DGSE: The French Spy Machine 9781687670533

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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 subcategories 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 subdirectorates.

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 subdirectorates 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 Englishspeaking 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 selfpublishing 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 “undercompensation,” 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 interministerial 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, Ivrysur-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 BricyOrléans 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, RosnySous-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 noncommissioned 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 OrléansBricy, 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 VélizyVillacoublay. 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-bycase 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 SousDirection 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 computerpowered 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.

2.

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),

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.

3.

Groupe Relations Internationales–GRI (International Relations Group),

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),

4.

2.

Département Sciences du Comportement–DSC (Department of Behavioral Sciences),

3.

Département Science de l’Analyse Criminelle–DSAC (Department of Criminal Analysis Science),

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-lesMoulineaux. 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 (GeneralSecretary 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 interministerial 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 NonProliferation, 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 betterknown 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 cellphone 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,” swimmerspalmers, 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, DRPP, 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 littleknown 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 ClaudeHenri 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 counterinterference, 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, counterinterference, 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 barbooz), 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 fulltime 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 ContreEspionnage (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 counterespionage 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 everpossible 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 submission, 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 (Seineet-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 semitrailer 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 allordinary 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 betterqualified 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-EnL’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-noncommissioned 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 realsituation 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 selfesteem. 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 highend 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 superagents. 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 noncommissioned 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 farleftist 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 roleplay 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 longlasting 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 robotlike 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, coldhearted, 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-toknow 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.

2.

Above a certain level of confidentiality, the computer must be in a protected room.[73]

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

3.

4.

Turn off the computer and all its peripherals.

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 everpossible 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 Englishspeaking 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 subservices, 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 exmilitary 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 Englishspeaking 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, 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. [77]

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 farreaching 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 militaryindustrial 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 longdelayed 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 highend 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-toknow 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 selfpublishing 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 spyfamilies 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 counterinterference. 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 highend 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 muchcoveted 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 abovethe-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 mid1990s, 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 Aranked 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 wouldbe-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 allordinary 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 noncommissioned 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-theaverage 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 lowranking 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 selfinjury 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 “publiclyknown 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 wellpaid 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-knowtraining 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 excolleagues, 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 lowerclass 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-bycase 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 wellknown 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, nonprofessionally 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 yesmen 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 longterm 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-berecruit 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 everpossible 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. Counterintelligence 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 caseby-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, selfcensorship, 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, cardiovascular 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-bycase 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 SaintSimon, 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 counterinterference. 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 expolitician 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 “halfconscious”. 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, exconvicts, 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 counteractions 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 roundthe-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 wouldbe-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 retrocommissions, 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 rightleaning 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 drugtrafficking 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, JeanChristophe 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 welltrained 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 18031815, 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, selfdefense, 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 18971920s 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 deChristianization. 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 subservices, 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. ExChief 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 counterinterference 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 midgrade, 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 partyelected 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 (SubDirectorate 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 noncommissioned 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 contreingérence (“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 socalled “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 SaintBarthélémy, 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 NorthAfrican 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 allpersonal 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.

2.

Domestic intelligence, counterintelligence, influence, and counter-influence (counter-interference).

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 “exspies” 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 alcoholchecked 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 roleplaying 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 nonpowered 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 bycars 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 dronelike 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 welltrained 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 Englishspeaking 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 saintsimonianism 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 mid19th 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 wouldbe-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 cathedralbuilding, 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 lowconsumption 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 AngloAmerican 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 agentprovocateurs, 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 wellknown 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, thirtyfour 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 wellknown 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 evergreater 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 cooptations. 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 Englishspeaking 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 AngloSaxon 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 subbody 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 Frenchimported 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 Germanspeaking 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 Germanspeaking 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 antiSemitism 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 subregister 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 “homeimproved” 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 highranking 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.

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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 counterargument 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 wellargued 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 volteface 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 antiriot 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 wouldbe-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 endessous 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 farrightist 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; AngloFrench 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, antiAmerican 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 “transculture”. 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 counterterrorism 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 “superpatriots” 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 metacommunication 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 selffulfillment 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 contemporarystyle 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 Englishspeaking 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-beanti-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, selfdepreciating 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 selfrestraint 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 anteCrash 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-beclassic 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 mediacensorship 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 wouldbe-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 subgenres, 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-inFrance 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 antiestablishment. 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 preelection 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 (2534). 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 RussianFrench 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 selfpublished 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 selfpublishing. 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 wouldbe-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 Englishspeaking 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 selfidentification 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 Dalailama 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 “submajority” 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 “ÉtatsUnien” (“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 wouldbe-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, metacommunication, 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 diplomaticlike 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 antiAmericanism. 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 “interministries” 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 normalsized 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 rankand-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-LeRoy, 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 20052006. 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 supercomputers 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 Communications.

Egypt,

Cyta,

SEACOM,

Tata

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 TGNEurasia. 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 UnderSecretary 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 FrancsTireurs 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 19141918, 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. Thirtyfour 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. *

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“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 French Republic.

The President of 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 Tu144, exact replica of the Concorde, eventually became a scandal that stained the relation. The Tu144 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 20182019 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 freefighter 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, BCENEurobank 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 selfassertiveness, 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 lettersized 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 MontparnasseBienvenue 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 socialistcommunist 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 mid1990s. 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 wellknown 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 everincreasing 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 “Kremlinsur-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 FrancoRussian 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 launchpad 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, exmember 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 highranking 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-beRobert 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 AngloNorman 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. RenaultNissan 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 proRussia 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 cryptocommunist 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 mid1990s, 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 exPrime 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 Englishspeaking 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 superequipped 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 metacommunication 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 preelection 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 “redpainted” 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 Frenchspeaking 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 BoutrosGhali, 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 capitalprovince 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 willynilly 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 counterinterference 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 whitecollar 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 Undersecretary 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 GaumontPathé 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 exdirector, 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-besecret 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 subcategories of a unique leftist crusade aiming to rallying all possible minorities under a common antiestablishment 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 antiAmerican 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 antiAmerican 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, saidto-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 antiAmerican 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 scifi 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 crosslegged 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-feethigh 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 satellitebased 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 remotecontrolled 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 fulltime 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 Applecompatible 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 photographiclike 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 selffinance. 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 wellto-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 supercomputer 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 20002001. 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 excolleague 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 coauthored 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 longlasting 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 FrenchRussian 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 wellknown 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 mediahyped, 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-toknow 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 ereader 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 JeanJacques 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 antiAmerican 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 Confidentialdefense.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 exhierarchical 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, CharlesHenri 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 CIASDECE 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 drugtrafficking 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 retranslated 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-tocross 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 evergrowing 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-betycoon 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 superagents 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 nearmonopoly 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 FrenchRussian 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 massproduce 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 highend 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 JeanMarc 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 Frenchspeaking 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 Frenchspeaking 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 selfsatisfaction 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 farleftists 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 allrational 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 Piednoirs 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 workingclass 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, thirdlargest 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 IIICJ, 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 publiclyowned 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: 19321951 (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, “JeanPierre,” 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 mid1990s 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 antiCommunism 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 spylike 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 subbody 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 crossborder 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 counterintelligence 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, DonzéBaume, 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.