Farewell (51 page)

4
On the Yurchenko case, see the journalistic investigation by Vladimir Snegiryov in the journal
Trud
, issues dated August 13, 15, and 18, 1992.

5
Kalugin,
Proshchai, Lubyanka
, 228.

6
Ibid., 227–228.

7
Andrew and Gordievsky,
KGB: The Inside Story
, 645; Kalugin,
Proshchai, Lubyanka
, 238.

8
See Chalet,
Les Visiteurs de l’ombre
, 186, and Gordievsky,
Le KGB dans le monde
, 622 [
KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev
].

9
Igor Prelin, interview by Sergei Kostin, March 30, 2007.

Chapter 34. The Farewell Affair Under the Magnifying Glass of the KGB and DST

1
Vladimir Kryuchkov, interview by Sergei Kostin, March 29, 2007.

2
He was at the time an army general (four stars), KGB first deputy chairman, and head of the Fifth Chief Directorate. Although somehow respected for being a veteran, Bobkov was not a hero in the eyes of intelligence officers because his action was aimed at repressing dissidents and other “anti-Soviet elements.”

3
Refers to the conspiracy by French, British, and American diplomats and secret agents to overthrow the Bolshevik regime in 1918. French ambassador in Moscow, Joseph Noulens, General Consul Fernand Grenard, military attaché General Lavergne, and other French individuals took part in this adventure which was, to a great extent, a manipulation by the Soviet secret services. See Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky,
KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev
(New York, HarperCollins, 1990).

4
There are also Vetrov’s personal file, work file, and an operational file documenting his espionage activity, with the name of agents, clarifying episodes that had remained obscure in the investigation file, and so forth. Besides being top secret, those documents are strictly internal to the PGU. Even to the Military Chamber of the USSR Supreme Court, supposed to investigate the espionage case, the PGU sent only a sanitized version of the investigation Department 5K had conducted for its own purposes. This version contained no information revealing how the PGU had learned about Vetrov’s collaboration with the DST, and no clues to the working climate in the service that would have explained his treason.

5
Not his real name.

6
Patrick Ferrant, interview by Eric Raynaud, January 24, 2003.

7
The KGB analysis of the operation shows several examples of Vetrov’s creative thinking. For instance, five clandestine rendezvous were set on holidays or on the eve of a holiday: May 1, May 8 and 9 (end of WWII in 1945, Victory Day); November 6 (eve of the October Revolution Anniversary), and February 23 (Soviet Army Day). During questioning, Vetrov said that meeting days were picked by “Paul.” Yet, he must have had his say. Being from the KGB, Vetrov knew that on the occasion of holidays, all the mobile surveillance teams were assigned to Red Square security, posted in the main streets part of the route for the parade, and at other points viewed as sensitive. This being said, on holidays Vetrov and his handler were running virtually no risk. The choice of these rendezvous days was, therefore, not entirely fortuitous.
Another assumption concerns Jacques Prévost, who had disappeared, for a while, from the loop. We do not share the opinion held by some that he was afraid of going back to the Soviet Union now that his friend had become a DST mole. He traveled there only once in 1980, when it was completely safe, and four times in 1981, when he thought he would be at risk even if this was not the reality. Naturally, Prévost did not call his friend then, since it would have been very imprudent. Soviet counterintelligence, however, later compared the dates of his trips with those of Vetrov-Ferrant meetings.
Prévost stayed in Moscow on September 15–18, September 29–October 2, October 18–23, and November 29–December 3, 1981. Consequently, he was there on September 18 and October 2; both times, he left Moscow on the same day a rendezvous was scheduled with Farewell. Was it pure coincidence?
Karavashkin does not believe so, and he explains why. He thinks that at the beginning of the Farewell operation, when the DST still had doubts about Vetrov’s identity, it wanted to be sure. Prévost supposedly drove by Vetrov twice to confirm the man was indeed his friend and not a KGB lure.
Karavashkin is convinced that the Americans made the French benefit from their pitiful experience in the manipulation of a certain Ogorodnik. This Soviet functionary from the Strategic Planning Department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, arrested for collaborating with the CIA, had the time to poison himself. In revenge, the KGB decided to catch Ogorodnik’s handler red-handed at a clandestine rendezvous in order to expel him from the country. They chose a KGB officer who looked a little like the dead mole, made him up and put a wig on him, and then made him drive Ogorodnik’s car. The American, who had seen his informant only once or twice before, rose to the bait. He was taken in for questioning and expelled.
Xavier Ameil, whose sincerity is beyond any doubt, just laughed at this scenario: “This is pure fiction!” According to him, Prévost came to Moscow only for business reasons, because of contracts to negotiate or to sign. The minute he was out of the plane, and all the way until he flew back, Ameil was taking care of him and did not let him out of his sight. Since his representative in Moscow had directly taken part in Vetrov’s manipulation, Prévost had nothing to hide from him. Ameil asserts that they never went by the Borodino Battle Museum.
It is worth noting that those dates also happen to coincide with weeks of intense business activity for Thomson-CSF. The French company was then finalizing the negotiations for the Urengoi-Uzhgorod gas pipeline project, which would later be sabotaged by the Gus Weiss operation (see chapter 28). This fact is confirmed by Catherine Cauvin-Higgins, who was Thomson-CSF and CIMSA interpreter during those negotiations and was present at the official signature ceremony in Moscow in September 1981.

8
Pierre Lacoste, interview by Sergei Kostin, September 7, 1994.

9
Vladimir Kryuchkov, interview by Sergei Kostin, April 26, 1995.

10
John Barron,
KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents
(New York: Bantam Books, 1974).

11
Patrick Ferrant’s correspondence to Eric Raynaud, March 11, 2009.

12
Not his real name.

13
See Pierre Marion’s comical account of his taking office as the head of the SDECE (
La Mission impossible
, 19–23).

14
Marion,
La Mission impossible
.

Chapter 35. Hero or Traitor?

1
On the Russian side, the documents passed to the DST by Vetrov are still classified. Even his investigation file is limited to a conclusion by experts evaluating the extent of the damage done by their disclosure. This being said, we can only base our analysis of the Farewell dossier on the information made public in the Western Bloc. There is, overall, no valid reason to doubt their veracity. Besides, the few clues found in the investigation file roughly support the analysis and the figures provided by Western sources.
The first synthesis of Farewell’s contribution was published in France, when he was still alive. This article, entitled “L’URSS et le renseignement scientifique, technique et technologique,” was published in the 1983 issue #12 of the French journal
Défense nationale
. It is signed by Henri Régnard, generally believed to have been Raymond Nart himself. According to Gordon Brook-Shepherd (
The Storm Birds
), this was the most authoritative account; he indicates that the article was reproduced in translation in the April 1984 volume of the American
Journal of Defense and Diplomacy
. This is, therefore, firsthand information. The article presents in minute details the Soviet system of intelligence collection in that area, along with its philosophy and operating mode. Everything is there: intelligence gathering and mining structures, means and methods used.
The conclusions drawn by the DST deputy head are of scientific quality in their rigor, sobriety, and lack of emotion. There are three conclusions:
“1). Existing evaluations previously made of the scientific, technical and technological level reached by the Soviet Union, in the military and civilian areas, must be revised upwards, quantitatively and qualitatively.
“2). The results yielded by Soviet open and clandestine operations in information gathering spare the Soviet Union the need to finance on its own a large part of its research activities, allowing it to free funds for its offensive and defensive military programs.
“3). To counter these hostile activities, the closest collaboration is required between NATO countries. A set of new defensive measures must be defined, aiming at controlling, if not more strictly at least more selectively, East-West trade; in particular in business, scientific and technical areas.” (
Défense nationale
, N°12/1983, pp. 120 and 121)
In September 1985, the American Department of Defense published a white paper entitled “Soviet Acquisition of Militarily Significant Western Technology.” This Pentagon report is based on a broad outline of the information passed to the DST by Farewell. In a statement by the then secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger, Thierry Wolton has rightly noticed an allusion to the Farewell dossier. The report summary states that “only recently has the full extent of illegal Soviet technology collection efforts become known.” (Wolton,
Le KGB en France
, 410; for the complete DOD report, see http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA160564&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf.)
Published in 1986, Wolton’s
Le KGB en France
completes the picture of the Farewell dossier. But the volume of documents was such that it allegedly took years and years for secret service analysts to study them. In February 1987, the DST decided to declassify documents with no operational value so they could ask researchers to participate in this effort. Our friend Pierre Lorrain, a writer and political analyst specializing in Soviet Affairs, was invited to join the team. Like his colleagues, he was astonished by the enormous quantity of documents supplied by Vetrov.
Following the release of those documents to the public, one can view as comprehensive the inventory given by Chalet and Wolton in their book of interviews (
Les Visiteurs de l’ombre
, and more specifically pp. 195–226). We recommend it to the more specialized or curious readers, limiting ourselves to giving the main points.
A lot of precise indications are given by Gordon Brook-Shepherd (
The Storm Birds
, 317–321), clearly also based on American sources.

2
The Soviet investigation file mentions forty-two volumes of operational documents, totaling over 1,200 pages. We do not trust the KGB figures as much since it was in Vetrov’s interest to minimize the damage; thus, he probably admitted only to what had been positively proven.

3
Dmitri Polyakov, a GRU officer, then a general, collaborated on his own initiative with American services, without defecting, for a quarter of a century, from 1961 to 1986. He was executed in 1988.

4
Chalet mentions “over seventy agents whose profiles were provided by Vetrov, sometimes precisely, sometimes in a more fuzzy manner” (
Les Visiteurs de l’ombre
, 221). Brook-Shepherd (
The Storm Birds
, 321) writes that Vetrov “gave the West slightly under a hundred case leads involving a slightly greater number of individuals, each of whom could be classed as an industrial spy, operating in at least sixteen NATO or neutral countries.”

5
Wolton,
Le KGB en France
, 410. See also: Caspar Weinberger,
Technology Transfer Intelligence Committee: Soviet Acquisition of Militarily Significant Western Technology
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1985).

6
Richard V. Allen, interview by Eric Raynaud, March 12, 2009.

7
Frances Fitzgerald,
Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 195.