The DGSE, or Directorate General for External Security, is France’s foreign intelligence service. It is responsible for all sources of intelligence and has benefited from a popular TV show, called The Bureau, about its inner workings.
I spoke with Damien Van Puyvelde, the author of The DGSE, about how the agency had to learn the hard way — through a string of high-profile blunders — how to conduct espionage. We wove in and out of time, through failures and successes.
Some of the DGSE’s major wins extend back to World War II, though the DGSE began by name in 1982. That year, the DGSE’s paramilitary branch, called Action Service, helped bring back a notorious Nazi. Klaus Barbie had been living in Bolivia. U.S. intelligence officers had helped “the butcher of Lyon,” their informant who mapped out Communist networks, escape through under an underground railway for defectors reportedly known as the Rat Line.
Even the DGSE’s training program gives a nod to World War II, Damien said. Each cohort of graduates receives a name of an honored member of the French resistance. “Newly minted intelligence officers get a little pin with the Cross of Lorraine,” he said. He was describing a historic two-barred cross that Gen. Charles de Gaulle chose to counter the Nazi’s swastika symbol.
But the DGSE would sooner forget some of its other work in the 1980s. Amid the civil war in Lebanon, an attack on military barracks harmed French and Americans troops. The Action Service was tasked with placing a car with a bomb in front of the Iranian embassy in Lebanon. But the bomb did not detonate and the device was traced back to France.
The worst publicly known debacle happened in 1985 in New Zealand with the Rainbow Warrior Affair. France had been testing nuclear weapons in the Pacific, and a Greenpeace vessel called the Rainbow Warrior had arrived to thwart that work. “The aim of the operation [was] to disable and sink the ship,” Damien said.
Divers from Action Service secretly put mines on the ship. “They wanted there to be a first small explosion that sends a signal to anybody who is in the Rainbow Warrior so that they would leave it. And the second one was supposed to just sink the ship in the harbor. But what they hadn’t planned for was that between the first and the second explosion, one member of the Greenpeace crew came back on board.”
A photographer named Fernando Pereira ran back to the ship for his camera equipment and went down with the ship. New Zealand’s investigators treated the incident as an act of terrorism and a couple purportedly on their honeymoon was caught. They had exhibited strange behavior, renting a camper van and staying near the harbor to keep tabs on people.
“When they got arrested, they had also kept all of their [receipts] for absolutely everything,” Damien said. Not exactly romantic… And they provided evidence after their arrest through their right to make a phone call. They called a number that linked back to the French Ministry of Defense. France’s defense minister and the head of the DGSE both resigned.
New leadership led to reforms. And by 2003, when the U.S. was invading Iraq on faulty intelligence about Weapons of Mass Destruction, “the DGSE was more careful in its assessment... it just said that there is an absence of evidence here, and that means the situation is uncertain, and indirectly that suggests to the policymakers that the British and the American position is a bit too forceful or a bit too confident.”
After Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own people in Syria, the DGSE deployed its paramilitary. On the ground, they smuggled back physical evidence that included sarin gas grenades. “I honestly don't know how they brought it back,” he told me. But he said that France’s colonial empire gives the agency more inroads in countries in Africa and the Middle East, like Syria.
Cut from this episode for time was how Damien said that leaked Edward Snowden files showed that Canadian intelligence had assessed the DGSE had launched malware to learn about Iran’s nuclear program. “An ecosystem of malicious software, or offensive cyber capabilities that is nicknamed ‘Animal Farm’ because most of the individual capabilities are named after animals, and the components include names that come from French cartoons actually — Babar, Casper, Dino.”
Every agency has a mixed record, and the DGSE is no exception. The examples go on. During the Cold War, DGSE divers were able to collect a piece of a Soviet submarine for analysis, Damien said. Decades later, a raid to rescue one of their own went bad. A French intelligence officer under the pseudonym Denis Allex had been kidnapped by al-Shabab terrorists in Somalia in 2009. A rescue operation in 2013 “made too much noise in their approach to the site,” Damien said. French commandos died in the raid and Allex’s captors chose to kill him.
I was intrigued when Damien described a mysterious level of cooperation with China, which he said was unwelcome by some DGSE officers. In years past, some spies from the service were arrested for working with China’s Ministry of State Security. Damien also described a rare case where a former DGSE employee in China was recruited by the Chinese, kicked out of the DGSE, and then recruited his stepson who was still working in the DGSE.
Anyone who follows my work closely knows how much I look for a bit of levity in the midst of these grave stories. So Damien also discussed the Maximator, a SIGINT alliance between the Netherlands, France, Denmark, and Germany which is named after a beer. “I think three officers from like three different countries, including Germany, [were] drinking a beer in Germany at the end of a meeting… and they were like, ‘Okay, how should we call this initiative?’”
Episode length: 36 minutes
Listen: On Spotify | On Apple Podcasts
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