[MUSIC] You're listening to the CyberWire Network, powered by N2K. [MUSIC] In the modern AI enterprise, adversaries no longer break in. They log in. As autonomous AI agents and machines gain privileged access, your risk is becoming invisible, and legacy tools can't keep up. Introducing IDEA from Palo Alto Networks. IDEA is the next generation identity platform built for the scale of the AI workforce. It helps you discover hidden risks instantly, eliminate static privileges with just-in-time enforcement, and automate governance at machine speed. Secure every identity, human, machine, and agentic with IDEA by Palo Alto Networks, visit PaloAltoNetworks.com/idirra to get started. [MUSIC] Welcome to Spycast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber. And each week, I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe. The DGSE, or Directorate General for External Security, is France's foreign intelligence service. It's found inside the Ministry of Defense, but reports to the President. And it began in name in 1982, learning the hard way through a string of high-profile blunders, how to conduct espionage. The service is responsible for all sources of intelligence and has benefited from a popular TV show about its inner workings. Damien Van Poivelt, the author of the book, The DGSE, draws on documents never before available and traces the agency's history from its early failures to its sweeping reforms and modern-day successes. Hey, Damien, I know that it's afternoon there for you. It's morning for us. You're in the hage at your office. Thank you for joining. Thanks, Sasha. Thanks for having me. So let's start off by discussing how this service, its origins trace back to World War II, what led to the start of the DGSE in particular? Yeah, you're right. The origin story of France foreign intelligence service, the directorate general of X-series or external security, can be traced back to the Second World War. So France had foreign intelligence capabilities before the Second World War, has a great power up to them at least. And the Second World War is just the first time that these capabilities were moved not just into or used, not just into military setting, but moved under a civilian authority of the French government in exile. And so around 1943, actually, it's the first time in French history that you have a single civilian agency that does foreign intelligence, counter-espionage, covert action in that integrated model under civilian authority. And that can be considered as the kind of early origins of the DGSE. Now, you've also described how the agency ties its history back to World War II when personnel finish up their training. What do they do in why? Yeah, I mean, so to this day, actually, the agency has put a lot of emphasis in its external communications, but also the internal communication around the Second World War. It's a useful way to give a sense of identity to the people that join the agency. And so they've created a sort of affiliation between the heroes of the Second World War in France, the resistance movement, and the people that are remembered for being part of the resistance movement. And every new generation of officers that finish the training at the DGSE that are considered as a cohort that will be named after one of these kind of Second World War heroes. So that's very present in the identity of the agency. And it's a strong motivating factor. I mean, also, it is linked to the emphasis that the DGSE puts on operations. And it gives that direct sense of purpose. OK, we're working covertly to protect the national interests and/or predecessors did it in their even harsher conditions that we're doing. It's kind of a motivating factor to join and to stay at the agency too. And I think it's interesting that in the 1980s, once the DGSE is established, that its paramilitary branch, which translates to action service, actually is able to bring back a Nazi and achieve a little bit of justice from World War II. Can you talk about that? Yes, of course. So in 1982, the DGSE is established and one of the early wins you could say that is public. There must be many, many wins that are not public and also possibly some failures. Is the support that the DGSE gave to bring back a close parby who was a Gestapo chief in Lyon, one of the major French cities during Nazi occupation, in famous in France for being a torturer and for sending thousands of Jews and resistant members to Auschwitz. Most in famous in France also for the torture of the leader of France resistance, Jean-Moulin, who was tortured to death, actually, by him. And at the end of the Second World War, a close parby escapes Europe, actually is recruited as an anti-communist informant by the Americans. There's French pressure to extradite him and then he disappears and reappears somewhere in Bolivia in the 1950s. But at that time, anyway, in the 1950s, parby works in Bolivia, where he's far from retired, actually, is helping the local security service with repression of a political dissidence. And in the 1970s, Nazi hunters activists, Sergen Béat-Klausfeld, track him in Bolivia, they identify him, they launch a campaign to try to bring him to justice, doesn't really work because he's being protected politically and even legally by the regime in Bolivia. Early 1980s, 1982, there's a democratic election with a new regime arriving in Bolivia, so better conditions, they start working together with a French to extradite parby on tax evasion charges, actually, as kind of a legal story here. And the DGSC here plays a role in the transfer of close parby and keeping that kind of covert up until it becomes public that is flown back to France going through, actually, French territory in Cayenne, French Guiana in Latin America, and then eventually going back to mainland France, where he's tried sentence to prison and eventually dies in prison. So that is a real victory in France's history. But some of the DGSC's work in the 1980s is also rather humiliating for the surface. Can we start by talking about an incident in Lebanon? That's right. So we are one year later, or even less than one year later, in Lebanon, as you mentioned, in October 1983, there's a major attack on a French military barrack, which is bombed in Beirut, Lebanon, and 58 French paratroopers are killed. And this is amid the civil war in Lebanon. That's right. So it's a bit of a coordinated attack on two different kind of military barracks, you could say. The French are targeted, as I mentioned, on the other side, the Americans are targeted. So 241 US Marines are killed in parallel close to Beirut international airports. This is a shock for France, also for the Americans, of course, for France, a shock in terms of loss of life for the military, not experienced in the Second World War, so quite major from that perspective. It's around that time, actually, that Hezbollah is emerging. So it could say that it's like proto-Hezbollah type of organization that is behind that. And therefore, most of the Western intelligence services would align the attack to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and to Iran. So according to the memoirs of a former DGSE director, the service action, so the primary tribranche of the DGSE, is then tasked with. We can interpret that it is sending a signal, a strong signal to Iran, and they place a car with a bomb in front of the Iranian Embassy in Lebanon. But the car doesn't explode, the bomb doesn't detonate. And the device inside the car is eventually traced back to France, which poses a major problem. On one side, you could say that France is still sending a signal that they're unhappy with Iran, and that that message has been communicated whether or not the car explodes. But it was not what the DGSE really intended to do, and that leads to problems back home. And so actually, the head of the action service that primary tribranche is removed as a result of this failure in 1983. So you could say that this mishap shows a bit the danger of using COVID action, especially when it doesn't work and it becomes public. Now, this failure pales in comparison to what happens in New Zealand. This is the rainbow warrior affair. It takes us through that.
Yeah, we know in 1985 Greenpeace, the ecologist organization, had been protesting against nuclear testing. Actually, they have a long history of protesting against nuclear tests, whether they're American tests or in this case French tests. The French tests at the time they were done in the pacific ocean and the French government and authorities are obviously unhappy with the disruptive potential of Greenpeace. And so there's an order that comes from the top, from the presidency, from President Mitevren to disrupt. DGC has quite a few options. Eventually, they end up going for infiltration of Greenpeace in New Zealand to understand what they're doing and thinking the rainbow warrior that was the flagship of Greenpeace that was supposed to disrupt physically the test by going into a protected zone where the nuclear test was supposed to happen. So the aim of the operation is to disable and sink the ship. They do some reconnaissance work. Eventually, they French divers working for the DGC for that primary tree branch place a couple of mines on the ship in the evening. They wanted there to be a first small explosion that sends a signal to anybody who is in the rainbow warrior also that they would leave it. And the second one was supposed to just sink the ship in the harbor. But what they haven't planned for was that between the first and the second explosion, one member of the Greenpeace crew came back on board that was their photographer, a man named Fernando Pereira. Understandably, wanted to recover his material and went back to the ship and sank with the ship and lost his life. So big disaster in terms of loss of life. And on top of that, in the days that follow New Zealand Police and Security Service launch an investigation, in fact, they treat this as a terrorist incident the first on their soil. And they start finding an unusual French couple that is supposed to be there on honeymoon. So they interrogate them and they cover story unravels. And it becomes clear, in fact, that they are tied to French foreign intelligence. The French government meanwhile continues denying any sort of knowledge or engagement or involvement in this operation. And eventually the evidence is such that the French government has to acknowledge responsibility. So major diplomatic crisis with New Zealand leading to resignation of the French Defence Minister. And eventually the dismissal of the DGC director. And he eventually had to pay reparations to New Zealand that were negotiated and to the UN Secretary General. So a big kind of diplomatic debacle. But also I would say in terms of public image of the DGC, really bad moment that has left an imprint on the agency. Nearly like a trauma on the agency. I think within the agency and in France also in the public perceptions that French people have of the DGC. And then internationally, I mean, if you talk about the DGC, that's one of two or three things that people will know about that agency that it was involved in that crazy sabotage operation against Greenpeace. That makes it sound like the DGC is a very rough service, which it can be obviously. Right. So state sponsored terrorism, essentially in New Zealand with the French Defence Minister resigning the head of the DGC resigning. I know that France also had to pay the family of Fernando Pereira, this Portuguese Dutch freelance photographer who went back to grab his equipment as you say and then drowned on the ship when it sank. But what exactly was this French couple allegedly on their honeymoon? What had they been doing that got them caught? Yeah. I mean, first they arrived a couple of weeks before the operations in New Zealand and they did reconnaissance. So they rented a camper van actually staying in the area around the harbor, potentially taking photographs, keeping tabs doing basic surveillance to keep tabern who's getting in, who's getting out of the ship and so on. And eventually kind of didn't make sense to the New Zealand authorities that they would stay in that area with the camper van when they got arrested. They had also kept all of their tickets for absolutely everything. So all of the bills and so on, which is not the behavior of a couple of honeymoon, you know, people tend to just spend without paying too much attention. I would hope on honeymoon. They were just kind of like perfect bureaucrats in a sense, keeping tabs so that they could get that proof that they hadn't gone over their expenses. And that's actually a bit of information that are in the New Zealand security service reports that have been made public in the 2010s, where they just say it was so unusual. They were issues with the numbering of their passport. When they got interrogated, they had the right to do a phone call after one of the two spouses call back a number that was then linked back to the French Ministry of Defense. And apparently that operator was kind of freaking out about what happened and somebody had died and so on. And so all of that was just suspicious and more and more suspicious behavior. They couldn't really explain what they were doing there, why they would stay there as a kind of destination to just stay around the harbor. So just suspicion, really, unusual people that make them stand out and tiptoon a sense the New Zealand police and security service. Not exactly stellar trade craft right there. So after these incredibly embarrassing blunders, you've said that in 1989 is when real reform occurs under the services first civilian appointed leader who was appointed by the president Francois Mieteran? Who is this new director and what does he do? That's right. So the first few DGSE leaders in the 1980s are more of a military background and then Claude Silversand is a senior civil servant, a prefe, we say in France, so that's interior affairs background. And he actually became interested in the DGSE from the outside because of the rainbow warfare affair and realized that there was a misfit between an agency whose capabilities are needed by the state, but that was struggling to find a good distance and a good relation to policy making circles in France and in the rest of the public administration. He's remembered to this day as probably one of the most, if not the most important director general of the agency because he brings stability and modernization at the DGSE. He really kick starts the kind of normalization of the DGSE from an agency that sometimes felt a bit too crazy or rough in a sense to one that becomes really more part of the normal French administration. And he tries to streamline the DGSE doing an internal reorganization and really to again normalize the agency. So the term was a troubled service into something that was more of a governable institution. You could say, but credibility, discipline, internal coherence, integration into the apparatus of the French state and is remembered for that is reform inside the DGSE, organizing it around five direct rates last set for 30 years. And so that's one measure, perhaps, of the success of the reform that the agency had the same internal structure that he established for 30 years. So all small administrative reforms that taken together really solidify and make it a more robust, more modern, more competitive agency. When we come back, Damien talks about the DGSE's work in the past two or so decades and an international intelligence sharing alliance named after a beer. So let's fast forward to the early 2000s. When the US goes to invade Iraq in 2003, the DGSE is saying we aren't sure that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. That's right. That's one of the few areas actually where I was able to get access to some DGSE reporting and documents. No, I didn't find a smoking gun in the archives or anything like that. You write to say that the DGSE was more careful in its assessment, more careful than the Americans, more careful than the British claims about the presence of WMDs in Iraq. So the DGSE didn't conclude that Iraq had a large active WMD stockpile. It didn't conclude either that Iraq didn't have anything. It just said that there's 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 about the presence of WMDs in Iraq as a justification for the US led invasion and following war there. The intelligence says it's uncertain, but it's a French positioning also. French leaders like to be positioned in a kind of autonomous way or presenting themselves as also maturing on the world stage and not always having the same position than their anglophone partners. And that matters to friends. In the documents that you accessed, what did you find that was surprising that hasn't come out before? Well, there were two
kinds. One kind was very technical. It shows the depth of expertise. It nailries like a scientific paper to look at evidence on aluminum tubes, for example, and whether they can be used in centrifuges and so on. And that really requires the technical expertise, which is not available in every series is across the world. It's definitely available in US community, but that's not for every community. And here maybe there's a story to be told that France has that understanding also because it's a nuclear power. So the level of technicality on the one and then on the other hand, sometimes it was a bit banal actually. There was type of intelligence that was in these documents that was a bit more like what some practitioners might call rumored, rumored intelligence. So we hear that the delegation of inspectors, the last delegation of inspectors that was sent to Iraq is discussing this, this and that today they feel that you know the might or might not be WMDs, but it was just rumors. It just felt like reading reporting of humor, so kind of role intelligence from that perspective more than finished products that really present a detailed evaluation. The service also played a role in alerting the world to Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons on his own people. What did DGSE operatives do? In 2013 France publicly released an intelligence synthesis. So that's the equivalent of a national intelligence estimate if you want that brings the entire community together that attributed chemical weapons used to the Assad regime. And in that document it becomes quite clear what other different sources that were used by the French government to kind of take a public sense and do a public attribution of intelligence to actually justify French strikes on the Assad regime. The documents and additional documentations actually make it quite clear that the DGSE sends service action officers on the ground or send at least some of its officers on the ground in Syria to collect samples, biomedical samples, environmental samples, munitions related material including saringas grenades that they brought back all the way to France. The idea here is that if the president is going to take a decision and go public on something that is as important as that they cannot just rely on hearsay or interrogating human sources not even just on satellite imagery videos or what partner services might tell the French. They want their own independent evidence and they want the supply chain for that evidence to go straight from Syria all the way to France with their own people so that they have 100% certainty of what they're doing. How do you bring back saringas grenades? That sounds incredibly dangerous. I understand that they wanted that tangible evidence but what a ride that must have been. I will imagine we don't have details yet to be honest on the kind of logistics of this. Now you can imagine that there are that transporting a biohazard so that's one thing already and then the extraction also. I guess the simplest way would be to go through the Mediterranean and then kind of bring it back shipping it back to France straight away like that so that you don't have to cross other countries or bring it in a plane but I honestly don't know how they brought it back is the logistics of covered operation sources and methods definitely something that is still classified. Right. Now let's also talk a bit about the way the DGSC operates with other countries. They aren't in the five eyes but you've told me that they do have an alliance and it is named after a beer. Yes that's right. The alliance is called the Maximator Alliance which you could then refer to the beer alliance because Maximator is a German beer. It was I think three officers from like three different countries including Germany drinking a beer in Germany at the end of a meeting a cooperation between between intelligence agencies that were drinking that beer and that were like okay how should we call this initiative? Well we're just drinking this German beer called Maximator so let's call this alliance Maximator and in France actually requests to join later on in the 1980s and joins I think in the mid 1980s and the alliance is basically a signals intelligence alliance I think looking mostly at sharing the burden of some of the technical platforms and sharing know-how in terms of crypt analysis so deciphering if you want of messages and so on. So it's one of the alliances you mentioned also the DGC is not a member of the five eyes but it does cooperate with the five eyes and there are different formats to cooperate with the five eyes. The nine eyes, the 14 eyes and so on which French intelligence will also contribute to. Right and they of course have good relations with major powers to include the United States and the UK but there are still some other partnerships that I found surprising and one of those was China. What were those partnerships? Why would they partner with China of all countries these days? Yeah there's not much out there on the DGC cooperation with China. We know that the DGC has a formal representation in China so they have a chief of station if you want to decryvel and of a chief of station in China and they've had one for a while and that as actually in some ways history really goes more trouble to the DGC. We don't know about what that DGC representation does but we can imagine that they do share intelligence to a certain extent or that when there are sensitive situations that can be used as a channel that is not a diplomatic channel and that can make conversations easier. It could be about common threats or common problems in the region or just to send messages more informally as I mentioned. We also know that it has caused problems because DGC representatives in China in the 1990s have been turned by the Chinese services and that has actually recently led in the last few years to one of the very rare cases where a French court was suing DGC officers, a former DGC officer that was working in China was recruited by the Chinese, was kicked out of the agency, recruited is a stepson that was stealing the agency after so a big counterintelligence and counter-espionage failure from the DGC. They decided to go publicly while usually they never go public with these kind of stories. Again I think to send a signal to send a signal to their own employees and possibly also to send a signal to partners and adversarial services that this had crossed a certain level and that's just really unhappy about it. Right it wasn't just that in years past that some DGC officers ended up working for China's Ministry of State Security but China also allegedly was targeting France's military and Starlink networks earlier this year. Yet you told me that inside the DGC there has been some frustration that China hasn't been prioritized. China is a major emerging threat for a lot of Western countries but most of the DGC resources from what we understand on the outside are still focused on the traditional zone that is around France that they call the arc of crisis from Mauritania all the way to Central Asia and now increasingly of course also towards East and Europe and Ukraine given the situation there at the moment and the threat that Russia is posing. So that's like in terms of general strategic orientation of the service that there might be some frustration we should maybe focus on the longer term but the reality is DGC has limited resources and it's kind of normal that it focus on the threats that are closer to home geographically. Now on the Chinese operations in France that is actually a matter for the DGSI the interior service to work on the equivalent of the FBI and that's the way that's what they've done yes so we know from public reporting that two Chinese engineers and two other individuals were arrested in the south of France because the DGSI found a house with a kind of radar system that was in the garden so kind of using a di Shantena in the garden that was spotted and that is believed to have been used to spy on communications with satellites and cryptid communications with satellites possibly and so there's a kind of current case against these individuals in France so that's more domestic kind of concern but in the world of intelligence partners adversaries can sometimes become adversaries of friends and vice versa it's much more kind of pragmatic in a sense it's not because China and you know China is spying on you trying to get some of your economic secrets or your intellectual property or even kind of some of your more sensitive information penetrating your agency that doesn't prevent intelligence agencies to still cooperate on other issues that are of common interests the rise of terrorism for example with cooperation between the DGSI and Russian services on counter-terrorist issues historically and in China we can imagine that sometimes they might exchange some intelligence about Russia I mean I don't know frankly or North Korea perhaps even now with France's legacy as having one of the largest colonial empires in the world spanning parts of Africa Middle East even the Caribbean is that legacy manifesting today I'm curious to understand how that might play into the service yeah I think the service has always kept strong ties and strong presence in Africa and in the Middle East
France had a mandate around Syria, ties to Lebanon also, and then of course all the francophone Africa countries that claimed their independence in the 1950s, 1960s, depending on which country. But it has always kept a presence there. And I think that is one of the main interests for other countries intelligence agencies to cooperate with the DGSE that they've had these ties. These links, these geographical kind of presence there. And so the French service has always been known to have these ties and perhaps a bit more access to human sources in these political networks in various African countries, historically. But Greece and history kind of goes with the other way. In these countries around the Sahel region. Yeah, ISIS has been growing in the Sahel, and major hotbeds. That's right, France was involved in a war there, in a conflict there for years, operation servile. And eventually it was kicked out when there was a change of regime in a series of countries there. And that was a major kind of failure, or it was interpreted as a major failure of the DGSE that it is said as failed to anticipate regime change in Mali and surrounding countries. And then eventually that led to French military presence being kicked out of the country, quite possibly also, the kind of more formal chief of station type of positions, the diplomacy of intelligence being kicked out from a range of countries in the region. And we think basically that the previous director of the DGSE lost his job over that failure. And what we had then to replace the French presence has been a Russian-Supported, not called Wagner anymore, but Russian-Supported Presence in the region. Africa Core, that's right. Now more closely and publicly tied to the Russian military complex. What has been in your eyes? One of the DGSE's most audacious operations. I'm an elementian, a couple of them. One that worked, one that didn't work. Historically, the DGSE sent combat divers, or specialized divers, to recover a piece of a Soviet submarine during the Cold War, and just bring it back to take a look at the stealth technology. So you would imagine that would have been pretty stressful for the divers to go and cut a little piece of a Soviet submarine and then just extract themselves back to France again to get disanalyzed. There was a daring operation that didn't turn well with Donnie Alex, who's a DGSE Paramely Tree Officer. I was kidnapped by Al Shabab, and the DGSE launched massive operation with its Paramely Tree branch to recover him. They made too much noise in their approach to the site where Donnie Alex was located and held hostage. And his captors just killed him. And in the advance towards that position, a DGSE operator was also killed. I'm curious to know how a hit TV show called The Bureau has affected the DGSE domestically as well as internationally, because it is quite known to people who follow these things. That's right. I think for me, The Bureau did a fantastic job at humanizing the DGSE. You have to take into account the public perception of intelligence and of the DGSE in France for a very long time public understanding of the DGSE was really marked by these big public failures that we mentioned before, mostly the rainbow warrior affair. Spies in France have a reputation as like a dirty job. That you find that in other democracies, but in most democracies that had evolved, if you look at the US and the UK, that had evolved into a more positive use of the role of spies as being kind of freedom fighters, if you want, or like taking massive risk to defend their country, to protect their country. It wasn't much like that. In France, I would say, and people were still wondering, OK, what are they doing? Are they just like rogue people that are just doing crazy things on our behalf? And what The Bureau did is just showing normal people that spies are also just normal people. They have stress. They have families. They have relationships. Life is difficult. Work-life balance is difficult. And it did make the DGSE look cool to an extent, too. They're doing some pretty crazy kind of operations in hot spots against bad guys. You could say it has a bit contributed to a form of public prestige. If you've seen a TV show, then TV show looks very realistic, actually, even the setting of it is inspired by how the DGSE looks within the offices of the DGSE. But of course, the plot is a bit out there. Right. They always take liberties with these sorts of shows for entertainment purposes. I'll leave it to them to figure out. Well, I know this is the first book that talks about this intelligence service in English. So we are happy to have you on. Thank you so much, Damien. Thank you for having me. 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