How the Cold War was won... by the French

[tocqueville]

When a KGB colonel decided to pass on secrets that would devastate the Soviet Union he turned to Paris, a new film reveals

By John Lichfield
Thursday, 17 September 2009


Emir Kusturica, left, plays Serguei Grigoriev, the character based on the Russian mole Colonel Vetrov, while Guillaume Canet, right, is Pierre Froment, his French handler in L'Affaire Farewell

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: " Farewell dossier... led to the collapse of a crucial 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."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/how-the-cold-war-was-won-by-the-french-1788720.html

In July 1981, during a conference in Ottawa, French President Francois Mitterrand took US President Ronald Reagan aside to share some intriguing information. Mitterrand told him of a mountain of secret Soviet documents which detailed the penetration of KGB spies in US industries. The source of these documents was Colonel Vladimir I. Vetrov, a fifty-three year old engineer working for the KGB’s Directorate T, a department dedicated to the acquisition of Western technology. French President Francois Mitterrand and US President Ronald ReaganFrench President Francois Mitterrand and US President Ronald ReaganVetrov’s duties included the evaluation of the intelligence procured by the department’s Line X field agents. Vetrov had become disillusioned with the Communist ideal, however, and in 1980 he defected and began supplying French agents with copies of Directorate T documents. The French assigned him the codename “Farewell.”

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-farewell-dossier

see even:

http://www.laffairefarewell-lefilm.com



official source :

"Into the receptive climate of the Reagan administration came President Mitterrand, bearing news of Farewell--that is, Colonel Vetrov. In a private meeting associated with the July 1981 Ottawa economic summit, he told Reagan of the source and offered the intelligence to the United States. It was passed through Vice President Bush and then to CIA. The door had opened into Line X."

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/96unclass/farewell.htm

[Aragorn]

1. can't wait

for this movie.

Also check the book "The Sword And The Shield - The Mitrokhin Archive" for similar info.