[LINK] "How the Cold War was won... by the French"

[rfmcdonald]

John Lichfield's article in the Independent makes for interesting reading, not least because of the secrecy that continues to surround the espionage relationship that changed the world.

James Bond and George Smiley can eat their hearts out. Who really won the Cold War for the democratic world? The French, naturellement. This rather startling claim is made by the publicity for a brooding, brilliant, French spy movie which reaches cinemas next week. Although somewhat far-fetched, the boast that French intelligence "changed the world" does have some basis in fact.

The story of L'Affaire Farewell, how a French mole in the KGB leaked information so devastating that it hastened the implosion of the Soviet Union, is comparatively little known in Britain or even in France.

Due credit is given to the French, the once-reviled "surrender monkeys", by, of all sources, the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA's official website still carries a compelling essay, written soon after the affair was declassified in 1996, by Gus Weiss, the American official who ran the Washington end of the case. He concludes: "[The] Farewell dossier... led to the collapse of a crucial [KGB spying] programme at just the time the Soviet military needed it... Along with the US defence build-up and an already floundering Soviet economy, the USSR could no longer compete."

The official version of events shows that the French taupe, or mole, was Colonel Vladimir Vetrov of Directorate T, the industrial spying arm of the KGB. In 1981-82, he gave French intelligence more than 3,000 pages of documents and the names of more than 400 Soviet agents posted abroad. The information, shared by Paris with its Nato allies, was deeply alarming but also hugely encouraging.

Colonel Vetrov, codenamed Farewell by the French, laid bare the successful Soviet strategies for acquiring, legally and illegally, advanced technology from the West. He also exposed the abject failure of the Communist system to match rapid Western advances in electronic micro-technology.

The case directly influenced President Ronald Reagan's decision to launch the "Star Wars" programme in 1983: a hi-tech bluff which would drag the USSR into an unaffordable, and calamitous, attempt to keep up with the democratic world.

Raymond Nart, the French intelligence officer who handled the case from Paris, reported that Colonel Vetrov approached the French because he had once been stationed in Paris and loved the French language. His original contact was a French businessman in Moscow and then a French military attaché and his wife. He passed on secrets by exchanging shopping baskets with the wife in a Moscow market.

The Russian never asked for money or for a new life in the West. He was an "uncontrollable man, who oscillated between euphoria and over-excitement", said Mr Nart. He appears to have been motivated by frustration with the Soviet system and, maybe, a personal grudge. He was eventually caught, and executed, after stabbing his mistress and killing a policeman in a Moscow park in February 1982. The case remains deeply sensitive, and mysterious, in Russia and France. The democratic Russia of Vladimir Putin (ex-KGB) and Dimitry Medvedev brought pressure on a celebrated Russian actor, Sergei Makovetsky, to withdraw from the French film, L'Affaire Farewell, which premieres at the Toronto film festival this week. A request to film in Russia was refused.

Thoughts?