Farewell (20 page)

Ferrant also knew how to combine business with pleasure. When he was walking up Kutuzov Avenue, on his way to the rendezvous with Vetrov, he often offered his help to elderly women, carrying their heavy bags. This made a perfect cover in case the KGB was tailing him, and it gave him the opportunity at the same time to get acquainted with those “babushki” Vetrov dreaded so much, famous for their denunciation skills.

During June 1981, Ferrant and Vetrov met six times, always at the same place, in the small park behind the Borodino Battle Museum. On Fridays June 5, 12, and 19 at seven p.m., after work, Vetrov handed over the documents. Ferrant made the photocopies in the military attaché’s office. The next day, on Saturdays June 6, 13, and 20 at eleven a.m., he returned them to his mole.

The new element introduced by Ferrant was the compensation of Vetrov. Vladimir never said he wanted to be paid, but the DST insisted. “Seriously, you need to be paid. Any effort should be rewarded,” was Nart’s message relayed by Ferrant.

On June 5, Ferrant gave Vetrov a thousand rubles.
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Although not negligible, the amount was modest. It was about twice Vladimir’s monthly salary. The KGB would later sneer at the legendary stinginess of the French services. What the DST had in mind, though, was to give Vetrov a reasonable compensation that would not change his standard of living to the point of being noticed by KGB counterintelligence. According to Ferrant, over the entire duration of the operation, the financial side of it seemed secondary to Vetrov compared to the satisfaction of getting revenge on his service and the opportunity to confide for hours, in French. He never made any direct request to Ferrant explicitly asking to be paid. Ferrant gave him the money in a very informal way, a little like friends would help out one another. He then showed the corresponding amounts on his expense reports to Nart. Clearly, we are far from the extravagant salaries imagined by the KGB. Vetrov, on the other hand, did not hesitate to ask, at times with insistence, for gifts intended for his son or for Ludmila. Ferrant remembered it very well since it was Madeleine who one day tried on a synthetic fur coat bought for Ludmila. Also, it was difficult to forget the Sharp hi-fi system bought for Vladik. “The stuff weighed a ton and barely fit in the trunk of the car. I really had a hard time bringing this thing to Moscow,” remembered Ferrant. But both men were ready to do anything to please little Vladik.

Ferrant’s annual vacation was scheduled for July. Should he stay to the last day his agent could meet him and then come back to work on the first day Vetrov had new information he could hand over? Many, former KGB agents included, would have answered yes without hesitation. They would smile patronizingly: “Yes, but for the French, vacations are sacred!” Igor Prelin, who has handled dozens of agents in various countries, had the same condescending smile, but in reaction to the critics of this behavior. “In the case of a valuable agent, we could meet him once every six months, even once a year, as American and many other services did,” he explains. “Each rendezvous was high-risk business, particularly if the agent was handled by an amateur. Besides, there was no panic, we were not at war! The VPK report? It was published only once a year. The list of KGB officers? Alright, Vetrov had five or six new names to add to it. Couldn’t this wait? When working in Africa, I had an agent who was ready to deliver new material every day. His motivation? He was fed at my house and would leave with a small fee. But this was not Vetrov’s case.”
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This was probably the way the DST saw the situation, too. Ferrant had already put in his request for leave; changing the dates might have looked suspicious to Soviet counterintelligence. Furthermore, as explained by the French officer, the volume of documents supplied by Farewell was expected to decrease drastically during that same period; the KGB top brass was going on vacation, too. In conformity with one of the operation’s rare operational principles, Ferrant and Vetrov thus decided to change nothing in their routine, and the Frenchman took his vacation as scheduled.

The largest family of the French colony left Moscow on June 26. Patrick came back from vacation on July 29, Madeleine and their daughters on August 22. The KGB machine was running smoothly, and all this data was meticulously recorded in Ferrant’s file. No one at the KGB, though, had any idea that this obscure deputy attaché was the most dangerous foreign resident in Moscow.

During those same months, while the Farewell operation was running its course in Moscow, the affair acquired an international dimension, linked to François Mitterrand coming to power.

Mitterrand, the new head of state, elected on May 10, 1981, played a major role in this story. He did not trust secret services, and he paid close attention to recent criticisms of the DST. Also, he had just appointed communists to serve as ministers in his first administration, and he knew he would have to pay the political price for this decision at the international level.

It is public knowledge that the newly elected president viewed the French special services very unfavorably. In 1953, while he was minister of the interior, he was the victim of a police conspiracy that caused his name to be dragged through the mud as an alleged “traitor” and a “Moscow agent.” Generally speaking, the socialists accused the DST of being “an instrument of the political right wing rather than a tool to defend the Nation.”
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Therefore, from the DST’s perspective, the election of Mitterrand was not exactly good news.

Moreover, a few recent scandals added to the DST’s bad reputation. There was the case of planted mics discovered in the offices of the weekly satirical newspaper
Le Canard enchaîné
, which had everybody laughing in France. There was also the Curiel dossier, which owed its name to the Egyptian businessman assassinated in Paris on May 4, 1978, in circumstances that remain mysterious to this day. This affair caused the DST’s chief Marcel Chalet to be summoned to the office of an investigating magistrate.

“We knew that the existence of the service would be challenged since there were people in the Socialist Party coming to power who were even saying that it was urgent to get rid of the DST,” Marcel Chalet remembers.
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“In the days following the arrival of Gaston Defferre as minister of the interior, I had to answer questions on affairs in which the DST was accused of wrongdoing. I could sweep away those rumors with no difficulty.”

Thus, the DST chief had his work cut out for him to find an administrative person who would both listen carefully and be well-disposed toward him, in order to deliver the “bomb” he had quietly been keeping in his hands for almost three months. “I proceeded slowly and cautiously, trying first to figure out what the political agenda could be, and what would eventually be the concerns of the people I would be dealing with.”
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Chalet first approached Maurice Grimaud, principal private secretary to the minister of the interior. Yet, Grimaud shared the views of his socialist comrades regarding the DST. “We arrived to power with a lot of preconceived ideas and grudges, and a huge mistrust of the police,” he admits. “To us, the DST was the epitome of all possible horrors. This was an extreme opinion, but unto those that have shall more be given.”
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The beginning of the first meeting between Maurice Grimaud and Marcel Chalet was laden with hidden meaning. Grimaud eventually decided to bring up, head-on, allegations such as the ongoing rumors about the DST’s borderline illegal activities against the ETA, a Basque separatist terrorist organization: “And then, you’ll have to put an end to a certain type of operations,” he stated. Marcel Chalet protested vigorously and assured Grimaud that those rumors were pure fantasy and that it was out of the question for the DST to violate its own rules. Chalet realized then, in the course of the conversation, that with serious arguments he was able to convince Grimaud that the accusations against his service were unfounded. Thus, a certain level of trust was established between the two men. “Very rapidly,” Chalet says, “Maurice Grimaud became much more cooperative with me. I could feel that all the reservations he may have had at some point had disappeared, and that it was now possible to have a frank and direct dialogue with him. This gave me the opportunity to pour out the Farewell story, which had been weighing heavily on me, and to explain to him that it was urgent to alert the president, while taking all the necessary precautions.”
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The purpose of such precautions was to limit the disclosure of the affair as much as possible. This was also Gaston Defferre’s very first concern, which he voiced a short while later, when they had their first meeting. The new minister of the interior, a former partisan during WWII, perfectly understood how critical it was not to leak the facts. Chalet would, nevertheless, take the precaution to put him discreetly to the test: Patrick Ferrant, as a military attaché at the French embassy, reported in theory to the Ministry of Defense, where another long-standing fellow traveler of François Mitterrand’s, Charles Hernu, had been appointed. It so happened that Hernu was well known by the DST, which had a file on him indicating that he was an occasional collaborator of the Bulgarian, then the Romanian intelligence services for at least two years, in 1956 and 1957. Chalet also knew that Hernu had been mentioned in a note written by the Securitate in 1962. Ceausescu himself asked, to no avail, that the contact be renewed with Hernu when he became minister of defense.
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After having stressed the urgency of alerting the head of state, Marcel Chalet added blandly, “And also, it is important not to forget to inform the minister of defense.”

Defferre sat up straight in his seat and said, “Certainly not, he is a Soviet agent!”

Entirely reassured by those words, Chalet proceeded to discuss the way they would inform the president of the Republic. From that moment on, the collaboration between the DST and the Ministry of the Interior rested on mutual trust and survived all the obstacles born of the case. They did not dwell on the presence of communists in the left-wing union government, since it was understood that prudence was required.

On the other hand, for President Mitterrand, the nomination of his communist allies was a serious issue.
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The Atlantic partners of France, and the United States in particular, reacted strongly. The next day following these nominations, the U.S. State Department made an official declaration, stating, among other things: “The tone and the substance of our relations as allies will be affected by the participation of communists in this government, just the same way it would be with any other government among our West-European allies.”
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Vice President George Bush, former director of the CIA (1976–1977)—in a position to evaluate the risks these appointments might represent for the Atlantic defense—traveled to Paris in order to protest in person during his visit with the newly elected president.

Apparently, Mitterrand chose to hedge his bets. As a matter of principle, and to reassure the French public opinion, the socialists displayed their indignation at what they considered interference in French domestic affairs. However, in reality, they would make every effort to reassure the Americans. All precautions would be taken, they declared, to prevent communist ministers from having access to information regarding the Atlantic security; and this was the case. The French prime minister Pierre Mauroy made France comply with the rules of access to information classified “secret” by NATO, thus denying the four communist ministers any possibility of accreditation or nomination to high-responsibility posts within the apparatus of government.
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Moreover, Charles Fiterman, whose responsibilities were in the most sensitive domain compared to his fellow ministers, lost part of his authority regarding the organization of transport in time of war.
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In spite of those measures, when François Mitterrand arrived in Ottawa for his first G7 summit, he was perceived as a murky (if not shady) character by the Western leaders gathered there. The French president did not take offense because for the last few days he had been holding a major trump card.

The DST had chosen July 14 to present Mitterrand with a token of its allegiance. At the DST’s express request, Mitterrand hosted a meeting with his old friend Gaston Defferre, accompanied by Maurice Grimaud and Marcel Chalet. The three men were greeted by Pierre Bérégovoy, Secretary General of the Presidency of the Republic, at the Elysée Palace where there was still evidence of the first garden party organized by the newly elected left government for Bastille Day.

Defferre and Chalet had already analyzed Farewell’s deliveries and knew that this was exceptionally important. Mitterrand understood immediately the scope of this affair for his country, his party, and his personal image in the eyes of the Western Bloc. He was indeed, for now, the only leader of a capitalist country to know about the systematic technological pillage practiced by the Soviet Union, the scope of which was such that it challenged NATO policies regarding defense and security. Chalet also explained to Mitterrand the urgency to inform “our American allies” about the nature of some of the information passed by Farewell, and in particular about the radar system protecting the territory of the United States, now totally documented by the KGB. Moreover, he added, his services were in a position to provide the names of dozens of KGB moles holding the most sensitive posts in the West as well as the names of Soviet intelligence officers operating abroad.

The president was so satisfied by this report that he gave the DST the green light to continue the Farewell operation, at a time when its mere existence was in jeopardy and in spite of the fact that such a mission was not the role of the DST and against the law! Chalet felt as if he had grown wings. Starting on that day, the DST claimed that it was the best of the French special services compared to its competition, the SDECE. This superiority was not due so much to the DST’s performance abroad as it was due to the poor results of the French intelligence services.

At his arrival in Ottawa, François Mitterrand took the initiative with self-confidence. He requested a private meeting with the leader of the Western Bloc, President Reagan. Actually, on that day, July 19, 1981, there were four participants: Claude Cheysson and Alexander Haig, heads of the French and American diplomatic staffs respectively, were also present during these discussions.

It was widely held that the participation of communists in the French government was increasing the chances for a tense meeting between the two presidents. In actual fact, that was not the case at all. Richard Allen, Ronald Reagan’s first national security adviser, had written up the briefing of the meeting. In his opinion, a man who had served in the French Resistance could not possibly warm up to a totalitarian regime like the Soviet Union. Reagan’s mistrust toward Mitterrand was therefore much more muted than was thought at the time.
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When Mitterrand eventually mentioned the Farewell dossier, probably from notes written by Marcel Chalet, Reagan did not grasp its significance right away. His services would simply transmit Chalet’s note to the addressee, Vice President George Bush. In order to avoid any loss of information, Marcel Chalet favored a direct contact with one of his old acquaintances. He and Bush had known one another since the time when the American vice president was holding the post of director of the CIA, from January 1976 to January 1977. The two men knew and appreciated one another. Chalet had naturally sent him his congratulations after Bush was elected to the post of vice president. If the boss of the DST addressed the information to the former director of the CIA, it was not only to limit the number of intermediaries, but primarily to assure that “the content of the dossier and the technical aspects be discussed at an expert level, and not at a political one.”
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Chalet’s letter remitted by Mitterrand to Reagan was only a summary of the essential points, without going into particulars, and proposed a plan for the next step, which would be a meeting between Chalet and Bush.

The following month, in August, Marcel Chalet traveled to the United States, like Bush had done in the other direction two months earlier. At the airport, a guide was waiting for Chalet with a limousine, and without saying a word, he took Chalet to his hotel.

The next morning, the same guide picked him up and drove him to the official residence of the vice president, on Massachusetts Avenue. As Chalet got out of the car, he was greeted by Bush in person, who was both happy and intrigued to see him again and addressed him in French: “Marcel, what’s up?” Chalet realized then, with a certain satisfaction, that in Ottawa Reagan had not grasped totally the importance of the case, and that Bush knew nothing about it.

For almost three hours, as they walked together in the park of the residence, Marcel Chalet explained to his former colleague the ins and outs of the affair. Before leaving Paris, he had carefully prepared an impressive file treating mostly the American aspects of the intelligence information produced by the Farewell operation and, in particular, the detailed Soviet knowledge of the defense of the U.S. territory. At the end of their stroll through the park, Bush, clearly shaken, said, “I’ll have to make a few phone calls.”

The next day, a first working session was organized at the CIA with William Casey, the director of the CIA, William Webster, the chief of the FBI, and Admiral Inman, who had just left his post as director of the NSA, directly affected by the radar coverage system for the defense of the U.S. territory. This would mark the effective start of a regular collaboration between the DST and the American secret services. As an expert, Bush was able to appreciate the value of the information in the Farewell file, and he admitted a short while later that this was “the first significant breakthrough of the West behind the iron curtain.”

After having saved the very existence of the DST in France, the Farewell dossier had also represented for Marcel Chalet a genuine reconciliation between France and the United States. For this man who had started his intelligence activities during WWII, and who had ever since nurtured a certain affection toward the Americans, the satisfaction was real. “This case, obviously, had the virtue of enhancing significantly the image of the French intelligence. For those who remembered what had been the France-USA relations the last few years, this was quite a new situation. That France was capable of providing the United States with information that would play a critical role in the orientation of the alliance activities and the consolidation of its means of defense was an entirely new situation, and I was especially aware of it.”
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