Farewell (38 page)

Another point shows the DST’s blindness during this especially critical time: what about Farewell’s former handlers in Moscow?
¹¹
As one can easily imagine, the expulsion was followed very closely by the Ferrant family, who was still in Moscow at the time of those events.

The Ameils had been called back to France as early as December 1982. Nart, worried by their lack of diplomatic immunity, had first offered to provide them with diplomatic passports. Xavier had turned the offer down. In his opinion, this could have only attracted the KGB’s attention. Nart had then insisted that Thomson management speed up the repatriation of the couple from Moscow. For Xavier Ameil, this anticipated return to the fold was bittersweet because it also meant retiring from the company. For Nart, the main thing was to have successfully, and rather “naturally,” brought his amateur spy back home, unharmed. He then focused on the Ferrant case.

After Vetrov disappeared, the couple had continued to lead a “normal” life. When they learned in the fall of 1982 that Vetrov had been imprisoned for a crime of passion, their first reaction was not to panic and to keep trusting “Volodia.” “Well, he is clever,” they told themselves, “until someone realizes…”

In Paris for Easter vacation 1983, Patrick met with General Lacaze and Raymond Nart to take stock of the situation. Nart enigmatically informed him that the following week “things would happen.” Lacaze went on: “So, in principle, you’re not going back.” Patrick Ferrant was well aware that the planned expulsion would get the KGB’s attention; yet, he is the one who decided to return to Moscow.

Patrick and Madeleine had seriously debated the issue. “Is it reasonable to leave? Aren’t we throwing ourselves in the lion’s jaws?” Two factors contributed to their decision. Patrick looked at the situation from the manipulation angle. He believed that not going back to Moscow was admitting to his crime. Since Vetrov had lived in Paris, this would have inevitably put him in a tight spot with Soviet counterintelligence. At the time, though, the DST had no evidence that the KGB was suspecting a French operation. As Patrick Ferrant pointed out to General Lacaze, “There is no sign of activity around us.” The Ferrants’ sudden departure could be interpreted, on the contrary, as a confession in disguise.

For her part, Madeleine was looking at the practical side of the situation. “What are we going to do if we stay in France now?” she wondered. “We didn’t have a place to live; all our things were in Moscow. We had no contingency plan. Staying in France was a big material complication.” Even though such details may seem mundane compared with the risks the couple was exposed to, they always play a part when decisions must be made rapidly. “And after all, there were only three more months to hang in there, so the risks were limited. Honestly, we did not have the feeling of being in great danger,” admitted Patrick. He thus persuaded his superiors, and flew back to Moscow on April 4, but alone for now. It was decided that Madeleine would leave a few days later.

The Soviet diplomats were expelled the day after Ferrant’s return, on Tuesday, April 5. Madeleine called her husband from Paris to check on how he was doing. At the embassy, Patrick Ferrant acted surprised like everyone else. Many French diplomats expected to be expelled in retaliation for the events in Paris. “We even laughed the situation off. In the beginning, we were being silly,” remembers Madeleine. “We phoned one another: ‘So, what do you think, we’re going to be expelled? Are you packing yet?’ We were making fun of the whole thing between ourselves, but I had my reasons to think that none of it could be that funny.”

During the three months they had left before their official departure from Moscow, the Ferrants kept a low profile. They went about their business as usual, but quit traveling. They did not go out as much, to their daughters’ great displeasure, since it meant no more slumber parties with their little girlfriends from the Spanish embassy.

When July came at last, the embassy informed Patrick that they had not yet received the passports with the precious exit visa the Ferrants needed to leave the Soviet Union the next day. With some apprehension, Patrick rushed to the MID, the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to get the passports himself. “I was ready to trample underfoot the first person who would have said
nyet
,” he recalls. Finally, after apologizing for his embassy’s mistake, Patrick received the passports, delivered by gracious functionaries.

The next day, the Ferrant family left Moscow in their car, en route for Vaalimaa on the Finnish border. On the Soviet side, the border post was surrounded by a security buffer zone; driving through was a moment of anguish for the couple and one of their five daughters. “The no-man’s-land, as it was called, was wire fences, barbed wires, and watchtowers over a forty-kilometer barren area, with nothing left but stones. It was truly impressive,” Patrick remembers. Keeping in mind the KGB’s expeditious methods Volodia had told him about, Patrick kept an attentive eye on the uninterrupted line of trucks going the other direction. Madeleine expected them to be arrested any moment, and she remembers this journey as a true nightmare.

Once at the border post, they had to deal with more red tape requiring Patrick’s skills to handle the overzealous border guards. The Ferrants eventually left the Soviet Union on July 2, in late afternoon. “What a relief that was,” remembers Madeleine.

For them, the adventure ended here. After this spectacular baptism by fire, Patrick went on to new missions and was rarely kept informed about the developments of his first case, or about the use that was made of the precious information he had transmitted.

As they admitted afterwards, the Ferrants’ exit from Russia was “touch and go.” This is easy to believe, with the expulsion of Soviet diplomats being the first incriminating evidence against Vetrov, although indirectly still.

Nothing, indeed, involved the former officer by name. The DST must have had its own list, and he was not the only one to have studied the VPK report. Even his clumsy exclamation, “They burned me!” could be attributed to a misinterpretation of his words.

It was Vetrov himself, actually, who provided the investigation with the first irrefutable proof of culpability.

He was constantly preoccupied by the fear that Svetlana might have to progressively liquidate their possessions. He intended to return to an untouched apartment-museum, with every single painting or piece of furniture still in the exact same place.

As is often the case with criminals, it was his petty concerns and greediness, added to his presumptuousness, that caused his downfall. Vetrov viewed himself as very bright—much brighter, he thought, than those acting against him. He knew that letters were opened in prison as well as in the Gulag, but
he
had found a secure way to send a letter to his wife.

He wrote it in prudent terms. Vetrov tells Svetlana that he will stay in the Gulag for a long time. She must, therefore, contact the French—she knows whom. The French are indebted to him, and it is their turn to help his family now. In June 1983, Vetrov gave the letter to an inmate who was about to be released and had promised to mail the letter to his wife once outside. Thus, the message would escape the camp postal check and would not be opened—or so Vetrov thought. It did not occur to this formerly brilliant operative that the mail could be intercepted at his home address. The story turned out to be even shorter: Vetrov’s companion took the letter straight to the camp management before leaving.

The investigators working on the case now had enough to expose the mole. The strongest proof of his culpability was obtained before he was transferred back to Moscow. In the “competition” between Vetrov and the DST to see which would provide more evidence against him, the next step was truly the coup de grâce, and it was delivered by French counterintelligence.

Let’s backtrack a little. During the operation, Farewell had given Patrick Ferrant a list of Western agents on the Directorate T payroll. The list was handwritten. As a precaution, Vetrov did not want to use the typewriter at his office, and he did not have one at home. The agents belonged to various countries, and the French, probably in the person of President Mitterrand, had decided to share this information, critical for the NATO alliance, with the affected states, each one receiving the relevant portion of the list. Since this information, in certain cases, could lead to lawsuits, allied governments received original documents, with the names of the moles and comments handwritten in Russian.

The listed moles were immediately investigated by counterintelligence services in their respective countries. Some were arrested on the spot. Unfortunately for Vetrov, one of those services was penetrated by the intelligence agency of a socialist country. The mole photographed the section of the handwritten list, which then found its way to KGB counterintelligence.

Since Vetrov was the one under the most serious suspicion, his handwriting was the first to be analyzed by a graphologist. He had come full circle.
¹²

In all truth, the exploitation of the treasures supplied by Farewell had started as early as 1981,
¹³
without necessarily threatening his safety. William Bell, a radar specialist at Hughes Aircraft, was on a list of over seventy foreign KGB informers. He was the first to be arrested. There were certainly other very targeted operations of which we are not aware. Finally, in April 1983, the sudden wealth of information available to French counterintelligence came out in the open.

In particular, at that time the DST warned West German secret services that a major mole was operating at Messerschmitt, FRG’s main weapon manufacturer. The mole was no small fry. Manfred Rotsch was head of the planning department of the aviation firm Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm (MBB). Over seventeen years of collaboration with the KGB, he had transmitted top secret information to the Soviets regarding the Tornado supersonic aircraft, and the Hot and Kormoran missiles. The Germans acted cautiously. Rotsch was arrested only in October 1984.
¹⁴

The trap also closed on Pierre Bourdiol. After Vetrov left France, he had been handled by Evgeni Mashkov, Alexander Kamensky, and Valery Tokarev, the Rogatins’ friend. Mashkov was expelled in 1978, and Kamensky in 1983. Despite the DST being hot on Bourdiol’s heels since Farewell had denounced him in March 1981, Tokarev left France on his own in April 1982. Later, the PGU decided to end the Bourdiol operation. The explanation given to the few officers who knew about it was the following. Pending a criminal investigation, Vetrov might talk to other Lefortovo inmates. He would not refrain from telling them about his KGB work, including during his posting in France. It was not impossible that he would mention recruiting and handling Pierre Bourdiol. A few Jewish prisoners were supposed to be released soon. That made them candidates for emigration, since they were, in those years, the only Soviet citizens who had the right to legally leave the communist paradise. So, in order not to blow Bourdiol’s cover, it was decided to leave him dormant. Our witness always thought this explanation was dubious. It seems it was meant only for internal consumption, to feed the rumors in Yasenevo hallways. As was established, the PGU had grounds to suspect Vetrov’s treason. In case of uncertainty, the first measure was to ensure the agent’s safety.

Bourdiol was arrested a year after he had ceased his espionage activity, in November 1983, and imprisoned in Fresnes on December 1. Being concerned with Bourdiol’s family’s well-being while their agent was in jail, the KGB decided to send money. In December 1983, Bourdiol’s last handler, Valery Tokarev, was included in a delegation representing the organization Intercosmos, scheduled to go to Paris; but the DST denied him the visa. Did French counterintelligence suspect that Tokarev’s mission had little to do with the conquest of space?

As far as Bourdiol was concerned, he had known for a long time the behavior to adopt. In case of his arrest, the KGB had fine-tuned a “legend” he had to stick to during the investigation. He could admit to transmitting documents to Soviet “specialists,” but those documents would be described as reference material and catalogs, stamped “confidential” but not “secret.” Apparently, Bourdiol followed his handlers’ instructions. He was also smart enough to collaborate with the investigators. For those two reasons, the French justice system showed some clemency. Sentenced to five years’ imprisonment (three with suspended sentence) for “intelligence with a foreign power,” Bourdiol was released soon after the trial because he had already served over two years in remand prison.

Bourdiol’s example is a good illustration of the different approaches adopted respectively by the PGU and the DST regarding their agents. The difference was not only in the precautions taken by the former to spare his sources an arrest or a severe sentence. Even when a source was “burned” and, therefore, was no longer of any use, Soviet intelligence made it its moral duty to assist, if not the agent himself when impossible to do so, at least his family. Here again, this is the difference between a powerful external intelligence service and a small counterintelligence agency like the DST, which had neither the culture nor the means for such practices. Vetrov knew the system inside out. During his long sleepless nights in his cell, was he disappointed or, on the contrary, relieved by the fact that his silent French partners obviously applied another line of conduct?

After the expulsion of “the forty-seven” by France, other Western countries that had been informed by the DST of KGB activities on their territories made a clean sweep too, especially considering the fact that the Soviet Union had not retaliated by expelling French diplomats in return. In 1983 alone, a total of 148 Soviet intelligence officers had to pack and go home; eighty-eight of them were expelled from Western Bloc countries.