“Case 1”:the Red Orchestra plays its part
The German-Soviet pact, which in August 1939 sealed the alliance between Hitler and Stalin for two years, disrupted all branches of the Communist International, but also of the NKVD (the ancestor of the KGB) and the GRU (the military intelligence service). Most of the “residents” posted abroad have bowed out, recruitment of agents has dried up. Only a few networks, notably in Germany, for easily understandable reasons, maintained the flame of anti-fascist resistance with great difficulty. more or less solid, but able to send blind radio messages to Moscow. The Abwehr (German counterintelligence) called this network “die Rote Kapelle (the “Red Orchestra”). The leader of these groups, who works in Germany, France and Switzerland, is called Leopold Trepper. He is a Polish Jew who lived for a long time in Palestine, then in Belgium, and who became a professional in clandestine action. He would become the hero of a book by Gilles Perrault, L’Orchestre rouge (1967), before publishing in 1975 his own memoirs, Le Grand Jeu .
These two books, according to many historians, have exaggerated the role of the Red Orchestra to the point of forging a legend. It remains that the organizers of this network (Harro Schulze-Boysen in Germany, Alfred Corbin in France, Alexandre Radó in Switzerland) succeeded, in fact, in informing the USSR on many military subjects - in particular the advance of German troops towards Stalingrad – communicating through radio transmitters long kept secret. But these resistance fighters, often admirable, were spotted, and the network ceased to function in the fall of 1943.
“Case 2”:the “Cambridge Five”
At the origin is a unique quartet in the history of world espionage:Harold Philby, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Donald MacLean. These former students of the prestigious Trinity College in Cambridge, England, were seduced in the early 1930s by a Marxist professor who swore by the October Revolution. When the first of them, Philby, was recruited in 1935 by the super spies Theordor Maly and Arnold Deutsch, the others were attracted and then absorbed by this obviously clandestine network. A fifth man, John Cairncross, also a former Cambridge student, soon completes this group, transforming the quartet into a quintet.
Evolving in journalism, diplomacy, administration or the fine arts, these brilliant subjects quickly accede to highly qualified positions and to very senior positions. Duly bullied by their officers, they entered the senior civil service, in particular the Foreign Office (the British Foreign Office), where they were to influence, through their espionage actions, the diplomatic issues of the immediate pre- war, the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War.
Listening to specialized historians, reading the memoirs of witnesses from that time, it is clear that these five agents smuggled into Moscow, through from their KGB contacts, a phenomenal amount of information on German domestic policy, on the war in Spain, on the strategy of the American and British staffs, on the atomic bomb, on the founding of the UN, on the sharing of Europe at the Yalta conference, etc. And even – a shame – on the counterintelligence actions carried out by Western services against the KGB:wasn't Philby the deputy director of the British SIS, delegated to what was to become the formidable CIA?
But you can't dance with the devil with impunity. Philby, Burgess and MacLean will eventually arouse suspicion. They will all three be exfiltrated to the USSR. Blunt, close to the royal family, will get away with staying in England. Cairncross, a specialist in French literature, will remain in the shadows for a very long time. Many books, investigations and testimonies have appeared on these five men – without exhausting the subject, more romantic than any other!
“Case 3”:Farewell no longer responds!
March 1981. In the offices of the DST (Direction de la surveillance du territoire) in Paris, commissioner Raymond Nart cannot believe his eyes. In the thick envelope that has just reached him, there is a number of secret information to make more than one Western head of state shudder. The package comes from Moscow, where an executive of the Thomson-CSF company, almost by chance, received it from the hands of a senior KGB official named Vladimir Vetrov.
Vetrov is no stranger. He spent five years in France, from 1965 to 1970, spying on scientific circles. He only dreams of returning to this country, but a dark affair plagued his stay in Quebec in 1975, compromising all his chances of returning to the West. Furious, frustrated, this officer of the KGB directorate T decided to take revenge by blowing up the whole system. In fact, the documents he delivers in bundles to the French secret services – in all nearly 3,000 photocopied pages – reveal, in great detail, that the KGB is carrying out the largest enterprise of industrial looting in the West in the 20th century.>e
century!
On May 10, 1981, François Mitterrand was elected President of the Republic. The Vetrov file, which the DST baptized “Farewell”, will allow him to show the Americans that he, the socialist, remains a friend and an ally! Ronald Reagan and his vice-president, George Bush, former head of the CIA, measure the exceptional importance of the Farewell file, which continues to grow over the months.
However, in January 1982, Vetrov no longer responds. Caught in a scandalous news item, he finds himself in prison, in Moscow, convicted of murder. A year later, convinced that we will never see him again, the new director of the DST, Yves Bonnet, will prompt President Mitterrand with a shocking idea:the Farewell file is so rich that we can justify – to show that the France is not fooled – the expulsion of a significant number of Soviet spies, members of the KGB and the GRU.
On April 5, 1983, 47 Soviet diplomats suspected of spying were expelled from France, starting by KGB "resident" Nikolai Chetverikov. The case is making a lot of noise. Nobody knows, at the time, that the man behind this major crisis between France and the USSR is languishing in a Siberian prison, where he will eventually confess everything. Farewell will be shot on January 23, 1985.