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  FAREWELL

  FAREWELL

  THE GREATEST SPY STORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  SERGEI KOSTIN & ERIC RAYNAUD

  TRANSLATED BY

  CATHERINE CAUVIN-HIGGINS

  FOREWORD BY RICHARD V. ALLEN

  Text copyright © 2009 Éditions Robert Laffont, S.A., Paris

  English translation copyright © 2011 by Amazon Content Services LLC

  Foreword copyright © 2011 by Richard V. Allen

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century by Sergei Kostin and Eric Raynaud is the English translation of their book Adieu Farewell, published in 2009 by Éditions Robert Laffont in Paris. The first version of this book, by Sergei Kostin, was published in 1997 by Éditions Robert Laffont in Paris as Bonjour Farewell.

  Translated from the French by Catherine Cauvin-Higgins.

  First published in English in 2011 by AmazonCrossing.

  Published by AmazonCrossing

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN: 978-1-61109-026-0

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011900156

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Foreword by Richard V. Allen

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1. Proletarian Beginnings

  CHAPTER 2. Svetlana

  CHAPTER 3. Joys and Hopes of Ordinary Soviet Citizens

  CHAPTER 4. The Good Life!

  CHAPTER 5. The Mysteries of Paris

  CHAPTER 6. Return to the Fold

  CHAPTER 7. In the Shade of the Maple Trees

  CHAPTER 8. A Puzzling Affair

  CHAPTER 9. Urban Worries and Pastoral Bliss

  CHAPTER 10. Crisis

  CHAPTER 11. The Leap of Death

  CHAPTER 12. The Adventurous Knight

  CHAPTER 13. An Espionage Robinsonade

  CHAPTER 14. An Easter Basket for the DST

  CHAPTER 15. A Family Business

  CHAPTER 16. Three Presidents: Mitterrand, Reagan, and Victor Kalinin

  CHAPTER 17. “Touring” Moscow

  CHAPTER 18. Two Men in a Lada, and a New World Order

  CHAPTER 19. The Lull Before the Storm

  CHAPTER 20. Vladik

  CHAPTER 21. February 22

  CHAPTER 22. A Not So Radiant Future

  CHAPTER 23. A Woman to Stone

  CHAPTER 24. Confession of an Outcast

  CHAPTER 25. A Jail for the Privileged

  CHAPTER 26. The Trial

  CHAPTER 27. A Disconnected French Connection

  CHAPTER 28. The Cold War, Reagan, and the Strange Dr. Weiss

  CHAPTER 29. The Gulag Prisoner

  CHAPTER 30. Portrait of the Hero as a Criminal

  CHAPTER 31. Unveiled

  CHAPTER 32. The Game Is Up

  CHAPTER 33. “The Network”

  CHAPTER 34. The Farewell Affair Under the Magnifying Glass of the KGB and DST

  CHAPTER 35. Hero or Traitor?

  FOREWORD BY RICHARD V. ALLEN

  In 1976, five years before the Farewell case, Ronald Reagan nearly unseated President Gerald Ford for the Republican presidential nomination. The major salient of his attack on Ford was on foreign and national security policy. Reagan rejected “détente,” not because he opposed a relaxation of tensions with the Soviet Union, but because under Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger “détente” had taken on a special, nearly theological meaning—a supposedly ineluctable process of gradually making the Soviets completely dependent on trade and technology from the West, hence causing them to moderate their behavior in terms of global expansion and military procurement. Reagan believed the theory to be defective and dangerous, even intellectually bankrupt.

  Gerald Ford went on to lose to Jimmy Carter in November, and the change in administrations merely resulted in giving the Soviet Union even greater incentive to pursue an aggressive course in its relationship with the United States. Reagan hosted a highly effective daily radio show from 1975 through 1979, regularly launching reasoned critiques of U.S. policies that failed to exact penalties for bad behavior from the other side. His speeches on foreign policy and defense increasingly reflected this tone: U.S. policy was in effect rewarding aggressive international behavior.

  Although his critics repeated the mantra that Reagan was “simplistic,” Reagan believed that simply “managing” the Cold War was a losing proposition. On the contrary, as he said to me in his Los Angeles study in early February 1977, just days after Jimmy Carter was inaugurated president, “There is a difference between being ‘simplistic’ and having simple answers to complex questions.” Then he said, “So, my theory of the Cold War is that we win and they lose. What do you think of that?”

  By “winning,” he did not mean that the other side would lose everything in disgrace and ruin—but that one side, the U.S. and its allies, would clearly “win.” He also believed in working to liberate the peoples of Eastern Europe and divided Germany suffering under the Soviet yoke. He meant what he said on that occasion; I waited many years before revealing his observation about “winning and losing.”

  Reagan then developed a series of persuasive political arguments concerning future U.S. policy. I was privileged to be along for the years of journey to the election in 1980 and into the White House, serving first as his chief foreign policy adviser and then as his first national security adviser.

  Surviving an assassination attempt on March 30, 1981, Reagan appealed to Leonid Brezhnev to sit down and negotiate critical issues contributing to tensions. The appeal was summarily rejected by Brezhnev.

  In early May, less than four months into the Reagan administration, France’s François Mitterrand surprised everyone by unseating President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. The French Communist Party had supported Mitterrand, and the winner appointed four communist ministers to his cabinet. The State Department and U.S. press were in a state of shock, and my colleague, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, a close friend of D’Estaing, declined to brief the press. I had studied Mitterrand’s career for years, and thus it fell to me to brief the press as an “anonymous senior White House official.” The theme used in the briefing: Mitterrand would be a canny manager of his cabinet, and there was no need for negative reactions.

  At the seventh G7 economic summit conference, July 20–21, 1981 at Chateau Montebello in Quebec, Mitterrand and Reagan met for the first time. Reagan was confident that he and the new French president would get along well; he was not mistaken.

  After the formal meetings, Mitterrand met with Reagan very privately. Accompanying Mitterrand was Jacques Attali, his brilliant adviser whom he treated like a son, and I accompanied Reagan. Mitterrand revealed that France had a private sector company, Thomson-CSF, working on contracts in Moscow, and through it French intelligence had achieved a very deep penetration of the KGB. It had in place a key Soviet source who was voluntarily providing astonishing national security information about Soviet technology acquisition from the West, including massive theft of technological secrets. Thus was revealed the famous “Line X” KGB espionage network by one of the most precious and extraordinary “moles” the West ever had. The “Farewell” case was born.

  Management of the matter in Washington was by Reagan’s close friend and mine, William J. Casey, CIA chief. On my National Security Council staff, an extraordinary fellow, Dr. Gus W. Weiss, whom I had first met in 1968 and then recruited for the White House international ec
onomic policy staff in 1971 in the Nixon administration and again in 1981 at the outset of the Reagan administration for the NSC, was given the assignment to handle and exploit this valuable intelligence resource from the White House end. The agent-in-place performed heroically, but committed actions that compromised his identity. The highly effective and secret cooperation served to reinforce French-U.S. relations and build mutual confidence.

  The reader of this wonderful book by Sergei Kostin and Eric Raynaud is in for a treat: an introduction to what President Reagan described as the most significant spy story of the last century. Catherine Cauvin-Higgins, interpreter for the Thomson chief at the time, has performed a great service in translating the volume, expanded and updated with newly available information, including a Weiss memo published by the CIA, “The Farewell Dossier: Duping the Soviets.”

  And expertly duped they were, principally by sophisticated economic warfare expertly waged. But to reveal more here would affect the reader’s exciting voyage into the murky world of espionage and counterespionage.

  Just as Reagan had hoped and planned, one side actually “won.”

  INTRODUCTION

  Spring 1981: The Reagan administration, still shaken by the assassination attempt on the new president by John Hinckley two months earlier, was in shock again. A socialist, François Mitterrand, was elected president of a major European power with nuclear weapons. The new French government included four communist ministers, allies of the Socialist Party. Even though France was not officially part of the NATO military organization, the role it played in the free world’s defense structure could not be discounted. The rest of the West was getting so worried that United States vice president George H. W. Bush paid a visit to the Elysée Palace to express those anxieties in person. International reservations toward France remained on the agenda during the G7 summit held in Ottawa in July 1981.

  At the summit, despite the reluctance he was sensing, President Mitterrand appeared very confident. He knew perfectly well that this was not militant communism making a spectacular breakthrough within the Western Bloc. To the contrary, the West was now enjoying a major advance into Soviet front lines. For the past few months, France had had a mole, code name “Farewell,” operating at the heart of one of the most sensitive divisions of the KGB. During a face-to-face meeting, Mitterrand shared this secret with Ronald Reagan and revealed to him the scope of global Soviet industrial pillage. At the time, the American president did not fully understand the impact of the dossier, but he was a fast learner. Soon after, he would refer to it as “the greatest spy story of the twentieth century.”

  Mitterrand-Reagan private conversation in Ottawa on July 19, 1981. The two presidents are relaxed and already in connivance: the disclosure of the Farewell dossier changed entirely the attitude of the leader of the Western Bloc toward the Socialist president.

  The Farewell dossier should be presented in this context. Located at a strategic node within the system, this officer opened the eyes of the West to the scope, structure, and operations of technological espionage as practiced by the USSR, primarily in the military-industrial complex. The free world suddenly realized the vulnerability of those very defense systems vital to its survival. Furthermore, it became clear that it was impossible to have the upper hand in the arms race against the East because, through the efforts of Soviet intelligence, it did not take long for the West to “share” its most efficient weapons and devices with this formidable adversary. Finally, the scale of this systematic stealing revealed a key strategic weakness of the socialist bloc in the domain of high technology. A window of opportunity to bankrupt the Soviet economy was open for the new American administration, who did not expect the Cold War to remain frozen forever. Under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, who had been informed of the Farewell operation less than five months after it all began, the NATO countries significantly toughened their attitude toward the USSR and its satellites. Many remember the anxiety the world was experiencing during the first five years of the 1980s. After a short-lived détente, the Cold War was back in full swing, heating up to the point that it could less and less be described as “cold.” Fear of an apocalypse resurfaced after cascading events, including the downing of a South Korean aircraft, the Euromissile crisis, and Reagan’s joke during a mic check that he had signed legislation outlawing the Soviet Union, and bombing would begin in five minutes.

  In the face of an unwavering position on the part of the USA, the Soviets no longer held such a good hand. World peace would have crumbled overnight had the president of the United States been matched by an equally stubborn and entrenched Kremlin leader, and the Soviet gerontocracy contained many such characters. Shaken, the communist regime under Yuri Andropov’s leadership kept trying to revamp its façade, but would not change a thing in substance. After Andropov’s death, the degradation of the international climate brought Mikhail Gorbachev to power. Being a flexible politician, Gorbachev eventually cooperated with the West to find a solution allowing the world to survive. The rest is history.

  Therefore, it is tempting to think that without Farewell’s solitary action—whose motivations were miles away from reshaping the world—perestroika and the end of the Cold War could very well have occurred ten, fifteen, or even twenty years later, assuming that world peace could wait that long.

  Undeniably, the factors leading to the collapse of European communism as a system are more numerous and complex, but only in the world of espionage can small acts have such great effects. The actions of a single person with access to the secrets of a major power have the potential to modify the course of history. Thus, among the “subjective factors,” to use Marxist terminology, the Farewell case certainly is in a class of its own. It was one of those stones that, as they crumble, cause the wall to collapse.

  The Farewell file is also the most disturbing case there ever was, with so many improbabilities and paradoxes that many people will even doubt that it really happened. Judge for yourself.

  A KGB officer, Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov, decided to betray the system. However, instead of contacting the Americans, he chose to contact the French secret services—the ranking of which, in the world of intelligence, was modest at best, and which had no presence at all in Moscow. Moreover, Farewell had not called upon the French intelligence service SDECE (equivalent to the CIA), but rather upon the DST (equivalent to the FBI), a counterintelligence organization that had neither the spy handling experience nor legal authority to gather information outside French territory.

  In order to handle this agent in Moscow, the DST began with an amateur who agreed to go along for the ride. This volunteer was then replaced by an officer, also with no experience in agent handling, from military intelligence operating under the cover of the French embassy. It is hard to believe that these two “amateurs” managed to meet routinely with their mole over a period of ten months, right under the KGB’s nose, without ever falling into the world’s most powerful police machine’s traps.

  It is also difficult to imagine that a man acting alone, at great personal risk, could have stolen so many state secrets from the Soviet regime, managing to shake the whole edifice.

  All this is quite understandable. Gus W. Weiss, one of the most respected among Reagan’s national security advisers, who knew the Farewell file very well, was probably the best man to express this murky feeling. “Devotees of 007,” he wrote, “are fiercely skeptical of Farewell’s authenticity, dismissing the adventures as a preposterous trunk of extravagant nonsense, sniping, ‘Buddy, you like got some kind of runaway imagination.’ It’s doubtful that a master of even Fleming’s dexterity could have persuasively stitched together as fiction the factual artillery of the Vetrov operation.”1

  Our ambition was, therefore, to try to reconstruct, as fully and truly as possible, this epic story mixing big politics and small existential disappointments, espionage and ideology, courage and villainy, love and hatred, calculations and madness, crime and punishment.
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  Sergei Kostin and Eric Raynaud

  Moscow – Paris, January 2011

  CHAPTER 1

  Proletarian Beginnings

  To get close to the truth, Farewell’s personality and inner motivations matter as much as the suspenseful, sensational side of this espionage story. It would have been impossible to learn as much as we did about Vetrov’s biography, his character, and his personal tics—elements that bring life to the portrait of a man—without his family’s contribution. We are therefore deeply indebted to his wife Svetlana, who, after much hesitation, finally agreed to tell Sergei Kostin about her husband.