SDECE and DST (French intelligence)

For most of the Cold War, France split its secret services the way Britain did, between a foreign service and a domestic security service, but with less coordination and more rivalry. The Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage (SDECE) worked abroad. The Direction de la surveillance du territoire (DST), a directorate of the National Police under the Interior Ministry, caught spies at home^1,6,7. Their most celebrated success, the FAREWELL case, belonged to the DST, the service that was not supposed to operate abroad³.

From the Free French to the "swimming pool"

The external service traces its line to the Bureau central de renseignements et d'action (BCRA), the intelligence arm Charles de Gaulle's Free French set up in London. In November 1943 it merged with the services built under General Giraud in Algiers, and in October 1944 it became the Direction générale des études et recherches (DGER). By the DGSE's own count the DGER had more than 10,000 agents, 123 buildings and 1,400 cars¹.

Colonel Passy (André Dewavrin), the BCRA's wartime chief, was charged with cutting it down. The result, in 1946, was the SDECE, with a much smaller establishment of 880 civilians, 600 military personnel and 750 contract staff. It moved to the boulevard Mortier in eastern Paris and stayed there; its neighbor, a public swimming pool, gave it the nickname la piscine^1,6. Passy's design rested on two principles the DGSE still claims: one integrated service for both intelligence and clandestine action, and subordination to political leaders rather than the army. The service reported to the head of government until 1966, when de Gaulle placed it under the Ministry of Defense¹.

The DST was older in spirit. A police counterespionage service, the Surveillance du territoire, had been set up in 1934 and was credited with catching many German spies during the Second World War. An order of 16 November 1944 re-created it as the DST, headed by Roger Wybot, who had run counterespionage for the BCRA; he led it until 1959⁷.

The SDECE at war and in scandal

The SDECE fought France's colonial wars. In Indochina it ran commando and guerrilla units; in Algeria its Action Service went after the FLN's supply lines in Europe^6,1.

It was also a working ally of the CIA. On 23 October 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, Sherman Kent, the CIA's chief of national estimates, briefed the SDECE's director, General Paul Jacquier, and his senior staff on the photographs of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Kent reported "absolutely no hint of doubt with respect to the genuineness of the photographs"². See Intelligence in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Relations then soured. The KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn told the CIA that a Soviet network, which the CIA called Sapphire, reached into the SDECE's leadership. De Gaulle regarded the allegation as an American attempt to disorganize his service, and cooperation suffered⁶.

On 29 October 1965 Mehdi Ben Barka, a Moroccan opposition leader living in Paris, was seized on a Paris street and never seen again. French police officers and men connected to the SDECE took part in the abduction; a 1967 trial sent two Frenchmen to prison and found that the main culprit was Morocco's interior minister, General Mohamed Oufkir. The affair is what led de Gaulle to move the SDECE under the Defense Ministry^8,6.

In 1970 President Pompidou appointed Count Alexandre de Marenches to clean the service up. He dismissed a large share of the staff, restored ties to the CIA and ran the SDECE until June 1981⁶. The incoming Mitterrand government replaced him and, on 2 April 1982, reorganized the SDECE as the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE), at the same address^1,6.

The DST and FAREWELL

The DST's Cold War work was mostly invisible: watching Soviet bloc diplomats and their French contacts. It had its own scandals. In December 1973 DST officers posing as plumbers were caught installing a microphone in the offices of the satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné⁷. In June 1975 the terrorist Carlos shot dead two DST inspectors in Paris⁷.

Its great coup came in 1981. Vladimir Vetrov, a KGB officer evaluating Soviet technology theft, chose to approach the DST rather than the SDECE, reasoning that the KGB watched French foreign intelligence but not the police service. The DST ran him in Moscow through French civilians, gave him the English code name FAREWELL, and, with Mitterrand's approval, shared his documents with Washington^3,4. The dossier identified hundreds of Soviet technology collectors, and on 5 April 1983 France expelled 47 Soviet officials⁵. The rivalry it stirred lasted: former French officers later claimed the case had been a CIA test of Mitterrand, and in 1985 Mitterrand, suspecting as much, dismissed the DST's director, Yves Bonnet^4,5.

The DST continued until 1 July 2008, when it merged with the police intelligence service, the Renseignements généraux, to form the DCRI⁷.