French spies are impossible to blackmail in honeytraps because their wives already know they’re having affairs. And if you believe this, I have a tower in Paris to sell you.
The source for this story is wafer thin yet nevertheless it has attracted prurient attention worldwide. It was ‘revealed’ on Tuesday night in a documentary screened on France 2 and has subsequently been repeated on news platforms worldwide. ‘Ooh la la! Those saucy Frenchies!’ That’s the general line, improbable as it may seem.
An agent, ‘Nicolas’, who appeared anonymously on the show, said that Soviet defectors talked of the ‘French paradox’ – that if you tell a Frenchman with a mistress ‘“we’ve caught you red-handed with a 22-year-old called Tatyana, work for us or we’ll tell your wife,” it didn’t work.’
Perhaps this claim is entirely invented or perhaps it merely reflects the sexual conceit of those employed by the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), whose 7,200 agents work ‘in the shadows to identify and anticipate threats of all kinds,’ according to the agency’s website.
There is a third possibility, that Russian spies don’t bother suborning French spooks because the French spies are mostly hopeless, don’t know very much and probably tell the Russians everything anyway.
France has never been trusted with the most valuable ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence collected by the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. If French intelligence is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Russians, it certainly spends plenty of time spying on the Americans. Senior Americans used to routinely be warned that every seat on the French Concorde was bugged.
Espionage is of course a French word, and spy might as well be one, but the notion of French intelligence competence is contestable. There are at least six and arguably ten different intelligence services in the country, all falling over one another and arguably missing what is happening under their noses.
While les spooks were supposedly bed hopping, they also entirely failed to notice the imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine, which provoked Macron to sack the head of military intelligence and to replace the head of the DGSE with Nicolas Lerner, 45, the former boss of France’s domestic intelligence agency and, like Macron, a graduate of the École National d’Administration. He is now the French ‘C.’
He’s badly needed. The vaunted French spies were blindsided by the Aukus submarine deal when the perfidious Australians tore up a deal to buy French submarines. Cue tantrum from Macron. They were then caught off guard by the military coup in Mali in 2021. Cue another tantrum.
A dozen DGSE officers were forced to leave Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso in December after four of their colleagues were detained. This is part of the general collapse of French networks in Africa that has occurred in parallel with failed French military intervention against Islamists across the Sahel.
The DGSE is to double in size by 2030 and move to an immense new headquarters in the Paris suburb of Vincennes. A relaunch long overdue. It is apparent that not only are its current spies hopeless, but the agency is far behind in recruiting new spies with the ability to master digital tools. Recently the agency has been opening up recruitment to younger officers who lack the social connections but have the know-how to hack into the Russian electricity grid.
The DGSE is the most renowned of the French special services, and has had a reputation for attracting officers from the higher social strata. We shall see what the new management makes of this.
Consider Gérard Royal, brother of Ségolène Royal, the socialist minister and ex-wife of François Hollande, a quintessential member of the Paris elite. Gérard was a DGSE officer, and accused of being in the team that bombed the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand, at the certain behest of François Mitterrand. Everything about this affair is hyper murky. A Greenpeace photographer died. Two officers, not including Gérard, were accused and sentenced to a brief Pacific exile.
Gérard’s brother Antoine subsequently told Le Parisien that Gérard had admitted planting the bombs which killed Fernando Pereira. Royal has refused to confirm or deny that, but made a statement complaining of ‘harassment by the media’. He has refused to discuss the operation and has denied wrongdoing.
The French seem to have become more discreet in their wet work subsequently, at least refraining from setting off bombs in the ports of supposed allies.
I know a guy who I suspect is a French spy. All the tells are there. Particule (‘de’) in front of his surname. Former major in the army. ‘Public relations adviser’ to a stinking rich African kleptocrat. Always chartering private jets. And a horrible husband who walked out on his family. I guess he might be hard to blackmail. But for what end? He seems to have been put out to pasture.
I know another person who was definitely a French counterintelligence officer and subsequently a deputy in the National Assembly. He was so astute he’s been charged with embezzlement of public funds after supposedly being bewitched by a ventriloquist fortune teller.
The truth about French spooks seems much closer to the OSS 117 films, which follow the exploits of Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, a colossally clueless French secret agent with the competence of Inspector Clouseau and the libido of Casanova. The French find this stupendously hilarious – but perhaps it’s funny because it’s true.
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