones, typically. The proponents of “no Swiss television broadcasting” argued
they do not want any longer to be forced to pay $450 a year for television and radio programs they
do no watch and not listen. The claim not only was no nonsensical, but also justified, it must be
acknowledged; except for the older and much more numerous Swiss who could not imagine life
without any Swiss news and programs, of course.
Notwithstanding, first, the latter event caught the Swiss population by surprise, yet it aroused
certain perplexity in the country. Swiss have for them this down-to-earth and distrustful mindset of
peasants that makes them instantly turning down any proposal that seems too nice to be honest, no
matter how convincing the arguments are. Due to the latter mindset, French presidents Nicolas
Sarkozy and Emmanuel Macron would never be elected to any position in Switzerland, even not as
mayors of hamlets. If the reader wanted to convince the average Swiss to join any movement or
cause, great are the odds that he would answer, “Why not; how much you pay me for?” This is what
makes Swiss people so different of French people, and what made Switzerland an undisturbed and
peaceful country during the two world wars.
At first, many saw in the referendum an opportunity to save the substantial amount of $450 in
their yearly household expenditures, and some others agreed on the fact that each of the five or six
most popular imported French television channels in Switzerland garners between 10 and 15% of
audience shares, for which they ought not pay, therefore. However, the French-speaking tiny group
of youngsters that had initiated the referendum was unable to present similarly sound arguments
each time journalists asked to them, “Who will broadcast Swiss national news and cultural TV
programs, if ever the Swiss national TV and radio stations disappear?” Indeed, SRG SSR, owner of
RTS1 and RTS2, also provides a determining financial help to nearly all privately owned Swiss TV
channels and radio stations, let alone the tremendously important role of this public body as
producer and co-producer of Swiss documentaries, TV series, films, and other forms of
entertainment in the country. The leaders of the group simply answered the thorny question by
arguing that Swiss television contents would “naturally” self-finance with the revenues they obtain
from the sale of advertising space, or 70% less than what they need to do the job. However, the
problem with the latter idea was, the advertising market in the French part of Switzerland is
proportional to the size of its audience, that is to say, ridiculously small. Last but not the least,
nearly all advertising agencies in this region are French-owned!
Many Swiss, and more especially the Swiss Federal Government, know well that if ever the SRG
SSR had to disappear, then the remaining private television channels and radio stations would
nearly all be French-owned, if not all. Moreover, those media are publicly owned more or less
officially, as the case of French media mogul Hersant exemplifies it. Due to political correctness and
diplomatic considerations, not a single Swiss journalist ever dared bringing the latter touchy matter
in broadcast reports and debates, no matter how heated the discussions could be. The subject of the
already overwhelming French media presence in Switzerland was brushed aside conspicuously,
forgotten. The Swiss are always ready to go far with politeness to avoid hurting France’s feelings.
Nonetheless, it became clear to everybody that this already existing French media presence, ready
to take over definitively the entire audiovisual market in Switzerland, was the real and sole stake of
the referendum. The latter deduction, if never even hinted in the Swiss media yet crisscrossed the
whole country from mouth to ear, and thus was understood to a large majority in the end, without
anyone knowing who launched the rumor first. This is the Swiss way of passive defense against
foreign influence, spies, and other undesirable persons, simple but very effective. The Swiss remain
largely united together beyond political divides, and they are poorly receptive to speeches on
defense of minorities calling for passion. They know well the latter trick because, contrary to what
happens in France, there are no agents of influence, opinion leaders, and trolls in this country to
censor explanations on psychology in the media. The characteristics and symptoms of antisocial
disorder and narcissistic personal disorder even make the themes of educational television
programs, and all Swiss thus learned what the Milgram experiment and minority influence are! The
Swiss may be cold people, often, but they are no fools.
As an aside about this referendum that thus became an affair: in its regular implication in coup
d’états in Africa for the last fifty years, the DGSE and its armed hand the COS, or a group of
Belgian mercenaries depending the circumstances,[705] made a rule to take over first the television
channels and radio stations of each country they target. For in all countries of the World, even the
most effective and popular government becomes powerless as soon it loses access to the mainstream
media. This is what should have happened in Switzerland, though in a quieter way than in African
countries, if ever the Swiss population had democratically voted “Yes” to the shutting down of the
SRG SSR. Soon after that, it is easy to guess, a new national referendum on the entry of Switzerland
in the E.U. would have been organized.
On March 4, 2018, an overwhelming 71.6% of Swiss had debunked the French stratagem and
voted, “No, we will each continue to pay $450 a year for having 100% Swiss-owned television
channels and radio stations”.
French influence on the Swiss Internet also exists, of course, and it extends even far beyond my
previously explanations about what it is in conventional media. Actually, the first reasons for this
are the particular provisions in French domestic influence and counterinfluence I explained in the
earlier chapters, as they naturally extends to all French-speaking countries and regions in the World
to serve the real aims of the francophonie. Are first accountable for censorship on French-speaking
Internet the agents of counterinfluence and trolls of the cell of the DGSE I presented and described
in a previous chapter. Their general mission, for the record, subsumes spotting, tracking, identifying,
moderating, challenging, questioning or simply making disappear everything from the Internet is
deemed harmful to the French national interest, and to France’s political and economic agendas and
reputation, whenever possible. That is how and why a Swiss national going on crusade against
France will be targeted, banned, blacklisted, and even harassed online in his own country, exactly as
if he were living in France. The small Switzerland that clearly runs no such state-trolls is a
powerless victim of this hidden face of the French power.
If literary choices in the French-speaking part of Switzerland are influenced by a French near-
monopoly in book publishing and books distribution networks, things are worsening when Swiss
readers are looking for online book retail stores. Amazon redirects all its Swiss customers to
Amazon.de, the German linguistic platform of this company, by identifying their IP addresses
automatically. To French-speaking Swiss who are not that fluent in Goethe’s tongue, the only
alternative to this is to resign to buy books in French language on Amazon.fr, therefore, and I
previously explained how France’s censorship is done on it.
Then the same cultural influence and dependence reproduce on the French version of Wikipedia,
as we have seen too. Additionally, for years, the same applied to reader’s comments on Swiss press
articles published online, now relocated on social networks with little changes in the effects. Biased
and aggressive comments on Swiss news and culture are posted either directly from Switzerland by
French nationals living in this country or from France. Overall, it is no exaggeration to say that the
French-speaking part of Switzerland is 100% dependent of France’s censorship and influence on the
Internet. In the latter region and overall, freedom of speech indeed does not exist when the subjects
are France, progressivism, socialism, and communism.
Now, I shift to Swiss military affairs with a good and recent example of French influence again.
As prerequisite, the reader must learn about an older but intimately connected story, popularly
known in Switzerland as “Affair of Mirages,” which is one of the biggest political scandals in the
history of this peaceful and quiet country, caused by France.
On June 21, 1961, the Swiss Federal Assembly voted to acquire 100 French Dassault Mirage III
type fighter jets, for which it opened a loan of 871 million Swiss francs. Three years later, on May
4, 1964, the Swiss Federal Council asked for an additional credit of 356 million Swiss francs, plus
220 million “for inflation cost”. The demand came as a surprise, because the Swiss Parliament had
not been previously informed of the additional costs, whose increase, it should be said, were
consequential to a will to build Mirage jet fighters under license in Switzerland. Additionally, the
Swiss Air Force wanted to equip the military planes with particular electronic equipment, and to
make them capable of various missions called versatility in military jargon. Nonetheless, the Swiss
Parliament considered it had been duped, and even refused to enter the matter.
On June 17, 1964, was created the first parliamentary inquiry commission in Swiss history to
investigate what went wrong with those military planes, exactly. The report the commission
delivered on September 2 was overwhelming: the Swiss Military Department was accused to
deceive the government, the legislative bodies, and the Nation.
Therefore, on September 23, the Chambers of the Parliament was forced to reduce the number of
aircrafts from 100 to 57. This proved not quite enough however, as 36 planes only were built in the
end, and the needed versatility was relinquished, even. Twelve fighters would be assigned to
reconnaissance missions, and the others to pilots’ training. It is useful to precise that the Helvetic
Confederation justifies her need for an air force to the surveillance of intensive and endless
fraudulent activities of all sorts across the Swiss borders.
Political leaders were sanctioned. Divisional Etienne Primault, Chief of the Swiss Air Force at
that time, was suspended, and head of General Staff Jakob Annasohn was dismissed. The head of
the Military Department Paul Chaudet was called for his resignation; he actually renounced a new
mandate in 1966. From the viewpoint of the Swiss military, the affair questioned the design of the
whole Swiss defense chosen in 1961. To prevent such a situation to happen again, parliamentary
control was strengthened, and the Swiss Department of Defense was given the organizational and
expert resources to prepare such projects in the future.[706] It is said that the French deceived the
Swiss military at some point in this story, but no one ever dared to elaborate about what happened
exactly, again. Eventually, the Swiss Air Force built under license American jet fighter Northrop F-5
Freedom Fighter and McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet. The latter planes are still in active
service today. Now, I can tell the story I alluded to earlier.
In 2013, the Swiss Government announced its intent to purchase a new jet fighter to replace the
F/A-18, due to its ageing. This time, it was question of a total expenditure of a bit more than $3
billion for 22 Swedish Saab JAS 39 Gripen. The future Swiss airplane had been chosen over the
French Dassault Rafale and the Eurofigher built by European multinational company Eurofighter
Jagdflugzeug GmbH.
However, upon the latter announce, green activist party Vert’libéraux—previously named in the
chapter 16 for its connections with the Swiss liberal Freemasonry and the GOS in particular—
collected 100,000 signatures to launch a national referendum called, “Non au Gripen” (No to the
Gripen). Moreover, the latter party orchestrated a huge campaign against the purchase of the
Gripen, on the ground that it was “an unnecessary expenditure for a peaceful country as
Switzerland”. It came to no surprise to the Swiss population that the left-leaning activist Groupe
pour une Suisse sans Armée–GSsA (Group for a Switzerland without Army) rallied Vert’libéraux in
the protest. For the record, the GSsA is an influential Swiss lobby advocating the reducing of
military activities of Switzerland. One hundred and twenty people created it in Solothurn in
September 1982, and its roster has varied considerably since. In 2009, the Internet website of the
GSsA claimed a membership of 20,000, comprising pacifists and anti-militarists with a left-leaning
stance, essentially.
As I followed the news about the issue with interest, a woman in her twenties who made recurrent
appearances on the Swiss television caught my attention in particular, because she sold her
arguments with a vehemence whose intensity was in no way commensurate with the matter at hand.
Say, her irrational aggressiveness bordering on hysteria had rang a bell to me. Years later, as I am
writing this chapter, curiosity spurred me to know more about this woman, simply by browsing the
Internet for a few minutes. I confess, the first bits of information I found out on her dragged me to a
less casual investigation that lasted for two to three long hours in the end. For I thus learned that
before this woman ventured in political activism, she had been “consultant” in a French-owned and
still active company based in Switzerland, whose activity focuses on economic intelligence. I also
discovered that several executives in the latter private business not only are “ex-members” of the
French intelligence community, but also that from Switzerland they remain in permanent touch with
the French SCRT, the domestic intelligence agency of the Ministry of the Interior that succeeded the
RG, for the record.
In the light of the latter finds, any skilled employee of the DGSE would conclude that, past her
recruitment, this woman received a one-year training in an undercover French intelligence cell in
view of a specialization in human intelligence. Further, prior her latter apprenticeship, the strange
activist studied in several European countries and universities, and she oriented her studies to social
sciences, data collection and analysis, and cultural anthropology. Indeed, the latter fields once
reunited serve well a specialty in human intelligence, and very few other possible professional
activities, if ever. My point with all this is that, theoretically, anti-military activism and dislike for
guns do not mix well with working for a company with a specialty in intelligence having settled in a
foreign country, and run by French spies acting under the authority of the French Ministry of
Defense and having close connections with the Ministry of the Interior. In the end, the curriculum
vitae of the activist woman suggests much more a French field agent than an anti-militarist, and
there is more to the point, below.
 The young emboldened woman of Spanish origin left the GSsA since then, and now, in 2019, she
is holding a position with political responsibilities at the Town Hall of Geneva as representative of
the Swiss Socialist Party. She always seems to have an axe to grind, and her attitude of social
vigilante and vindictive self-righteousness she shows, each time she expresses her griefs against the
Swiss Government, would make anyone believe that Switzerland would be a repressive far-rightist
police state where freedom of speech does not exist. In December 2015, the official position of
influence she holds in Geneva allowed her to partner with the rightist but pro E.U. party PLR to
question a new Swiss law on intelligence (called LRens) aiming to bolster counterintelligence,
which the Swiss Senate had voted earlier on September 25. On the occasion, she gave her take on
how the Swiss intelligence service, SRC, should recruit! Below is an excerpt of her arguments I
translate, verbatim.
“The SRC could therefore act before a procedure is opened [official judicial enquiry]? This
principle is fundamentally unconstitutional! I do not want a country where intrusive investigations
are carried out preventively on people, while no concrete fact would justify it. By putting a bug in
the lamp of the so-called suspect, we risk spying on a household and undermining the presumption
of innocence of all. Liberties are not hierarchical. We cannot assume that security comes first”.
I may understand the personal worries underlying the noble claims of this socialist activist, given
what I found in her biography, to put it mildly.
Additional in-depth investigations would demonstrate that France had a hand in a number of
national referenda in Switzerland for several years. When looking at a larger picture, one could see
in all this a tactic aiming to challenge the Constitution of Switzerland with a focus on her system of
popular referenda because it gives too much power to the people. It won’t hurt for once, shortly
after the referendum on the Gripen, a number of Swiss politicians took a stand about a new and
alarming rise in the yearly number of petitions and referenda in the country. From 1945 to 1970,
there have been 88 popular referenda in Switzerland, whereas from 1971 to 2009, the number
climbed to 341. To figure out the oddity by comparing the numbers, in all there has been 563
referenda between the creation of the new Swiss constitution in 1848 and the same year 2009. It
must be said that, reciprocally, the constitutional provision of the popular referendum in Switzerland
became a highly effective ploy against the relentless attempts of the Council of Europe to swallow
Switzerland. For the latter reason, in the Council of Europe’s view, popular referendum in
Switzerland shines as a bad example of true democracy to the populations of all European countries
around.
In point of fact, challenging the constitution of a target country is a pattern that reproduces in the
United States against the 1st and 2d amendments in particular. In this respect, I remind the
American reader that the interest for him in this account on French intelligence activities in
Switzerland lays on similarities with facts that happened in his country for a number of years.
Not long ago, two prominent French politicians openly expressed the aggressiveness of France
toward Switzerland. In June 2014, at the Swiss Economic Forum in Davos, Nicolas Sarkozy, former
President of France at that time, stated offhandedly in front of a retinue of senior Swiss officials,
“The Swiss must join the E.U. A country cannot be governed under a presidency that changes every
year”. Bold and authoritarian Sarkozy also said, in substance because the Swiss media found too
disturbing to quote his plain words, “A country whose constitution provisions that it is truly
governed by seven federal councilors is ineffective and outdated”. Sarkozy added, still alluding to
Switzerland and France’s expectation that this country joins the E.U., verbatim this time, “One
cannot escape one’s destiny”. A few years earlier, when Sarkozy was elected President of France, he
said on a speech he was going “to play hardball with Switzerland”.
In 2012, Jean-Luc Mélanchon, leading figure of the French far left and Member of the European
Parliament stated, while being interviewed on the Swiss TV channel RTS1, verbatim, first in French,
“I do not want to tell you a story,” then in English, to everyone’s surprise, “I am very dangerous”.
Then back to French language, “I really mean to make your pockets”.[707] Shortly earlier, during the
French presidential elections of 2012, Mélanchon had coldly said on live on French television to a
Swiss politician, “We are going to make your pockets”. The warmongering quotes are but examples
among others that bloom since the year 2012 precisely. In the eyes of Swiss politicians, the French
threats are unprecedented since Napoléon Bonaparte.
French spies who come in Switzerland with a visible specialty in political influence often
introduces themselves as founders and members of associations and NGOs, with an unusually high
number of women agents in such instances, we notice, posing as exponents of green activism,
humanism, and far-leftism. However, for a few years, a number of clues are pointing toward a focus
of the DGSE on penetrating Swiss rightist parties, aiming to demonize and to destroy them from
within. The latter tactic that French spies call noyautage, otherwise is largely in use in French
domestic intelligence, and was explained in detail in a previous chapter. Again, the prime target in
the effort is the Swiss rightist party UDC, which remains a highly influential political force in the
entire Switzerland, following a steady rise since its creation in 1971. Additionally, the success of the
UDC knew a boost paralleling growing foreign interference in its country.
The latter actions of French penetration and political influence reproduces in other European
countries with a participation of the French National Front of Marine Le Pen that is now publicly
known as a Russian front financed and supported by Russia, for the record. The latter evolution
comes as an additional evidence of a joint French-Russian effort in influence in all those countries
for discrediting by association foreign rightist and conservative parties in Europe, and for instilling
doubt in the minds of the public.
As I said, the French intelligence community, and not the DGSE only, is also visibly active in
Switzerland in the field of economic and industrial intelligence. In the chapter 24, I mentioned the
case of French national Hervé Falciani who stole the database of HSBC bank in Switzerland. The
latter interest reproduced in July 2013, in Geneva, with the scandal of two members of the French
intelligence agency, DNRED, caught red-handed in an act of economic espionage. For they clumsily
crossed the Swiss border aboard a vehicle whose licenses plates indicated that it belongs to the
French customs. Upon their arrival in Geneva, the two intelligence officers parked their car near the
headquarters of Pictet and UBS Swiss banks, from which they monitored the entries and exits of
customers of Pictet in particular.
They were caught accidentally because passerby noticed the presence of this car that parked at a
same place for hours, with two men inside who kept looking at the main entrance of Pictet bank.
That is how a Swiss police officer in plain clothes confused the spies with bank robbers. The two
suspects belatedly answered they were tourists visiting Geneva, but it did not work. The incident
transformed into an affair that made front pages in Switzerland, and the French mainstream media
were forced to take up the news, lest of an accusation of censorship. A Swiss official of the
Département Fédéral des Finances (Swiss Federal Department of Finances), interviewed at that time
by a journalist of La Tribune de Genève newspaper, answered the followings on condition of
anonymity.
“They were hunting French tax fraudster! It is little secret in the trade of financial intelligence.
It’s rare but it already happened. They were interested in the license plates of French cars entering
and leaving the parking lot of the bank, to find out the names of the owners in the aim to control
them upon their return on the French soil, either on the road or directly to their homes. But
customers and employees as well could be targeted, possibly.”[708]
Following the incident, Swiss journalists contacted the headquarters of the French customs, but
this administration denied unapologetically its responsibility in it, and it added sternly it “respected
the principle of territoriality”. Thus, the French customs took up as their own the policy of the
DGSE, “Flatly deny everything with sincerity even when caught red-handed, and those who saw
you with their own eyes will come to doubt in the end”. As usual in Switzerland, UBS and Pictet,
the two aimed Swiss banks, declined to elaborate about the case, and even the police of Geneva
refused to make any official statement, as if nothing of abnormal ever happened.
The latter case of financial espionage and the theft of Falciani at HSBC are not justified by
French concerns over fiscal evasion only, of course. Since the early 2000s, they have been
paralleled by a similar effort in industrial espionage, with a focus on the Swiss watchmaking
industry. As surprising as it may seem, this branch of Swiss industrial activities connects to older
espionage stories of the Cold War era, with the Soviet Union in the leading role. What is going to be
explained, below, has not been reported in the Swiss media nor in espionage books to date, due to
the customary unwillingness of the Swiss to make public espionage affairs happening on their soil,
even when their silence and leniency cost dearly to them. However, when in private, many of them
are not so shy with confiding facts they witnessed or even experienced firsthand. One of them, well
known for a number of years in the Swiss watchmaking industry, published for a short while on the
Internet his personal story in industrial counterespionage against the Soviets, until he or someone
else deleted it.[709] Overall, on the Swiss Internet, everything relating to subjects of this nature,
directly or indirectly, should be promptly saved as .html of .pdf files on a hard disk, because they
never remain available for long. This is thanks to such testimonies and saved files, which I
crosschecked and associated with other open sources, that I am able to make known the following
facts among others, no less surprising.
It is about unknown today that, between the 1950s and the 1980s, the Soviet Union ranked second
World leading producer of wristwatches behind Switzerland. From the 1930s, the Soviet Union had
proposed to communist workers of the Swiss watchmaking industry to come to work in Russia.
Upon their arrival in this country, those Swiss immigrants discovered the realities of communism
and were disappointed by cheap wages, hard working conditions, and compulsory political
indoctrination. History says that, circa 1935-37, two at least of those disenchanted Swiss were
sentenced to death only because of their Trotskyist stance, and were shot at once by a firing squad.
Others managed to run away and came back to Switzerland.
Nonetheless, the Soviet Union developed and improved its watchmaking industry, partly thanks
to the expertise that the Swiss had brought with them, and partly with tools and precision machines
purchased in Switzerland. In 1939, a state-owned factory with an activity in stone cutting, based in
Petergof aka Petrodvorets, near St. Petersburg, was transformed into a technical stone factory. The
plant was destroyed during the WWII but rebuilt in 1946. Between the latter year and 1949, it was
transformed again into a wristwatch factory that began to manufacture watches under the brand
names Zvezda, and Pobeda.
On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin made the first manned flight in outer space on the Vostok 1
rocket. To honor the feat, the watch factory in Petrodvorets rebranded its watches Raketa (Ракета),
which translates as “rocket”. That is how Raketa instantly acquired the status of a real and popular
wristwatch brand in the Soviet Union. Soon, the Soviets exported Raketa watches worldwide, and
by the end of the 1960s, Raketa was one among the most produced watch brands in the World. In
the 1970s, about five million mechanical watches a year were manufactured under this brand, and
many were made for the Soviet military.
However, the name Raketa began to be perceived negatively in the Western world, as it was
newly associated with the latest generation of Soviet R-16 intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Regardless, France had her special relationship with the Soviet Union since 1966, and from the
1970s to the 1980s, the French Ministry of Defense was the leading importer in France of Soviet
military watches. The latter fact remains little known to date even to the French public. Actually, the
Ministry of Defense purchased those watches via the Économat des Armées–EdA (Armed Forces
Stores), which is a central purchasing office and a service provider supporting defense
administrative units under the supervision of the France’s Armed Forces Staff. There is an EdA in
each French military barracks and base since the end of the WWII, but those stores exist since 1916.
When I was in the French Army, between 1979 and 1980, a military barracks was about the only
place in France where one could buy one of those Raketa Soviet military watches. At that time, they
were sold for the reasonable price of 50 French francs ($12.5) the “standard issue” Soviet military
watch, and 150 ($37.5) the “officer type”. To figure the expense, a 2d class draftee was paid about
75 French Francs a month ($19), that is to say, about twenty time less than the minimum legal wage,
enough to me to go twice to eat a currywurst with fries and a glass of beer in a cheap restaurant of
the chain Wienerwald, in West Germany. The French Army did not sale any other watch brand, even
not those made in France, on the claim that the Soviets were the only manufacturers of military
watches in the World.
Since the 1960s, the Soviets dreamed to be World-leading manufacturers of wristwatches,
because they had understood that a wristwatch was a powerful medium / message for promoting the
image of the Soviet Union abroad. However, the watches that the Soviets manufactured were of
poor quality and did not work for long, notoriously. That is why the Soviet Union spied on the
Swiss watchmaking industry during the Cold War. The main objective of this effort was to steal the
much-coveted secret of the legendary precision of Swiss watches, which rests largely on the
material and of the delicate manufacturing of a particular spring watchmakers call “spiral”. In point
of fact, spies of several other countries were interested in this all-Swiss particular expertise too, and
Japan and France ranked second and third after the Soviets in that untold order. However, stealing
the secret of the Swiss spiral is not yet enough to make watches as accurate as those Switzerland
commonly manufactures. The other ingredient of the Swiss recipe is love for precision and details in
one’s work, and an extreme professional conscience bordering on compulsive obsession, common in
many citizens of this country, but which foreign workers seldom have, Russian’s especially not.
From the mid-1970s, the invention and then mass manufacturing of electronic watches put a hard
blow on the watchmaking industry worldwide, which resulted in a pause in espionage in this branch.
However, in the 1990s, the prices of electronic watches had become so cheap that in all rich
countries the middle and upper classes did not want to be seen wearing them anymore. So, the
expensive Swiss mechanical watches made a bright come back, the Swiss watchmaking industry
knew a boom, and espionage activities in the branch resumed accordingly. The French intelligence
community and its Russian counterpart joined their efforts in this particular field of industrial
espionage, in Switzerland consequently and chiefly. Now, both France and Russia wanted to tout
their images as manufacturer of reliable and even luxury watches, with a focus on the upper-middle
and upper classes of all countries in the World. From the late 1990s on, France launched a potent
offensive against the Swiss watchmaking industry via her privately owned luxury groups, PPR,
LVMH, and South African Compagnie Financière Richemont SA.
A few years later, Jacques Von Polier, a French national of Russian origin, immigrated in Russia
where he purchased the Russian factory of Petrodvorets and the brand Raketa by then defunct. Von
Polier actually was funded in this venture by a group of wealthy but discreet Russians living in
European countries, in France essentially. Together the Russian investors officially established their
group in Switzerland under the name Duraine Funds. In March 2018, the official head of Duraine
Funds is another French national, young too, who trained at the Saint-Petersburg International
Institute of Management; so, he is another straw man, apparently.
From Russia, Von Polier also partnered with British national of Russian ancestry David
Henderson-Stewart, who currently runs a business in Saint-Barthelemy, the French overseas
territory in the Caribbean where the DGSE settled the hub of its intelligence activities in the region
near the U.S. East coast.[710] Prior to rallying Von Polier and the Russian investors in the business
venture, Henderson-Stewart was personal adviser to Russian billionaire Sergei Pugachev,[711]
previously named in this book and in other contexts; small world, indeed. Von Polier, now official
head of Raketa watches, introduces himself as “a nostalgic of the Soviet Union,” and
simultaneously as a dedicated “admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin,”[712] thus taking up the
contradiction I found earlier in all Russian intelligence officers and agents.
On his appearances on Russian and French televisions, Von Polier takes visible pride in dressing
with a military-like parade uniform of the Soviet era, to show how far his double commitment to
Soviet values and modern Russia extends. Anecdotally, for a while, Jean Claude Biver, a
Luxembourger and a man of influence and public relations at the service of the French presence in
the Swiss watchmaking industry, also made appearances on the Swiss television while wearing a
sober gray worker-style jacket of a similar style yet bespoke and visibly expensive.
From the same late 1990s, several French investors purchased or created in Switzerland print and
online watches magazines. Arrived in the early 2010s, all print and online publications on watches
printed in French for the public and professionals were French-owned or financially dependent of
French-owned Swiss watch brands. Between the second half of the 1990s and 2014, luxury groups
PPR, LVMH, and Richemont purchased numerous renowned brands and manufactures of the Swiss
watchmaking industry. Additionally, they created from scratch almost as many others exclusive
brands, all settled officially in Switzerland. Actually, many among those watch brands once had
been renowned before they disappeared during the great crisis of the watchmaking industry in the
early 1980s.[713] Some of those brands pose officially as independent businesses manufacturing
high-end watches available on the market at prices ranging from $10,000 at the very minimum to
more than $1 million apiece, and all the others are subsidiaries of PPR, LVMH, or Richemont,
manufacturing wristwatches with a starting price of about $3,000.
Actually, all those brands and luxury groups work together in the service of the same French-
Russian interests, and serve a common real aim to be the manufacturers of all luxury watches in the
World, which is about to be reached in this year 2019. At the moment, a few other foreign industrial
or financial groups and companies together own a tiny number of ten or so Swiss wristwatch brands.
[714] Still in 2018, the Swiss watchmaking industry finds itself left with a small number of
authentically Swiss-owned brands.[715]
As the reader understands, at this time in 2019, an industrial and economic war in the
watchmaking industry is raging in Switzerland, and dirty tricks, influence, figureheads, and
espionage are the means used in this context. The three main opposing parties are the stand-alone
Swiss-owned Swatch Group, Rolex, and Patek Philippe on one side, and the dozens of watch brands
French-owned by PPR newly renamed Kering, LVMH, and Richemont on the other side.
Anecdotally, rich Russian oligarchs and mafia favor high-end Ulysse Nardin watches, manufactured
in Le Locle, about three miles only from the French border. In 2014, French luxury group LVMH
purchased Ulysse Nardin for “13 times the amount of its annual sales” being estimated $250
million, which would make $3.25 billion. The starting retail price of an Ulysse Nardin watch is
about $7,000.
Richemont headquarters are based in Geneva, Switzerland, and his official owner is a South
African national. However, the luxury group hires a large majority of French people in all brands it
owns, up to the Senior Executive Committee.[716] Overall, political relations between France and
South Africa are close and, for the record, the intelligence communities of these two countries are
collaborating currently and closely under Russia’s benevolence since communist Nelson Mandela
took the power in South Africa in 1994. In France, François Mitterrand celebrated the latter event in
great pumps and invited Mandela for the occasion.
For the moment, in 2019, prominent and independent companies Rolex and Patek Philippe
remain Swiss-owned companies, though the strong interest of France for these two brands in
particular is conspicuous and known to many in Switzerland. In point of fact, to everyone’s surprise,
in June 2015, Rolex hired as its CEO French national Jean-Frédéric Dufour who hitherto had been
CEO of Zenith International, maker of the eponymous watches and a subsidiary of French-owned
LVMH luxury group.
All French-owned Swiss watch brands hire as many French nationals as possible, who thus come
to work every day from France. Additionally, those brands use components made in other countries
than Switzerland, as much as possible. The two latter provisions aim to reducing manufacturing
costs, due to the high Swiss average wages. Everyone in the French-speaking region of Switzerland,
and in the canton of Neuchatel in particular where about all famous Swiss watch brands are made,
knows the latter facts and is indignant of it. That is why the Federation of the Swiss Watch
Industry–FH, the Swiss watch industry’s leading trade association, was forced to react at some point
against the French abuses by strengthening the criteria of the Swiss made label.[717] To say, if the
Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry did not exist, the only Swiss thing one could find in a Swiss
watch made in a French-owned company would be the pure air of the mountains in those that are
waterproof!
All foreign groups that purchase Swiss watch brands do not relocate them in other countries
where manpower is much less costly, only because the “Swiss made” stamp is a magic selling
argument. As good example of the latter fact, although Cartier for long makes the best known
French luxury watches yet this brand pays dearly for manufacturing their movements on the Swiss
soil, less than six miles behind the French border, between the towns of La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le
Locle, in the Neuchatel canton. Cartier does this solely to enjoy the right to print the Swiss made
stamp on their dials, because about all people working in this factory actually are French
commuters.
In the Swiss watchmaking industry as in nearly all sectors and countries, a recurrent French tactic
in economic and industrial intelligence is to plant an agent in a foreign company with a position of
Human Resources Manager. Thenceforth, each time a position is open in the company, the
infiltration agent of the DGSE (often a woman) is counted on to favor French nationals or other
agents over locals. From the viewpoint of the DGSE, and in general with regard to infiltrating a
foreign company in view to take it over, to spy on it, or to sabotage it, one among the best tactic is
to plant or to recruit its human resources manager. Other executive positions are considered of
secondary importance, except when a company must be sunk only. In the latter case, the favored
position is Accounting Manager, as I witnessed it in the 1980s with the Rabkors. In second position
comes either the marketing manager or the business manager, depending the size of the company.
Of course, the best way to have a company “in the palm of one’s hand” is to have penetration agents
at the two key positions simultaneously.
As an aside about the latter tactic, on the French soil and in European countries, still in 2001,
when an agency of the intelligence community wanted to plant an agent at a managerial position in
a company, it often enjoyed the discreet cooperation of PageGroup, a well-known U.K. human
resources company posing as “heads hunter”. For all employees of its French subsidiaries are
French nationals, and many of them are contacts of the French intelligence community. As a bonus
in the latter contrivance, it is difficult to accuse or even to suspect French subsidiaries of this
company to be at the service of the French intelligence community, since “they are British”. The
scheme reproduced with the U.S. human resources company Manpower.
Still about planting agents in private companies, the reader might be surprised to learn that it is
not uncommon to go as far as to staging a minor accident such as a broken leg, or to give a disease
to a targeted employee in the sole goal to sending an agent to his company to take his job.
Back to the context of the French-Russian offensive against the Swiss watchmaking industry, the
prime target is Swatch Group and not Rolex, contrary to what the reader could possibly assume. The
reason for the latter interest is that Swatch Group has the capacity, unparalleled to date, to mass-
produce watches’ spirals of the highest quality. French luxury groups PPR-Kering, LVMH, and
Richemont are very annoyed with finding themselves forced to buy spirals for their watches’
movements to Swatch Group. The more so since Nick Hayek, Jr., CEO of Swatch Group, publicly
stated in 2009, “Enough is enough with selling movement’s parts, and spirals more especially, to
companies that are consistently trying to undermine our business in our own country”. I add to
Hayek’s statements, “… by resorting to all possible dirty tricks the DGSE has in its bag”. Since
then, Swatch Group is imposing quotas on its sales of spirals to its French competitors, thus
punishing them, and putting them in the delicate situation to suffer spirals’ shortages.
Finally, in 2011, the unwillingness of Swatch Group to comply with the untold French rule of the
boldest in Switzerland became an affair of international magnitude, reported as far as in the United
States by The New York Times, below.
“GENEVA—The Swatch Group may be best known for its playful, plastic watches. But it also
produces mechanical movements and other watch components that it sells to most of its rival
timepiece makers.
“Starting Jan. 1, though, the company will begin to cut back, and possibly eventually end, its
sales of the inner workings to competitors to concentrate on producing watches with higher profit
margins and to make sure it has enough supplies on hand for its own brands, including Longines,
Omega, Tissot, and Breguet.
“Swatch’s move, which was approved by Switzerland’s competition authority, is being challenged
in court by nine watch companies, many of them small and without the financial wherewithal to
produce their own movements.
“The plaintiffs predict that several companies will disappear because they have few other options
for the parts, which must come from Switzerland to keep the lucrative Swiss made label. They also
argue that if Swatch goes through with its withdrawal, the result could be as wrenching to the Swiss
watch industry as the arrival of Japanese digital watches, which almost led to the industry’s collapse
in the 1970s.
“ʻA lot of companies will cease to exist while Swatch, the monopoly operator, will simply get
strongerʼ, said Peter Stas, the Dutch co-owner of Frédérique Constant, an independent watch
company in Geneva that is one of the plaintiffs.
“Mr. Stas acknowledged that it would have been nearly impossible for him to start out in
watchmaking 23 years ago without access to Swatch’s production platform.
“[…] In June, the Swiss competition authority ruled that Swatch would be allowed to lower its
deliveries of mechanical movements to third parties next year to 85 percent of the 2010 levels,
pending an antitrust investigation and a final ruling on whether Swatch could stop supplies
altogether. That ruling is expected in the second half of next year”.[718]
Pending the judgment of the above-named COMCO, the Swiss Competition Commission,
Grégory Pons, a French flying agent of the DGSE in Switzerland acting under the cover of
journalist specialized in the watchmaking industry,[719] “managed to find out” evidences proving
that the COMCO would give its biased preference for Swatch Group. However, the confidential
document Pons “stumbled upon” actually said nothing conclusive at the latter regard. For plaintiffs
obtained an agreement from the COMCO with Swatch Group, although they claimed they were not
yet happy enough with it. Since then, the French are struggling to create companies to manufacture
spirals and other watch components on the Swiss soil, with a quality similar to that Swatch Group
currently manufactures. In this endeavor, they are collaborating with a Japanese company having
activities on the Swiss soil, whose true ownership remains unclear. For a few years, all Swiss
citizens who are working in the latter company, based in La Chaux-de-Fonds, are submitted to
hardship until they resign or yield to depression, and are replaced with French upstarts.
Nonetheless, Swatch Group remains World leader in quality and quantity. At some point, a few
years ago, the French attempted a sexual entrapment against Nick Hayek, Jr., in vain too. The
beautiful young swallow hired for the particular circumstance proved unable to do more than
disseminating angry rumors on the Internet, alleging the CEO of Swatch Group would be “a
philanderer”. Yet she failed to present any supporting evidence and disappeared thereupon.
Back to the Russian brand and company Raketa, in 2015, it hired Evgeny Lednev, a man of
Russian origin who for years lived in Switzerland, where he managed to be appointed manager of
the department of spirals in Rolex watches! Since then, its French manager Von Polier is boasting,
“Raketa is going to manufacture Rolex-like Russian watches”.[720] Well, China does this already,
and with Rolex logos and stamps at their right places as a bonus.
The latest tactics the French found to attack Swatch Group has been to create and to promote at a
considerable expense a Swiss watchmaking exhibition that yearly unfolds in Geneva. The goal with
this new stratagem is to supplant the annual BaselWorld Watch and Jewelry Show in Basel,
Switzerland. For the record, the trade show BaselWorld of the international watch and jewelry
industry unfolds each spring since 1917. The new French watch exhibition in Switzerland,
christened Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie–SIHH, was officially launched by Richemont
luxury group, and the effort was supported by French-owned watch brands Audemars Piguet and
French PPR-Kering’s subsidiary Girard Perregaux. Earlier in this book, the reader understood that
creating exhibitions is a recurrent tactic of the DGSE for helping French businesses and ventures
succeed against their foreign competitors, and for launching cultural trends.
The success of the SIHH in Geneva largely owes to the participation to it of the numerous Swiss
watch brands that Richemont, PPR-Kering, and LVMH purchased since the late 1990s, and to the
unanimous partisan support of the print and online media specialized in watches, all French-owned
and funded. To sum things up, France created her own Swiss watch exhibition in Switzerland in the
expectation to make Swiss watch groups and brands dependent on a French promotion. However,
nearly all true Swiss watch brands, including those owned by Swatch Group, understood what the
aim of the cunning plot is, and they boycott the SIHH to date. As a result, today, the SIHH is a large
watch exhibition in Switzerland in which about nothing is Swiss except the electricity it consumes.
Notwithstanding, the Russian-backed French offensive in the Swiss watchmaking industry remains
potent, persisting, and dangerous, and if ever the SIHH in Geneva succeeds to topple BaselWorld in
the years to come, this might establish definitively a Russian-French monopoly over the entire
Swiss watchmaking industry.
At this point, the reader may ask possibly, “How France is doing with her strong interest in high-
end watches and jewelry that seriously clashes with her anti-materialism and anti-capitalism
propaganda?” First, I answered this question in a previous chapter. Second, I specified in the
chapter 19, “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them”. Third, those who
write the text of the cause, and not those who serve it, do no mind at all enjoying the perks of
capitalism. When I met Jacques Attali, ex-special adviser to President François Mitterrand and
exponent of saint-simonianist socialism, I could not but notice his full-gold Cartier Tank type. For
my elder brother had exactly the same, in addition to his full-gold Cartier eyeglasses, bulky Mont
Blanc pen, upscale Mercedes SUV, and 27-rooms castle. Yet they would not bother to be called
“Comrade,” since they claim to be at the service of the class struggle. Doublethink, doubletalk; that
is all it claims.
I am going to conclude this chapter and book with some funny anecdotes about French espionage
activities in Switzerland; humor sans cynicism in espionage is very rare, yet it happens each time it
is unintended. I start with the particular case of Grégory Pons, the DGSE flying agent who was
interested in COMCO and the Swatch Group.
Pons, aged 67 in 2019, has a character whose excesses not only drove him into becoming the
most publicly known spy in Switzerland, but also to be held as the dumbest spy of the country
because he has even not the excuse to be a decoy. For Pons’ flaws are to brag too much and to be
excessive in his anti-capitalist and far-leftist rants when expressing himself in the media, in addition
to his claim to be “the best expert in high-end watchmaking in Europe,” excuse the little, as the two
claims oddly mix.
A few years ago, Pons wrote his own page on Wikipedia, deleted thereafter because he went too
far with self-praise to the taste of the contributors to the free encyclopedia. In the first lines of his
autobiography, Pons could not help himself specify that he began a military career in the
1st RPIMA, the highly secretive elite unit of the DGSE connecting to the Service Action, for the
record. Seemingly, Pons believed that no one in the Swiss watchmaking industry could know what
the latter precision implies. He was right, but the trouble was that many other people who are not
watchmakers also read his Wikipedia page, me included. Things worsened when it was discovered
that Pons has a brother, Frédéric Pons, aged 65 in 2019, who has his own Wikipedia page too. On it,
Pons’ little brother is presented as a senior French intelligence officer, currently (2018) teaching
intelligence at the Centre de Formation Inter-Armées au Renseignement à Strasbourg–CFIARS
(Joint Intelligence Training Center in Strasbourg).[721] In his biography, Pons further boasted with
naming all watches magazines he collaborates with regularly, and about other publications
addressing other categories of readers. Last but not the least, he boasted to be one of the main
animators of the new French sponsored watchmaking exhibition in Geneva, the SIHH.
While considering the latter series of blunders, if ever the reader believes that Johnny English
could only be a fictional spy, then I am bringing a challenging evidence that such spies truly exist.
As incredible as it may seems, Pons even succeeded to become a popular laughingstock in
Switzerland, when famous Swiss humorists Vincent Kucholl and Vincent Veillon created a parody
of him as the fictitious but unflattering character “Gilbert Vacheron”. To the reader unenlightened in
high-end watches, the choice for Pons of the nickname “Vacheron” is a passing reference to the
French luxury watch brand Vacheron Constantin. “Gilbert Vacheron,” as a parody of Grégory Pons,
includes far-leftist ranting mixed with praises for wristwatches sold for $100,000 apiece, and thus
made appearances on several editions of 120 Secondes, a popular satiric TV show broadcast daily
on RTS1 Swiss television channel.
However, agent Pons is not an exception in Switzerland. For several years, and until 2017, Rajiv
Patel, Economic Attaché at the Embassy of India in Bern, distinguished himself by making
humorous shows on the Swiss television and on evening parties of the Swiss affluent society,
willingly and on purpose in his case. Diplomatic attaché Patel indeed entertained French-speaking
Switzerland owing to his authentic talent as self-depreciating humorist, speaking in French but
behaving exactly as “Kwik-E-Market” proprietor “Apu Nahasapeemapetillon” in The Simpsons TV
animated series. Thank you, come again Mr. Patel!
As I am still talking about television broadcasting and French spies in Switzerland, I can hardly
resist the need to tell a last anecdote, which puts again French-Russian agent André Bercoff[722]
under the limelight.
On January 17, 2018, Bercoff, a conscious French (or Russian) agent of influence posing as
“French thinker,” for the record, was invited as special guest on the stage of Infrarouge, a Swiss
popular weekly TV show broadcast on RTS1. Why? Because the entire and exclusive theme of this
edition of Infrarouge was … U.S. President Donald Trump![723] There, for nearly one hour, Bercoff
did not tire of praise for the American conservative president, siding with Yvan Perrin, another guest
who is a celebrity of the Swiss political landscape as a respected pundit of the rightist political party,
the UDC. The rightist stance of Perrin is authentic and unquestioned, and unquestionable as far as I
know. Sorrily, the Swiss politician thus found itself publicly associated on Swiss screens and on
prime time with strange bedfellow Bercoff, courtesy of RTS1 whose responsibility in the entrapment
remains unclear. Anyway, that evening, Bercoff fooled everybody on stage, and a Swiss television
audience of hundreds of thousands by the same occasion. Bercoff even claimed he met personally
with President Trump before he was elected President of the United States, which fact seems to be
true.
Actually, most French spies in Switzerland are easy to frame, simply because many of them do
not do much efforts with discretion and do not dread the passive and overly courteous Swiss
counterintelligence. I noticed, those French spies when they are male often belong to the barbouze
category. I mean in the vein of the muscular and brazen former Service Action soldier sort, who
upon their setting foot on the Swiss soil magically transforms in CEOs of respectable real estate or
consulting firms or the like. Therefrom, identifying male French spies in Switzerland is no more
difficult than spotting French immigrants having the demeanor and brazen manners of thugs while
posing as CEOs and senior executives. If ever my reader can remember of Al Pacino starring as
“Tony Montana” in Brian de Palma’s film Scarface (1983), then he is able to spot French flying
agents and super-agents in Switzerland easily and without my help. Then their female colleagues
distinguish themselves with an enterprising attitude and a similar boldness very rarely encountered
in Swiss women, which in this country make them shine as a lighthouse by a dark night can be.
We have seen, as Snowden testified, that spies in Switzerland do not have to dread the Swiss
authorities, which even close their eyes on about everything the former may do, indeed. The latest
example of it, humorous too, yet authentic, is Jean-Marc Gadoullet, a DGSE intelligence officer of
the Service Action with rank of Colonel. For Gadoullet publicly introduces himself as “former
French spy” who reconverted as “advisor in sensitive affairs”. Below is my translation from French
of an excerpt of Swiss newspaper Le Temps about Gadoullet.
“According to one of his relatives, he is a quiet pensioner established with his wife on the Vaud
Riviera, and who founded a company in Geneva to receive ʻsome feesʼ to supplement his retirement
pension. But how do you explain that Jean-Marc Gadoullet, a 49-year-old former French officer,
was shot in the shoulder in Northern Mali on last November 23, while trying to get around an army
roadblock in a region infested with Al-Qaida fighters?
“The spectacular episode sheds an unprecedented light on a little-known sector: that of shock
soldiers who reconvert in private security, of which Switzerland has become a land of choice.
“According to an article recently published by Intelligence Online newsletter,[724] Colonel Jean-
Marc Gadoullet is a ʻrespected figureʼ in the DGSE’s Service Action, the French Foreign
Intelligence Service. He belonged to the former ʻ11st Chocʼ, an elite unit on the frontier of
espionage and parachute commandos, responsible for deep infiltrations into hostile territory and
other secret missions.
“[…] Last September, Jean-Marc Gadoullet founded in Geneva a structure called ʻOpérations et
Organisations Spéciales Sàrlʼ [Special Organizations and Operations Ltd.] aka OPOS, whose stated
purpose is to offer services such as business settlement and solicitation, security goods, workforce,
and businesses”.[725]
With lawyer Thierry Jacques Ulmann, his partner in Switzerland, Gadoullet much expanded his
activities since. Together they also created XENOS Sàrl, and a foundation named ICARE. Ulmann
is the head or partner in a number of businesses based in the same country, with a focus on financial
intelligence.
On March 12, 2017, however, Swiss newspaper Le Temps published an article titled “Under
Pressure from Bern, Private Security Companies Come out of the Shadow”. In it, we learn that the
Swiss Government flushed out a hundred of companies offering private security and intelligence
gathering abroad, and that most of those businesses settled their activities in Western French-
speaking Switzerland. For, since 2016, the Swiss law obliges companies active in the service of
physical protection or of private intelligence to declare their mandates out of Switzerland and
Europe. Therefore, the measure does not apply to another hundred such businesses concentrating
their activities on Switzerland. As a matter of fact, the Swiss Government itself acknowledges,
“Many have a field of action too limited to fall under the law; those that are active in Switzerland
only, for example”.[726]
The government in Bern thus called for an interview Bertrand de Turckheim, head of Axis and
formerly commander of the 1st RPIMA, again. De Turckheim acknowledged he “was” intelligence
officer in the DGSE and in the DRM, but he specified his customers are in Switzerland and in
Europe. Jean-Philippe Lafont, ex-French military and head of Tara, based near Neuchatel, was
asked to specify his exact activities either. Then the Swiss Government identified a number of
British and American companies with similar activities.
Finally, or not, is the DGSE going to settle an official subsidiary in Geneva next to the
governmental palace in Bern, with a panel “DGSE. We recruit” above its door? I would be in no
way surprised to learn this someday.

——
 NOTES.

[1] ELF Acquitaine was the name of a leading French oil company that was forced to merge with its national competitors Total
and Fina, following the Affair Elf Acquitaine and due to a sulfurous reputation. At the same time, the French Government promised
to the people “there would be no connection between French petroleum companies and spies anymore”.
[2] Crédit Lyonnais is a leading French private yet but state controlled bank that was purchased in 2003 by Crédit Agricole,
another French leading and state controlled bank.
[3] See Wikipedia (fr) “Affaire du Crédit lyonnais.”

[4] Articles of the French Code of Defense D 3p. 126-1 to D 3126-4. JORF n° 265 du 14 novembre 1982, p. 3423.

[5] The allowed budget passed from two to 1 billion French Francs, or about $400 million in 2000.

[6] Similar provisions exist for the DGSI and the GIC, and for some other intelligence agencies to satisfy the need for regional
cells, mainly.
[7] Stanley Milgram’s “small world” experiment (1967) became the basis for the subsequent “six degrees of separation” theory,
and for the book Six Degrees, ultimately, in which the author demonstrates that anyone is frequently closer to others than we figure,
even in an hypothetic world populated by billions of people living in hundreds of nations, and within thousands of cultures and
subcultures.
[8] The true average printing per issue of those publications typically amounts in the surroundings of 1,000 to 6,000 copies,
whereas their claimed circulation generally are in the surroundings of 16,000 to 45,000.
[9] Commonly, French intelligence workers are paid cheaply, as it will be shown later with examples and figures.

[10] Each time a punctual intelligence mission entails the use of a too expensive gear, another similar company that owns it is
asked to lend it for the duration of this mission. In a year, this may happen a number of time in an intelligence cell.
[11] Military programming law 2014-2019, published on December 18, 2013.

[12] As states an order dated November 17, 1958, six months after General De Gaulle took the power through a revolution of
palace backed by the military and the SDECE.
[13] Office of the Director of National Intelligence; Remarks and Q&A by the Director of National Intelligence Mr. Mike
McConnell; John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard University; Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; Cambridge, MA, Dec. 2,
2008.
[14] In the aftermath of the WWII, the new French Government had given to this agency a civilian status when it was named
DGSS. The provision resumed when the DGSS changed its name for DGER for a short while, when it changed again for SDECE in
1945. In 1982, the foreign intelligence service was placed under the authority of the military, and so of the Ministry of Defense.
However, in reality, the agency has always been ruled by the military, from the inception in 1944, as it had ever been from 1871 to
1940, when the WWII broke out, under the same name, 2nd Bureau.
[15] I will cite Dufresse, aka Pierre Siramy a dozen of times or so in this book. Dufresse was a senior executive of the DGSE
with a 25-year career in this agency. He experienced serious troubles after his publishing of a book on this agency, public revelations,
and shattering criticism. In particular, in 2010, on an interview he gave to Canal+ television channel, Dufresse bluntly said about the
DGSE, “But … we are the French KGB!,” and added that he perceived the agency as “a little North-Korea”. Circa 2012, Dufresse
was coerced, or fooled I could not say, into signing an exclusivity contract with Global Literary Management, a French publishing
house in New York City owned by Didier Imbot, son of General René Imbot, himself former Director of the DGSE. Unsurprisingly,
Global Literary Management never translated and published any book Dufresse authored, for the true and only reason of this
exclusivity contract actually was to prevent that they be published in English in the United States, or worse that Dufresse publishes a
still more devastating book with more details on the DGSE in this country.
[16] Specified in the Art. 2 of the decree of April 2, 1982 of the creation of the DGSE. This decree says that the
counterespionage mission of the new DGSE consists, outside the national territory, in searching information on the activities of
foreign intelligence services, on their operations in progress or scheduled against France more especially, and to hinder those actions
whenever possible “in order to prevent their consequences”.
[17] This really happened in August 1999, and thereafter.

[18] The DGSE has been doing this commonly for decades in African countries, in South-American countries, in the French-
speaking region of Canada (Quebec), in the United States, Britain, Ireland, Switzerland, and in Belgium, often jointly with the Soviet
KGB, and thereafter with the Russian SVR, for much I know, as I never heard of joint operations with the Russian military agency,
GRU. However, I know the French counterintelligence service, DST cooperated with its Russian counterpart, the FSB, in Lebanon
against Israeli operatives and agents in this country until 2008 at least.
[19] The DGSE often did this on the occasions of GATT and then WTO meetings and rounds.

[20] The DGSE regularly does this in several countries since the 1960s, by using activist groups, opinion leaders, and NGOs,
mainly.
[21] The DGSE often does this, since it is part of the other above-mentioned actions.
 [22] The DGSE does this consistently. In particular, it did it against U.S. companies Microsoft, Monsanto, McDonald, Coca
Cola, against Amazon in particular, and against American and British tobacco companies. Equally and similarly, the DGSE is very
active in the U.S. movie industry, and the takeover attempts in the United States of MGM and of Universal Pictures were entirely
planned and supervised by this agency, as I knew it firsthand about the latter company. The enumeration above by far is not
exhaustive, as many smaller and lesser-known companies, mostly Americans, were concerned.
[23] Harsh forms of punishment await operatives of the DGSE who make profit of those special occasions to express their
discontent over the carelessness this agency displayed for them while they were in trouble abroad. In the 1980s, one such disgruntled
flying agent, officially a commissioned officer of the French Army, ended up in a psychiatric asylum where he became insane for
real; a fact the media abstain from reporting about, unsurprisingly. No one ever heard of him since. I have firsthand knowledge of
field agents whose lives were made a misery, and who died from varied diseases or simply from their unhealthy life conditions in a
couple of years.
[24] Actress Madeleine Stowe in The General’s Daughter, 1999.

[25] To the attention of the reader knowledgeable in the fields of terrorism and counter-terrorism, for a while I was attentive to
talks on the subject of whether terrorists are manipulated or not, counter-terrorism specialists Brian Jenkins and Marc Sageman in
particular. However, my personal opinion still is that those “field terrorists” are manipulated people in an overwhelming number of
cases, at least because they have been exposed to propaganda prior their joining a terrorist network. In numerous cases, and
increasingly often, their pedigrees demonstrate they self-indoctrinated while reading Jihadist propaganda on the Internet, before they
became “loners” acting entirely by their own. Actually, those would-be-terrorists are desperate and disgruntled North African
immigrants, whose discontent and frustration are taken as opportunities to give to them the cause they need as alibi justifying their
violence that was more or less suppressed until moment. In other cases, they are tricked, converted to Islam, and recruited in prison
while they still were petty criminals, and thus their manipulations begin and resume.
[26] See Lexicon, “Occuper la place”.

[27] The creation of false protest movements and activist groups was an invention of Joseph Fouché, French Minister of Police
under the 1st Empire (1804-1815). Fouché found the idea to spot isolated and unknown would-be-conspirators who ambitioned to
assassinate Napoleon Bonaparte, by creating fake cells of dissenters acting as lures, and thus he foiled their plans and arrested them.
Fouché’s false conspirators became a common method that eventually evolved and extended to creating political parties that thus
stood under the discrete control of the secret police, and whose claims and actions could be tamed. By this means, special units of the
police and domestic intelligence agencies could forestall the natural emergence and actions of independent and uncontrollable
political parties, or of political parties created by enemies of France. The Front National has always been such a bogus political party
under tight surveillance and control—otherwise, it would have been disbanded for long, and its leaders would have been forced to
flee the country, as this happens to all true extremist parties whose existence all prove ephemeral despite the success some collect at
times. Of late, the case of the Gilet jaune (Yellow vest) protest movement is a good example of those authentic parties that are nipped
in the bud by means that will be summarily explained in a next chapter of this book.
[28] Methods relevant to this goal are explained in the chapter 20.

[29] These units are 1er RPIMA, 13e RDP, and Commandos Marine, which all belong to the COS. See Lexicon, “COS”.

[30] Informants and secrets agents are often recruited by using this method either.

[31] These words are put between commas because they commonly include deserters of the DGSE and people who refuse to let
themselves be recruited or to cooperate (see chapter 10).
[32] The DGSE, in most instances.

[33] The SDECE and it successor the DGSE have a long record of coup d’états, revolutions, revolutions of palaces, and
assassinations in continental Africa, for which it sometimes hire anonymous mercenaries, for long and until the 1990s led by Belgian
mercenary Robert Denard aka Bob Denard.
[34] It seems this is what happened in 2006 in Britain to Russian former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, and more recently in
2018, to former GRU military officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripal, in Britain too.
[35] “As our old friend and ally, France’s place awaits her wherever she decides to resume her leading role”.

[36] As an aside, many of those spies sent to the United States transit via Canada, from the province of Quebec in a majority of
instances; not all of them by far though. For long, the SDECE and then the DGSE, and the Russian KGB and then the SVR, have
been using Canada as an “espionage hub” to facilitate their intelligence activities in the United States. French case officers and
couriers thus can quickly go back and forth from Canada to the United States, provide their agents in the latter country with varied
helps, and communicate safely with them, thus turning round the tricky use of the Internet and of radio transmitters.
[37] In the 1990s, it was a military issue 9mm Berretta 92, a gun with which many DGSE recruits received their short training at
that time—this French version is of a bad manufacturing quality and has a disappointing accuracy, similar to that of Colt 1911 series
manufactured for the military.
[38] A very common case is that of a recruit who is son or daughter of someone who is working with the DGSE already.

[39] Names cited here are relevant to French indigenous culture. Therefore, it is normal if some of them do not ring a bell to the
American reader. French specialists in influence favor national writers, and they go as far as to run websites, blogs, and forums on
intelligence, military, and police subjects, more or less anonymously.
[40] Former agent of the Service Action Dominique Prieur can be considered as first in a series of rare exceptions about this. See
here and here.
[41] I experienced this firsthand in the Army when I enlisted in the SDECE, in 1980.

[42] Achieved in 1978, the nuclear power plant of Fessenheim is one among the oldest of its kind in France. Additionally, the
French Navy uses this plant as training center and as a temporary workplace for sailors, navigating officers, technicians, and
engineers, who work on nuclear reactors powering French strategic and spy submarines. For crewmen in French nuclear submarines
must not be left with the high responsibility of driving a nuclear reactor for too long in a working environment that is particularly
stressful and with rare daylight exposure. The solution to this problem has been to send them working regularly in civilian nuclear
power plants, which allows them to stay fit to resume their jobs while enjoying daylight exposure. The privileged relationship
between the Ministry of Defense and the public energy supplier EDF greatly facilitates this special provision.
[43] Early retirement in the French military, formally called “compensation” (same word and meaning in English) is possible
after 15 years of service only. Military retirees are helped finding out good positions in the civilian, which provision includes their
partners. Thus, a non-commissioned officer on early retirement with no diploma may however enjoy an above-the-average life
standing and be the owner of his home, as to be paid a retirement pension while having a job in the civilian are a legal provision.
[44] In the building of a four-room apartment, located rue des Rasselins, Paris, where I was lodged, near the headquarters of the
DGSE, the janitor was an active low-ranking police officer. Additionally, an old delivery vehicle remained parked near the building
entrance all year long, in which one or two small cameras with wide angle lens allowed the surveillance of the main entrance of the
building and the street from a remote location. Sometimes, someone came to change the batteries of the camera and the license plates
of the car. In general, the DGSE has hidden cameras in streets surrounding its headquarters. Allegedly, since the 1990s, the DGSE
would even have hidden cameras in the wagons rolling on the short subway line Porte des Lilas-Gambetta, because this train passes
under the headquarters of the DGSE.
[45] The choice of those items ranges from paper documents to a laptop computer, fake small explosives and incendiary bombs,
and their detonators.
[46] I did not, except a longtime ago when I was in the Army.

[47] My psychiatrist had also been trained in psychoanalysis.

[48] Alain Dewerpe, Espion: une anthropolgie historique du secret d’État contemporain, Gallimard pub., 1994.

[49] Schadenfreude (compound of schaden “damage,” “harm,” and freude, “joy”) is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-
satisfaction that arise when learning about or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of other people. A New York Times
article in 2002 cited a number of scientific studies on schadenfreude, which it defined as, “delighting in others’ misfortune.” Many
such studies are based on social comparison theory, the idea that when people around us have bad luck, we look better to ourselves.
Other researchers found that people with low self-esteem are more likely to experience schadenfreude as it comes to alleviate their
frustrations.
[50] The reader may easily find videos on Internet showing trainings in French elite units, which actually are parts of selection
processes only. In particular, the final stages of those trainings preceding final approvals are never shown.
[51] Before he died early in age in 2006, Bernard Rapp made another espionage film under the title, Tiré à part (1996), which I
warmly recommend too, due to its realism.
[52] As an aside, the same applies the more so to all personnel working in French public and private schools, which explains
why French teachers have a leftist stance, overwhelmingly and notoriously, with membership in the Socialist Party in most instances.
The Ministry of Education is considered a strategic public body, because it is in primary and secondary schools that all citizens are
taught not only national and patriotic values, but opinions in nearly all things as well. Because of this, the Ministry of Education
closely monitors French Christian private schools to which families of the French upper-middle and upper classes favor for their
children, although a large majority of those people are secular. Additionally, teaching programs and schoolbooks in all French private
school must be approved by the Ministry of Education under legal provisions, in order to prevent the possible emergence of rightist
biased educational programs and schoolbooks in those “parallel establishments”. Actually, the main advantage of private schools over
public schools in France is to shelter children from contacts with bad behaviors, drugs, and juvenile criminality, frequent in the latter,
and common and even trivialized in urban areas.
[53] In this context, the noun “fatigue” must be understood in a military sense, also called “combat fatigue” aka “combat stress
reaction,” which the unenlightened reader may translate as “moral exhaustion”.
[54] Guy Briole, François Lebigot, Bernard Lafont, Psychiatrie militaire en situation opérationnelle, ADDIM pub. Paris, 1998.

[55] Walter Nicolai, Geheime Mächte. Internationale Spionage und ihre Bekämfung im Weltkrieg und Heute, Leipzig, 1923.

[56] Design department of Renault carmaker, France Telecom-Orange, and Publicis advertising.

[57] There is no “military unit specialized in video surveillance” in the French military, actually, but some military indeed are
sent to places where they are taught video surveillance and are asked to carry on this type of duties, presented as integral to the
current mission of counter-terrorism in France.
[58] Erasmus is a European educational program, well-known in this continent.

[59] L’Auberge Espagnole, literally, The Spanish Inn, also known as Pot Luck (U.K.) and, The Spanish Apartment (Australia), is
a 2002 French-Spanish film directed and written by Cédric Klapisch.
[60] Haloperidol is a chemical substance available in any pharmacy, on prescription only because it can be lethal in case of
overtake, sold in France under the name, Haldol. “Haloperidol is normally used in the treatment of schizophrenia, tics in Tourette
syndrome, mania in bipolar disorder, nausea and vomiting, delirium, agitation, acute psychosis, and hallucinations in alcohol
withdrawal. Haloperidol typically works in thirty to sixty minutes. Takes of Haloperidol may result in a movement disorder known
as tardive dyskinesia, which may be permanent. Neuroleptic malignant syndrome and QT interval prolongation may occur. In older
people with psychosis due to dementia, it results in an increased risk of death. When taken during pregnancy, it may result in
problems in the infant. It should not be used in people with Parkinson’s disease.”–Excerpt from Wikipedia, “Haloperidol,” December
2017.
[61] For long and since the 19th century at least, British spies used to call “the great game” their general missions of espionage
and counterespionage opposing several parties. More rarely, French intelligence executives, specialists in geopolitics, chief analysts,
and strategists use exactly the same expression (“le grand jeu”) while alluding, in particular, to the secret war of oil in the Arabic
peninsula and up to the region of the Caspian Sea. However, the expression is largely seen as a romanced and “old-school” perception
of the trade of intelligence, with its intrigues, large networks of spies, and diplomats of varied sorts.
[62] Prieur, Dominique, Agent secrète, Fayard pub., 1995.

[63] Lucie Aubrac is one among those woman spies whose story was made a film in 1997, under an eponymous title.

[64] This point will be exemplified with true stories and anecdotes in the chapter 11 on physical eliminations.

[65] Those courses do not necessarily relate to fundamentals and techniques in civilian intelligence, and they are not classified in
this case. Many are about computer technology and software, specialties in social science, management, business, and foreign
languages.
[66] At that time, Eric Denécé was working with the SGDSN, and he was simultaneously giving courses on information warfare.
His name will arise again in the chapter 27.
[67] Christopher M. Andrew and David N. Dilks, Eds. The missing dimension: Governments and intelligence communities in the
twentieth century, London: Macmillan, 1984. Ft. from the authors.
[68] Eric Denécé and Gérald Arboit, The development of intelligence studies in France, Centre Français de Recherche sur le
Renseignement–CF2R, Jan. 2012.
[69] In France, Social Security refers to public and compulsory health insurance, and it names the concerned public service
subsuming the four following departments: 1. illness, 2. old age / retirement, 3. family, and 4. work accident and occupational
disease.
[70] My ex-colleague, Frédéric de Pardieu, was sent to Nepal in the mid-1990s, and came back from this country seriously ill
due to food poisoning with adulterated sodas.
[71] All those agents, typically, came back from Mongolia with an irrational fondness for this country. In France, DGSE
employees and agents in domestic influence, and also communist and green activism associations, made a large promotion of the use
of Mongolian yurts. For a few years, the DGSE is also discreetly promoting the use of Mongolian yurts in certain foreign countries,
in the French speaking part of Switzerland in particular, still for reasons that remain unknown to me.
[72] Several of those agents went back from Mongolia with an irrational fondness for yurts … and nothingness!

[73] See Lexicon, “Airgap,” and “TEMPEST”.

[74] The Gendarmerie and its mission will be presented and described in the chapter 13 on domestic intelligence.

[75] See their exact legal power in the Lexicon, at the entry “OPJ”.

[76] Claude Silberzahn, Au Cœur du Secret: 1500 jours aux commandes de la DGSE, Fayard pub., 1995, p. 51. My translation
from French.
[77] The DGA, which stands for Délégation Générale de l’Armement (General Delegation for the Arms Industry), is the French
Government Defense procurement and technology agency responsible for the program management, development, and purchase of
weapon systems for the French military. My father was official in this military agency in the 1950s, in a service specialized in
research on equipment for airborne troops, named Direction des Études et Fabrication d’Armement–DEFA (Directorate for
Armaments Studies and Manufacture) at that time.
[78] As defined by Article R. 1332-1 and R. 1332-2 of the French Code of Defense, respectively. See Lexicon, “OIV,” and
“SAIV”.
[79] This figure, given by the NGO Amnesty International, does not match at all reliable reports and news published since 2013,
with figures such as more than $8 billion in 2014, and $15 billion in 2015.
[80] See Lexicon with the entries “SGDSN” and “ANSSI” to know more about this point.

[81] Today, another agency called, ANSSI, is in charge of this particular mission of prevention against the risk of industrial
espionage.
[82] In the DGSE, technicians who solve compatibility problems with computer software, and who install or update them are
“flying technicians.” They are constantly on the move from a building to another in another city. The best are often sent to solve
problems far away in the country or even abroad. They do not really have an office but a cell phone.
[83] Bull SAS, aka Groupe Bull, Bull Information Systems, or simply Bull, has its headquarters based in Les Clayes-sous-Bois,
France.
[84] In this context in particular, the DGSE is working closely with the BND, its German counterpart.

[85] The same about the Russian intelligence community and for operatives it sends abroad and to the United States in
particular.
[86] See also Lexicon, “Nonverbal language”.

[87] This happens, especially in Paris.

[88] In France, “schizophrenia” indeed was the chosen qualifier often used in the media to name this new paradigm, until it was
definitely replaced by “political correctness”. Few journalists venture into elaborating about the cause of it because this would oblige
to describe changes of a political order, themselves censored by the same psychological phenomenon.
 [89] Protection du patrimoine économique et technologique. See Lexicon, “Patrimoine,” and “SISSE” the agency responsible for
it in the industrial sector.
[90] See Lexicon: “OIV,” “SAIV,” “EMOPT,” and “ANSSI”.

[91] “Le traitant doit bien tenir en laisse son agent.”

[92] French case officers trivialize this perception by saying that “cemeteries are full of irreplaceable people.”

[93] This definition must be weighed in the light of the privatization of the services, because numerous full-time employees of
the DGSE in particular do not work in its headquarters or in its other places. Instead, they stay clandestine employees, exactly as
agents are. This leaves many of them with the frustrating feeling to work for a mafia-like organization, a faceless power yet
omnipresent and omnipotent.
[94] Equivalent to a high school degree in the United States.

[95] « délai de recrutement d’environ 5 mois (le temps de passer tous les tests de sélection) »—Emploipublic.fr, « La DGSE
recrute sur concours et sur contrat, » April 3, 2017, update June 26, 2017.
[96] « la DGSE s’ouvre à de nouveaux recrutements pour mieux préserver la sécurité des intérêts et ressortissants français à
travers le monde ». Defense.gouv.fr, DGSE, « Nos besoins en recrutement », June 28, 2017,
[97] It seems Edward Snowden fit a similar pattern in his country.

[98] Commonly, “gray information” (information grise) are internal documents in private companies or state agencies such as
ministries, police directorates, and the military. A military user manual for an equipment, for example, is gray information.
[99] I was in touch with some of those French publishing houses in 2000, which I name again in the chapter 27.

[100] This problem has been straightforwardly brought upon by Soviet intelligence thinker and strategist Georgy Arbatov, who
testified about the difficulties he faced himself, though through a different context, of course. Arbatov said, “A dictator is naturally
afraid of strong and bright people around him. They can become rivals and, in any case, they cannot be relied upon as obedient and
mindless executives of his orders. Such people are moved three, four or five rungs down the ladder.” Georgy Arbatov, The System: An
Insider’s Life in Soviet Politics, 1993, Three Rivers Press, p. 243.
[101] Numerous civilian employees of the DGSE with specialties in telecommunication interception are officially hired and paid
for by Orange S.A., including the Director of the COMINT service of the DGSE himself. The COMINT service of the DGSE,
internally and anonymously named, Service Technique (Technical Service), is part of the Direction Technique (Technical Directorate)
of this intelligence agency.
[102] In spite of its left-leaning culture, the French society in his entirety remains deeply influenced by its monarchic past and its
respect for inherited special privileges. For long, and until not long ago, positions in foreign affairs were largely reserved to heirs of
the ancient noblesse. Even the left-leaning military largely limits accesses to senior positions to heirs of this same middle and to sons
of high-ranking military officers, provided they stand by leftist values in all cases.
[103] In the French intelligence community, police, Gendarmerie, and customs, the French word direction, or “directorate,” is
customarily favored over département (department) to name a large specialized branch. For example, the letter “D” of DGSE and
DGSI both mean Direction (Directorate). Even the large specialized branches of these two intelligence agencies are named directions
themselves. In the DGSE, things are further complicated by the fact that a directorate is an administrative name that is barely used
beyond the exclusive circle of the directorial staff at the headquarters. This particular provision owes to a need to compartmentalize
secrecy and staffs, as explained in detail in the chapter 4. In sum, directorate is nothing but an administrative name given to a service
or even to a small cluster of services, rather called department in the United States. However, in the DGSE, a directorate commands
one or several larges services, each with a corresponding Chief of Service.
[104] But planed career rises in France by far do not limit to the realm of intelligence, as this even extend to the private sector.

[105] The origin of this recommendation always seems “opaque,” whence the lack of further precisions. The reader will find
other clues about this particular question in other chapters.
[106] “I was not intending to go beyond Italian and recent examples, but I am unwilling to leave out Hiero, the Syracusan, he
being one of those I have named above. This man, as I have said, made head of the army by the Syracusans, soon found out that a
mercenary soldiery, constituted like our Italian condottieri, was of no use; and it appearing to him that he could neither keep them not
let them go, he had them all cut to pieces, and afterwards made war with his own forces and not with aliens”. Machiavelli, The
Prince, C. xiii.
[107] To the reader who wants to know more about this point, I recommend especially the reading of Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping
the Memory of the World Wars, 1990, by historian George L. Mosse, and Reflections on Violence, 1919, by George Eugène Sorel.
[108] The reason of State, at last is mentioned on occasions of meetings between senior intelligence executives and politicians.

[109] The DGSE sent me to pass my physical health checks at ACMS (Association interprofessionnelles des Centres Médicaux
et Sociaux), a non-profit medical association, in one of its Paris offices located 16 Rue Montgolfier, near the Arts-et-Métiers subway
station.
[110] See Lexicon, “44e Régiment d’Infanterie”.

[111] About $3,000 in 1996.

[112] Pierre Lethier, Argent secret: L’espion de l’Affaire ELF parle (Secret money: The spy of the Affair ELF speaks), Albin
Michel pub., Jan. 2001.
[113] In French civil law, a Société Civile Immobilière–SCI (Civil Real Estate Company) is a civil society whose unique
purpose is real estate ownership. It is sometimes named Real Estate Management Company (SGI). The use of an SCI allows the
possession of a land property by several people collectively, and it can facilitate its transmission through the sale of shares, as with a
business. This form of society requires two partners at minimum at the moment of its creation. During its existence, an SCI may be
held by a single partner, but this situation can only be transient according to article 1844-5 of the French Civil Code.
[114] This is not a conceit of mine. For long, everyone in France knows that members of the elites receive much more lenient
sentences than ordinary people do, or even no sentence at all.
[115] Miles Copeland Jr., The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics, Simon & Schuster, 1st Ed. of May 15, 1970,
p. 203 and f.
[116] See here for further details about this place.

[117] Les agents s’usent comme des piles.

[118] Certain DGSE specialists in ciphering and their colleagues who work in influence much appreciate Quenau.

[119] The reading of The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, by Eric Hoffer, will provide the reader
with an accurate insight of the profile of many of those under-agents, and of many agents as well. The DGSE would not disagree with
everything I say about many of its agents and under-agents abroad. However, Hoffer’s book is about unknown in the DGSE, and
totally unknown to the French public, in spite of its great interest and huge success in the United States.
[120] For decades, the 2 Chevaux has been a highly popular down-the-range and inexpensive French car, built by Citroën
carmaker. It can be considered as the French equivalent of the Volkswagen Beetle. Many French people regard this car as a strong
symbol of French identity and patriotism, which eventually evolved toward a status of symbol of French leftism.
[121] For decades, the DGSE, the Soviet KGB and then the Russian SVR together use Adidas as a front, which fact explains, in
passing, why Cuban leader Fidel Castro was often seen wearing conspicuously an Adidas sport jacket. Indeed, Adidas gained a status
of iconic brand of the far left, and also in Palestine for similar reasons..
[122] The two key men of France-Navigation were Giulio Ceretti and Georges Gosnat, also Soviet agents. They graduated at the
École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris–HEC Paris (School of High Studies in Commerce).
[123] Previously, I mentioned this realistic espionage story. The story of Lucien de Rubempré fills two volumes of the Comédie
humaine (The Human Comedy), to which Balzac gave the appropriate titles, Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions), and Splendeurs et
misères des courtisanes (The Harlot High and Low). Again, I recommend the reading of these novels, because the story and its
psychological dimension differ in no way from today’s realities, pertinent indeed to the super-agent’s category, along with Dumas’
The Count of Monte Cristo.
[124] The KGB would be the inventor of this trick.

[125] A number of French Presidents made for themselves reputations of womanizers, François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac
in particular.
[126] This book is Dictionnaire de la mythologie grecque et romaine (today The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology), by
Pierre Grimal.
[127] A similar description can be found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V-TR) at the entry
“Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” Otherwise, the Wikipedia page “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” will provide the reader with
satisfactory information.
[128] « Les activités de la DGSE sont constitutionnellement couvertes par le secret défense ».

[129] A concourse of circumstances, purely fortuitous and irrelevant to the subject of espionage, featured an exact replica of the
way a case officer ordinarily behaves with his agent, in the form of an American TV commercial for Crest toothpaste brand titled, You
Can Say Anything with a Smile. The campaign was welcomed by the public with some reserve, I assume; we can understand why
since it leaves anyone who watches it may easily finds it weird or disturbing. It is still possible to find videos of varied versions of
this TV ad on YouTube, by typing the name of the brand Crest and the title I just cited.
[130] The practice is no novelty by far. Ancient accounts dating back to several centuries tell it was customary in China for
diplomatic envoys to mimic the joy, anger, indignation, and all other facial and bodily expressions of the lords who sent them
delivering their messages. It is also said that those couriers often were killed on the spot, as a result.
[131] “La méfiance qui règle la conduite de l’officier traitant ne doit jamais paraître dans les rapports qu’il entretient avec ses
agents.”
[132] See Lexicon, “Fonds spéciaux”.

[133] « Partout où nécessité fait loi ».

[134] « Tout est permis, mais il est interdit de se faire prendre ».

[135] I will have the opportunity to tell more about General Guyaux in the chapter 27 of this book.

[136] Bernard Caillaud will be summarily presented in another chapter.

[137] Professor Henri Laborit was Research Master of the Armed Forces Health Service (Maître de Recherche du Service de
Santé des Armées). He was well known outside the realms of military and intelligence as a reputed scientist, including in the United
States as recipient of the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, and as the author of several books on behavioral
biology. Additionally, Laborit was a pioneer of the complex theory and of self-organization in France. It is worth noting that Laborit
joined a French think-thank known as the Groupe des Dix (the Group of Ten), active between 1969 and 1976. This think tank was led
by French sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin, lesser known as intelligence officer with a specialty in influence and propaganda
from 1946 (see Lexicon “Somnambule”). The Groupe des Dix led researches mixing politics and science, with a focus on the possible
contribution of cybernetics and information theory to the study of the relation between politics, violence, and economic growth. The
reader may find unsurprising that Laborit’s interests and researches also included psychotropic drugs and memory in the service of
intelligence activities. Anecdotally, a TV journalist once asked to Laborit, in substance and from personal recollection, “What you are
explaining to us about the mind of Man makes me wondering, ʻHow are you seeing friendshipʼ? Laborit befuddled the journalist as
he answered, with a warm and ingenuous smile, as often, “I don’t have any friend; only competitors. We can say we have friends until
the age of about sixteen. Past this age, we have competitors only.”
[138] For the record, the struggle of passion vs. reason seems to have been first seriously studied by Hume in his A Treatise of
Human Nature. In it, Hume wrote, “Reason is, and ought only to be, a slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office
than to serve and obey them.” At this point of this chapter, the reader has no difficulty understanding that passion, as Hume describes
it, is nothing but the innate need to being and its ensuing drives that behavioral biology explains in a more scientific way, and that
reason is the acquired experience / knowledge that must normally ponder innate urges to make them more effective. It seems that
behavioral biology relies on a same premise as one in modern epistemology saying, all actions, even when “reasonable,” are
passionate expressions. Wherefrom, the superior effectiveness of manipulation over mere persuasion, i.e. tampering with the
unconscious rather than with the conscious, according to philosophers this time.
[139] I have had the opportunity to experience simultaneously hunger, thirst, cold, and extreme physical exhaustion for short
periods of several days, and also sleep deprivation up to five days. These experiences allowed me to figure out what the theory says.
Therefrom, I can testify that such experiences engender repeated and short hallucinations and false perceptions, invariably. Sleep
deprivation for durations in excess of 6 days are said to be dangerous and likely to cause permanent and irreversible mood disorders.
[140] See Melnik’s quote on courage.

[141] These causes, I call “natural,” arbitrarily, have been pinpointed, named, and extensively explained by some historians,
sociologists, and thinkers, such as Toynbee, Spengler, Sorokin, Schubart, Berdyaev, Quigley, Huntington, for the authors I know.
[142] These researchers, Nobel Prize winners for some, are Gerd Gigerenzer, John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, Konrad Lorenz, Karl
von Frisch, Nikolaas Tinbergen, Henry Laborit, Sigmund Freud (discussed in Civilization and its Discontent, 1929), and Burrhus F.
Skinner in, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971).
[143] As previously exemplified with the case of U.S. soldiers of the Vietnam War who compensated for their ordeals by
inflicting violence upon their fellows. See here for the record.
[144] Religious rules of conducts and regulations on varied topics often make sense at some point or we just lost sight of their
ancient practical reasons. Some among the best examples relate to strict religious practices with regard to food, which were presented
as formal aims intending to reach real and salutary aims in food hygiene in hot countries, where ignorance and carelessness with meat
storage and consumption caused devastating epidemics and countless deaths.
[145] Here I am making allusion to the Biblical story of Jesus, Barabbas, and Pontius Pilate. Accounts of the First Council of
Nicaea, in 325 A.D., would also apply, as far as one admits that the formal aim of the definition of God’s essence in fact served the
real concern of whether the Mediterranean world had to be politically centralized under Rome or divided.
[146] Even though Freud attacked Communism, and said that this political doctrine is an “illusion,” thus seriously challenging
the assumption of some who mistakenly hold the famous psychoanalyst as a would-be-Communist. Freud was a secular thinker only.
[147] In the late 20th century, French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser gave further strength to this postulate by asserting
that the ruling class in capitalist countries—implicitly meaning the United States—resorts to what he calls “repressive state
apparatuses” in order to dominate the working class. That is to say, still according to Althusser, government, courts, police, and armed
forces. He further asserted that the ruling class has control over these repressive state apparatuses, because it also controls the
political and legislative powers. Henceforth, Althusser distinguished the concept of his own of the repressive state apparatuses from
another notion he called “ideological apparatus of the [capitalist] state” (my brackets). He described it as an array of social
institutions and multiple political realities propagating several ideologies, which include a “religious ideological apparatus of the
state”. At this point, Althusser enhanced the Marxist theory on religion, by postulating that Capitalism utilizes Man’s receptivity to
religion as a leverage of this religious apparatus of the State to justify the alienation of the working class, whose individuals would be
devalued to the level of a “commodity”.
[148] By “recent” and “birth of civilization,” for the record, I mean sometimes between the birth of the Neolithic period and the
development of farming we locate 12,000 years ago, and the birth of writing, about 3,200 years B.C. Therefore, this is a very short
period with a sudden beginning suggesting “a spark,” when compared with the first known apparition of Man, and then as a first
species named Homo erectus, about 1.8 million years ago. In other words, no discovery to date comes to suggest the past existence of
anything akin to civilization in the life of Man for 1.7 million years, at least. Of course, another angle from which we can consider
this question, is that of the apparition of behavioral modernity that characterizes the more evolved species, homo sapiens, around
40,000 to 50,000 years ago only, which, thenceforth, could possibly have been caused by exogenous factors, such as the end of the
last glacial period.
[149] In general, liberal societies rely on Freud and reject Jung, and the opposite seems to be true. This fact may exert
tremendous influence at a cultural and even political level. In the mid-1990s, a psychiatrist of the DGSE once recommended me to
attend a conference on Jung, hosted by renowned French psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik. There, among an audience almost exclusively
made of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, I grasped the real aim of the event, which in truth was to discredit Jung and to downplay
his works, in a blatantly partisan and dishonest way biased by secularism.
[150] France is no exception about this. Everybody knows that Edward Snowden is unhappy with his new life in Russia since he
said it himself, in spite of having rendered huge services to this country—willingly or not regardless—and to Russia’s allies, by
publicly exposing CIA and NSA’s secrets. As other similar example, U.S. FBI agent and Russian mole Philip Robert Hanssen,
arrested in 2001, skillfully managed to remain unknown to the Russian foreign intelligence agency (SVR RF) while selling State
secrets to this agency for several tenth of thousands dollars. For Hanssen was knowledgeable enough in intelligence methods to know
he would never have been paid for his service, otherwise. The SVR RF would have asked him for more secrets upon his first delivery,
in exchange for the sole promise not to reveal his name and his betrayal to his employer, the FBI. Thus, Hanssen would have been
expected to continue spying for his Russian handlers without ever being paid for it until the end of his days.
[151] More precisely, those psychiatrists consider that Man is no longer able to have sincere and unselfish feelings of love past
the age of about fifteen—as defined by behavioral biology, again. From this age on, they claim, the deepest motives of love change to
become alibis to selfish interests, and more exactly from a purely scientific standpoint, alibis that come to justify Man’s action
fulfilling his need to being.
[152] Eric Hoffer accurately describes variants of this type of commitment and profile in his enduring bestseller, The True
Believer. This enlightening book, note in passing, was never translated in French and is known to few in the French intelligence
community, whereas its reading for long was recommended in the U.S. CIA, and still today is, very possibly.
[153] As an aside, numerous DGSE employees fit this pattern, which is a core characteristic of the esprit de corps, itself
intending to foster the antagonistic notion “us vs. them”. I personally question the sincerity of esprit de corps in the DGSE, by
arguing that the real cause of it, very often, instead is to be found in past trainings and indoctrination, and in the arranged
impossibility to have relationships with ordinary people who do not belong themselves to this agency. The remarkable and popularly
known British TV series, The Prisoner (1967), repeatedly and realistically shows by which techniques and tricks, serious and
authentic in their principles, someone can be lured into developing a false sense of belonging; although this story is a fiction of the
fantastic genre. In point of fact, The Prisoner is a highly regarded reference in fiction in all intelligence agencies of the World, the
DGSE included. For it can be described as the clever allegory of the initiatory journey of a counterspy, presented as a recollection of
its main character, filled with countless and pertinent symbols and double-entendres never seen in any other fiction to date, and
certainly impossible to reproduce with similar mastery since it equally succeeds at reveling an unenlightened audience.
[154] Anecdotally, note that this find is not new, as it seems to date back and locate to the late 1930s in Nazi Germany, at least.
At that time, some German intelligence officers and expert propagandists said they found surprisingly easier than usual to convert far-
leftists to Nazism than people with moderate political opinions. Eventually, other occidental specialists in counterterrorism noticed
the same easy transfer of people’s extremism with religions, and even from religious extremism to political fanaticism. This fact led
to the conclusion than in many political and religious extremists, the cause is nothing but an alibi to an urge relieving an intense
frustration perceived as too trivial or shameful in the eyes of others, as explained earlier in this book and in another context with the
explanations of Miles Copeland Jr. Anecdotally, about politics vs. religion, the surprising case of Iran is unique and interesting, since
the odd political system of this country is based on “Muslim socialism,” therefore an antithetical myth and its narrative otherwise
borrowing to the cult of personality, very possibly imagined in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, to which the masses of Iran indeed
commit. Making masses of people believing in abstract concepts can go very far, as testifies for the phenomenon known as “cargo
cult” (see Wikipedia with the same keywords).
[155] In a few instances, and according to my own estimates, the DGSE wasted several years of vain efforts of a crew, and
certainly more than one million dollars in money and varied means, in repeated and failed attempts to corrupt or recruit a single
individual who would have complied simply in exchange for a lower middle class job! Let alone the disastrous and costlier
consequences that followed these fiascos in at least one of those instances I know about.
[156] Unlike the reptilian brain, easy to see on a picture of the brain, the reward system actually is a complex neural network
establishing a connection between several areas of the brain, much remote form each other in some instances. In the first instance,
and wholesome, we can talk about a connection between this gathering of particular parts of the brain together called limbic system—
MacLean and behavioral biologists see the limbic system as a whole, and call it the second brain or mid-brain or mammalian brain—
and a particular area of the exterior part of brain, better known to a majority because of its typical circumvolutions, called prefrontal
cortex. MacLean and behavioral biologists call the neocortex “third brain”. In all, the connections of the reward system concern the
prefrontal cortex, therefore, and different parts of the limbic system called nucleus accumbens, ventral pallidum, amygdala, ventral
tegmental area (located very close to the reptilian brain), and the hippocampus.
[157] I borrow the notion of “circulation of elites” to Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, as he described it in his authoritative
Trattato Di Sociologia Generale, 1916 (Mind and Society in 1935 for the Eng. trans.). I will use the term again along this book for the
sake of simplifying all notions and explanations it implies.
[158] Cf. Mosca in, The Ruling Class; Pareto in, The Mind and Society.

[159] This affirmation, however, is recently questioned, following new discoveries with regard to the important memory
structure called hippocampus, in which brand-new neurons would be created during adulthood in a process since then called
“neurogenesis”. Yet neurogenesis would exist in this part of the limbic system only, and could occur under certain conditions.
[160] From a still more scientific approach, a naturally induced intense stimulation of the reward system is mediated by the
mesolimbic dopamine pathway, sometimes referred to as “pleasure center” of the brain, with dopamine as the pleasure
neurotransmitter. Dopamine and serotonin are the main ingredients of the chemical process of the stimulation of the reward system,
which fact comes to explain, in part, the high vulnerability of Man to hard drugs.
[161] But “A man simply cannot conceal himself,” as Chinese philosopher Confucius is quoted as saying. The experienced spy
often is quick at seeing his likes hiding themselves under disguises. For most spies cannot help themselves be who they truly are, at
least by virtue of the recurring Pavlovian method of their trainings, which transforms them into characters more or less oddly
different of the ordinary individual, ironically. Even better than that, the experienced intelligence officer can hazard some pertinent
guesses about which intelligence agency trained an individual he identifies as a spy, or at least that he was not trained by the same
intelligence agency as his, simply by a careful observation of his demeanor. This is hard to explain in concise terms, regretfully. For
wants of a satisfying explanation, say, it is about the same as when art experts are trying to explain how they can make the difference
between a painting by Rembrandt and another made by one of his best pupils, since it is largely based on mere intuition that,
however, must not be taken lightly as irrational or groundless. For, intuition can be described as a “gift” acquired through repeated
experiences i.e. failures and successes, and completed by a background knowledge largely made of bits of information that are not
textual. That is why the DGSE considers seriously intuition, when thus expressed by its specialists.
[162] There is no need to justify the interest of game theory in tactics and strategy, as many English-speaking readers know, I
presume. However, game theory remains largely unknown in the French intelligence community, and in France in general.
[163] The reader will find a relevant example that is a true story, in the chapter 14.

[164] As the Part II of this book will largely relate to influence and the manipulation of bodies of individuals, detailed
explanations of this human characteristic will complete this introduction I actually began in the previous chapter.
[165] For the record, Marx and Engels coined the word “Lumpenproletriat” in the 1840s, to denote people of the proletarian
class aka working class who do not deserve to be included in the society because of their unwillingness or inability to commit to the
class struggle, or because they cannot be useful to the revolutionary cause in any way. Wikipedia provides a larger and satisfying
definition of the word “Lumpenproletriat”.
[166] Most full-time employees of the DGSE and many of its agents themselves do not know this either, for a reason that now is
easy to understand to the reader.
[167] Disgraced top French politician and official Dominique Strauss-Kahn—ex-prominent member of the French Socialist
Party, but truly committed to the progressive doctrine of Saint-Simon—seems to fit this possibility. For the last years, and since his
spectacular disgrace following the scandal he made of himself in New York City in 2011, he is known to be involved in various and
odd business activities in a number of countries, and with Russia in particular since 2013. In 2014, Strauss-Kahn’s reconversion
resulted in the apparent suicide of French-Israeli investor Thierry Loyne, one of his closest associates. Strauss-Kahn seems also to be
in more or less discreet touch with one “former” senior executive of the DGSE at least. As other possible example, since the early
2000s, certain particular patterns that occurred in the life and new activities of French would-be-philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy,
together strongly suggest his reconversion in intelligence activities, and more especially in influence abroad. Between the 1970s and
the late 1990s, Henri-Lévy considerably involved in French domestic influence already, even though he never lived up to the huge
media hype he has been bestowed with—successfully “exported” to the United States until today!—nor had the stature that his
acronym “BHL” is supposed to convey, as ever testified for the poor sales his books made in reality. Actually, Henri-Lévy makes his
comfortable living with a logging company in Africa, he inherited from his parents.
[168] On condition that such trained agents also have an in-depth knowledge in psychology or behaviorism—which must be
very rare, if ever a thus enlightened field agent indeed exists—and an equally rare ability to self-analysis. I speak about it knowingly,
for I have been submitted in France to a social elimination by the DGSE, my former employer. The ordeal lasted for a bit more than
six years before I managed to escape to Switzerland, where I temporarily refuged. However, I was not a flying agent, just a much
sedentary office worker with a specialty in influence, and a marked interest for psychology, psychiatry, and sociology, a cocktail of
knowledge that indeed saved me.
[169] See Lexicon, “Bury (to)” to learn more about this technique.

[170] Frederick II of Prussia, Die Politischen Testament - Testament Politique, “De la Discipline,” pp. 86-87. Fst. 1752. Pub. by
Redigirt von Prof. Dr. Gustav Berthold Volz, Verlag von Reimar Hobbing in berlin, 1920.
[171] Colonel Nicolaï, Forces secrètes, Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Critique pub., Paris, 1932.

[172] For the record, and to those who are interested in History, French King Louis XV promised Voltaire he would be granted
the high honor of his membership in the Académie Française, in exchange for spying on his friend Frederick II of Prussia. In detail,
Voltaire’s mission as a spy was to know the secrets of the Prussian foreign policy between the two wars of Silesia. To do this, Voltaire
had to present before the King of Prussia as a “refugee dissatisfied with the manner he was treated in his own country.” This fact was
discovered and revealed a century later by historian and diplomat Albert de Broglie (1821-1920), who had access to confidential and
diplomatic archives, and who brought it to light in his historical eaasy, Frédéric II et Louis XV, d’après des documents nouveaux;
1742-1744, Calmann Lévy publ., Paris, vol. ii., c. iv., 1884-85.
[173] An ex-colleagues I knew for years partook in the publishing of the first essay on harassment at that time. On an informal
conversation with him, he told me that many more books on the peculiar subject were about to be published soon, but he did not seem
to know the reasons for it.
 [174] See Lexicon, “Code 50”.

[175] See Lexicon, “EMOPT,” and “Fiche S”, and the database.

[176] See files databases in the chapter 17.

[177] The latter details are not trivial. For breaking the moral stamina of an individual by starving him while being repeatedly
exposed to shows of another person eating appetizing dishes is a technique of psychological torture that was frequently used in Soviet
Union against political prisoners and spies. The French police and the Gendarmerie also resort to this trick when attempting to
“break” suspects during their custody, although the practice is denied officially.
[178] The DGSE also resorts to a particular technique on the Internet, called “man-in-the-middle attack,” which this agency has
no difficulty to carry on by reason of its free access to the Internet network in France, and to the Wi-Fi encryption keys of all Internet
users, by law. “In cryptography and computer security, a man-in-the-middle attack–MITM is an attack where the attacker secretly
relays and possibly alters the communication between two parties who believe they are directly communicating with each other. One
example of man-in-the-middle attacks is active eavesdropping, in which the attacker makes independent connections with the victims
and relays messages between them to make them believe they are talking directly to each other over a private connection, when in
fact the entire conversation is controlled by the attacker. The attacker must be able to intercept all relevant messages passing between
the two victims and inject new ones.”—Excerpt from Wikipedia, “Man-in-the-middle attack,” March 2018.
[179] “Participation à une association de malfaiteurs” and “detention d’explosifs”.

[180] Former Prime Minister Manuel Valls will be cited again in this book, in an entirely different context that makes him a
French agent mingling in Spanish political affairs!
[181] Army General René Imbot (1925-2007) was appointed deputy military governor of Paris in 1979, taking on command of
the 3rd Army Corps and of the 1st Military Region. In October 1980, Imbot took over as staff director of the Army. He was made
Army Corps General in 1980, and promoted Army General in March 1983. Later on the same year, Minister of Defense Charles
Hernu appointed Imbot Head of the Army. Together, Hernu and Imbot created the Force d’Action Rapide–FAR (Rapid Action Force),
designed for rapid intervention in Europe and overseas. President François Mitterrand appointed Imbot Director of the DGSE in
1983. The latter event came amidst widespread calls for the reform of this agency in the wake of the “Rainbow Warrior affair,” which
had caused the resignation of Admiral Pierre Lacoste his predecessor in the role. Imbot is said to have reorganized and modernized
the DGSE, and he reinstated the 11st Shock Parachute Regiment (specialized in shadow operations, sabotage, and assassinations),
previously dissolved in 1963. He was removed from this position two years later in 1985.
[182] La Fayette-class frigates aka FL-3000 standing for “3000 metric tons light frigate,” aka FLF standing for “stealthy light
frigate,” are multi-purpose light warships built by Naval Group formerly DCNS and operated by the French Navy. Derivatives of the
type are in service in Saudi Arabia (Royal Saudi Navy), Singapore (Republic of Singapore Navy) and Taiwan (Republic of China
Navy). Excerpt from Wikipedia, “La Fayette-class frigate,” April 2019.
[183] President and chief executive of TDI China, and Deputy Director of Thompson Delstar Inc., both international trade
consultancies in McLean, VA. For a number of years, Imbot lived in the United States, presumably as DGSE Chief of Station at some
point. He was successively domiciled in Washington DC, Bethseda, MD, and Chevy Chase, MD. There, in 1994, he married Susan
Caryl Todffler, an American woman who was Washington producer for CNN & Company. After her marriage with Imbot, Toddfler
quitted CNN for an employment at the Paris bureau of International Herald Tribune, a position more suitable to her new situation of
spouse of a French top spy. However, The New York Times Co. purchased International Herald Tribune in 2002.
[184] Taiwan’s Lafayette Frigate Affair, World Peace Foundation, Compendium of Arms Trade Corruption, the Fletcher School,
Tufts University, 2016-2019.
[185] Ibid.

[186] Excerpt from Wikipedia, “Joseph Doucé,” 2017.

[187] Well known but sulfurous French lawyer Jacques Vergès was also a “writer and political activist who earned fame for his
defense of FLN militants during the Algerian War of Independence. He was imprisoned for his activism in 1960 and temporarily lost
his license to officially practice law. A supporter of the Palestinian Fedayeen in the 1960s, he disappeared from 1970 to 1978 without
ever explaining his whereabouts during that period. He had been involved then in legal cases for high-profile defendants charged with
terrorism or war crimes, including Nazi Klaus Barbie in 1987, terrorist Carlos the Jackal in 1994, and former Khmer Rouge head of
state Khieu Samphan in 2008. He also famously defended Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy in 1998.”–Wikipedia, “Jacques Vergès,”
2017.
Jacques Vergès was much lesser known as a spy. Born in Ubon Ratchathani, Siam now Thailand, and brought up on the French
island of Réunion, Jacques Vergès was the son of Raymond Vergès, a French diplomat, and of a Vietnamese mother. In 1942, upon
his father’s encouragement, he sailed to Liverpool to become part of the Free French Forces led by Charles de Gaulle, and to join the
anti-Nazi resistance. In 1945, he joined the French Communist Party. After the war, Vergés registered to the University of Paris where
he studied law, while his twin brother Paul Vergès went on to become the leader of the Reunionese Communist Party, and a member
of the European Parliament. In 1949, Vergès became president of the AEC (Association for Colonial Students), where he met and
befriended Pol Pot, future despotic leader of Cambodia. In 1950, Vergès went to Prague at the request of his Communist mentors to
lead a youth organization for four years. While Vergès has always been an agent of the Soviet Union, which fact was never known
publicly but that many suspected, he enjoyed French protection and permanent access to the mainstream media in France. Actually,
Vergés’ fame in France always and only existed on the mainstream media, and very rare French people appreciated the man.
[188] Typically, French journalists, including those tasked to write on crimes, are confused with the American aka Imperial
system. As a result, they commonly write mistakes such as “revolver cal. 38 mm,” “carbine cal. 22 mm,” “shotgun cal. 12 mm,” etc.
Moreover, much more than half of French journalists are unable to explain the difference between pistol and revolver, rifle and
shotgun, and even between assault rifle, machine gun, and submachine gun; but they all seem able to identify correctly a Kalashnikov
AK 47 on a picture, at least. This does not help understand already tricky cases as that of the murder of Colonel Picard. For the latter
reasons, there is no certainty that the 22LR carbine journalists mentioned in their articles on this affair ever existed!
[189] My effort to find on the Internet a press article about the case of an inmate who was thus assassinated proved fruitless.
 [190] Norman Pomar & Thomas Allen, The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 p. 497-499.

[191] Typically, the cause of infective endocarditis is a bacterial infection; less commonly a fungal one. Risk factors include
valvular heart disease, rheumatic disease, congenital heart disease, artificial valves, hemodialysis, intravenous drug use, and
electronic pacemakers. The bacterial most commonly involved are streptococci or staphylococci. In 2017, the number of people
affected with infective endocarditis was about 5 per 100,000 a year; so, endocarditis is rare today. Rates however vary between
regions of the world, and males are affected more often than females. The risk of death among those infected is about 25%. Without
treatment, it is almost universally fatal.—Excerpt from Wikipedia, “Infective endocarditis,” 2017.
[192] Suxamethonium chloride aka suxamethonium aka succinylcholine, otherwise referred to as “sux,” is a medication used to
cause short-term paralysis as part of general anesthesia. This is done to help with tracheal intubation or electroconvulsive therapy.
Succinylcholine is administered either by injection into a vein (IV) or muscle (IM). When used in a vein, the onset of action generally
occurs within a minute, and effects last up to 10 minutes. Succinylcholine was described as early as in 1906, and it entered medical
use in 1951.
[193] One might inquire on where did come from such food cans? It is an interesting question since those things are not easy to
find on demand. According to all likelihood, the DGSE would stores a sufficient quantity of them in prevision of needs of this
exceptional sort.
[194] This reaction should come to no surprise because, as a rule, the DGSE and the DGSI never promise anything to anyone;
they do things without notice. Then, when these agencies promise something to somebody, it is always with the intention to fooling or
entrapping. Maybe the promise will materialize, but it will go along a steep and incommensurate price to pay for it. Any
thoroughbred agent or intelligence officer knows he must never trust an intelligence agency, his own in the first place. See also the
example of Robert Philip Hanssen I tell in this book.
[195] This generic and much bureaucratic—but vague—formula in French is, “en relation avec un movement subversif à
potentialité violente”. In French police jargon, it is otherwise called, “carding or filing someone S” (ficher quelqu’un “S”), after the
letter S standing for Sûreté de l’État (State Security), which designs people whose every move and activities must be closely
monitored. See Lexicon, “Fiche S,” and “EMOPT.”
[196] This maxim, inspired by Roman mythology, has no known origin. Here it is in its Latin form: quem Iuppiter vult perdere,
dementat prius. American proverb and riddle scholar and folklorist Archer Taylor wrote about it in his, The Proverb (1931) that it
would have been composed circa 1640, in Cambridge, England. Others think it could be a derivative or an interpretation of a verse
from Dis exapaton, by Latin comic author Plautus (254-184 BC): “The one that gods love dies young.” Actually, and ironically, it
would have been a bad transcription from Menander (end of the 4th century B.C.), who wrote, in substance, that “the gods would be
impatient to see the one they love die so as to welcome him by their side”. In French intelligence, people are always looking for
symbols and metaphors as a way to disguise their true motives, never to tell them in plain and explicit words.
[197] See Wikipedia, “Active Measures Working Group,” for further details.

[198] Ion Mihai Pacepa, Ronald J. Rychiak, Disinformation ; Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining
Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism, WND Books pub., 2013, pp. 4-6, 34-39, and 75.
[199] The entry “disinformation” made it first appearance in the 1945 annual issue of the Боль а Советса Енциклопеди –
БСЕ (Great Soviet Encyclopedia), then in Russian dictionaries and encyclopedias from the early 1950s, but possibly earlier,
elsewhere in this country.
[200] Martin J. Manning, Herbert Romerstein, “Disinformation,” Historical Dictionary of American Propaganda, Greenwood
pub., 2004, pp. 82-83.
[201] Former name of the KGB from 1946 to 1953.

[202] To everyone, the “Cambridge’s Five” means colloquially British moles Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, “Kim” Harold
Philby, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross. Modin remained controller (i.e. supervising one or several case officers) of the same
group until the defection of Philby, in 1963.
[203] Kds.BP stands for Komitet do Spraw Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego (Committee for Public Security, responsible for
intelligence and government protection), responsible of the Glówny Zarzad Informacji Wojska Polskiego (Main Directorate of
Information of the Polish Army), at that time in charge of military police and counterespionage.
[204] As an aside for comparison, the U.S. CIA names its field spy “operative,” that is to say, an individual tasked to physically
spy on; by opposition to “speculative,” or mentally spying on (analyzing, deducting, etc.) based on intelligence that the operative is
collecting and sending from behind the enemy lines.
[205] See Lexicon, “Leurre”.

[206] To the reader who is interested in learning more about all this or who simply wants to check the validity of my statement, I
recommend two interesting and enlightening books in particular. The first is by Robert Jervis, and is titled, Perception and
Misperception in International Politics, Princeton University Press, 1976. The second, by Michael Handel, is The Diplomacy of
Surprise: Hitler, Nixon, Sadat, University Press of America, 1984.
[207] Friedrich Ratzel, Politische Geographie oder die Geographie der Staaten, des Verkehrs und des Krieges (Political
Geography, or the Geography of States, of Circulation, and of War), R. Oldenburg, Munchen und Leipzig, 1897.
[208] Friedrich Ratzel, Die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (The United States of America), 1882 and 1891.

[209] Ratzel’s father was a pharmacist, and this influenced him in his choice to study zoology at the universities of Heidelberg,
Jena, and Berlin until 1868. From the latter year, Ratzel continued studying zoology by his own.
[210] In 1869, Ratzel published on the works of Darwin, Sein und Werden der organischen Welt (Past and Future of the Organic
World), 1869.
 [211] Friedrich Ratzel, Stadte und Kulturbilder aus Nordamerika, 1876.

[212] Friedrich Ratzel, Anthropogeographie, 1882 and 1891.

[213] Friedrich Ratzel, History of Mankind, MacMillan and Co., 1896.

[214] First, Kjellén introduced the word geopolitik in his teachings as professor in political science at the university of Göteborg,
Sweden. He formally used it in a book he published in 1905, titled Stormakterna, Konturer kring samtidens storpolitik, första delen
(The Great Powers: Contours of Contemporary Great Politics. Part One).
[215] Rudolf Kjellén, Staten som livsform (The State as a Form of Life), 1916.

[216] Werner Sombart, Deutscher Sozialismus (German Socialism), Chrlottenburg: Buchholtz & Weisswange, 1934. This book
was translated and published in English under the title, A New Social Philosophy, New York, Greenwood, 1st ed. 1937; 2nd ed. 1969.
[217] All my personal researches about “reasoned dictatorship” proved fruitless. However, I noticed, the fundamentals in
political governance that Frederic II of Prussia presents in his Political Testament, he wrote in 1754, are similar to those the DGSE
professes or implicitly enforces with its human resources. Interestingly, perhaps, this book had been censored in a number of
countries, on pretense that one sentence in it is anti-Semitic. In reality, Frederic II in this book treats Jews on an equal footing with
Catholics, women, young heirs of the noblesse, and others, as people who should not be involved in the State at a high levels, and he
attributes flaws to each of these minorities. The censorship of Political Testament aims more realistically unpopular principles of
governance that are still in use in Western countries in our 21st century. Moreover, deductive reasoning based of the life of Frederic II
suggests that the few published version of Political Testament are truncated version of a longer text that a number of European
governments did not want to see published, with respect to the role of secret societies in political governance and in domestic spying
and influence in particular.
[218] For the record, enlightened despotism is a non-democratic or authoritarian form of state governance intending to serve the
common good of the Nation. Enlightened despotism is a political doctrine issued from the ideas of the philosophers of the Age of
Enlightenment (18th century), which combines force and progressive will in the one who has the power. It is defended by Voltaire,
d’Alembert, and the Physiocrats, and it was practiced by Frederick II of Prussia, Catherine II of Russia, and Joseph II of Austria. The
notion appeared around 1670. Enlightened despotism is also known as the “new doctrine”.
[219] Bernard Kouchner and Christine Ockrent are lesser known as ex-field agents of the SDECE / DGSE, as the reader saw,
earlier.
[220] I vividly remember this night of October 29, 2002, when I watched the first broadcast of the TV film Lathe of Heaven on
the American TV channel A&E that also produced it. For I could easily see in it exactly the same underlying and cryptic second
reading that French filmmaker and Soviet agent Chris Marker first intended in 1962, for its short film, The Jetty. The authors of Lathe
of Heaven do not provide any explanation for the sequence of a jellyfish that recurs as interludes of a sort, completely irrelevant to the
plot, at first glance. For only a small number of French and Russian intelligence specialists can decipher the symbolic meaning of the
aquatic creature as the mindless intelligence service—on condition it would not be mere coincidence in this film, of course, though
this is very unlikely given the impossible happenstance. Without this key and another one, Lathe of Heaven is hard to understand, or
can only be understood as a fantastic plot whose author gave leeway to his fantasy that he alone could understand. I would not be able
to say whether this motion picture adaptation is true to the eponymous novel Ursula Le Guin published in 1971, since I never read it.
However, I can say that French and Russian spies certainly had fun with seeing it produced and broadcast in the United States. For
the true plot is a cryptic presentation of a secret war mixing espionage, deception, and agit-prop against the United States, spanning
several decades. The pretense of time-traveling forth and back in time, in reality is a physical travel between the advanced capitalistic
country that the United States is (future), and another one, socialist, which would be lagging (past) because of the faults and excesses
of the former. In the end, the spy of the lagging country (France in this film adaptation of 2002) is rewarded with success. The
advanced country is destroyed from within because the flying agent successfully deceived its leaders. The perceptive reader will spot
exactly the same plot, presented under a slightly different cryptic form, in the other film 12 Monkeys (1995), by filmmaker Terry
Gilliam, which actually is an avowed re-working of The Jetty of Chris Marker. I was explained the real and exact meaning of The
Jetty in the 1990s, by a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst of the DGSE who then was teaching me in influence in films. In The Jetty and
Twelve Monkey, the spy of the lagging country is killed by his own agency, as a punishment for his defection in favor of the advanced
country. For years, The Jetty has been shown to flying agents to be sent in missions to the United States, essentially in this particular
case as a warning “in passing” if ever they yielded to “the sirens of capitalism” once they would live in this country.
[221] “Non est protestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei”. Job, 41.24.

[222] The French Civil Code, usually referred to as the “Civil Code” or “Napoléon Code,” still in use today, brings together
provisions relating to French civil law; that is to say, the set of rules that determines the status of persons (Book I), that of goods
(Book II), and that of relations between private persons (Books III and IV). It was drafted and first edited in 1804, the same year
Napoléon was crowned Emperor.
[223] The author alludes to Frédéric Le Play, a pioneer of French sociology. As great defender of the values of the Ancient
Regime (family, social order, and the maintaining of the ruling elites), Le Play is also one of the thinkers of modern corporatism and a
theoretician of the social economy in France. It is introduced as a must-read and as a fundamental in the French progressive ruling
elite today.
[224] Honoré de Balzac, historical footnote in La Fausse Maîtresse, j. Le Siècle, 1841. Transl. from French by the author.

[225] Pedigree is the familiar word in use in the French police for more than a century, but it is falling into obsolescence and has
largely been replaced with the word “fiche” (card) since the 1970s at least.
[226] This “ritual,” if I thus may name it, was still in use when I quitted the DGSE, and it is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
Maurice Dufresse, ex-Chief of Service in the DGSE turned whistleblower told his own experience about it, which I will tell later.
[227] Inflation was approaching 6%; GDP growth south of 1%; and emerging CA deficit and gold coverage had dwindled from
55% to 22%.
[228] Conally had been Democrat Governor of Texas from 1963 to 1969.
 [229] Three key features of the macro-economic backdrop drove the demise of the Bretton Wood system: accelerating private
capital flows, burgeoning imbalances, and dramatically undervalued currencies.
[230] The mentor of Macron’s team in economics is Socialist former head of the World Monetary Fund–WMF Dominique
Strauss-Kahn, yet denied due to the bad reputation of the latter. David Amiel and Ismaël Emelien, Macron’s ex-advisors—who both
resigned from their position at the Élysée Palace on March 27, 2019 in the wake of the Benalla Affair—co-authored a progressive
manifesto published the same day, titled Le Progrès ne tombe pas du ciel (Progress does not fall from the Sky).
[231] On March 6, 2019, the United Nations launched an inquiry into the use of excessive violence towards protesters, citing
France during the Yellow vests protests as bad example, alongside Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Haiti. Commissioner Michelle Bachelet,
former president of Chile, announced on behalf of the U.N. the “in-depth investigation” of France’s police repressive practices. On
this occasion, Bachelet stated that the “gilet jaunes [had protested against what] they considered as the marginalization of their
economic rights and participation in public affairs”.
[232] Sorry, but even English-speaking journalists and contributors, whose distrust and defiance toward France are well known,
themselves remain remarkably quiet about the subject, however.
[233] With respect to the Yellow vests riots, for the most recent and visible part, since December 2018, in a classic attempt to
divert the attention of the public by accusing foreign scapegoats, the French Government indeed alluded several times to this
hypothesis, though indirectly and briefly in each of these instances. It did it either through the voice of the French mainstream media,
or even more discreetly via YouTube accounts and social networks visibly created by agents of influence and agent provocateurs of
the French intelligence community. Once in the former case (the first time) against the United States of America. Once in the latter
case (the third time) against the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. Once in the former case again (the second time) against Russia,
lest of possible questions about the conspicuous absence of this other accusation. China and Muslim religious organizations were
sparred the offense though. In an additional instance, and through a scheme that most specialists in influence and counterinfluence
could easily identify, agents / trolls of the French intelligence community suggested on French social networks that the Yellow vest
movement was helped / fueled by an anonymous Christian religious conspiracy, an indirect suggestion pointing the United States,
obviously. Simultaneously, the same agents / trolls attempted to sow doubt and mutual distrust from within this movement, mainly by
launching rumors alleging that some of its better known figures actually were police snitches. The latter allegations were broadcast on
YouTube again, and associated with Christian religious references and obscure symbols alluding to “the Devil”. All this of course is
information jamming more than disinformation.
[234] Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez for the French original version of this series’ title.

[235] Le Gendarme à New York (Gendarme in New York), released in U.S. theaters in 1965.

[236] The commune is a level of administrative division in France. French communes wholesome are equivalent to civil
townships and incorporated municipalities in the United States, or Gemeinden in Germany.–Excerpt from Wikipedia, “Communes of
France,” 2017.
[237] In the administrative divisions of France, département is one of the three levels of government below the national
(“territorial collectivities”), which locates between administrative régions and communes, exactly. There are 96 départements in
metropolitan France, and 5 overseas départements that are also classified as régions. Départements are further subdivided into 334
arrondissements, themselves divided into cantons. The two latter have no autonomy, and their definitions are used for the
organization of police, fire departments, and political elections sometimes.
[238] “Particularly intended for the safety of the countryside and communication channels,” according to article 1 of the decree
of May 20, 1903. “The Gendarmerie remains a police force of rural character, essentially”.
[239] The police handle 75% of the delinquency, and 80% of urban areas with known recurrent troubles and a large majority of
poorly skilled and uneducated immigrants, mostly from North African countries.
[240] The RG in Paris were named RG-PP previously, standing for Renseignement Généraux de la Préfecture de Police de Paris
(General Intelligence Agency of the Police Prefecture of Paris).
[241] Already named in the chapter 11, in the affair of the physical elimination of DGSE agent Forestier.

[242] See Lexicon, “Mutualisation”.

[243] Pew-Templeton, 2010.

[244] Identifying a representative of the DGSE, DRM or SGDSN interviewed on television is easier than it seem, as most
introduce themselves as “researchers” for associations with a specialty in geopolitics and related, or as consultants in security and the
like, or as “former high-ranking official of the Ministry of Defense,” or else as “journalist specialists in military or / and intelligence
affairs.” Otherwise, the logic supporting this deductive reasoning is, “How to make a living in France with such occupational
activities, if not in working for an intelligence agency as analyst or chief analyst, which are their real and undisclosed occupations?”
[245] As in early December 2016, 303 such French nationals returned to France already, according to the Ministry of the
Interior.
[246] Interview of George Fenech by C dans l’air, France 5 TV channel, Jan. 5, 2018.

[247] „Islamist konnte sich in Geheimdienst einschleichen,“ Zeit Online, Nov. 29, 2016.

[248] Sénat, Session ordinaire de 2015-2016, Rapport général par M. Albéric de Montgolfier, t. III, « Les Moyens des politiques
publiques et les dispositions spéciales, » Annexe n° 29a, Sécurités (Gendarmerie nationale ; Police nationale), p. 53. English transl.
by the author.
[249] Prefects are appointed by a decree of the President in the Council of the Ministers, following the proposal of the Prime
Minister and the Minister of the Interior. Formally speaking, Prefects are representatives of the State in the local governments of the
Republic, representing each member of the Government. They are locally in charge of national interests, of administrative checks,
and of the respect of the law. Nonetheless, prefects operate under the Minister of the Interior, which explains why they wear a police-
like uniform on official occasions. The latter particular also explain why their mission includes the coordination of police and
Gendarmerie forces, the handling of major local crises, and emergency defense procedures. Prefects are also responsible for the
issuing of official documents, such as identity cards, passports, driving licenses, and even vehicles registration certificates. Those
prefects and préfectures must not be confused with the Préfet de Police (Police Prefect) and Préfecture de Police–PP (Police
Prefecture) supervising the police forces of Paris and its suburbs. Anecdotally, many past and active prefects are former intelligence
officers of the DGSE. As examples taken among many, such was the case of Pierre Marion, who even became Director of the DGSE,
and of late, of Bernard Gonzalez, acting Prefect of the Alpes Maritimes (2019), who began his career in spycraft in the special forces,
and left the DGSE upon fifteen years in the service of this agency.
[250] The same remark applied to intelligence on “individuals of interest” who lived in the countryside, and which was
transmitted to the RG in order fill their dossiers secrets. The latter task is now largely supervised by the EMOPT.
[251] See which those databases are in the chapter 17.

[252] I remember of two such blacklisted individuals, whose interest herein is to exemplify other possible causes of simple
blacklisting. One was a streetwise and brazen Asian immigrant who had been hired as under-agent in counterintelligence, and
rewarded with a desk job in a bank agency of a middle-sized city. On a day, the lucky but cocky and short-tempered little spy badly
reacted to a remark from the director of the bank agency, by violently beating him up. He was fired obviously, but also dismissed as
under-agent. He never found a job again thereafter, and became a dropout and a drunkard. The other was a witty and good-tempered
DGSE full-time contractor in domestic intelligence who happened to be a colleague of mine for a couple of years, in the early 1990s,
with a specialty in domestic influence and propaganda. The garrulous man, then on his late twenties, graduated in political science
prior his hiring, and he had a passion for his work. However, the realities of French politics shocked him, cronyism and misuses of
public funds in this middle in particular. By a morning, he took the initiative to send a letter to the official owner of the company
sheltering our secret activities, in which he blew the whistle about all things he had mistakenly translated as irregularities. He was
fired the next day for “reckless behavior,” and was unable to find another job for more than a decade thereupon.
[253] As a matter of fact, this behavioral trait, common in a large majority, has been the main cause of innumerable cases of
discreet collaboration of French ordinary citizens with the German police during the occupation of France, between 1940 and 1944.
The more so since it was spurred by rampant fear, incommensurate of course with that of French police and gendarmes nowadays.
[254] Municipal law of April 5, 1884, and art. 16-1 of the Code de Procédure Pénale (Code of Criminal Procedure).

[255] For decades, and until 1997, about 200,000 Frenchmen were yearly drafted.

[256] The words astronaute (astronaut) and cosmonaute (cosmonaut) were first created by the United States and the Soviet
Union respectively. For this unique reason, France created the third word, spationaute (“spationaut”), after the root espace (space), to
name the first French national this country sent into space in 1982, although the feat owed entirely to the Soviet Union. For French
politicians and journalists for a while used French translations of the two perfectly understandable first words—simply by adding an e
in both cases—before creating a third of their own in the early 1980s. The French denial of the word astronaut also owes to the all-
rational claim that its root is Latin, astra, translating a celestial body, thus implying traveling in space to then land on a celestial body
as the Moon is. Notwithstanding, the use of one of these three words in a conversation may also be interpreted by some as a way to
express one’s political stance or patriotism, or even as a Freudian slip of the tongue! French politicians, spies, and journalists, use to
take those linguistic subtleties very seriously.
[257] Transl. by the author from « [la fonction de contre-espionnage] est la matrice de l’esprit et des méthodes des services de
renseignement. En son sein, c’est le service spécifiquement chargé du CE qui a mis au point tout le système de recherche, de fiches,
de croisement de faits, d’hommes. » Claude Silberzahn. Ibid. cit.
[258] In those places that are islands, with the noticeable exception of Guyane in South-America, France is called colloquially
“la métropole” (the metropolis), shortened version of “France métropolitaine” (Metropolitan France).
[259] The publicly available number of about 2.4 billion euros (2018) for the annual public expenditures in French overseas
territories is much inferior to what it must be in totality, in my own opinion.
[260] This fact is never reported in the French media despite its exceptionality.

[261] Inasmuch as the reader rallies my opinion saying, the exception of the space base in French Guyane in fine connects
largely to strategic and intelligence concerns.
[262] See Lexicon, “COS,” and “Com-Rens”.

[263] The idea of mobilizing the entire civilian population came out with the Levée en masse (“mass levy”) adopted in the
aftermaths of the French Revolution of 1789. The decree that was effectively enacted by the National Convention on August 23,
1793, read in ringing terms beginning with, “From this moment until such time as its enemies shall have been driven from the soil of
the Republic, all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for the services of the armies. The young men shall fight, the married men
shall forge arms and transport provisions, the women shall make tents and clothes and shall serve in the hospitals, the children shall
turn old lint into linen, the old men shall betake themselves to the public squares in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and
preach hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic.”
[264] Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany, wrote his memories in prison and made them
published in 1969 under the title Erinnerungen (Memories), or Inside the Third Reich for the English translation of 1970. At some
point in this book, Speer gives estimates of the number of informants in some European countries including Nazi Germany, by then
established by the Nazi intelligence service. Therefore, we can reasonably assume the figures were reliable, though rough, and we can
take into account the influence of war that certainly boosted them. Nonetheless, the proportions in the order of more or less 5
informants on 10 citizens, on average and whichever the country, remain impressive.
[265] People living in mountainous regions often oppose unusual resistance to threat, pressure, and tyranny, because they are
used to enlarged freedom poorly supervised by governments along generations. Native Americans made bad slaves, even in the face
of impeding death, thus forcing colonialist Americans to import Black Africans at a great cost because they proved more cooperative.
I hope my quote of historically proven facts will not be taken the wrong way. Otherwise, I explained earlier that Colonel Walter
Nicolai probed the particular topic with respect to Europeans people and cultures as soon as in the WWI.
[266] Assault rifle FAMAS, cal. .223, with a 20 rounds magazine.
 [267] Office français de protection des réfugiés et apatrides (French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless
Persons).
[268] In the early 2000s, even the staff in the Russian embassy in Paris was Russian national, and it was the same for consulates
and press agencies of this country, whereas the reverse in French diplomatic representations in Russia was not quite true. Things
changed for the opposite today, with Russian media companies and press agencies having a bureau in France in which one may find
one Russian only for 20 French nationals.
[269] That is what English-speaking specialists call a “walk-in”. Anecdotally, walk-ins in U.S. embassies are no longer possible
for more than twenty years, because their premises are heavily guarded and no one can enter one without an appointment. Therefore,
the latter provision implies a phone call or a contact via Internet, which in France would be intercepted and analyzed, thus betraying
the intent of the spy who would be tempted to change sides. Then, those embassies are infested with local employees who are as
many informants of the host country.
[270] Paradoxically, on one hand, the more a defector has sensitive information to give, the more chances he runs to be
distrusted. On the other hand, the defector who brings little sensitive information is deemed of poor value, and he will be ill-treated
and even “dumped” or temporarily “stored for sale” to another intelligence agency that will be happy with it. That is why the skilled
spy who defects knows he must not reveal too much, in order to reduce the odds to be thus treated instead of being warmly
welcomed. However, the history of intelligence teaches us that many defectors were fake and loaded with deceptive intelligence and
that, in many such instances, they had been deceived by their own side themselves, and induced to defect in reality. In the United
States, the sad story of Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko perhaps epitomizes the consequences of uncertainty about the good faith of a
defector. Nowadays, defecting is a very risky venture whose end may easily be tragic, contrary to what says a popular belief.
[271] Roger Wybot himself explained all this in detail in his thick biography enriched with facsimile: Philippe Bernert, Roger
Wybot et la bataille pour la DST, Presse de la Cité pub., 1975.
[272] See Lexicon, “Boîte-aux-lettres morte”.

[273] Liberal politician Jacques Chirac launched the political career of François Baroin in 1995, when the latter was aged 30,
and when the former was just elected President of the French Republic. At that time, the argument advanced to support this sudden
introduction in the inner circle of the French political power was that young Baroin had demonstrated talent with writing speeches for
Chirac. Six years later, Baroin was appointed Minister for the Economy and Finance. Baroin is still mayor of Troyes in 2018. The
DGSE physically eliminated his father, Michel Baroin, in 1987, cited in this book.
[274] Readers fluent in French will certainly enjoy the reading by the same author of Le Montage, translated in English in the
1980s under the title, The Set-Up, but out of print for long already, and more particularly Le Retournement, which other novel was
translated in English under the title, The Turn-around, now out of print either. L’Agent triple (The Triple-Agent), still by Volkoff, is
become hard to find even in French. Le Trêtre is not bad too. Most of my ex-colleagues in the DGSE, if not all, rather preferred Le
Berkeley à Cinq Heures, because of certain second-degree allusions to real espionage affairs that Volkoff let slip in this thin gathering
of novellas—amusing but not brilliant, in my opinion.
[275] Others books John Le Carré wrote after 1996, that is to say, from The Tailor of Panama on, are of an entirely different
style that does not interest us here.
[276] Such as Le Serpent (Night Flight from Moscow) (1973) whose interesting particularity I comment in the chapter 23, Le
Silencieux (1973), and above all and again, Le Dossier 51 (1978). I make a profit of this occasion to talk about French espionage
films for recommending the two following must-watch, A Question of Taste aka Une Affaire de Goût (2000) about a recruitment, and
Tiré à part (1996) because its accurate professionalism in its depiction of a domestic influence mission introduced as a subplot, and
then of a sabotage that is a realistic rendering of a counterinfluence mission. The two latter films have been made by late French
filmmaker Bernard Rapp, whom I willingly nickname “the French David Mamet”. A last one, La Discrète (1990), by director
Christian Vincent, also presents a story that all French spies recognize as the realistic recruitment of an unconscious under-agent.
[277] Erwan Bergot has been commissioned officer in the Foreign Legion and a leading figure of the Service Action in the time
of the SDECE. He became a prolific and good writer, and several of his novels are serious and interesting readings, even by today’s
standards. Bergot’s books are in the same vein, overall, as those of Frederick Forsythe, though with a focus on the military realm.
[278] See Lexicon, “Appartement conspiratif”.

[279] FLIR stands for “Forward Looking InfraRed” cameras, typically used on military and civilian aircrafts. It is a
thermographic camera that senses infrared radiation emitted from heat sources—thermal radiation—to create an image assembled for
video output (as those the reader possibly saw in the film Predator, exactly). Flir cameras can be used for helping pilots and drivers
steer their vehicles at night and in fog, or for detecting warm objects against a cooler background. The wavelength of infrared that
thermal imaging cameras detect is 3 to 12 μm, and differs significantly from that of night vision, which operates in the visible light
and near-infrared ranges (0.4 to 1.0 μm). In the field of counterintelligence, and also of counter-criminality and of search for a
fugitive, Flir cameras may have several uses ranging from “seeing” somebody from afar in the night or who is hiding in a dark room,
to detecting traces of recent human activity, to knowing whether a vehicle or an electric material has been used recently, and else.
Overall, the purchase, possession, and use of night vision systems may be restricted in France, depending their types, technical
possibilities, and intended applications. Yet they have become inexpensive and easily available on the Internet.
[280] Which can be a coin or else placed in equilibrium on the top of a door, which will make or not a noise when falling on the
ground. Or else several small objects whose locations are measured to the millimeter with an ordinary schoolboy rule, a key, or a pack
of cigarettes, by always using the same distance with a number easy to memorize, such as x = 50mm, y = 25mm.
[281] In a dynamic microphone, the thin diaphragm is glued to a magnetic coil, similar to that of a dynamic loudspeaker.

[282] Still in the early 2000s, in Paris, the sound analysis of spied on conversations was done by a team of specialized and
highly skilled technicians of the DGSE under cover of sound engineers in films and TV programs, who otherwise worked under the
cover activity of dubbing and sound effects in a small company by the name of Bell X-1, after the name of the famous U.S. jet that
first crossed the sound barrier.
[283] That is to say, Pôle Emploi (Employment Centre), which is a government agency that registers unemployed people, helps
them find jobs, and provides them with financial aid.
 [284] That is to say, by one of the 109 Caisse d’Allocations Familiales–CAF (Family allowances fund), since there is one such
public service per regional département (country subdivision). A CAF is a local representative of the National Family Allowances
Fund (CNAF), which forms the family branch of the French Social Security. Each CAF is a public body with territorial jurisdiction,
responsible for paying individuals or family financial assistance under conditions determined by law, called “legal benefits”
(prestations sociales). Each CAF also provides at the local level an essentially collective social action through technical assistance
and subsidies to local social actors (town halls, child day care, Youth and Culture Houses, leisure centers, etc.).
[285] Technically speaking, the part-time spy is put in touch with a representative of the local bureau of Pole Emploi agency
who, often in this case, is a former employee or agent of the French intelligence community who has been honorably discharged
(either for health troubles or because of a broken cover or else), or a contact. Somehow, this official has a role of social worker, and
he is empowered with the right to decide whether an individual in layoff can be granted financial benefits or not, or not any longer.
For example, I once met one such representative, a woman then in her early 40s, who prior she was hired by Pole Emploi was a
DGSE agent abroad with a cover activity as low ranking executive for the sportswear brand Adidas. She had been discharged for
severe nervous breakdown followed by a suicide attempt.
[286] Small or part-time agents who served well may be “rewarded” with a status of physical or mental disability, which makes
them eligible for a small pension disability benefit for the rest of their lives.
[287] I presented them in the chapter 10 on social elimination.

[288] In France, this can be done legally in the official context of the fight against criminality and terrorism (see “administrative
interceptions”). Then all telephone and Internet providers in France are requested by law to keep records of voice communications for
30 days, of encrypted communications for 6 years, of metadata for 4 years, and indefinitely for collected intelligence relating to
cyber-attacks. However, things seldom are legally done in counterespionage, and an agency such as the DGSE does not care about
legal provisions. The latter intelligence agency enjoys immediate access to the cell phones, landlines, and Internet lines of anyone
living on the French soil and at any time.
[289] A zero-day vulnerability at its core is a flaw. It is an unknown exploit in the wild that exposes a vulnerability in software or
hardware, and can create complicated problems well before anyone realizes something is going wrong. In fact, a zero-day exploit
leaves no opportunity for detection.
[290] A wireless router is a device that performs the functions of a router, which also includes the functions of a wireless access
point. It is used to provide access to the Internet, or to a private computer network. Depending on the manufacturer and model, it can
function in a wired local area network, in a wireless-only LAN, or in a mixed wired and wireless network.–Excerpt from Wikipedia,
“Wireless router,” 2018.
[291] In computer networking, a wireless access point (WAP), or more generally just access point (AP), is a networking
hardware device that allows a Wi-Fi device to connect to a wired network. The AP usually connects to a router (via a wired network)
as a standalone device, but it can also be an integral component of the router itself. An AP is differentiated from a hotspot, which is
the physical location where Wi-Fi access to a WLAN is available.–Excerpt from Wikipedia, “Wireless access point,” 2018.
[292] “Steganography is the practice of concealing a file, message, image, or video within another file, message, image, or
video. The word steganography combines the Greek words steganos (στεγανός), meaning ‘covered, concealed, or protected,’ and
graphein (γράφειν) meaning ‘writing’”.–Excerpt from Wikipedia, “Wireless access point,” Jan. 2018.
[293] In the United States, famous historians on military intelligence Roberta Wohlstetter wrote a book—a must-read indeed—
titled Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. This book presents largely another aspect of the same problem, which materializes by too
many repeated suspicious patterns never followed by any event, which Wohlstetter first coined “cry wolf”.
[294] François Thual is a known figure of the French intelligence community in addition to being active in politics as Senator,
and formerly dean of the geopolitics department at the École de Guerre (French War School). He currently (2018) teaches at the
École Pratique des Hautes Études. Thual is reputedly knowledgeable on religions, with a focus on the Catholic Orthodox Church,
Chiism, and Buddhism. In 1983, Thual co-founded the Grande Loge des Cultures et de la Spiritualité–GLCS (Grand Lodge of
Culture and Spirituality) together with Army General René Imbot and General Jeannou Lacaze. For the record, General Imbot was
former Director of the DGSE from 1983 to 1985, and high-degree member of the GOdF. General of the Foreign Legion Jeannou
Lacaze, former senior executive of the SDECE / DGSE and specialist in African affairs, has been special advisor for several African
presidents, and first French interlocutor in arms sales with Saddam Hussein. Thual was also a member of the regular Grande Loge
National de France–GLNF (National Grand Lodge of France) until 2003. Since 2011, Thual is Grand Master of the Grand Loge
Mondiale de Misrahim–GLMM (World Grand Lodge of Misraim), though this little known grand lodge is far from being as large as
its noun “World” conveys. In 2013, Thual was indicted for embezzlement of public funds belonging to the French Senate.
[295] François Thual, « Renseignement et franc-maçonnerie », Le Renseignement à la française, sous la direction de l’Amiral
Pierre Lacoste, Economica pub., January 1st, 1998, pp. 559-575.
[296] This psychological phenomenon also happens in other countries. In the United States, it is even well known since Ohio
Senator Warren G. Harding ridiculed himself by asking to join the Masonic order of the Shriners as a special favor upon his election
as President of the United States.
[297] In French verbatim, “de bonnes mœurs et de bonne moralité”.

[298] Those names of associations are not phony however; they are those truly given to lodges as officially registered
associations. Then the word “association” is specified conspicuously in order to deceive the public on its true quality. As true
examples, a lodge thus christened La Concorde (The Concord) or La Bonne entente (The Good Alliance) or Harmonie (Harmony)
appear in public telephone databases as Association La Concorde, Association La Bonne entente, and Association Harmonie, without
additional precision.
[299] The German ruling class has always been the most restrictive in Europe about this.

[300] Plural of pied-noir (black-foot). See Wikipedia, “Pied-noir,” for an exhaustive definition.

[301] Upon their returning to France, many of those loyalist Pied-noirs were offered positions in French public services and in
the National Education in particular, often at managerial levels. Others were offered attractive opportunities in the private sector and
helps to create small businesses. All this did not go smoothly however, because French communists despised and ostracized the Pied-
noirs because they had very actively supported the colonization of Algeria, whereas French Communists had backed the Soviet Union
in its efforts to take over Algeria under the pretense of freeing this country from the France’s yoke. Since the end of the Algerian War
of independence, the Pied-noirs have constituted notably a strong and influential solidarity minority in France in the sectors of
television, radio broadcasting, and show-business. As a minority of Pied-noirs is of Jewish origin, and thus largely represents the
Sephardic Jewish ethnic division, those privileges fueled already existing anti-Semitic feelings, and they still do today.
[302] This sub-body was the Office français de protection des réfugiés et apatrides–OFPRA (French Office for the Protection of
Refugees and Stateless Persons). This public body recruited trusted Laotians immigrants tasked to translating documents, and to help
determine whether adult Laotian immigrants could have been members of the resistance movement led by the CIA in Laos. In
passing, the RG gave a hand in the investigations, but this agency was quickly overwhelmed with the monitoring of the rising Muslim
community, and with the hunt for Muslim fundamentalists they internally nicknamed “les barbus” (“the bearded men”).
[303] In accordance with the law of July 1st, 1901.

[304] On November 23, 1831 in an issue of Le Semeur, a publication founded in Paris by protestant pastors, French philosopher
and political economist Pierre Leroux for the first time presented a definition of the word “socialism” as “doctrine that sacrifices the
individual to society” (“Doctrine qui sacrifie l’individu à la société,” Le Semeur, n° 12, Nov. 23, 1831, p. 94, 2nd col.). Others say
Leroux would have used the word “socialism” for the first time around 1824 (In Garaudy, Roger, Les Sources française du socialisme
scientifique, Paris, 1949, p. 134). Anyway, the first sure written statement of the word socialism can be found in the issue 12 of the Le
Semeur again, in 1831, in an article by Swiss writer and theologian Alexandre Vinet (Cf. Dictionnaire des sciences économiques,
Paris, 1958, v. ii, p. 1032, and J. Thiele, Zur Entwicklung des lexikalischen Feldes socialisme/socialiste. Zu den Quellen des
marxistichen Wortschatzes: Saint-Simon und Fourier, in „Beiträge sur Soziolinguistik“, Halle, 1974, pp. 171-186). A year later, the
word is attested in the review Le Globe that Leroux had founded in 1824, edited by the sect of the Saint-Simonianists. At that time,
the meaning of the word, socialism, did not yet correspond to that the Saint-Simonianists gave to it. Pierre Leroux use the word in
1833 in his Cours d’économie politique at the Athénée of Marseille, in the sense of “antonyms of individualism” (“Revue
Encyclopédique,” v. lx, Nov. / Dec. 1833 pp. 94-117 [cf. J. Thiele, loc. cit., p. 172]. This publication was headed by Pierre Leroux
again from 1831 to 1835. The antonymic couple socialism vs. individualism corresponded for years to the use of that period.
According to Leroux, socialism denotes the doctrine of the disciples of Enfantin, head of the Saint-Simon school at the death of
Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon in 1825. Leroux, who had left this school headed by Enfantin in 1831, refuted the saint-simonianist
explanation of socialism (Likewise with Leroux, society is antonyms of individual and individualism (cf. P. Leroux, “Man, reasonable
being, lives in a certain middle which is the society, whose more general name is humanity.” Ibid. p. 91 and p. 174). The same
acceptance of the word socialism is found two years later in Buchez (Cf. J. Thiel, loc. cit., p. 173)—another renegade of the sect of
the Saint-Simonians—who uses it in the sense, pejorative in his eyes, of “saint-simonianism”. By 1840, the word socialism was quite
established to mean, “Any system that aims to improve and renew the existing society”. The word thus crossed the threshold of
special political terminology to enter common language as a key word, and was positively connoted for the first time. It is in the
Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) that Marx and Engels denoted socialism in an exact manner, in the sense of “scientific
socialism” (to locate it in the early 20th century cf. also J. B. Mercellesi, Le Congrès de Tours. Études sociolinguistiques, Paris, 1971,
pp. 84 and f.). It does not matter that Claude-Henri Saint-Simon did not seem to know the word socialism. Saint-Simon preferred
other words to explain his doctrine, such as “social system,” “social doctrine,” “social reform,” and “social science”. It is remarkable
that the adjective “social” took up on a new meaning around 1840, in close contact with the workers’ movement of that time (As for
the 18th century, cf. P.J. Seguin, La Langue française au XVIIIe siècle, is not a new word, but it extended its meaning from Bayle to
Mirabeau through the Social Contract of Rousseau). The adjective “social” refers since then to everything is relevant to the working-
class situation and the improvement of the lot of the working class. That is why the word “social” is said to be synonymous of
“socialist”. In 1839, saint-simonianist Léon Brothier published his work, Du Parti social (On the Social Party). Victor Considerant, a
pupil of Fourrier, attests “the social party” in his work, Destinée sociale (Social Destiny), in 1837 (Cf. J. Thiele, loc. cit. p. 176).
Thus, the word, “socialism,” became the central element of a whole lexical field. The terminology of “saint-simonianism” and
“fourierism” contributed to the terms, “industrialism,” “industrial social system,” “collectivism,” “collectivist association,”
“communism,” and “saint-simonianism”. In Fourrier and his disciples, we find next to the term, “association,” “harmony,” “serial
organization,” “serial order,” “society system,” “phalansterist system,” “phalansterism,” and “fourierism.” Most of the latter words
became obsolete around 1848, when the term “socialism” prevailed for good.
[305] I often heard some Masons of the GOdF saying, “All Masons of the regular Freemasonry are CIA agents,” but this was
said with the intent of a deterrent, of course, since the DGSE has no qualm about resorting to false accusations when it wants to
sanction those who refuse to comply.
[306] Alain Juillet, born in Vichy in 1942 and in a family with highly influential connections in politics, began his career in the
Service Action of the DGSE in 1962; that is to say, when this agency was still named SDECE. He left the SDECE five years later in
1967, and from that moment on he was sent to occupy senior executive positions in several major companies and other entities, which
each made up for a cover activity in France and in varied countries. These companies were Ricard, Suchard-Tobler, Union Laitière
Normande, Andros, France Champignon, and Marks & Spencer. About simultaneously from 1978 to 2002, Juillet was Advisor for the
Commerce Extérieur de la France (Exterior Commerce of France). In 2002, the DGSE called him back as head of the Directorate of
Intelligence for one year. The same year, he was appointed Honorary President of Amadeus Dirigeants. In 2003, Juillet was entrusted
the mission to found a department of economic intelligence in the SGDN (now SGDSN), and was simultaneously appointed advisor
to the Prime Minister for economic intelligence, and senior advisor in the law firm Orrick, Rambaud, Martel. From 2004 to 2009,
Juillet was President of the Cercle Culture Économie Défense. From 2008 to 2010, he was member of the Economic Council for the
security of the Ministry of the Interior. About simultaneously, from 2004 to 2009, he was Administrator of the Imprimerie National
(National Printing Office). About simultaneously from 2008 to 2019, he was member of the Conseil Scientifique of the Institut des
Hautes Études pour la Science et la Technologie (Institute of High Studies for Science and Technology). In 2011, Juillet was named
President of the Club des Directeurs de Sécurité des Entreprises–CDSE, and of the publication Sécurité & Stratégie. In 2016, he was
named President de l’Académie de l’Intelligence Économique (Economic Intelligence Academy). In 2017, he created the Association
de Lutte contre le Commerce illicite (Association for the Fight against Illicit Business). Juillet is member and administrator of the
surveillance councils for a number of French companies, including Altrad Investment Authority SAS. Additionally, Juillet was
awarded a number of high honors, distinctions, and medals, during his career.
[307] On December 6, 2017, Alain Juillet officially associated with far-leftist French YouTube TV channel Thinkerview, to
advocate far-leftist ideology at the École de Guerre (War School) of the Ministry of Defense.
[308] Frère couvreur, which I clumsily translate as, “Cover Brother,” in the GOdF is a Mason with de degree of Master who,
during tenues (meetings), is entrusted the responsibility to guard the Temple and prevent any profane (layman) from entering it or
eavesdropping.
 [309] The exact expression in French is recevoir la lumière (“to be enlightened”), which event happens symbolically on a night
(“day” internally and symbolically) of initiation as Apprenti (Apprentice) or 1st Degree in the GOdF that counts 33.
[310] Earlier named. His name appears in another affair and in the United States.

[311] This blue lodge then was settled in Donnemarie-Dontilly, in the department of Seine-et-Marne in 2005, to be precise.
Shortly after, circa 2007, this lodge was moved to the city of Provins nearby, because the owner of the place and funder (the
counterespionage officer) had involved in a large insurance swindle (more than 1 million dollars), and more particularly because this
man made a couple of mistakes that the DGSE deemed highly likely to expose himself. That is how and why this agency instructed
unofficially the GLF to relocate immediately this blue lodge elsewhere.
[312] For example, each arm of the French Army has its own saint. The saint patron of French paratroopers is Saint-Michel,
Sainte-Barbe in the artillery, etc. In the Foreign Legion more than in any other military corps, Christmas is the object of much
attention. Legionnaires each year build a crèche in each regiment and attend a special Christmas mass.
[313] I accidentally noticed he moved from Paris to Ouistreham, where he has been elected member of the municipal council,
not coincidentally I assume. For Ouistreham is an important maritime hub connecting France to Britain, where 1 million people come
and go from and to these two countries each year. Poubelle is named a number of times in this book.
[314] Years ago, I read an original copy of this small book of one hundred pages or so I had bought in a small public library of
the Massachusetts. However, the great interest and expectations that spirited me, when I started its reading with an eagerness my
reader can imagine, proved to be disappointed by a content filled with enthusiastic platitudes, short Masonic references, and amusing
photos of an ever-smiling William Taft. The whole of it is typical in its style of an optimistic early 20th century. Its interest lays on its
being an evidence of Masonic diplomacy in foreign affairs between the United States, France, and French-speaking Canada.
Wherefrom my trouble with remembering its title.
[315] The 5 points of Alpina, or Winterthur are: 1. Grand Lodge Alpina of Switzerland recognizes the Great Architect of the
Universe and invokes it in his works; 2. in accordance with the ancient traditions of the Order, the Bible is placed on the altar; 3.
Grand Lodge Alpina solemnly proclaims her unwavering loyalty and total dedication to Motherland; 4. the Grand Lodge and the
Lodges do not interfere in political and religious affairs. To a request for instruction, a mutual exchange of views is allowed on these
issues, but it is forbidden to vote or deliberate, which would impede the freedom of each; 5. Grand Lodge Alpina of Switzerland
refers to the points not covered by these principles, to the former duties.
[316] The GOdF rallied mainly the Grand Orient of Switzerland–GOS it had just created in this country, the Grand Lodge of
Italy–GLI, the Grand Orient de Belgique–GOB, the Grand Orient of Austria, the Grand Lodge of Luxembourg, and the Spanish
Serenisima Gran Logia de Lengua Española.
[317] In 1990, the CLIPSAS had a membership of 35 grand lodges worldwide.

[318] The Grand Orient of Switzerland–GOS, and the Grande Loge Symbolique Helvétique.

[319] The George Washington Union, the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the State of New York, The South
Carolina Grand Lodge of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons, and The Most Worshipful NY Grand Lodge.
[320] Dino Auciello, and Guertchakoff, “Influence: comment réseauter dans les cercles qui comptent”, Bilan magazine, Sept. 30,
2015, http://www.bilan.ch/economie-plus-de-redaction/devenez-influent-0
[321] Ibid.

[322] Apparently, Rauzy was conscripted, as military draft in France ended under the presidency of Jacques Chirac between
1997 and 2002. Nonetheless, to be drafted in the ALAT (a helicopter regiment, essentially) was a special and rare privilege not
offered to everyone.
[323] For much I could understand, the Swiss Socialist Party does not seem to breed close relations with the French Socialist
Party, nor appears as similarly conspiring in its business, it is useful to precise.
[324] The Parti Libéral-Radical–PLR (The Liberals) more particularly is the joint-largest party in the Federal Council, third-
largest party in the National Council, and the largest in the Council of States. It is also a member of the Alliance of Liberals and
Democrats for Europe, and an observer member of the Liberal International movement. However, the PLR, must not be confused
with a political party that would be strongly influenced by France. Its membership clearly gathers a large majority of Swiss patriots in
spite of its avowed stance for the joining of Switzerland in the European Union.
[325] In particular, several influential members of the GOS have executive positions up to General Manager in Diffulivre, a
subsidiary of Lagardère Group, which is a French leading media conglomerate with longtime and close connections with the Ministry
of Defense, owing to the other activity of this group in defense and military aeronautics.
[326] Online newspaper Mediapart, a French equivalent of British The Guardian, has been co-founded and is directed by Edwy
Plenel, formerly Chief Editor of Le Monde daily newspaper.
[327] The French slang word bobo is a contraction for pejorative “bohemian bourgeois,” or wealthy leftist.

[328] Jean-Noël Cuénod, author of this press article, is a Swiss born journalist currently working (2018) for both the Swiss and
the French media.
[329] Cuénod, Jean-Noël, “Contre la Franc-Maçonnerie: Une gousse de vieux fascisme dans la fondue valaisanne,” Mediapart,
Sept. 5, 2015.
[330] This affair, resounding in the whole Europe at its time, made a polemic and a national referendum on an initiative of the
UDC, the Swiss rightist and conservative party for the record, in 2009.
[331] Jean Mamy did it under the assumed name “Paul Riche”.
 [332] The headquarters of the GOdF are still located at this address today.

[333] Orient in French Masonic talk is the name given to the town or city where a grand lodge has a lodge. For example, the
lodge of Strasbourg translates in Masonic talk as “the Orient of Strasbourg”. Yet many Masons do not bother with that, as with many
other formalities of that order, and very often in casual conversations simply say, “the lodge of Strasbourg”.
[334] Minute books on which lodges record all their works. The minutes are often short and fairly stereotyped. Most of the time
the planches are evoked only by a short summary or even their titles only.
[335] In the GOdF, bulletins are made to suggest the matters of talks on occasions of General Assemblies and of contributions
from lodges. From the end of the 19th century, and still today, bulletins propose questions on varied subjects submitted to lodges,
which then are made objects of works and planches in each of them. Then the lodges send to the headquarters of the grand lodge a
report on the results of those works. Finally, the grand lodge publishes a synthesis report based on all those reports.
[336] A tableau (chart) in French Masonic talk is the directory of the membership of a lodge, which had to be sent each year to
the headquarters of the GOdF. Beginning in the 18th century, some lodges, but not all made their directories printed by brother
printers. Then, from 1830 on, the first national Masonic directories were printed, and the new practice rose until the 1880s.
[337] A bureau (same orthography in English) in French Masonic talk means the Collège des Officiers (College of Officers).

[338] A Patente de Loge (Lodge’s License) in French Masonic talk is the official license a grand lodge bestows upon a new
lodge (on the day of the ceremony of the allumage des feux [ignition of fires]), which endows it with official recognition at a national
level, with the right to initiate brothers, and to carry on Masonic tenues and works. Henceforth, this lodge must regularly send a fee to
the headquarters of the grand lodge to which it belongs.
[339] The GOdF did not keep national directories of its membership until the mid-19th century. Each lodge was left responsible
of its membership and of its management. Since the 18th century, however, it asked to lodges to keep it informed on their
memberships.
[340] Decree No. 2015-741 of June 24, 2015. This legal threshold is lowered to 10,000 euros for foreign tourists, but those must
present an identity document for any payment in cash in excess of 1,000 euros anyway.
[341] Ubuntu is an open source operating system developed by UK-based Canonical Ltd., a company founded by South-African
entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth. It is a Linux distribution based on the Debian architecture, usually run on personal computers, but it
is also popular on network servers in its Ubuntu Server variant with enterprise-class features. Ubuntu runs on the most popular
architectures including Intel, AMD, and ARM based computers.
[342] CNIL, Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés, or National Commission on Computer Databases and
Privacy.
[343] See Wikipedia, “Groupthink”.

[344] This observation was first formalized by French researcher Gustave Le Bon in his famous work, The Crowd: A Study of
the Popular Mind (Psychologie des Foules), in 1895. This book is a classic on this particular subject since then. French historian and
academician Hippolyte Taine had already reached to the same conclusions as Le Bon, a few years before the publication of his book.
For Le Bon actually was pupil of Taine who guided him in his researches and writing for this book. In point of fact, we find the bases
of it in Taine’s monumental work in five vol., Les Origines de la France Contemporaine (The Origins of Contemporary France), first
published between 1875 and 1893, and unofficially censored thereafter for 70 years. In it, Taine conducted a real modern
psychological analysis of the collective mind of crowds, based on archives of the French Revolution of 1789.
[345] This is also why the real aims of a political action must leave room to formal aims, therefore appealing to passion.

[346] This observation had already been made at the end of the nineteenth century by Gustave Le Bon. It was regularly
confirmed by other scientists eventually.
[347] As a matter of fact, I once observed on video the very primitive behavior of traders in the room of financial exchanges of
the Paris Bourse. Although each individual of this crowd had been shortlisted and hired because of his high intellectual capacities,
precisely.
 [348] In the DGSE, I once heard that German-French activist Daniel Cohn-Bendit was not directly shortlisted by the KGB,
contrary to all expectations, but by the East-German Staatssicherheitsdienst–SSD (State Security Service), then commonly known as
“Stasi,” when he was living in Germany, without further precisions however. In any case, Cohn-Bendit shown techniques and skills in
influence and propaganda the young man he was could not possibly invent on the spot and in the few days of May 1968, thus strongly
suggesting he was a trained agent indeed.
[349] Correspondence Marx-Engels, 1857, translation by Peter Paret, Gordon A. Craig, Felix Gilbert, in Makers of Modern
Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, Princeton University Press, 1986, p. 26
[350] In addition, immigrant minorities are often familiar with the pitfalls of political discourses, especially political refugees.
That is why the French intelligence community was particularly cautious with Asian immigrants of the 1970s and 1980s, and
approached them very carefully. First, because many of them held high office positions in their country before communists regimes
took over. Second, because they often have firsthand knowledge of the trappings of political conspiracies, and they experienced
political abuses at their own expenses and not only heard of this on television. Anecdotally, a prominent figure of the intelligence
community of the former Royal Lao Government with the rank of minister found refuge in France in the 1980s. He was “allowed” to
hide as a simple monk in the Laotian pagoda of Saint-Leu-La Forêt, but not to find any employment nor to interact with the French
population. His high intellectual capacities, skills, and knowledge were considered potentially harmful to public order.
[351] The choice of this very early age has been defined on a knowledge of children of this age who shot dead adult prisoners in
cold blood, and recurrently inflicted severe violence, in a number of countries. The fact that they acted under the influence of adults
when doing so is not taken into consideration, because comprehensiveness for their authentic irresponsibility does not dismiss their
equally real harmfulness.
[352] This epigrammatic maxim, claim many, was first coined by Karl Marx. Its origin remains unclear in reality.

[353] This was my specialty in domestic intelligence in the early 1990s, under the cover activity of Art Director, first, an then of
Copywriter, in the French advertising firm JCDecaux.
[354] Winner of the Academy Awards on April 7, 1970, Nominated at the BAFTA Awards, and Best Film Music by the same
jury in 1970, nominated by the Directors Guild of America, nominated Best Foreign Language Film by Golden Globes on February
1970, nominated Best Film by the National Society of Film Critics in January 1970, nominated twice Best Film and Best Director by
the New York Film Critics Circle on January 25, 1970. On the year of its release, Z had already won the Jury Prize and the Best
Director Awards at the Cannes Film Festival, from May 8 to 23, 1969.
[355] A member of the Dutch Labor Party (PvdA), Sicco Leendert Mansholt was a farmer who entered politics in the late 1930s.
Manscholt rallied the Dutch Resistance during the WWII, when Nazi Germany occupied the Netherlands. He witnessed the Dutch
famine of 1944. After the war, he was offered a position as Minister of Agriculture, Fishing, and Food Supply (1945–1958). Later he
became European Commissioner for Agriculture (1958–1972), and fourth President of the European Commission (1972–1973). He
was one of the architects of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union.—Excerpt from Wikipedia, “Sicco Manscholt,”
March 2018.
[356] Willem Oltman did not hesitate to intervene pro-actively in international politics. Due to the highly critical and opposite
stance he often took towards Dutch global politics, in 1956, the Dutch Government conspired to keep him out of work. A lengthy
lawsuit (1991–2000) involving the Royal family led to the State having to pay him damages. An erudite orator, straightforward and
uncompromising Oltman was a striking character in the Dutch society.—Excerpt from Wikipedia, “Willem Oltman,” March 2018.
Eventually, Oltman partook in anti-American propaganda, still under the lead of Georgy Arbatov with whom he even co-authored a
book titled, The Soviet position. The latter work elaborated on Moscow’s perspective on the East-West issues in 1981, received much
attention, and was published in several languages.
[357] I could elaborate on the case of the acting Sultan of Brunei, particularly exemplifying, but this would extend far beyond
the subject of this book.
[358] See Lexicon, “Nonverbal language”.

[359] The accent faubourien (“accent of the [Paris] streets”) was typical of Parisian blue-collars until the mid-1960s. It quickly
disappeared from the late 1960’s, to appear again spontaneously, and spread largely among far leftist and anarchist-leftist French from
the 1990s. It is supposed that French popular humorist Michel Colucci, best known as Coluche, was accountable for this revival and
unwitting promotion. From the late 1930s to the 1960s, the accent of the proletarian Parisian streets had been largely promoted by
French actor Jean Gabin and a few others, who closely associated it with a distinctive assertiveness. It possibly is as old as the late
1800s in Paris.
[360] See also Lexicon, “Catharsis per proxy”.

[361] Some such cases and their countermeasures were presented in the chapters 10 and 11 on social and physical elimination
methods, respectively.
[362] It must not be confused with the Council of Sages (Conseil des Sages) that also sits at the Conseil Constitutionnel, and
whose members (9+4) mostly are well known and ageing former ministers and senators.
[363] Respectively, in French, un membre du Conseil d’État, un magistrat de la Cour de Cassation, un magistrat de la Cour des
Comptes, un député, un sénateur.
[364] „Ein Dichter ist Schöpfer eines Volkes um sich: er gibt ihnen [sic] eine Welt zu sehen und that ihre Seelen in seiner Hand,
sie dahin zu führen“–Herder Johann Gottfried, Sämmtliche Werke (SWS), Berlin, 1877-1913, vol, 8, 433.
[365] Commission des Archives diplomatiques.

[366] Minutes of the Diplomatic Archives Commission, April 6, 1880.

[367] The title of this first volume was, Recueil des Instructions données aux Ambassadeurs et Ministres de France depuis les
traités de Westphalie jusqu’à la Révolution française (Collection of Instructions Given to the Ambassadors and Ministers of France
from the Treaties of Westphalia to the French Revolution), edited by historian Albert Sorel, who thus became one of the founders of
the History of French diplomacy. Albert Sorel must not be confused with his cousin, famous sociologist George Sorel, whose works,
as an aside, underlined in the early 20th century the realities of political power. No less great thinker James Burnham abundantly cites
George Sorel in his masterpiece and must-read, The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom (1943).
[368] Les Origines diplomatiques de la Guerre de 1870-1871.

[369] The following anecdote comes to epitomize this. In 2005, my son, then in high school in France, told me: “This is weird:
in History course, today, our professor shown us a photo of firemen standing beside an American flag on the ruins of the World Trade
Center, and he asked to us to explain and to develop on, ‘Why this picture is bad for democracy?’ instead of asking, ‘Is this picture
bad for democracy?’” To me, this is the boldest example of the fallacy of the loaded question I ever heard. In the same vein of blatant
political propaganda in French schools, I heard this other no less striking testimony about young orphan political refugees from Laos
who, in the 1980, where indoctrinated to Marxism-Leninism unofficially during their normal courses in French primary and
specialized schools. Some of those young teenagers, who were old enough to complain about it on the ground that their parents had
been killed or interned in labor camps by the Pathet Lao communist political organization, were suavely answered, “We,
Communists, like to stay close to our enemies”.
[370] This explanation does not refers implicitly to Korzybski’s epigram: “The map is not the territory”.

[371] My use of the word, plumbers, must be taken as a joking play on this word with a dual meaning, because in France,
domestic spies tasked to do dirty tricks (putting spy microphones in particulars) are popularly nicknamed “plumbers” (plombiers).
Those “do-it-yourselfers” must be included in the category of agents (they belonged to a special unit of the police, called GER, until
2008). Today, there is a new special unit (of the Gendarmerie) named GOS with a specialty in “bugging” (formally called “pose
technique” or “sonorisation” in French intelligence jargon).
[372] Perhaps because there is no word in French that could correctly translate pattern in this context. However, French rather
popularly use the word tendance (tendency) to name a particular social or cultural trend.
[373] Since the election as President of Emmanuel Macron, a number of harbingers many French seem to see well and even
comment on the Internet are portending a complete reversal of this attitude anytime soon.
[374] France has its own fair share of look-alikes of singers Claude François and Johnny Hallyday.

[375] French sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) was the first to understand and to rationally explain the psychological
mechanism of mimetic. He exhibited it in his essays, Les Lois de l’imitation (The Laws of Imitation) (1890), and L’Opinion et la foule
(The Opinion and the Crowd) (1901), in particular.
[376] Few French knew for years that Les Bains Douches was directly financed by the French Ministry of Defense, alcohols in
particular. As few people know that a former French female singer has been influential in the sexual entrapments and blackmails of
countless French and foreign personalities, in particular in night clubs of the chain Le Whisky à Gogo. An internationally renowned
French actress, still active today, was also involved in those sexual entrapments. Sexual entrapments of influential people that the
SDECE set up became quickly known. To the point that, once during a conversation I had in the early 1980s with a Kuwaiti diplomat
and Director of the Kuwait Press Agency’s bureau in Paris, this man not only made clear he knew about all this, but also he told me
other striking facts with precise locations and names I had never heard of before and after! Much later, I learned that the Soviet KGB
played an active role in those sexual entrapments in France, and that it had its own places—mansions—set for it in Paris’ wealthy
suburbs.
[377] See, by Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, and for the French original version, La
Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement.
[378] Because Mozart was deaf, some experts explain today.

[379] However, Edith Piaf began to be known in 1936, four year before the Germans invaded France.

[380] First on July 1954, Israel ordered to French Dassault plane-builder six fighter-bombers Mystère II. However, Israel
cancelled the order due to technical problems with this plane, and ordered Ouragan instead in September the same year, and more
advanced Mystère IVs in 1956. That is how French Ouragan and Mystère fighters-bombers played a crucial role during the Suez War
of 1956 against Egypt’s Soviet-built MIG-15s and MIG 17s. In 1958, Israel placed orders for 36 Dassault Super Mystère B2, first
European jet capable of breaking the sound barrier in horizontal flight. In May 1960, Israel ordered to Dassault 24 new Mirage III-
CJ, capable to fly at Mach 2. Deliveries began in 1962, and the order was updated for 76 aircrafts. Finally, Israel and France signed a
contract for the license-manufacture of Mirages. In 1968, Israel established Israel Aircraft Industries, and assembled 51 new Mirage
5 from parts manufactured in France until 1973.
[381] An event in which the Ministry of Culture briefly attempted to take an active role.

[382] Son of music composer Maurice Jarre.

[383] Charles-Henri de Pardieu appears a number of times in this book.

[384] Jacques Vergès has been named and presented in another affair and will appear again.

[385] In France, since about the early 2000s, youngsters dressed in rap and hip-hop style outfits ritually set ablaze cars in large
cities and suburbs on each New Year eve. Since the mandate of President Nicolas Sarkozy, the French Government imposes to the
media an official ban on the publishing of the exact number of cars burned in France on those occasions, lest it would make of it a
promotion and an encouragement. Nonetheless, foreign media publish estimates that are far superior to 1,000 cars thus destroyed in
France on each January 1st only.
[386] Although I had been directly involved in music a few years earlier, my role for this particular circumstance limited to
public relations and advertising.
[387] All those musicians began their careers in the 1960s, and were eventually rewarded with being hired full-time by publicly-
owned TV channels as musicians, composers, and orchestra conductors. They all knew well each other. I knew two of them in
particular for a number of years.
 [388] Thanks to its bassist at its inception.

[389] In 1977, before he became a prominent figure in French politics, Jacques Attali wrote his first essay on the French history
of connections between artists and state power: Attali, Jacques, Bruits; Essai sur l’économie politique de la musique, Presse
Universitaires de France, 1977. This book was translated in English under the title, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Univ. of
Minnesota Press, June 30, 1985. Though serious and interesting, this book is not a fundamental. Yet I recommend its reading to
anyone is interested in the origins of the influential role of the ruling elite in popular entertainment and arts in Europe, and in France
in particular.
[390] In France, this particular provision had to become the rule of the thumb after the Government had to give up official
literary censorship, following the affairs of the novel, Madame Bovary, in 1857, by Gustave Flaubert (himself protector of
Maupassant who would never have made a career as writer otherwise), and of the novel, Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire the
same year. One of the first and most obvious case of discreet censorship that followed the latter concerned the essay, Les Origines de
la France contemporaine, in five volumes, achieved in 1893 by renowned historian Hippolyte Taine (benefactor of Gustave Le Bon
and many others). The latter work, though being the most accurate on the events of the French Revolution of 1789 ever published,
was quickly made “out of print” and “forgotten” by all French book publishers for seventy years.
[391] One of the best known cases of this kind happened in France between 1773 and 1774, when French spy propagandist
Théveneau de Morande who flew to Britain was about to publish in London an essay titled, Mémoires secrets d’une femme publique
(Secret Memoirs of a Public Woman), a lampoon directed against the Comtesse du Barry, then favorite mistress of king Louis the
16th. The attempt transformed into a scandal, to the point that the French Government reluctantly accepted to pay a hefty sum to
Théveneau de Morande, in exchange for he would not publish his book—neither British book publishers nor diplomat did care about
enforcing French censorship. As an aside, the latter deal was negotiated by famous French novelist Beaumarchais, himself a spy in
the service of the secret cabinet of the King. From the late 18th century to the late 19th century, many French censored books were
printed in Belgium and Switzerland.
[392] In the aftermath of the WWII, even though the CIA believed for a while that Sartre and de Beauvoir could oppose a
Socialism à la Française to Soviet-inspired Communism, these two chickens came home to roost about the same way Herbert
Marcuse did in the United States.
[393] Martha Wolfenstein, and Nathan Leites, Movies: A Psychological Study, The Free Press pub., Forge Village MA, sec. pr.,
1970, pp. 15-16.
[394] For the record, the best-known movie stars of this particular period of the history of French cinema are Bourvil, Jacqueline
Maillan, Darry Cowl, Mireille Darc, Bernard Blier, André Pousse, Michel Constantin, Lino Ventura, Bernard Blier, Louis de Funès,
Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Fernandel, Paul Préboist, Marie Dubois, Jess Hahn, Francis Blanche, Jean-Louis and Trintignant.
[395] For the record, movie stars of this other period were, and some still are today for the best known, Anémone, Thierry
Lhermitte, Gérard Jugnot, Christian Clavier, Josiane Balasko, Michel Blanc, Sophie Marceau, Daniel Auteuil, Gérard Depardieu,
Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Villeret, Claude Brasseur, Isabelle Adjani, Tchéky Karyo, Jean Reno, Anne Parillaud, Marie-Anne Chazel,
Dominique Lavanant, Miou Miou, Nathalie Baye.
[396] Wikipedia, “Self-fulfilling prophecy,” Jan. 2018.

[397] William Isaac Thomas (1863-1947) was an American sociologist.

[398] Wikipedia, “Thomas theorem,” Jan. 2018.

[399] Planned economy was invented in France in 1904, and was applied immediately in this country by Étienne Clémentel after
the WWI, in 1919, named after him, Plan Clémentel (Clementel Plan). Clémentel is regarded as one of the founding fathers of
technocracy and state interventionism in French economy. From 1915 to 1919, Clémentel brought together under his authority most
of the ministries dealing with economic issues. Clémentel is also responsible for the creation of the administrative regions in France.
His intellectual approach and his action are part of the solidarist doctrine.
[400] One of those companies, named Articque, and based in Tours, is a provider of the Ministry of the Interior (police).

[401] For the record, here I am making implicit reference to Vilfredo Pareto in particular, and then to Pitirim Sorokin, Walter
Schubart, Oswald Spengler, and historian Arnold Toynbee, and to a lesser extent and according to my own perception of it, to Nikolai
Berdyaev, Carrol Quigley, and strategist Herman Kahn.
[402] The Certificate of Professional Competence (CAP) is a French secondary and vocational diploma, which endows
somebody a status of skilled worker or employee in a specific professional activity. A BEP (Brevet d’Études Professionnelles) gives
access to slightly higher status and wage.
[403] Indeed, in the French intelligence community, American-inspired libertarianism is considered as politically hazardous to
public order, and is put in the same category as Nazism, thus justifying for its most active exponents to be carded “S,” and to be put
under the monitoring of the EMOPT, formerly under that of the RG.
[404] See also Lexicon, “Occuper la place”.

[405] See Lexicon, “Noyautage.”

[406] The French département of Haute-Savoie is an important hub of French and Russian intelligence activities aiming
Switzerland. Barbouze and ex-DGSE agent Daniel Forestier lived and was physically eliminated in this département, as we have seen
earlier. Then, in the 2010s, we find the mystery of the assassination of a British family of Iraqi origin while aboard their car, along a
road of the village of Chevaline, in the same small area.
[407] Philippe Silberzahn co-authored an essay on the U.S. CIA, titled, Constructing Cassandra: Reframing Intelligence Failure
at the CIA, 1947–2001, Stanford Security Studies pub. Aug. 2013. Milo Jones co-author this book. Today, Milo Jones introduces
himself on the Internet as follow. “Visiting Professor at one of Europe’s leading business schools, IE in Madrid. At IE, he teaches in
the MBA, Masters in Advanced Finance, and Executive Education programs. In addition to teaching, Milo pursues a variety of
commercial activities as a strategy consultant and merchant banker. Following the Marines, he worked for Morgan Stanley Dean
Witter in New York, and for Accenture in London. In addition to his PhD. from the UK’s University of Kent, Milo also holds an
MBA from London Business School, an MA in International Relations (with Distinction) from Kent, and a BA in Art History from
Northwestern University. Milo is a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar, a member of London’s International Institute for Strategic
Studies, and a member of the AFIO and AFCEA. His research interests are geopolitics, intelligence analysis, and non-market /
integrated strategy”. Unsurprisingly, “a native of Manhattan, Milo now lives with his family in Europe”.
[408] This publishing house was Opta, based in Paris.

[409] Censorship remained official in France until 1906, when it was abolished by decree. Nonetheless, it remains active to date
in press, book-publishing, audiovisual content, and culture in general, though it is rarely enforced officially.
[410] There is a Wikipedia page on “Reverse psychology”.

[411] Fnac is a large French retail chain selling books, cultural, and electronic products, founded in 1954. In October 2010, Fnac
associated with Canadian-based company Kobo Inc., a subsidiary of Japanese group Rakuten, to launch its own e-book reading
device christened, FnacBook. In October 2011, FnacBook was replaced with “Kobo by Fnac,” an eReader device still supplied by
Kobo Inc., in response to the coming of Kindle books and readers in France from October 6, 2011.
[412] His name will arise again in the Part III of this book.

[413] Daniel Ichbiah is a French author of several books on musical and technical topics.

[414] Notable in the latter case are the five volumes of The Origins of Contemporary France, by French historian and
academician Hippolyte Taine, which was not reissued for 70 years. Then we find the translation of The Tale of the Two Cities, by
Charles Dickens, some novels by Gaston Leroux (from the years 1970-80 and for purely political reasons), the Part 2, titled, “The
Scowrers,” in the novel, The valley of Fear, by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Mind and Society, by Vilfredo Pareto (for 50 years until it
was published in French, but in Switzerland), other essays by historians and sociologists Gaetano Mosca (The Ruling Class, in
particular), the works of Robert Michels and of Georges Sorel, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand (for more than 50 years in France), The
Machiavellians, by James Burnham (since the 1980s), the original French version and all translations of Political Testament, by
Frederic II of Prussia (since 1925 and until the early 2000s), the translation in French of The True believer, by Eric Hoffer. There are
dozens more; I cite only those I can remember.
[415] Quite surprisingly, any Internet search with the name of this “Major” indeed demonstrates that he is not a veteran of the
unit he went as far as naming, nor of any other. Then, one may rightly wonder, why the U.S. Embassy in France conspicuously
remained silent for decades about this fraud?
[416] John Kenneth Galbraith’s son is fluent in French, and he happens to be invited as guest of French TV programs, in which
he offers his advice on today’s American society, openly in the frame of his overt support to the anti-American narrative.
[417] Éditions du Gant et de la Plume pub., Jul. 28, 2017

[418] The reader has seen on several occasions that the sense to be given to the adjective “private” must be relativized in France,
when it applies to major companies and groups. No major French business or group is really private in the absolute; all are subject to
the authority of the State at some point, justified by the notion of economic and industrial heritage.
[419] Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des foules, Livre II., c. iv. « Limites de variabilité des croyances et opinions des foules », §2
« Les opinions mobiles des foules », 1895. Transl. by the author.
[420] At that time, the position of Prime Minister was called “President of the Council of Ministers” (Président du Conseil des
ministres), because the French Constitution was slightly different under the Third Republic (Troisième République) created in 1871. It
changed for Prime Minister (Premier Ministre) with the creation of the Fifth Republic, in October 1958.
[421] His name is François Cellier, and he will appear in the Part III of this book.

[422] From July 7, 1958 to January 8, 1959.

[423] Transl. by the author. This excerpt would have been censored when it was published first in Réflexions politiques: 1932-
1951 (Éditions Le Monde et Seuil pub.) in 1952; probably the Marshall Plan commanded decency. Yet it resurfaced in the second
printing of 1953, one year later only.
[424] For the record, Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin (1922–2004) was a major and senior archivist for the Soviet Union’s foreign
intelligence service, the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. He defected to Britain in 1992, after providing the British embassy in
Riga with a vast collection of KGB files, which became known as “Mitrokhin Archive” since then.
[425] Wikipedia, “Louis Dolivet”.

[426] Wikipedia, “Louis Dolivet”.

[427] “La France et l’U.R.S.S. on conclut un traité d’alliance et d’assistance mutuelles prévu pour une durée de vingt ans.”

[428] The first payment of Churchill’s bargain with Stalin came due. Stalin demanded Britain to recognize the Soviet Union’s
western boundary as specified in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, wherein the Soviet Union had absorbed half of Poland. As Germany’s
invasion of Poland was the reason for which Britain went to war, Churchill considered he could not do this. At the Council of Foreign
Ministers–CFM meeting in London in September 1945, it became apparent that there was considerable Western resistance to Soviet
and Communist domination of Eastern Europe. Negotiations at the CFM indeed broke down over the issue of Western recognition of
the Communist-dominated coalition governments of Bulgaria and Romania. In March 1946, Stalin entered the fray when he gave a
substantial interview in reply to Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri. Stalin denounced Churchill as a warmonger,
and accused him of advocating a racial theory of the superiority of English-speaking nations, just as Hitler had proclaimed the racial
superiority of the Aryans. In addition, Churchill had coined the phrase “special relationship” at the same time, thus alluding to
another alliance with the United States, which implicitly but clearly overshadowed that with the Soviet Union. The latter facts in turn
spurred France into beginning to distance herself with both Britain and the United States, secretly first, but for the decades to come
and until today.
 [429] Accordingly, the word “états-unien” would have been first coined by Arthur Laurendeau in 1934, a Canadian from
Quebec who was Director of the Quebec secessionist political publication, L’Action nationale. However, French dictionary Le Robert
states the word would have made its first appearance in the media in 1955, one year after Le Monde Diplomatique newspaper was
created. In, Martin Francoeur, L’Express, “Américain ou états-unien?” Nov. 23, 2010).
[430] Ordonnance de 1945 sur le monopole d’État sur les ondes nationales.

[431] Secrétariat d’État chargé de l’Information auprès de la présidence du Conseil.

[432] Sous-secrétaire d’État à la présidence du Conseil (December 16, 1946).

[433] Ministère de la Jeunesse, des Sports et des Arts et Lettres (January 22, 1947).

[434] Présidence du Conseil (February 6, 1947).

[435] Secrétaire d’État à la présidence du Conseil (May 9, 1947).

[436] Secrétaire d’État à la présidence du Conseil chargé de l’Information. (July 26, 1948).

[437] 5 Colonnes à la Une.

[438] The title 5 Colonnes à la Une was meant to be a journalistic allusion to “5 columns of text on the front page of a
newspaper,” a French standard in tabloid press.
[439] I do not know which intelligence agency did this surveillance mission, but the more likely at that time was a special squad
of the RG, since De Gaulle was only interested in names of those who paid visit to Lazareff and his wife at their apartment of the Rue
Réaumur, in Paris.
[440] Loi n° 64-621 du 27 juin 1964 Radio-Télévision.

[441] For the French brand Régilait, still in existence today.

[442] Interview by journalist Karl Zero on BFM TV channel, March 24, 2010.

[443] Marine Le Pen’s sympathy for Vladimir Putin and connections with Russia are public knowledge. In an interview with
Euronews in 2014, she expressed her admiration for the Russian President and the achievements of his government, which, she said,
“has cleansed its bureaucracy and developed economic patriotism”.
[444] Former professor of auxiliary philosophy (IPESIEN) and former territorial officer Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, first was a green
activist. Eventually, he approached Marcel Rudloff at a time he needed the benevolence of ecologists following his election as
president of the newly created Alsace region. Schaffhauser became a collaborator of Rudloff, with whom he created the Regional
Council of Alsace. He became a consultant on European strategic issues, and worked between 2000 and 2008 for Dassault Aviation,
which position implies approval from the Ministry of Defense. Schaffhauser lived in Russia and Poland. He is a member of the
steering committee of the Pan European Union of France, and founder of the pro-Russian association Rhine-Volga. Said-to-be close
to Catholic organization Opus Dei, he worked from 1991 for the rapprochement between the Vatican, Russia, and the Orthodox
Church. Schaffhauser points out this latter initiative was requested by Rocco Buttiglione, friend of John Paul II. Schaffhauser asserts
that Russian economist Jacques Sapir much helped him in the mid-1990s with having influential contacts in Russia linked to the
Russian military-industrial complex. Today, Schaffhauser’s closest collaborators all seem to be French nationals with close
connections with Russia. In particular, Schaffhauser is in close touch with Alexander Mikhailovich Babakov, adviser to Vladimir
Putin in charge of cooperation with Russian organizations abroad.
[445] Dominique Jamet is former editor in chief of French newspaper Quotidien de Paris, and of numerous other newspapers
and magazines including Marianne. The biography of Jamet is eclectic indeed, to the point that it does not seem to make any sense at
first glance. All along his life, Jamet served any French political interest one could name. As official, he served the French Socialist
party, and as editorialist and writer, he did it for the French right as much as for the left. As politician, he served the far right and the
far left simultaneously, in 1991, in particular, when he initiated the Appel des Trente and sided with the French Communist Party
against the Gulf War. From 1969 to 1972, Jamet was personal secretary of André Fanton, then Secretary of State for the Defense. For
all services he rendered, Jamet was awarded thrice with prestigious medals: Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1995, Commandeur
des Arts et des Lettres in 2005, and Chevalier des Palmes Académiques in 2008.
[446] See Lexicon, “Leurre,” and “Agent provocateur.”

[447] Allegedly, the website’s name is an allegoric reference to the street in Paris, Boulevard Voltaire, which symbolically
connects the Place de la République with the Place de la Bastille, and where far leftist and labor union strikers customarily march and
make demonstrations.
[448] The URL of Réseau Voltaire news website is www.voltairenet.org

[449] In 2018, the holder of a press card could deduct €7,650 from his annual income, which was not taxed, therefore.

[450] As an aside, in France and in some other countries, an important number of employees of the German multinational
corporation Bertelsmann, which publishes numerous magazines and edit books under several subsidiaries’ brands, are employees and
clandestine of the French intelligence community under this cover. To the point that, in the 1990s, many internal security rules of the
DGSE were similarly enforced in several of Bertelsmann’s subsidiaries, with respect to the purchase and use of U.S.-made computer
software in particular. In the DGSE, it is said that Bertelsmann’s benevolence has been made possible thanks to a “laissez-faire”
policy of the German headquarters of this group. Thus, Bertelsmann would be perfectly aware to hire French spies, owing to the close
partnership between the DGSE and its German counterpart, the BND. There are even several permanent contacts of the BND—
French intelligence executives—in the DGSE, and the reverse is true. In Germany, Gruner + Jahr, subsidiary of Bertelsmann is
known in the DGSE as an important provider of cover activities to the BND.
[451] The Institut Pratique du Journalisme (Practical Institute of Journalism) is a highly regarded school of French journalism,
founded in 1978 by French famous historian Pierre Miquel.
 [452] Actually, I was not told the truth formally and clearly about this story, but rather suggested and alluded to, as things often
are thus explained in the DGSE. This happened in the mid-1990s, on the occasion of a staged fake burglary in Paris.
[453] Jean-Édern Hallier, whom I sometimes saw in his favorite recreational spot, Parisian restaurant La Closerie des Lilas, in
the late 1980s, was a writer, polemicist, pamphleteer, journalist, literary critic, and host of French television. He became the target of
a social elimination in the 1990s, and his death is thought by many as the work of the DGSE. Anecdotally, in the 1980s, “Jean-
Pierre,” owner of La Closerie des Lilas who also owned the restaurant Le Bullier across the street, was a French counterespionage
agent provocateur specialist of England. So much so that he was at the right place to see whom Hallier met in his restaurant. As a
joyful and trendy spot highly prized by the Parisian affluent society, the DGSE considered La Closerie des Lilas a place worthy to be
closely monitored. “Jean-Pierre” used to come at work aboard an old black London taxi, and he ostensibly wore sockets with a
British flag on it. Many of his customers and Hallier perhaps either believed Jean-Pierre “had secret connections with the British,” as
expected.
[454] The best-known characters of Pif Gadget were the prehistoric cave dweller and social vigilante “Rahan,” the sailor
vigilante “Corto Maltese,” the Judo master and vigilante “Dr. Justice,” and proletarian wandering cowboy “Lucky Luke,” also a
vigilante.
[455] Fort Boyard is the most exported French TV format and the fourth most exported adventure-style game show format in the
World after Wipeout, Fear Factor, and Survivor.
[456] In the DGSE, the ideas to launch Internet television channels is not new; this agency was already working on it in the late
1990s, in partnership with Compagnie Générale des Eaux before it became mass media conglomerate Vivendi. First experiments
were launched in 2000, from a building located near the Place de l’Étoile, in Paris.
[457] YouTube, “L’Esprit hacker de Thinkerview,” Jul. 25, 2017.

[458] Alain Juillet has been cited in an affair in the chapter 16 on freemasonry, here.

[459] At some point in this story, the count of Monte Cristo sees the contraption “like the claws of an immense beetle” and feels
wonder “these various signs should be made to cleave the air with such precision as to convey to the distance of three hundred
leagues the ideas and wishes of a man sitting at a table”. Then he bribes the operator to send false information down the network,
causing a financial panic in Paris. This instant in the book, written in 1844, prefigures today’s practices in a striking fashion.
[460] Our agent in Courrier International was a man named “Longuéppé” or “Léppé” or sounding the same with an orthography
I cannot remember exactly, today. Then we were actively working with this weekly to spread anti-American influence and
propaganda. Microsoft was also targeted, ranking second after the NSA in the peculiar order.
[461] This cell and its activities will be largely presented in the chapter 27.

[462] Jean Guisnel will appear again in another affair, in the chapter 27.

[463] Jean Guisnel, Guerres dans le cyberespace: services secrets et Internet, La Découverte pub., 1995.

[464] This is legally justified by the Section 2 of the 1991 Act, which gives investigating judges the power to conduct “criminal
and correctional wiretaps, if the [possible] sentence is two years of prison at least”.
[465] The CTA is officially a department of the Ministry of the Interior having “mission to assist the criminal authorities during
investigations on data systems, containing data being the subject of processing operations preventing access to information in the
clear.” Or, to put it simply, to break the password of a smartphone or computer and of all encrypted data it may contains.
[466] I noticed the same interest for the Arabian Peninsula at the Directorate of Economic and Financial intelligence in the mid-
1990s already, just by looking at folders on desks.
[467] From 1962 on, Melnik fell in disgrace, and Director of the DST Roger Wybot either, for the same reason of anti-
Communism and pro-American stance, and because of their stubbornness to hunt Soviet spies in France. From then on, Melnik
reconverted as novelist, until he passed away in 2014, despised by the upstarts of the DGSE of the 1980-1990s. He had to face
endless negative criticism in the French media from the 1960s on already, starting with a smear campaign initiated by Le Canard
enchaîné newspaper, explained in this book. In the 1990s, in the DGSE, Melnik was openly considered as “a traitor” because of his
erstwhile connections with the U.S. intelligence community, to the point that anyone who would just utter his name was running the
risk to become a “suspect” himself, DGSE employees who were ten or fifteen years older than me seemed to express either contempt
or hatred for Melnik, much more than for Roger Wybot who was simply forgotten, or held as an insignificant character in the best of
cases. On the French version of the Amazon website, Melnik’s essays and novels continue to receive nasty negative criticism
anonymously posted by the cell in charge of counter-influence.
[468] Décret n°2002-497 du 12 avril 2002 relatif au Groupement Interministériel de Contrôle.

[469] Lionel Jospin resigned on May 6, 2002. He had been Prime Minister for more than three years. Earlier, it was publicly
revealed in the mainstream media—newspaper Le Monde, and news-magazines L’Express, and Le Nouvel Observateur—that Jospin
had been a member of the Internationalist Communist Organization. The media added, he was a Soviet agent, ran under the codename
“Ми а” (Micha) by the Departamentul de Informatii Externe–DIE, the Romanian foreign intelligence branch of the Departamentul
Securitatii Statului–DSS. Today, the French intelligence community is still struggling to make disappear all traces of the latter news
on the Internet. Politician Claude Estier, who actively involved in Lionel Jospin’s campaign for the 2002 presidential election, was a
Soviet spy too, ran by the Romanians under the codename “Stanica”. This other fact was not known until 2016, when Romania
declassified some archives of the Soviet era, in which it was found that Estier was recruited in February 1982 by Oros Popescu, a
Romanian agent stationed in Paris. Upon his recruitment in 1983, Estier was elected Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of
the National Assembly. Remarkably, the work of Estier as Soviet agent was revealed by French weekly newsmagazine L’Express, on
November 10, 2016. That is to say, only after Estier died, and eight months earlier day for day, on March 10, 2016.
[470] The classification degree Très Secret Défense is the highest (see also Lexicon, “Besoin d’en connaître”). At that time,
already, there was an additional provision, taken to satisfy the need for compartmentalization, which consisted in typing on a highly
secret document the list of the names of its exclusive recipients, and to print as many copies of it and not a single one more. As I
previously said, very sensitive documents the more often are “blank,” anonymous and unintelligible to anyone has no sufficient and
specialized knowledge to understand their meaning and importance.
[471] The postal and official address of the GIC is Ministère des Armées, 51 boulevard La Tour Maubourg, 75700 Paris SP 07,
without “GIC” added, which fact unambiguously indicates it belongs to the military. All intelligence agencies of the military have
similar addresses, with “Ministère de la Défense,” and some postal code without further precisions, even not a street name in some
instances. The French post office alone knows which such cryptic addresses are and where the envelopes that bear them must be
delivered.
[472] Since he left the GIC, Rear Admiral Durteste was called to assist National Intelligence Coordinator–CNR Didier Le Bret
at the Élysée Palace with respect to “technical matters in intelligence”.
[473] Philippe Brocard’s military unit is never specified in his past biography. When he was Captain, he was officially known as
“Staff Officer,” which suggests he was in the DGSE or the DRM.
[474] That is to say, according to Le Monde, which newspaper is not supposed to know details of that order, even though they
are inaccurate, unless the DGSE leaked this information to them for deceiving foreign intelligence agencies, as this agency uses to.
[475] French journalists and bloggers name telephone and Internet tapping units “listening stations” (“stations d’écoute”), and
the same indistinctly for large listening sites with parabolic antenna. On some maps of their own those people publish, they even
sketched a symbol of parabolic antenna to indicate the location of a domestic telephone tapping unit. The amalgam does little to
dispel confusion in their readers.
[476] What I said in the previous footnote about Le Monde newspaper applies to those bloggers for different reasons, because if
they truly are so independent and sincere in their curiosity, then why don’t they cite facts leaked by people who successfully escaped
the DGSE? Thus, we know they are trolls actually, who are holding the original news atop the list on Google in order to bury already
existing others of real interest. See also Lexicon, “DIRISI”.
[477] ADSL stands for Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line, a data transmission protocol that works by using the frequency
spectrum above the band used by voice telephone calls. With a DSL filter, often called splitter, the frequency bands are isolated, thus
allowing for a single telephone line to be used for both and simultaneously ADSL service and telephone calls. ADSL is generally
installed at a short distance from a telephone router (the last mile), less than 2 miles typically, but has been known to exceed 5 miles
if the originally laid wire gauge allows for further distribution.
[478] In late 2017, the number of homes ineligible for ADSL was estimated in France to 500,000.

[479] In 2006 the Commandement des Opérations Spéciales–COS (Special Operations Command) left Taverny for the
Villacoublay Air Base 107. In 2007, the Centre de Conduite des Opérations Aériennes–CCOA (Center for Conduct of Air
Operations) left the Taverny Air Base 921 for the Lyon-Mont Verdun Air Base 942. The same year, the Commandement de la
Défense Aérienne et des Opérations Aériennes–CDAOA (Air Defense and Air Command) left Taverny to join the Base aérienne 117
Paris (Paris Air Base 117); and the Centre de Renseignement Air–CRA (Air Intelligence Center) also left Taverny to join the 128
Metz-Frescaty Air Base.
[480] It is still in existence today, and I suppose that it is now working on Internet data tapping since the Minitel system and its
servers no longer exist.
[481] See Lexicon, “Com-Rens”.

[482] On such occasions, gendarmes change their usual role of law enforcement and traffic police for that of military-like or spy-
like missions, dressing either in camouflaged uniforms or in plain clothes according to the circumstance.
[483] The BR was created in 1993, first under the name Brigade de Renseignement et de Guerre Électronique–BRGE
(Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Brigade).
[484] As an aside, until the 1970s (at least), the military offered two internal learning programs in Russian and in Arabic
language, and no more, in addition to intelligence learning programs in the SDECE (called “Stage SDECE”), in the DRM (then still
called 2nd Bureau), and in the DRSD (then called DSM). Remarkably, they also offered a complete learning program in foreign
affairs that awarded its students the exotic executive position of Cadre d’Orient (Orient Specialist) in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs;
so, Military Attaché in embassy, and Chief of Station possibly.
[485] The Institut Français du Pétrole–IFP (French Institute of Petroleum) is one such example.

[486] For years, the DGSE used Silicon Graphic super-computers.

[487] The CRE / CTM / DAT of Mayotte hung on the side of the crater Dziani Dzaha.

[488] In July 2007, following an Emirati demand, France committed to developing a permanent military presence in this
country. It was announced in January 2008, during a tour of the Gulf by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and it was officially
inaugurated on May 26, 2009.
[489] On the basis of facts I witnessed, the DGSE intercepted submarine communications cables much earlier already.

[490] Between New York City and Miami in particular.

[491] Not to be confused with the second massive recruitment campaign for more than 600 additional specialists in 2017.

[492] See Wikipedia, “XYZ Affair”.

[493] Отделение по Охранению Об ественной Безопасности и Порядка.

[494] Оханное отделение.

[495] Охрана.
 [496] The Germans had helped secretly Lenin and the Bolsheviks during the First World War, as testified the archives of the
German Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Auswärtiges Amt) in the aftermaths of the WWII.
[497] Коммунистический интернационал.

[498] Коминтерн.

[499] Всероссийская Чресвычайная Комиссия– ВЧК VChK, All-Russian Extraordinary Commission.

[500] Государтсвенное политическое управление–ГПУ, State Political Directorate.

[501] Обьедин нное государственное политическое управление при ОГПУ СССР, Joint State Political Directorate under the
Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR.
[502] Народный комиссариат внутренних ден–НКВД, People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs.

[503] Herbert Romerstein, Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets, Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors, pp 56-57.

[504] Ibid, p. 56.

[505] See Wikipedia, “Red Orchestra”.

[506] Leopold Trepper, Le Grand jeu: Mémoires du chef de l’Orchestre Rouge, Albin Michel pub., 1975.

[507] Testimony of André Dewavrin aka “Colonel Passy” in Paris-Presse newspaper, June 20, 1947.

[508] Testimony of André Dewavrin, ibid.

[509] Thyraud de Vosjoli, Pierre, Lamia, Little Brown and Co. Boston-Toronto pub., 1970.

[510] Министерство Государственной Безопасности, or МГБ.

[511] This public agency, still in existence today, changed its name since then for Délégation Générale à la Recherche
Scientifique et Technique–DGRST.
[512] Sandor Rado, Sous le pseudonym Dora, Julliard pub. 1972. Oddly enough, although Rado later immigrated in the United
States where he became a famous psychoanalyst, his autobiography as former Soviet spy was never translated in English. This fact is
accountable for mistakes American historians on intelligence made about his activities in WWII.
[513] Today, EADS is a well-known European multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and sells civil and military
aeronautical products worldwide.
[514] One of the most interesting books about this event perhaps is Diplomat among Warriors, by Robert D. Murphy (1976),
because the author has no regard for political correctness. In it, Murphy reveals facts he held from first-hand knowledge that no
French publishing house would dare publish, and which would probably make hesitating even an American publishing house today.
[515] From my meeting with Messmer in 2000.

[516] The reader will find some information about this event on Wikipedia, “Workers’ Force”.

[517] Anatoliy Golitsyn (1926-2008) was a Red army veteran, university trained in intelligence techniques by the KGB, before
he rose to the strategic planning department of the First Directorate of this agency with the rank of Major. At the moment of his
defection, he was assigned to the Soviet embassy in Helsinki, Finland, as vice counsel and attaché, under the name “Ivan Klimov”.
[518] Life, “The French Spy Scandal,” April 26, 1968, p. 31.

[519] Because of the obvious implications of such a security breakdown, the American President had chosen to resort to a
personal courier from Washington to Paris, to give a letter to De Gaulle in person rather than depending upon possibly vulnerable and
more formal channels.
[520] Life, “The French Spy Scandal,” April 26, 1968, p. 31.

[521] Ibid. p. 34.

[522] Still in the late 1990s, I could not but notice, certain Russian agents who worked with the DGSE seemed to know much
more about this agency in general indeed than I and my ex-colleagues. As striking example of it, when I casually reported the death
of Jérôme Ventre, former head of the of COMINT service to some of my ex-colleagues, months after it happened, they all did not
even know who this man was.
[523] “Among my responsibilities in the middle of 1962 was the direction of a French intelligence effort in Cuba”. Testimony of
Thyraud de Vosjoli for Life, April 26, 1968, p. 34.
[524] Thyraud de Vosjoli’s own testimony. Ibid. p. 35.

[525] Paul Jacquier was a general of the French Air Force loyal to de Gaulle, who was appointed Director of the SDECE in
February 1962. He was removed from office in January 1966 when France left NATO and signed an cooperation agreement with the
Soviet Union.
[526] Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior - James Jesus Angleton: The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter, Simon and Schuster, 1991, p. 124.
Eventually, the SDECE cleared Houneau, who said Angleton was a “madman and an alcoholic”.
[527] Oleg Penkovsky was a colonel with Soviet military intelligence (GRU) during the late 1950s and early 1960s, who
informed the United Kingdom and the United States about the Soviet emplacement of missiles in Cuba. He was shot for treason and
cremated on May 16, 1963.
[528] Stig Erik Constans Wennerström (1906–2006) was a Swedish Air Force colonel employed at the Swedish Ministry for
Foreign Affairs, who was convicted of treason in 1964 following Golitsyn’s revelations.
[529] Testimony of Walt Elder, Special Assistant to DCI John McCone at that time.

[530] Thyraud de Vosjoli, Pierre, Lamia, Little, Brown and Co. Pub., 1970 (first print.).

[531] With a participation of John Barry of the London Sunday Times, which for the three previous months had been conducting
its own investigation on the Russian agent, only known under the codename “Martel” at that time.
[532]
[533] Thierry Wolton, Le KGB en France, Grasset pub. 1986.

[534] Testimony of author and journalist Edward Jay Epstein, who met Thyraud de Vosjoli.

[535] Maurice Vaïsse, France and Nato: A History, col. Politique étrangère, IFRI pub., 2009, 139-150.

[536] However, the French forces in Germany remained stationed there until 1993, in the context of a French-German military
cooperation agreement.
[537] The French Ministry of Defense indeed printed a consistent documentation about the armies of the Warsaw Pact and about
Soviet military tactics; I saw and read plenty of them. There was even a periodical on all this. Most if not all this documentation,
including the magazine, was classified at the lowest level (i.e. Diffusion Restreinte, or Restricted), but it was not distributed upon
arrival in French bases in Germany, and stored in cellars instead. No one read it.
[538] Déclaration commune franco-soviétique - 30 juin 1966, www.charles-de-gaulle.org, March 2019.

[539] “Oui, c’est l’Europe, depuis l’Atlantique à l’Oural, c’est l’Europe, c’est toute l’Europe, qui décidera du destin du monde!”

[540] I once have been sent to the CFDT labor union headquarters in Paris to fix a minor technical problem, which had to be
done in secrecy, unbeknownst to executives of this organization.
[541] As a good example among some others I knew about, Bernard Thibault, who was elected secretary of the Confédération
Générale du Travail–CGT in 1999, is unaware, perhaps, that his election greatly owed to discreet but consistent interventions of the
DGSE. This was undertaken long before it happened, in particular with the help of journalists of the French mainstream media who
were instructed to focus on his person at a time he was known to none. So much so that his electors could not think another candidate
“as famed as him” already.
[542] To the reader knowledgeable in firearms, Barry had the rarest pistols on Earth, including prototypes of the late 1800s and
early 1900s Borchardt, carbines Lüger, and Mauser, Webley-Fosberry, earliest Browning and Colt, Savage, Liliput, etc. He owned all
those guns illegally of course, since it would have been impossible in France, at least because of their number, limited in this country,
and because some of those guns had a full-auto selector.
[543] From recollection, one of those media was La Vie Française magazine.

[544] This counter-intelligence officer was Pierre Levergeois, who at that time was presenting his book titled, J’ai choisi la
D.S.T: Souvenirs d’un inspecteur (I Chose the DST: Recollections from an Inspector), Flammarion pub., Jan, 1st, 1978.
[545] When I heard the testimony of Levergeois, he was a guest of Apostrophes, a live, weekly, literary, prime-time talk show on
French television created and hosted by famous journalist Bernard Pivot.
[546] Pierre Marion, Director of the DGSE from June 1981 to April 1982, unwittingly made the blunder to reveal publicly that,
since long already in 1981, France did not carry any intelligence activities in the Soviet Union, neither in any of its satellite countries.
See, Marion, Pierre, La Mission impossible – À la tête des services secrets, 1991, Calman Levy pub., p. 22.
[547] “Come here! Come here!”

[548] The exact secret symbolism the DGSE gives to putting in prominent display a rustic chest is that its rustic and poor aspect,
instead of a beautiful piece of furniture one would be proud to own and to show, means the funds collector and provider is not a rich
person himself, but an agent as any other who is entrusted “the money that the chest contains,” symbolically.
[549] Excerpt from Wikipedia, “Vladimir Vetrov,” March 2018.

[550] The Attentat de l’Observatoire (Plot of the Observatoire) was a murder attempt by firearm against François Mitterrand that
happened in the Avenue de l’Observatoire in Paris, on the night of October 15 to 16, 1959, whence the name of the plot. The
investigations of the police quickly suspected Mitterrand actually organized a fake murder attempt against himself for the sole sake to
draw the attention of the public opinion on his person. Mitterrand denied he did it, of course, but six day later his accomplice in the
plot, Robert Pesquet, surrendered to the police, confessed the truth, and even brought overwhelming evidences of his saying.
Cornered Mitterrand finally resigned to acknowledge Pesquet said the truth. Thereupon, it was further established that Mitterrand
planned and organized the attack against himself in every details, and that indeed he was just looking for advertising himself. Years
later, Pesquet retracted unexpectedly, and claimed he was the brain of the plot, and he had fooled Mitterrand all along on instruction
of the French far-rightist wing that wanted to discredit him when he was Socialist Senator. Mitterrand was also former Minister of
Justice, and former Minister of the Interior. However, the new explanations of Pesquet proved farfetched and unconvincing, and
supported by no evidence nor any other testimony than his own. Furthermore, no rational came to explain why Pesquet had wanted to
modify spontaneously and publicly his previous version of the facts in a way that incriminated himself.
[551] Sergei Kostin, Bonjour Farewell: La vérité sur la taupe française du KGB (Hello Farewell: The Truth about the French
Mole in the KGB), Robert Laffont pub., September 1, 1999.
[552] Sergei Kostin, Éric Raynaud, Adieu Farewell (Goodbye Farewell), Robert Laffont pub., September 10, 2009.
 [553] Raynaud, Éric, Un crime d’État? La mort étrange de Pierre Bérégovoy, éditions Alphée pub., 2008.

[554] Raynaud, Éric, Suicide d’État à l’Élysée, la mort incroyable de François de Grossouvre, éditions Alphée pub., 2009.

[555] In March 2018, further inquiry on the “Prix de la Justice Citoyenne” did not allow to find out a single trace of its past or
present existence.
[556] Raynaud, Éric, 11-Septembre, les vérités cachés, éditions Alphée pub., 2009.

[557] I named Meyssan and voltairenet.org in the chapter 21 already, but my explanations will be exhaustive in the chapter 27.

[558] Thierry Meyssan and Éric Raynaud, “Éric Raynaud: ʻaux États-Unis, plus aucun expert ne prend le risque de défendre un
point précis de la version gouvernementaleʼ,” (Éric Raynaud: in the United States, no expert takes the risk of defending a specific
point of the government version), Sept. 10, 2009,
http://www.voltairenet.org/article162014.html,
[559] In 1994, Grossouvre was found dead with several gunshot wounds in his office in the Élysée Palace, officially ruled as
suicide.
[560] This ex-colleague held managerial and technical responsibilities in the particular field of banking data interception and
collection, banking cards activities in particular. Anecdotally, he once told me that learning FORTRAN computing language when he
was young, accidentally saved his career in intelligence and greatly helped him access responsibilities in financial intelligence.
[561] Anecdotally, I once was invited to go to a private conference at the Senate on the causes of Muslim radicalization in
French youngsters of North-African origin. Former Director of the DST Yves Bonnet was expected to be there. So I talked about the
latter event to Charles-Henri de Pardieu who was head of the Directorate of Financial and Economic Intelligence of the DGSE at that
time, and I proposed to him to join in since I was in capacity to ask for putting him on the guest list. To my surprise, I heard him
declining the offer with a smile, on the ground that Bonnet was “an uninteresting guy”.
[562] France Inter, radio program Affaires Sensibles, “L’Affaire farewell,” interview of Jacky Debain, Nov. 22, 2018.

[563] Excerpt from Wikipedia, “Irish of Vincennes,” March 2018.

[564] Actually, a few decades ago, the following incident of minor importance, but that could have entailed grave consequences,
spanned a running joke in the DGSE. An agent of the DGSE (or of the SDECE) who was about to be sent in mission abroad under a
fictitious identity could not help himself taking with him his police card, “just in case,” he explained when his wallet and fake papers
were checked for a last time before he boarded his plane. The anecdote since then is cited regularly in the DGSE as example of
mistake an agent must be wary of.
[565] Such code words and sentences generally are in the vein of, “I feel sick today,” “I have a big headache” or “backache” or
analogous. Then a crypted call for an exfiltration in emergency must contain the word “swimming pool,” such as, “We did not go to
swim today, because there is a problem with the swimming pool”.
[566] When the New Zealand police called in France to know who was the telephone number, the French national telephone
networks was ruled by Direction Générale des Télecomunications–DGT (General Directorate for the Telecommunications), a sub-
body of the Postes, Télégraphe et Téléphones–PTT, assimilated to a ministry.
[567] “La France ne le sait pas, mais nous sommes en guerre contre les Etats-Unis. Une guerre permanente, économique, une
guerre sans morts.” As an aside, this article of Courrier International is hard to find on the Internet since then; quotes of it are
available, only.
[568] PSU stands for Parti Socialiste Unifié (United Socialist Party), founded in 1960 and dismantled in 1990. Its stance located
between the Communist Party and the Socialist Party; that is to say, the left wing of French socialism.
[569] Paul Touvier was head of the pro-Nazi French Militia during the German occupation.

[570] François Labrouillère, “Les Dossiers secrets de la DGSE,” Paris Match, March 30, 2010.

[571] See Wikipedia, “Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits”.

[572] Excerpt from Wikipedia, Ibid.

[573] Allied Joint Force Command (JFC) Naples (JFC Naples) is a NATO military command based in Lago Patria, in the
Metropolitan City of Naples, Italy. The base was formerly located in the Bagnoli quarter of Naples. See Wikipedia, “Allied Joint
Force Command Naples”.
[574] See Wikipedia, “Franco-German Brigade”.

[575] See Wikipedia, “Eurocorps”.

[576] See Lexicon, “Fonds spéciaux”.

[577] As an aside, TV program C dans l’air often invites on its stage executives and chief analysts of the DGSE, some of whom
I knew personally, unbeknownst to the audience. For they are introduced under varied but unclear cover activities, such as “expert,”
“specialist,” and “historian” on such or such field, all activities that hardly suffice alone to make a living in France. I have been at the
right place to know that the books those analysts and strategists publish rarely sell more than 2,000 copies, and rather a few 100 on
average.
[578] The francophonie is a potent means of French influence abroad, mainly managed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and
the Ministry of Culture. The francophonie is described in detail in the chapter 26.
 [579] Russian President Vladimir Putin and France’s President Emmanuel Macron press conference after their meeting in Paris,
on May 29, 2017.
[580] Encrypted and highly secured cellphones Teorem are 100% French-manufactured in Cholet by Thales Group, an industrial
group with a specialty in the defense sector. Those cellphones were provided initially to French ministers, the President, and senior
official of the Ministry of Defense only, to secure their telecommunications, especially against possible interception by the U.S. NSA.
The Teorem is a folding cellphone with an outdated Ericsson-like looking. It has a keyboard because its screen is not tactile, and it is
sold by Thales 4,500 euros apiece. It is not available on the private market because it is classified material at the high level Secret
Défense. In 2013, the DGA and the Ministry of Defense would have ordered 14,140 Teorem cellphones to Thales Group, for a
negotiated price of 2,500 euros apiece. However, a number of its privileged users complained about its complex use and slowness,
and resigned to use ordinary smartphones instead.
[581] “Atteinte au secret de la défense”.

[582] Interview of Government Spokeswoman Sibeth Ndiaye by France Inter radio station, May 23, 2019.

[583] Charles S. Cogan, French Negotiating Behavior: Dealing with La Grande Nation, USIP Press, 2003.

[584] The Celts gradually emigrated from Central Europe to spread over the entire European continent, and as far as England
and Ireland from the end of the 3rd century BC.
[585] The expression “Perfidious Albion” comes from there, but it was the French preacher and writer Bossuet who coined it in
the 17th century to refer to England in a pejorative way.
[586] Translation courtesy of The Society of William Wallace, http://www.thesocietyofwilliamwallace.com/wallaceletter.htm

[587] The only other politician who left me a similar feeling was former President of Lebanon Amin Gemayel, whom I once met
in the mid-1990s with his wife and his son at the French Senate.
[588] If I do not reproduce the logo of the DGSE in this book, it is because this agency makes clear that its “private” author will
sue for copyright infringement anyone who reproduces it without his formal (or implicit) authorization. This would constitute at least
one way to retaliate against me for publishing this book, doubtless. It is otherwise visible on the Wikipedia page of the DGSE.
[589] Jean Guisnel is cited several times in this book..

[590] Some months earlier, my “informal” teacher on Japanese culture, a psychoanalyst of Paraguayan origin who, I strongly
suspect, was one of those Russian agents who work as full-time employees in the DGSE, regularly brought me to watch old Japanese
movies in the tiny movie theater Saint-André-des-Arts, located near the Boulevard Saint Michel in Paris: films made by Yasujirō Ozu
in particular. As a result, I thus watched all films made by Ozu!
[591] Léon Blum has been Prime Minister of France from 1936 to 1938, and then President of the Provisional Government of
France from December 1946 to January 1947—one month only—and then Vice-Premier of France in 1948.
[592] The advertising agency in question was named Cat’s, and settled in the affluent 16th arrondissement of Paris. However,
Blum was spared the agonies of falling too low, and his last businesses with Sonauto allowed him to retire with a little money.
Anecdotally, I know that Blum was counted on to similarly sabotage the popular French chain food store Félix Potin, which indeed
closed not long after the sabotage of Hyundai in 1995. The reason for which Félix Potin food store chain—which was ailing already
at that time—had to disappear is unknown to me; perhaps this simply served the interest of another food store chain.
[593] The P5+1 refers to the UN Security Council’s five permanent members (the P5); namely China, France, Russia, the United
Kingdom, and the United States, plus Germany. The P5+1 is often referred to as the E3+3 by European countries. It is a group of six
world powers that, in 2006, joined diplomatic efforts with Iran with regard to its nuclear program.–Excerpt from Wikipedia, “P5+1,”
March 2018.
[594] Statement by French Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian and French Minister of Defense Florence Parly after
the Western strikes in Syria, April 14, 2018, 8:09 AM; updated 12:30 PM.
[595] “Donald Trump a tort de se croire irresistible”.

[596] Christie Lagarde, expert in financial and economic intelligence with a specialty on the United States, to say the least, first
went on an American Field Scholarship to the Holton Arms School in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1973, then aged 17. She was already
fluent in English at that time, because her father, Robert Lallouette, was English professor. During her first year in the United States,
Lagarde worked as an intern at the U.S. Capitol as Representative William Cohen’s congressional assistant, helping him correspond
with French-speaking constituents during the Watergate hearings. Back to France, Lagarde mastered in English labor law and social
law. In 1981, she joined Chicago based international law firm Baker & MacKenzie, where she handled major antitrust and labor
cases; she was named head of this firm in Europe eventually. By then, Lagarde held three ministerial positions in the French
Government. In 2011, she succeeded Dominique Strauss-Kahn as head of the International Monetary Fund-IMF upon his resignation
following a sexual scandal in NYC. On December 17, 2015, French Finance Minister Michel Sapin said Lagarde could stay on as
head of the IMF, despite being charged with criminal negligence in an affair in which she arranged for French super-agent Bernard
Tapie to obtain an extraordinary financial compensation amounting to more than 400 million euros.
[597] This fact has been a supporting argument for the launch of the idea of “candides” in the French military-industrial
complex in the late 1990s, previously explained.
[598] The terms “black operation” and “black ops” are not in use in the French intelligence community, and they have no other
equivalents than operation spéciales (special operations), which other term however belongs to military intelligence, specifically.
[599] This is a simplified and straightforward interpretation of my own of Machiavelli in Il Principe, often translated in a softer
way from the following original version, “E nelle azioni di tutti gli uomini, e massime de’ principi, dove non è iudizio a chi
reclamare, si guarda al fine. Facci dunque uno principe di vincere e mantenere lo stato; e’ mezzi saranno sempre iudicati onorevoli e
da ciascuno laudati; perchè il vulgo ne va sempre preso con quello che pare, e con lo evento della cosa; e nel mondo non è se non
vulgo; e li pochi non ci hanno luogo quando li assai hanno dove appoggiarsi.”–Il Principe de Niccolò Machiavelli, Turin, 1926,
cdxix, p. 35.
[600] Actually, a Russian intelligence officer invited me to learn epistemology, and not the DGSE, formally speaking.

[601] See, Wikipedia, “Defence and Citizenship Day.”

[602] This provides me with an opportunity to highly recommend the reader, again, to watch the French film Dossier 51 (1978),
whose realism describes and explains how this kind of recruitment can be carried out, better than I did in this book.
[603] I once met one of those returning French. He was a man on his thirties who graduated in the United States. He had a PhD.
from Harvard University, and when I met him, he was doing the chores of a masonic lodge of the GLF as part of his cooptation by it.
[604] Excerpt from Wikipedia, “Organisation internationale de la Francophonie,” March 2018.

[605] Ibid.

[606] Claude Mollard, Le 5e pouvoir – La Culture et l’État de Malraux à Lang, Armand Collin pub., 1999.

[607] Pollock had died two years earlier in a car accident.

[608] Boards on which management and unions are equally represented.

[609] In passing, this includes the study for future means of storage for the archives of the DGSE and all other intelligence
agencies, police, and Gendarmerie. These bodies have always been worrying about certain things of a technical order, such as the
ageing of the aluminum layer on optical data storage disks, and the regular disappearance of computer file formats and connection
standards when they fall into obsolescence.
[610] Located Quai François Mauriac, Paris, for the new one.

[611] The seminar rooms of the Carousel du Louvre in particular are such meeting places.

[612] Located 116, Avenue du Président Kennedy, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.

[613] Anecdotally, Eco had a close relationship with French scenarist Jean-Claude Carrière, which other person and one of my
ex-colleagues, François Cellier, knew each other.
[614] See also Sergei Pugachev’s long biography on Wikipedia.

[615] https://www.brunolussato.com

[616] I cited Vladimir Volkoff already as former counterintelligence officer and author of some of the best French espionage
novels.
[617] Alexander Pugachev, Russian and French citizen, as his father has close connections in the inner circles of political power
in Russia.
[618] Testimony of Michel Sima (1912-1987), French sculptor and friend of Picasso, whom I knew for a while.

[619] All You Need is Love by the Beatles is a special song in other ways that indeed connect to politics, and to the Cold War in
particular. Its first release was planned to inaugurate the first global television link by the cooperation of television networks
worldwide, on June 25, 1967, on an idea of the BBC, titled Our World. The broadcasting of the song was done by this body, yet
overseen by European Broadcasting Union. Planned 10 months earlier, the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact had
initially agreed to partake in the event, yet they backtracked a few days before the event over the issue of the Six-Day War of June 5
to 10, allegedly. Then the first notes of the French national anthem, the Marseillaise, which marks the beginning of All You Need is
Love in a striking way, would be a friendly gesture of Britain toward France, some believe, but the oddity remain a mystery that rises
conjectures as the lyrics of the old French song are quite warmongering and call for violence and blood, and considering the
withdrawal of France from NATO and the agreement she signed with the Soviet Union one year earlier almost day for day. In any
case, we know that it was not an idea of the Beatles’ composer of the song John Lennon, and some cannot but surmise that it may
have been that of arranger George Martin, without any certainty. Additionally, note that All You Need is Love comes again as an
unexpected feature in the last episode of the British espionage TV series The Prisoner, by and with actor Patrick McGoohan, aired a
few months later, on February 1, 1968.
[620] Wikipedia has a page on “Groupthink”.

[621] Not coincidentally, theorist on advertising Edward Bernays, who happened to write excellent books on propaganda he
preferred to call “public relations”—Crystallizing Public Opinion in 1923; and Propaganda in 1928—was Sigmund Freud’s nephew.
[622] See Wikipedia, “Sokal affair”.

[623] In France, members of the Socialist Party call each other “brother” and “sister,” as Freemasons do. It must be kept in mind
that a majority of French liberal freemasons are socialists, and that the GOdF was enormously influential in the rise of socialism in
France from the 1870s on. The latter point was acknowledged exceptionally by French professor and socialist politician Marcel Prélot
in, L’Évolution politique du Socialisme français: 1789-1934 (The Political Evolution of French Socialism: 1789-1934), published by
SPES pub. in 1939. It is a succinct yet interesting essay in some respect on the rise of socialism in France between the French
Revolution of 1789 and the WWII.
[624] In 2009, the district of La Defense had 2,500 businesses, around 180,000 employees and 20,000 inhabitants working and
living in 71 towers.
[625] Guido Gualandi will be largely presented in the chapter 27, as he was my supervisor for a couple of years.
 [626] To name a few of them among the most popular: René Allio, Jean Becker, Jean-Claude Brialy, Philippe de Broca, Henri
Cartier-Bresson, Christian Cascio, Alain Cavalier, Jerome Caza, Michel Drucker, Robert Enrico, Michel Fuzellier, Costa-Gavras,
Patrick Jeudy, Georges Lautner, Thierry Lecuyer, Claude Lelouch, Marcel L’Herbier, Xavier Liébard, Jean-Louis Lorenzi, Antoine de
Maximy, Claude Miller, Frédéric Pieretti, Bruno Podalydès, Pierre Schoendoerffer, Jean Vautrin.
[627] I discovered The Iprcess File in 2001 while in the United States; I had never heard of it before.

[628] My use of these words here must not be taken as reference to the eponymous American TV series.

[629] Francis Veber wrote scenarios and directed French and American films. He emigrated and worked in the United States in
the 1980s. He returned to France circa the years 1997-98, owing to his unsuccessful attempts to impose in Hollywood his particular
style. I think he could not possibly escape the attention of a Conservative audience, and also of specialists in counterinfluence in the
U.S. intelligence community. Veber made eight French-language films, in which he involved either as writer or director or both.
Some of these films have been remade as English-language Hollywood-style versions. They are The Man with One Red Shoe, Buddy
Buddy, The Birdcage, The Toy, Fathers’ Day, Pure Luck, Three Fugitives, and Dinner for Schmucks. Veber wrote the screenplay for
My Father the Hero.
[630] In this context, I did not hear about Veber before the early 1990s.

[631] News International is a forerunner of today’s News Corp UK & Ireland Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of American
mass media conglomerate News Corp. It is the current publisher of The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun newspapers, and its
former publications include Today, News of the World, and The London Paper newspapers.
[632] Computer software in the early 1990s, and until the last years of this decade, typically did not occupy more than 3 to 6
megabytes each on a computer hard-disk, which itself averaged 40 to 80MB typically. By 1994, the whole collection of Apple
compatible software of the DGSE barely amounted to 6GB for several thousands of software of very varied complexity and size, and
other plug-ins, all versions of Apple operating software included (the latest Apple OS by then was the 7.0).
[633] Maison de la Radio is the headquarters of Radio France. It is located in the 16th arrondissement of Paris near the Eiffel
Tower. Built in the shape of huge ring more than 500 yards in circumference with a central utility tower, the building houses the
administrative offices, broadcasting studios, and performance spaces for all of Radio France’s national stations.—Excerpt from
Wikipedia, “Maison de la Radio”, March 2018.
[634] “Bruno Deléan, PDG de Live Picture, ce logiciel français qui fait réver-Kodak et John Sculley”.

[635] Excerpt from Wikipedia, “SS Normandie,” March 2018.

[636] Gualandi was the agent who had fooled The New York Times by posing as painter in New York and he had much fun with
it each time talked about it. He once shown me this press article to prove he was not kidding.
[637] The École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales–EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) is a
French grande école (élite higher-education establishment that operates outside the regulatory framework of the public university
system). It has a specialty in social sciences, and it is often considered as the most prestigious institution in the field of social sciences
in France.
[638] For an unexplainable reason, although Gualandi obtained his PhD in 1998—Gardin and I were there on his weird
“examination day”—, his thesis was officially recorded in February 1993, that is to say, at a time he did not yet speak French, as one
of his acquaintances once made the mistake to remind him jokingly.
[639] I remember Gardin, then aged 72, persisted calling the DGSE “La Centrale,” which was normal for a man his generation.
However, he did it sometimes in presence of people who were not “in the know,” which was not normal at all, to the concern of some.
Gardin once asked to me, half-jokingly and in substance from recollection, “I can get a PhD. at the École des Hautes Études en
Sciences Sociales for you too, if ever”.
[640] From the viewpoint of the French Government, overall, Fnac is a brand to be helped in all possible ways against Amazon.

[641] The DGA is the French Government Defense procurement and technology agency responsible for the program
management, development, and purchase of weapon systems for the French military—Excerpt from Wikipedia, “Direction générale
de l’armement,” March 2018.
[642] I found on the Internet a man named Thorsten Bernhardt, with a similar educational background, coincidentally or not.
However, on the pictures, this man does not resemble at all my correspondent in the BND. Just in case.
[643] Circa 1995, the DGSE had some childish pride from having successfully suggested to Apple Inc. to use a butterfly as
symbol, on the release of its software and technology QuickTime VR. Apple Inc. could not possibly be responsible of this choice,
since this company did not understand its real meaning, and so it remained unexplained and mysterious to the public. The enthusiasm
was so great that the DGSE helped Apple Inc. in many ways to promote the use of QuickTime VR in several governmental agencies
for whatever purpose, beginning by virtual photographic tours of Paris and of Le Louvre Museum. As I said, the DGSE gives special
importance to symbols, because this relates to a long-term strategy in influence whose general principles have been explained in the
previous chapters of this book.
[644] Earlier, for a while I had been asked to contribute to the implementation of this archive filing system, as countless other
DGSE workers do, in my case by converting painstakingly printed documents of the police into HTML files for the DGSE central
archives. At that time, OCR software performed too poorly to do a good job. That is why we re-typed everything!
[645] The Apache HTTP Server, called Apache, is a free and open-source cross-platform web server released under the terms of
Apache License 2.0. Apache is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache
Software Foundation.–Excerpt from Wikipedia, “Apache HTTP Server.” March 2018. For long, already, Linux Apache is in a
situation of near monopoly on the worldwide market of Internet host providers.
[646] The Eyrolles bookstore, located Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris for long is well known for its large choice in technical
books on computer programming and related, imported and hard to find elsewhere in France, therefore.
 [647] The COMDEX, first launched in the United States in 1979, is a large annual computer expo trade show.

[648] Translation from French by the author. This text is still available today (March 17, 2018) on the website of Stéphane
Fermigier at the page titled, “Bilan du COMDEX+Evènements à venir”.
http://fermigier.com/blog/1999/02/bilan-comdex-evenements-venir/
[649] All characteristics or almost of this particular laptop computer are available on the Wikipedia page “Asus Eee PC,” at the
paragraph titled, “Eee PC 1000 series”.
[650] See Wikipedia, “Illegals Program,” about this affair.

[651] Since I left the DGSE, this agency proved persisting in its attempts to track me and to monitor my personal computer
activities online as wireless and whenever possible. As at some point, I set particular measures to spot surveillance and intrusions,
and that is how I located its operators in a privately owned building in Taverny, a few hundred yards from the underground Air Base
921. On those occasions, I tested the capacities of the DGSE in breaking wireless encryption keys, which proved to be very effective
and fast. Indeed, it took less than 10 minutes on average to the DGSE to break all my encryption keys, until I gave this agency some
hard time with a particular encryption protocol that was not used by Orange, nor by any other French operator. Nonetheless, I noticed,
my “guardian angels” persisted in their will to monitor my Internet activity with a surprising relentlessness, as if knowing everything
I could do was of a vital importance to them, or else as if they believed I was attempting to establish a secret communication channel
with a B party. Actually, I never established any such contact with anyone, nor have I been able to have a single acquaintance because
the DGSE had socially eliminated me successfully, precisely. In my particular case, I did those experiments in counter-measures just
for the fun and to kill time, as there was not much else I could do with my days, for years. Yet the DGSE never stopped, nor seemed
to tire of monitoring my dailies, which at some point left me with the belief that I was a sort of particularly dangerous criminal in its
eyes.
[652] Although this was a secret provision in the French war against Amazon to be told to no one, on February 19, 2012, a
product manager in Laffont publishing stupidly blew it during her interview, broadcast on M6 TV channel, in a prime time edition of
the program Capital titled, “Nouveau, moins cher: ces idées qui révolutionnent nos achats” (New, cheaper: these ideas that
revolutionize our purchases).
[653] Founded as “Business Software Alliance,” this organization dropped “Business” from its name in October 2012, and was
renamed, “BSA | The Software Alliance”.
[654] Jean Guisnel will appear again in another story of disinformation against the United States, in this same chapter.

[655] As a passing reference, the DGSE had given authorization to Gualandi to name this magazine with the English title, Red
Green Blue; that is to say, the secret colors of this agency, because the denial of this meaning was obvious since the words, red green
blue, or “RGB,” were used frequently in the computer industry, and more particularly in graphic design.
[656] Those discreet conferences were organized in classrooms in the Pôle Universitaire Léonard de Vinci, located in the major
business district of La Défense, near Paris.
[657] Unifrance is a public organization for promoting French films outside France, managed by the Centre National de la
Cinématographie–CNC. It has several hundred members including filmmakers, directors, screenwriters, and agents.
[658] Excerpt from Wikipedia, “France 24,” March 2018. Translation from French by the author.

[659] I should have put the word ex-colleague between comas, because when I met Patrick Pasin in his office of Éditions Carnot,
in late 2000, he had been described to me as a member of an influence cell then ran by the DST (now DGSI), and not the DGSE.
[660] « Meyssan vend 100 000 exemplaires en une semaine ».

[661] Edwy Plenel, La Part d’ombre, Stock pub., 1992.

[662] Peter Allen, “Marion Cotillard’s 9/11 conspiracy theory,” The Daily Telegraph (telegraph.co.uk), March 1, 2008.

[663] Philippe Lheureux, Lumières sur la Lune : La NASA a-t-elle menti (Lights on the Moon: Did the NASA lie), Éditions
Carnot pub., October 16, 2000.
[664] Stéphane Jah, an ex-non-commissioned officer in an elite unit of the COS, indeed was badly treated and paid by the DST,
as I could see by myself, though I confirm he was an enlightened person in counterespionage.
[665] As an aside, Jean Paul Ney was boastful about a particular trip he did in the United States, because there, he said, he was
granted a visit of the entrance room of the headquarters of the U.S. NSA. I suppose it is true, because he shown me a photo of him in
this place that did not seem to be photoshoped. On a particular occasion, I met him in the company of several other agents of the DST
who were investigating on a grandson of prominent French politician and writer Jean-François Deniau, on the ground that, as avid
gun shooter and collector, this man “a bit too privileged” owned illegally numerous full auto guns, including machine guns he shot
with in his property.
[666] Bonnet, Yves, Contre-espionnage; Mémoires d’un Patron de la DST, Calman Lévy pub. 2000, pp. 104-103, and 222.

[667] Ibid, p. 102.

[668] This fact happened to be publicly revealed in 1996, four years after, allegedly, a Romanian intelligence official came to
Paris in the autumn of 1992, with intelligence files on Hernu. Hernu would have been first recruited by the Departamentul de
Informatii Externe–DIE, Romanian foreign intelligence branch of the Departamentul Securitatii Statului–DSS. However, a more
likely version was, Hernu spied directly for the Soviets since the early 1950s already, and they possibly spotted and recruited him
very early in the aftermath of the WWII, when he was a student in Belgium.
[669] Did the new Socialist Government of May 1981 need a naïve to head the DST at the time the Farewell Affair was
launched? A couple of phrases I spotted in Bonnet’s autobiography suggests the reality of a naïve sincerity in this man, when he says,
with a surprising pride, he did a great job to help the French and the U.S, intelligence communities resuming good relations.
 [670] Bernard Caillaud had been professor of physics at the Paris Sorbonne University, and a confirmed computer scientist. He
had a PhD. in Arts and Sciences of the Art. Caillaud wrote press articles in French and in English on cellular automata. He had a
passion for the music of American composer and pianist Philip Glass. Together Caillaud and I listened tunes by this composer in his
home in southern Brittany, mixed with his teachings on chaos theory and on sound pattern analysis he called sonagraphic analysis
(analyse sonagraphique). With an equal fascination, I could listen to Caillaud—also a good man, indeed—talking for hours. Caillaud
died in 2016, then aged 70.
[671] Many spies appeared on the stage of this television show under various cover activities. At least one of them was the
author of another book published by Éditions Carnot. Dechavanne hosted Claude Vorilhon several times on his TV show, who is a
French national and guru of a sectarian movement called, “Raelians,” with members in several countries. The full extent of what was
successfully done with Vorilhon and his Raelians remains unclear to me, to date. However, I know at least that this sect was used for
recruiting abroad, and for spreading disinformation on particular occasions. The Raelians have been particularly active in South
Korea and in Canada, in which latter country in the early 2000s, Vorilhon its leader spread some rumors of the same dubious kind as
that of Meyssan, which the American mainstream media indeed relayed, to my surprise.
[672] Intelligence Online (intelligenceonline.fr), aka Le Monde du renseignement (The World of Intelligence) is a bimonthly
newsletter on intelligence, and a front of the French intelligence community since 1980. Its financing would be done thanks to
generous subscriptions via certain African countries, I was once explained. It publishes, pell-mell, true and sometimes interesting
news on intelligence activities worldwide, and much content aiming to influence and deception. It is a subsidiary of Paris based
Indigo Publications press group, editor of 15 publications including 9 in French and 6 in English, in the form of newsletters for
professional audiences. It is better known as a webzine on intelligence.
[673] Bunel, Pierre-Henri, Crimes de guerre à l’OTAN, Edition n° 1 pub. June 30, 2000.

[674] Bunel, Pierre-Henri, Crimes de guerre à l’OTAN, Éditions Carnot pub., November 16, 2001.

[675] Bunel, Pierre-Henri, Mes services secrets: Souvenirs d’un agent de l’ombre (My Intelligence Services: Memories of a
Shadow Agent), Flammarion pub. April 24, 2001.
[676] See David Ray Griffin’s biography on his Wikipedia page.

[677] David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, Olive Branch Press pub., November 30,
2004.
[678] With the help of Jean-Jacques Cécile, who wrote articles on military affairs under the pen name “Roger de St-Sorlint”.

[679] Lavauzelle Graphic is a French printing, publishing, and stationery company founded in 1835 in Panazol (near Limoges),
which originally specialized in military-themed books and supplies to the army. After the War of 1870, Lavauzelle became one of the
main suppliers of the French military. Lavauzelle was publisher of Bulletin de la Guerre (The War Bulletin), a publication drafted by
the Ministry of War, and then of La France Militaire (Military France) military newsmagazine.
[680] Éditions L’Harmattan, known colloquially as “L’Harmattan,” is one of the largest French book publishers. It specializes in
non-fiction books with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. It is named after Harmattan, a trade wind in West Africa. L’Harmattan
controls costs by requiring authors to prepare electronic manuscripts in final format, not paying royalties on the first few hundred
copies, and having short print runs of only a few hundred for its most specialized books. When a DGSE analyst is allowed to publish
a book, often he does it with L’Harmattan, and so he obtains no money for it. As an aside, as a personal service I once designed the
cover of a book on terrorism in Indonesia that my ex-colleague (then DGSE analyst) Philippe Raggi published with l’Harmattan.
Raggi told me he was aware that his book would never reach a thousand copies; 600 in the best of cases, and more likely about 200.
[681] Ellipses Editions publishing dedicated originally to the publication of books for preparatory classes, whether scientific,
commercial or literary, and diversified eventually. In addition to publishing and distributing polytechnic publications, this company
publishes books on medicine, administrative concourses, preparation to various educational degrees, and law and languages, rare
languages especially.
[682] Economica is a French publishing house that specializes in economics and on the subject of strategy. Based in Paris, it was
founded in 1971 by Jean Pavlevski, a Macedonian national.
[683] La Découverte publishing merged in 1998 with Havas Group, an published serious books on intelligence from the latter
event on. Eventually, La Découverte was purchased by Éditis Group, and became known for its far-leftist stance.
[684] PGP, which stands for “Pretty Good Privacy,” is an encryption computer program, well known in the realm of intelligence
worldwide, that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is used for signing, encrypting, and
decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories, whole disk partitions, and for increasing the security of e-mail communications.
[685] The French law formally calls spying at the service of a foreign country, “intelligence with a foreign power” (intelligence
avec une puissance étrangère).
[686] At that time in France, the law forbade to ordinary citizens the use of encryption protocol larger than 40 bits, and PGP
could make 512 bits encrypted messages and even above.
[687] Jean Guyaux, L’Espion des sciences, Flammarion pub., 2002.

[688] Jean Guyaux, DST : Dossier Mimosa, L’Esprit du Livre pub., 2004.

[689] His interviews broadcast on French national TV channels were still available on the Internet in March 2018.

[690] Wikipedia, “Moon landing conspiracy theories,” January 2018.

[691] See the Wikipedia page of “Bill Kaysing.”

[692] Czeslaw Bojarski-.

 [693] Henrik Krüger and Jerry Meldon, with a foreword by Peter Dale Scott, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence &
International Fascism, Trine Day; Updated edition, Jan. 1, 2016.
[694] “Après l’évasion, les interrogations,” L’Express newsmagazine, October 28, 2015.
 [695] “Pardonnez-moi – L’interview d’Edward Snowden,” RTS - Radio Télévision Suisse on YouTube, March 2015.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e94nv7zca-k
[696] I recommend to the reader to watch those enlightening and funny commercials that sum up well relations between the
Swiss people and its European neighbors, by typing the words, “Appenzeller Käse.” on YouTube.
[697] Bernard Tapie has been cited several times in this book. I may add, he was a friend of Russian and French super-agent
André Guelfi, as both agreed on many things when they shared the same cell in prison.
[698] “Christine Lagarde was accused of negligence over a €400 million payment made to a French tycoon [Bernard Tapie]
while she was France’s Minister for the Economy and Finances. Lagarde approved the payment from public funds to businessman
Bernard Tapie who was a friend of then acting President Nicolas Sarkozy. This ʻnegligence by a person in a position of public
authority constituted a misuse of public funds, according to prosecutors” – “Christine Lagarde in court over €400m payout to
French tycoon”. The Guardian, Dec. 12, 2016.
[699] Friedrich Von Schiller, and Jules Mulhauser (transl.), Guillaume Tell, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform,
Sept. 20, 2015, ISBN-13: 978-1517431730.
[700] SRG and SSR stands for Schweizerische Radio-und FernsehGesellschaft. In French: Société Suisse de Radiodiffusion et
télévision. In Italian: Società Svizzera di Radiotelevisione. In Romansh: Societad Svizra da Radio e Televisiun.
[701] I could have taken the other example of Belgium, where the Belgian accent is gradually disappearing for the past thirty
years, at the favor of French Parisian accent.
[702] Di Leonardo, Patrick Courrier neuchâtelois, « Les Neuchâtelois perdent l’accent » (Neuchâtelois are losing their
accent). Feb. 20, 2013.
[703] This influence is not accidental as it is not attributable to an unavoidable overflow of satellite TV coverage, but to cable
and ADSL television broadcasting.
[704] This political influence, for the most part, consist in lobbying actions to change Swiss local laws and decrees, with the
real aims to easing the conditions of access to jobs in Switzerland for cross-border workers of French origin, and to immigration of
French origin, overall. There is even direct French political influence aiming to secure Swiss financial means to build new cross-
border railways between Switzerland and France, by resorting to Swiss popular referenda.
[705] For decades and until the 1990s, Belgian national Robert Denard aka “Bob Denard” was the leader of those French
mercenaries unofficially working in African countries with the SDECE, and then with the DGSE.
[706] Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse, “Mirages, affaire des,” March 2018.

[707] “Mélenchon veut ʻfaire les pochesʼ à la Suisse”, RTS1, April 19, 2012.

[708] Roselli, Sophie, “Une banque épiée par des douaniers français,” Tribune de Genève, July 19, 2013. Translation from
French by the author.
[709] I do not name this man on his formal demand, because his business activities now strongly depend on his French
customers.
[710] My brother, as some of my ex-colleagues in the DGSE, sometimes tripped to Saint-Barthelemy from the late 1980s to
the 2000s, in the frame of obscure and varied financial and real estate operations in connection with intelligence and counter-
intelligence activities against the United States, and with the support of the GOdF. I can only assume particular intelligence
activities take place in this island, because I once saw one of my ex-colleagues, a woman, who, upon her return to continental
France, appeared shocked and remained traumatized for several weeks, as if she saw terrible things or brushed death. She did not
want to say a word about what happened to her in Saint-Barthelemy, but some jokes I heard incidentally suggested it had
something to do with sex, partly at least.
[711] Dorman, Veronika, “Raketa joue à la Rolex russe,” Liberation newspaper, Feb. 6, 2015.

[712] LCDR, “Jacques Von Polier: ʻSi vous cherchez un truc vraiment russe, vous achetez quoi? Une chapka, une matriochka
ou une Raketaʻ, Le Courrier de Russie, Jan. 6, 2011.
[713] To name the brands that luxury groups PPR, LVMH, and Richemont acquired and revived, including some that were
French already or even German and pell-mell: A. Lange & Söhne, Baume & Mercier, Cartier, Chloé, Alfred Dunhill, Lancel, IWC,
Jaeger-LeCoultre, Montblanc, Montegrappa, Alfred Duhnill, Officine Panerai, Piaget, Roger Dubuis, Vacheron Constantin, Donzé-
Baume, Van Cleef & Arpels, TAG Heuer, Chaumet, Zenith, Fred, Dior montres, Hublot, De Beers, Bvlgari, Gucci, Yves Saint
Laurent, Boucheron, Girard-Perregaux, JeanRichard, and Ulysse Nardin (possibly this list is not exhaustive). The French brand
Bell & Ross does not belong to any of these groups, but one of its major shareholders is Chanel clothes and fashion accessories.
[714] Such as, Ebel (U.S.), Corum (China), Breitling (CVC Capital Partners, a private equity firm based in Luxembourg),
Aerowatch (Russia), Eberhardt (Italy). This list is not exhaustive.
[715] To name some of those “survivors” among the best known, the list begins with all brands owned by the Swatch Group,
which are, Breguet, Harry Winston, Blancpain, Glashütte Original and Union Glashütte, Jaquet Droz, Léon Hatot, Omega,
Longines, Rado, Tissot, Balmain, Calvin Klein, Certina, Mido, Hamilton, Flik Flak, and of course Swatch. Then there are Rolex
(still ranking best-selling high-end Swiss watches), Patek Philippe, Victorinox, and Parmigiani Fleurier. Possibly, this list is not
exhaustive.
[716] The holding company Richemont is officially owned by Johann Rupert, a South-African national, and its headquarters
have been settled in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1988. However, its Senior Executive Committee is composed (in January 2018) of
eight people, of whom five are French nationals, one German, one Belgian, and one South-African only. Unusually, France did not
express any concern when Richemont purchased some of its most prized luxury brands, such as Cartier, Lancel, Van Cleef &
Arpels, Chloé, and Azzedine Alaïa, which is not in the habits of this country, due her concern over French cultural and economic
heritage (patrimoine), and thus betrays true French ownership.
[717] As in March 2018, the FH regulates the use of the label Swiss made as follow. “Art. 1a. Definition of the Swiss watch.
A watch is to be regarded as a Swiss watch if: a. its technical development has taken place in Switzerland; 1. in the case of
exclusively mechanical watches, at least the mechanical construction and prototyping of the watch as a whole, 2. in the case of
watches that are not exclusively mechanical, at least the mechanical construction and prototyping of the watch as a whole, together
with the conception of the printed circuit or circuits, the display and the software; abis its movement is Swiss; b. its movement has
been cased up in Switzerland; c. final inspection by the manufacturer took place in Switzerland and d. at least 60% of the
manufacturing costs is generated in Switzerland.” The full list of those requirements, sanctioned by law if not respected, is
available on the Website of the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry–FH: http://www.fhs.swiss
[718] Minder, Raphael, “Swatch, Supplier to Rivals, Now Aims to Cut Them Off,” The New York Times, Dec. 9, 2011.

[719] Grégory Pons also managed to be regularly interviewed on the Swiss TV as “leading journalist expert in the Swiss
watchmaking industry”.
[720] Dorman, Veronika, “Raketa joue à la Rolex russe, ” Libération newspaper, Feb. 6, 2015.

[721] See Lexicon “CFIARS,” aka CFIAR, and pp. 134, 604.

[722] I previously named André Bercoff, p. 574.

[723] Infrarouge, « Trump: Fou ou génie? », RTS, January 17, 2018.

[724] See p. 786 and ft. 52 about Intelligence Online.

[725] Besson, Sylvain, “Un agent de l’ombre déploie ses affaires à Genève” (A Shadow Agent Deploys his Business in
Geneva), Le Temps, Dec. 1, 2011.
[726] Sylvain Besson, “Sous pression de Berne, les entreprises de sécurité privées sortent de l’ombre,” Le Temps, March 12,
2017.