Last week was a good time to bury bad news in France. While French and international media were focused on president Macron’s Trump-like maverick statement of not ruling out western troops being deployed in Ukraine, a new book slipped out detailing the extent of KGB spying in France during the Cold War. Ironically this was also a week in which Macron and French authorities publicly warned of France being a privileged target of Russian intelligence agencies, through large-scale hacking, manipulation of social media in everything from the French ‘bed-bug scandal’ to the June European elections. Combine this with prime minister Gabriel Attal’s charge in parliament that the Rassemblement National – coincidentally with a 15-point lead in the polls – are the agents of Russia and the cocktail becomes explosive. It does so because France has form for being a soft target for Russian manipulation of politicians, civil servants and journalists.
The KGB had more than 50 agents in France, more than any other western European state
In 1999, the Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew and the Soviet defector Colonel Vasili Mitrokhin published a remarkable volume entitled, The Mitrokhin Archive: the KGB in Europe and the West. It was striking, not merely because Professor Andrew was (and remains) a world authority on the history of intelligence, but because Mitrokhin was a senior KGB officer who, for almost 30 years, worked in the KGB’s foreign intelligence archives. From 1972 to 1984, he supervised the transfer of these most secret archives from the Lubyanka to the new KGB headquarters outside Moscow. In 1992, the British Secret Intelligence Service – commonly known as MI6 – exfiltrated Mitrokhin. But most singular of all, this secret dissident with unrestricted access, had spent over a decade noting and copying 25,000 pages of highly-classified files which he smuggled daily out of the archives and hid under the floor of his dacha.
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