Farewell

by Eric Raynaud

  Vetrov knew that, in spite of its large staff, Soviet counterintelligence did not have the material means to tail women, not even the wives of known intelligence officers. He knew the place, which was one of the best-stocked kolkhoz markets of the capital; he went there from time to time to buy fresh produce.

  After a final warm handshake, Ameil said goodbye to Volodia and, for the last time, transmitted Farewell’s latest wish list to the DST.

  President Mitterrand pins the rosette of Officer of the French Legion of Honor to Xavier Ameil’s lapel. To protect secrecy, Farewell’s first handler was awarded this decoration for services to foreign trade, but Mitterrand whispered in Ameil’s ear, “I know what you did for France.”

  CHAPTER 14

  An Easter Basket for the DST

  Let us try now to look at the operation from Vetrov’s and the DST’s perspectives. What could have been Vetrov’s thoughts regarding the DST’s attitude toward him? Viewed from Moscow, it probably looked like the motion of a pendulum.

  When Vetrov was posted to France, the DST through Jacques Prévost surrounded him with attention and, on the eve of his return to Moscow, suggested he could ask for political asylum. Even after his refusal to defect, the DST maintained the contact with him through Prévost. So, from 1965 to about 1973, the Soviet officer was undeniably in favor with French counterintelligence. Then, after Prévost’s last trip to Moscow, the DST seemed to have written him off. It even denied him an entry visa to France, which would have provided a good opportunity to pursue its study of the target for several years longer (as was mentioned earlier, Vetrov had no way to know the visa was denied because of an administrative blunder). At that time Volodia did not present any interest anymore. However, with the pendulum motion going the other way, the DST did not prevent its Canadian allies from opening their borders for him. It eventually forgot him for good, since Prévost never called his friend again in spite of dozens of trips he made to Moscow in those years.

  And here was Vetrov sending his SOS out of the blue. The DST realized that its former study target could become a fruitful source of information on Soviet espionage in France. And yet, the message transmitted by Ameil was clear. It was up to Vetrov to find a way on his own to defect to the West, and he did not want to leave the Soviet Union. The man dispatched by the DST to handle him in Moscow did not seem to be an experienced professional. So, what to make out of all this? As a typical Russian fatalist, Vetrov had resolved on making do with what he had.

  From the DST standpoint, the situation was more complicated.

  In early 1981, the DST was still a service unfamiliar with fighting espionage by agents from the Eastern Bloc countries. The explanation of such a state of affair has its roots in history. Created in 1945 after the Liberation, the DST focused on tracking down former Nazi collaborators. After that, it had to turn its attention to subversive activities linked to decolonization wars in Indochina, in Algeria against the FLN (the Algerian Liberation Front), and against the OAS, a French anti-independence terrorist organization. During this entire period, it was usually the American secret service who was in charge of intelligence gathering about KGB activities in France, keeping the French authorities informed on a regular basis. It is undoubtedly the good relations between the DST and its American colleagues built at that time that would play a role later in the Farewell affair.

  It was only at the end of the sixties and in the early seventies that the DST started in earnest to develop counterintelligence strategies against Eastern Bloc secret services. The DST, however, was not qualified to handle agents or implement active measures outside of France. It had no presence at all in Moscow, and neither did French intelligence.

  The office of French intelligence that existed at some point in the Russian capital (usually staffed by two or three persons) had been closed down by Alexandre de Marenches, director of the agency called the SDECE at the beginning of the seventies. Although an authorized and credible source claims that French intelligence kept handling Russian agents during their trips outside of the Soviet Union, France gave up secret activities in its main enemy’s territory. The whole thing seemed so ludicrous at the time that the KGB launched a gigantic investigation to clarify the situation. After two years of relentless checking of operations, Soviet counterintelligence had to conclude that the SDECE had withdrawn, a consequence of the draconian Soviet police state.

  With respect to military intelligence, an area in which the French had the reputation of being among the best, there was at the French embassy in Moscow a station of the Deuxième Bureau (Second Bureau of the General Staff), the official name of which was the Office of the Military Attaché. The Deuxième Bureau officers were not better equipped than the DST when it came to carrying on complex and delicate operations such as agent handling. Furthermore, what service would give up such an exceptional and promising case to a rival?

  There is another important point. Unlike the foreign intelligence service (SDECE), the counterintelligence DST came under the authority of the Ministry of Interior, not the Ministry of Defense. It was staffed by police, not military personnel. Its culture, mindset, and methods were inherited from managing police informants. The “cousins,” as they were called in France, used to move in their own milieu in all independence, making decisions at their own risk, without reporting to anyone—a type of profile that, oddly enough, looked very much like Vladimir Vetrov’s.

  So, in March 1981, there was the DST who inherited the treasure recovered by Xavier Ameil in Moscow, faced with a substantial double challenge. One was strictly operational. As mentioned, the service had no experience whatsoever in manipulating agents abroad since the legal framework of the DST’s activities was limited exclusively to the French territory. The other challenge was more political. The affair occurred in the middle of the French presidential election campaign, immediately after Ronald Reagan was elected in the United States, an event cooling East-West relations.

  Two men handled these two challenges, each with his own style and personality. They were Chief Inspector Raymond Nart and his superior Marcel Chalet, director of the DST.

  In 1996, both men refused to be interviewed by Sergei Kostin for the first version of this book. It was only in 2003 that they talked with Eric Raynaud about some aspects of the affair that remained unclear.

  When Raynaud met them in a café near the Hôtel de Ville, he was struck by the perfect casting of characters their association formed. They seemed both taken directly from a detective movie made in the seventies, each playing in a style distinct from the other, yet perfectly complementary. Marcel Chalet projected the image of a subtle and cultivated man, expressing himself in extremely refined French and anxious to never contradict his interlocutor. Passion for secret action could pierce through the veneer of good manners, of course, but moderation was back in full force the minute the conversation moved on to the political dimension of counterintelligence activities. Raynaud was then face to face with a ministry-level official, totally at ease with those in high places. To Raymond Nart, who hardly hid his admiration for his boss, Marcel Chalet was the “classy” type.

  Marcel Chalet, the head of the DST. He skillfully managed the political aspects of the operation with the new socialist team in power as well as with the CIA.

  For his part, Raymond Nart had clearly the profile of a true cop on the beat. Crafty, he came across as an expert in operations of all kinds. In the murky world of espionage it seems, however, that Nart’s most important quality was to remain direct and methodical, and always go for the simplest solutions. This inspector was obviously not inclined to speculate for hours about the ins and outs of a case. When Eric Raynaud asked him about one murky point of the operation and suggested some elaborate answer, Nart merely gave him a benevolent smile, saying that the truth is much simpler, and “it is precisely because we kept it simple that it worked.”

  Things did not seem so simple, though, when he first received the assignment. As incredible as it is, when
Raymond Nart received Vetrov’s two “life and death” messages, he was almost totally alone in the service due to exceptional circumstances. His direct superior Désiré Parent, deputy director of counterintelligence, was away, and Marcel Chalet was in the hospital. It was, therefore, on his own initiative that he decided to respond to Vetrov’s SOS, and “recruited” Xavier Ameil to begin the operation. Who at the KGB, the world’s most feared secret service, could have imagined that at that very moment they had only one lonely man facing them? The situation lasted several weeks.

  When he recalled those first moments of the operation, and the potential for a deception campaign mounted by the KGB, Raymond Nart, with a dry voice and his lilting accent from southwest France, explained the situation. “In this service, where you did not have to report to anyone, you could beat about the bush for years. I had no intention to ask a minister if I needed to wait for a third signal.”1

  There was no possible comparison between the DST and “superpowers” such as the CIA and the KGB. Its limited staff made simplicity a material necessity considering the disproportionate strength of the forces facing one another. As in the story of David and Goliath, in unbalanced confrontations, the weakest has to outsmart the strongest.

  By accepting transmission of the documents without hesitation, the amateur Ameil allowed the DST to skip a step. Raymond Nart did not really have to weigh the pros and cons, he did not have to ask himself if it could be a setup by the KGB, nor did he need to ask Vetrov for proof he was acting in good faith. As will become obvious soon, the value of the information received spoke for itself.

  Although a legalist in principle, Raymond Nart was very aware that the service sometimes had to flirt with judicial limits, and that secrecy required a few transgressions. By operating outside of France, the DST had crossed a line, leapfrogging the SDECE, which had sole authority to deal in foreign countries. As happened many other times during his career, Raymond Nart preferred addressing his responsibilities “and facing up to them in case of failure” in contrast to prevaricating and submitting the matter higher up to cover himself.

  In fact, it would be ridiculous and unfair to reproach the DST for having gone beyond the limits of its jurisdiction. Some missions cannot be accomplished within a strict limitation of time or space. In spite of its regulatory status, the DST had available contacts outside the French territory, notably in the French embassy in Moscow, including the office of the military attaché. The fact that Raymond Nart thought of Patrick Ferrant for the mission, a man he knew personally, cannot appear fortuitous.

  Back to March 1981. With the arrival of the first shipments from Xavier Ameil, Raymond Nart, still on his own, decided to work with a colleague, Jacky Debain, and engage a translator, closeted in an office, to translate the huge volume of information received. For the entire duration of that period, his constant concern was to involve as few individuals as possible. “One is fine, two is borderline, three is a crowd.” The team worked relentlessly; the translator delivered ten pages a day, having no clue about where the documents were coming from. The stack kept growing, and Nart was anticipating with the utmost satisfaction the surprise he was preparing for Marcel Chalet.

  A little while later, as soon as he came back from his sick leave, Chalet had a phone call from Nart asking if they could meet.

  “Is it serious?” asked Chalet.

  “Not at all,” answered his subordinate, with as detached a tone as possible.

  Flanked by his two collaborators, Nart walked into Chalet’s office and, solemnly declaring “on this red-letter day,” placed a three-hundred-page stack on the desk, adding, “every single one coming from the KGB inner sanctum.”

  “Are you kidding me?” asked Chalet, astonished.

  “I wouldn’t dare, sir,” answered Nart.

  Still shocked, the DST boss immediately suggested the risk of a KGB deception, but Nart had no difficulty, with the pile of documents in front of them, in convincing Chalet that the amount of information received to date ruled out such a possibility. “It would have taken a team of about eighty people doing just that, like an entire network, while sacrificing countless agents that had been patiently recruited. Impossible.”

  Quickly convinced of the importance of the case, Marcel Chalet was nevertheless wondering about the political aspects of this affair. The elections were around the corner. France would have a new president in two months. In case of a left-wing victory, there would be a new government, a new administration, and consequently new actors to let into the secret—a multiplication of participants which the DST boss strongly disapproved of, not because of their political affiliation, since Chalet considered himself first a civil servant, but for a strictly technical reason.

  “Why take the risk to talk about the case with the team now in place, at a time when it might soon be swept away? I thought it was not urgent to talk about it because, from that very moment, the main point was the necessity to preserve an exceptional source at all cost,” he explained.2 Marcel Chalet carried professional ethics to the point of prohibiting Raymond Nart from revealing Vetrov’s identity to him, so he would not be able to tell his superiors about it in case they would ask.

  The director of the DST thus decided to wait until after the elections to inform his future superiors. In the meantime, with his assistant, he focused on the operational aspects of the case.

  First, they needed a code name for their mole. In order to avoid one that might allow the identification of the agent, French secret services had a ready-to-use list of pseudonyms. The first pseudonym available is used, provided it has no link with the real name or biographical details of the person to protect. Soviet counterintelligence personnel had a good laugh when they learned that, during the big hunt launched by the CIA in the sixties and seventies to find the mole named “Sasha,” those named Alexander (the diminutive form of which is Sasha) were under particular scrutiny.3

  Marcel Chalet came up with a more elegant solution. A nationally qualified English teacher, Chalet knew the language of Shakespeare very well. To confuse the issue, he chose an English word. This way, if there were a leak, the KGB would think that it was an American or British operation, and would not necessarily look at the French services. Furthermore, the chosen name “Farewell” could suggest a closed case. The hope was it would slow down the KGB’s zeal to identify the source. And last, there was a humane side in this pseudonym, quite touching on the part of a counterintelligence ace. Written in two words, fare well conveys well-intended wishes for a safe journey. “And that was indeed,” said Chalet, “what we were wishing our man in Moscow, from the bottom of our hearts.”4

  It was also all about putting an end to the improvised nature of the operation, in Nart’s words, to the “reckless heroism” of Xavier and Claude Ameil. The couple, as mentioned, did not have diplomatic passports and would have been in a very precarious situation if things were to go wrong.

  Chalet then mentioned the possibility of recruiting a diplomat, but Nart answered he already had just the right man. Explaining the replacement of the Thomson representative, Nart told Chalet for the first time about a certain Patrick Ferrant, deputy military attaché posted in the French embassy in Moscow, where he lived with his wife and their five daughters. Nart had known Ferrant since the time the young man was appointed to the National Defense Secretariat; he was the liaison between the Ministry of Defense and the DST in a few sensitive cases.5

  Born in 1940 in Pas-de-Calais, northern France, Patrick Ferrant was a Saint-Cyr graduate. He was fluent in English and had some knowledge of Russian and Bulgarian. He was posted in Moscow in August 1980, as he remembers, on the last day of the Olympics, “as the marathon runners were finishing the race.”6

  Summoned by the Ministry of Defense, Ferrant flew back to Paris in April 1981, officially to attend a meeting organized for military attachés posted in Eastern Bloc countries. Ferrant found himself in the office of the newly nominated chief of staff of the French armed forces, General
Jeannou Lacaze, at that post since February 1. Ferrant was surprised to see there Raymond Nart and his superior Désiré Parent.

  As a military man and former officer of the Foreign Legion, Lacaze did not beat about the bush. “Well, Ferrant, we need to ask you something, and we are urging you to accept. There is somebody to contact in Moscow. Monsieur Nart will now explain.”7

  Nart briefed him on the affair and, without elaborating too much, gave the big picture in all of its importance and implications. “Oh, by the way,” interrupted Lacaze, “the guy would like a woman to be the first contact. So you’ll have to find one at the embassy.” Caught unawares, Ferrant mentioned an acquaintance, a woman working for a humanitarian program, but “chances are,” he said, “it’s going to be delicate.” After a moment’s thought, Lacaze added in his direct style, “Listen, why not send your wife?” Unruffled, Ferrant answered, “You are right, General, it did not occur to me. And indeed, from the standpoint of the operation, it is definitely simpler.”

  As the meeting broke, Nart had reasons to be pleased. Ameil could, at last, be removed from the operation, and his replacement definitely presented appreciable advantages to handle Farewell. Most importantly, he had diplomatic cover. Also, he was a disciplined military man, punctual and discreet.

  On the other hand, Ferrant was not without serious shortcomings for the job. A secret agent must go unnoticed, with an ordinary look, medium size, no striking features. Even though in Moscow he was wearing civilian clothes, Patrick Ferrant was a typical cavalry officer: crew cut, close-shaven, military gait. Nart even asked him to let his hair grow a little in order not to trigger a military salute on the part of the Moscow policemen walking by him. To complete the picture, Ferrant was six feet six inches tall. In the middle of a crowd, his head was visible from fifty meters away, extremely convenient for those in charge of tailing him.