Farewell

by Eric Raynaud

  The French officer even made several discreet trips to Vetrov’s apartment building to watch out for him. For her part, Madeleine came back equally empty-handed from the emergency weekly contacts at the Cheryomushki market. It was time to face the facts: Volodia had disappeared.

  Then, a period of great uncertainty and contained tension started for the Ferrants, who were anxious not to change their habits, to continue living as if nothing had happened, although every day brought new questions about Vetrov’s whereabouts. The couple adopted an attitude close to the one adopted by the DST; kept in the dark, with no means of action, they chose to stay put and wait patiently and calmly, and to stay on the lookout for any providential reappearance of Vetrov at the backup rendezvous.

  Figure 5. Ferrant’s report to the DST after Farewell’s disapearance.

  We learned that the DST never finalized an evacuation plan. Based on the emergency contact procedures in force, Vetrov’s best chance would have been to plan a murder on a Saturday. At ten a.m. he would have showed up at the Cheryomushki market, buying radishes while at it, then would have left quietly to go kill Ochikina, and afterwards would have had only to patiently wait a few hours before being rescued behind the Borodino Battle Museum at seven p.m. Had Vetrov not lost his self-control, he should have waited an extra day and could have then explained his situation to Ferrant during their rendezvous scheduled for February 23, pressing him to prepare an exfiltration procedure. There are two possible explanations for this enigma: either Vetrov, indeed, had a sudden fit in the car, or he had another plan (see chapter 30). The DST put its hopes in the second chance rendezvous. It was supposed to be on the third Friday of each month; in this case, it would have been March 19.

  However, when Farewell did not come to that meeting either, the DST chose to continue thinking that a business trip or a long illness “prevented him from dropping a postcard in a mailbox.”1 Does this last detail mean that Farewell still had a way to communicate with “Paul”? If this was true, any message sent through the regular mail, ciphered or not, would have exposed them to a huge risk. The mail addressed to foreigners living in Moscow was systematically opened. Asked about it, Nart explained that in case of a problem cropping up, the signal was to send an anonymous postcard to a specified address, but with a “somber” illustration.2 In fact, considering the logistical shortcomings of the DST in Moscow, it is not difficult to understand that the low profile the service kept during that period was the result of those circumstances.

  Meanwhile, the Vetrovs were meeting at Lefortovo, either in Petrenko’s directorial office or in one of the small interrogation rooms with bars on the window. Usually, there was an investigating magistrate present. He was minding his own business, but the spouses could not exchange any remark without him noticing.

  It happened during one of their early visits, in the beginning of October.3 Apparently, Vetrov feared he might be transferred somewhere else. One day, in the middle of the visit, the magistrate left the room. Vladimir used the opportunity to slip a folded piece of paper in Svetlana’s hand. They knew that the office was probably bugged. It was also possible that the magistrate left them alone on purpose. Vetrov, therefore, indicated to Svetlana only by a gesture to hide the paper.

  Once back home, Svetlana realized that the few sentences written on the piece of squared paper were addressed to Jacques Prévost (see Figure 6). Vetrov was asking his French friend to take care of his family. Svetlana had no questions, since Vladik had told her everything he knew about his father collaborating with the DST.

  She had no intention to contact Jacques Prévost, though. She was too scared. She flinched each time she heard the elevator door opening on their floor. Had they come to arrest her too? A few decades back, Svetlana would have been sentenced to follow her husband to the Gulag. How could she be sure things had truly changed since then? Officially, Stalinism had been condemned, but proven methods could very well still be applied secretly.

  The last thing Svetlana wanted was to be dragged into an espionage story. Even if she had been living in poverty and if an intervention by the French had showered her with money, she would not have transmitted the message4 to Prévost. Furthermore, in her opinion, this was totally unrealistic. Svetlana was even wondering whether what Vladik told her was true since in spite of the disappearance of their mole, the French did not make any contact.

  Figure 6. The message to Prévost written by Vetrov in the Lefortovo prison.

  On the part of the French players who lived in Moscow, Vetrov’s disappearance was at first perplexing, followed by a gnawing anxiety, felt as acutely by the Ameils as by the Ferrants, if not more.

  Xavier Ameil, as the reader remembers, handed over to Patrick Ferrant in mid-May of 1981. The Ferrants and the Ameils continued socializing fairly regularly. Both couples knew the nature of their respective relations with Volodia. However, fearing KGB eavesdropping, they never discussed the topic over dinner. Claude Ameil claims that they talked about the whole thing only after they had all returned to France for good. And yet, everyone had remained very discreet since it was only during our interviews that the Ameils learned about many details they ignored concerning “Marguerite” and “Paul’s” meetings with Vetrov. Unlike the Ferrants, the Ameils, who had no diplomatic immunity, never stopped fearing that the KGB would find out what was going on.

  Starting in the spring of 1982, Xavier called his wife on the phone to tell her he was leaving the office every evening. They thought that should the KGB learn about Ameil’s role in the Farewell operation, it could seek revenge by setting up a car accident. Claude was worried sick for thirty minutes each night until her husband rang the doorbell.

  One evening they had invited friends for dinner, and Xavier called home as usual: “Do you need anything? I am leaving the office now.”

  At the set time, he was not home. Claude started worrying. An hour later, Xavier still had not turned up. If something had cropped up at the last minute, Claude hoped that her husband would have called her; but no phone call. The guests were becoming aware of her anxiety.

  Two hours later, Xavier turned his key in the door. He was slightly tipsy. He’d had a cocktail at the office with some Russians. Ameil had indeed left the office after having called his wife. Except that he had forgotten to tell her he intended to give a lift home to his three Russian business partners. Claude was so happy to see him safe and sound that she did not lecture him.

  By the end of their stay in the Soviet Union, Xavier was alone in Moscow for ten days; each time he left his apartment or the office, he called Ferrant, the only person informed of the affair.

  It must be said that their fears were not justified. The KGB could openly arrest an accomplice, but since Khrushchev, “wet affairs” (assassinations) involving foreigners were prohibited.

  Ameil noticed another alarming sign. When Xavier came back to Moscow on September 2, 1982, after his summer vacation, he wanted to change clothes, but the pants were missing on the hanger of the suit he planned to wear. Xavier called his wife in Paris: “What did you do with my pants?” Claude had no idea. Inspecting the apartment more closely, Ameil realized that five hundred rubles left in a drawer were gone, and that a few objects had been moved. If it had been a break-in, the damage would have been much worse.

  Through friends from the French colony, Xavier knew that instead of making a fuss, it was the usual way to warn a foreigner considered persona non grata: “Leave! Clear out quick, we are tailing you.” In the past, KGB people just left traces of their presence in the apartment, moving objects or changing the combinations of locks. Recently, the rumor was that they had started stealing while “visiting” rooms. When she came back from vacation, the wife of a “diplomat” could not find a single pair of tights in her drawers; her entire stock was gone. Thus, after noticing that his pants and five hundred rubles had disappeared, Xavier concluded it was a warning.

  In fairness, it must be reported that Vitaly Karavashkin, who had headed the onl
y KGB service empowered to secretly search French residents’ apartments, vigorously denies such practice. According to him, this was part of the climate of paranoia the KGB created and maintained among foreigners regarding surveillance. We leave the reader free to decide the truth.

  On Ferrant’s side, it was no longer the time for fruitless trips to rendezvous spots or hanging around his friend’s home. In Paris, too, they wanted to know more. The decision was made to call Vetrov’s home phone.

  Initially considered to make the phone call, Ferrant was eventually taken out of the loop for safety reasons. Nart preferred asking the one person who could the most naturally call Volodia: his old friend from France, Jacques Prévost. To say the least, Prévost was not too keen about carrying out the mission. KGB fear was real on the part of a man who had often stayed in the Soviet capital and had been identified as a DST “honorable correspondent.” It was, therefore, with apprehension that he met Xavier Ameil in Moscow and decided to place the phone call, between October 25 and 29, 1982. To Ameil, on the contrary, this was the continuation of an adventure he had acquired a taste for, but had been taken away from him. He, thus, was the one who insisted Prévost call the Vetrovs’ home. The two men got in a public booth.

  The Vetrovs’ phone was tapped, making it possible to relate the transcript of the conversation, which was archived in the investigation file.

  The phone rang at 7:26 p.m.

  Svetlana Vetrova: “Hello!”

  A man’s voice: “Svetlana?”

  Svetlana: “Who’s talking?”

  The man’s voice, in Russian: “It’s Jacques. Where is Volodia?”

  The communication got cut.

  “I hung up,” said Svetlana. “I was scared stiff. I was certain it was a trick from the KGB. I imagine that Jacques was as scared as I was and rushed back to Paris.”

  Svetlana adds that she was so terrified by the espionage side of the story that even if she had met Jacques by chance in the street, she would not have let on that she knew about it. She would have mentioned only the crime of passion.

  This is how the only opportunity to transmit Farewell’s message to the French was lost.

  How could the KGB or the CIA have proceeded to find out with certainty what happened to their agent? They would have thoroughly studied pictures of Svetlana and her son. Then they would have tailed them discreetly for a while to make sure they were not followed by the KGB, and to establish their routine itineraries. It would probably have been safer to contact Svetlana through Jacques Prévost, a man she knew and trusted. On the day chosen for this encounter, Svetlana would have been tailed closely a good part of the day. A discreet countersurveillance would have also been put in place to protect Prévost. Then Jacques would have met her on her way home from the museum, and he would have asked her the same question again.

  Such measures, however, would have required a serious plan and the means to implement it. Which would have been feasible for the KGB residency in Paris, with its dozens of operatives on the ground, or even by the CIA in one of the Eastern Bloc capitals. The DST did not have a single officer in Moscow. Its operational style went against all the rules of the trade, whether it was a conscious choice on the DST’s part or imposed by circumstances, assuring its success for a while. The other side of the coin, though, was bound to become apparent in cases where the DST simply did not have the means to respond to an unforeseen situation.

  In fact, Marcel Chalet and Raymond Nart learned only a few months later what had happened to their precious mole.

  Since the director of the DST had informed George Bush about the details of the affair, a steady collaboration had been established between the French services and the CIA. The American agency had first given them the Minox, and then an even smaller miniature camera. At the beginning, the CIA had to recover the films, they said, because only they could process the rolls in their labs. Raymond Nart used, soon after that, a specialized lab in Boullay-les-Troux, eighteen miles southwest of Paris, in order to become independent from his American “friends” and to be able to recover the snapshots directly. Since about 80 percent of the documents were about American technologies or facilities, it took Raymond Nart time to separate and compile all of the “Made in the USA” data from the documents gathered by the Farewell operation. When the DST started transmitting the information, meetings with CIA correspondents in Paris became more frequent. It was during one of those encounters that Nart eventually found out about what had happened to Vetrov.

  “One day,” Nart remembers, “Chalet called me and said, ‘I have our CIA friend visiting here, plan on a lunch. We might get some news about Farewell.’”

  Chalet liked meeting in restaurants, for gastronomic reasons, certainly, but also because this way he knew he was not tapped, and the background noise was good for scrambling conversations. When they all met at the restaurant—the Fermette Marbeuf in the eighth district, not far from the Champs-Elysées—Chalet was in the company of the CIA correspondent, a certain Wolf. The three men chatted for a few moments about this and that, and then Chalet turned to the American: “Alright, you may now say the name.”

  As we learned earlier, Chalet did not know Farewell’s real name. Before letting the correspondent reveal anything on a source, he wanted to make sure they were indeed talking about the DST mole.

  “Vladimir Vetrov,” answered the CIA agent.

  Nart nodded to confirm, looking distressed, aware that the secret of the most precious mole the French secret services ever had was now in the open. Then the American told them the details of what happened to Vetrov. Actually, a CIA mole had provided them with a KGB internal log where the tragedy involving two of their colleagues was briefly recorded, one of them being a lieutenant colonel. Informed by the DST of the mole’s disappearance, the CIA had no difficulty putting two and two together.

  Without truly admitting to it, the loss of Farewell was very difficult to accept for the two DST executives. As it was, the two men had not considered Vetrov’s prolonged silence “significant,” as the DST boss put it, possibly in an effort to keep denying the obvious. Even years after the facts, Chalet and Nart continue thinking that at the time the CIA correspondent did not sound that “categorical.”

  In any case, in Chalet’s opinion, Vetrov’s arrest for a crime of passion did not change a thing in his instructions of absolute prudence to protect the source: “I still firmly thought that this affair had to be completely mothballed, processed with the most extreme prudence, kept perfectly secret from all other members of the alliance, and lead to no evasive action. That’s all. Those were my personal views.”5

  Unfortunately for Vetrov, Marcel Chalet would not be able to remain the guardian of those principles much longer since he was scheduled to retire the following November. The French counterintelligence chief’s leaving was quite untimely. He was forced, at a critical moment for the source, to abandon an affair that provided “the strongest emotions of his career.” All he could do was to urge his young successor, Yves Bonnet, to observe the utmost prudence. Yves Bonnet, formerly prefect in Mayotte, replaced Chalet in December 1982.

  Chalet’s retirement only accentuated the feeling of having lost this “French connection,” already perceptible in the field. Chronologically, it marked the transition of the Farewell dossier from its gathering phase to its exploitation phase. From this perspective, the affair was just starting, and in that sense, Farewell had already accomplished his “Great Work.”

  It was precisely at the time when Vetrov was about to leave for the Gulag in a third-class car with bars on the windows that the Farewell dossier started acquiring its true historical dimension.

  CHAPTER 28

  The Cold War, Reagan, and the Strange Dr. Weiss

  There is no evidence that while he was languishing in his cell in the Lefortovo prison Vetrov was aware of the developments the Farewell dossier was already having at the international level. By confiding in the French secret services, Vetrov had chosen first of
all the surest way to take his revenge on his own service. As far as seeing his secret dream of destroying the KGB come true, Farewell understood perfectly that France had neither the means nor even the will to accomplish such an ambitious task alone. It would take a close collaboration between the DST and the CIA to make things happen. As one can observe after the facts, major disasters often have their roots in causes that, at first appearance, do not seem connected. Even though the causes of the USSR’s collapse were complex and many, it is tempting to establish a link between the Farewell affair and Ronald Reagan’s election occurring at the same time. The new republican administration did not hesitate to use the information transmitted by Vetrov as a first choice weapon in their arsenal. They had the same objectives as Farewell, but contrary to the modest KGB officer who was then in jail, they had the means to reach those objectives.

  The end of the Carter presidency had been marred by the hostage crisis in Teheran that had become the symbol of the United States’ waning influence on the international scene. With Reagan, as he claimed in his campaign ads, “America was back,” and the attitude toward the USSR was about to change radically.

  With Republicans coming back to power, men from the Nixon and Ford administrations returned to the White House. Although many of Reagan’s advisers had begun their careers under Nixon, it soon became apparent that the two presidents had a very different approach to USSR relations.

  Since the big scare of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, East-West relations had eased up, transitioning to the period of détente at the end of the sixties. To preserve world peace, each bloc agreed to renounce crusades, letting adversaries impose hegemony in their zones of influence. Against this background, President Nixon, and then President Ford, embarked on a subtle strategy with the USSR, using a variety of peaceful coexistence policies (initially a Soviet theory) that could alternate from active to passive according to circumstances. Those policies were very elaborate schemes. They embodied the personality of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a German-born American political scientist of European culture, whose mind thrived on this geostrategic chess game with the Russians.