Last week was a good time to bury bad news in France. While French and international media were focused on president Macron’s Trump-like maverick statement of not ruling out western troops being deployed in Ukraine, a new book slipped out detailing the extent of KGB spying in France during the Cold War. Ironically this was also a week in which Macron and French authorities publicly warned of France being a privileged target of Russian intelligence agencies, through large-scale hacking, manipulation of social media in everything from the French ‘bed-bug scandal’ to the June European elections. Combine this with prime minister Gabriel Attal’s charge in parliament that the Rassemblement National – coincidentally with a 15-point lead in the polls – are the agents of Russia and the cocktail becomes explosive. It does so because France has form for being a soft target for Russian manipulation of politicians, civil servants and journalists.

The KGB had more than 50 agents in France, more than any other western European state

In 1999, the Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew and the Soviet defector Colonel Vasili Mitrokhin published a remarkable volume entitled, The Mitrokhin Archive: the KGB in Europe and the West. It was striking, not merely because Professor Andrew was (and remains) a world authority on the history of intelligence, but because Mitrokhin was a senior KGB officer who, for almost 30 years, worked in the KGB’s foreign intelligence archives. From 1972 to 1984, he supervised the transfer of these most secret archives from the Lubyanka to the new KGB headquarters outside Moscow. In 1992, the British Secret Intelligence Service – commonly known as MI6 – exfiltrated Mitrokhin. But most singular of all, this secret dissident with unrestricted access, had spent over a decade noting and copying 25,000 pages of highly-classified files which he smuggled daily out of the archives and hid under the floor of his dacha. He defected to Britain with the archive in six large suitcases, described by the FBI to be ‘the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source.’

Twenty of the 996-page volume deal with France. When the book was first published, French scepticism was the order of the day. Despite the large number of code-named French individuals in high places many of their true names were absent. What was clear from the book is that, for most of the Cold War, the KGB had more than 50 agents in France, more than any other western European state.

Last week, the French journalist Vincent Jauvert in his book A la solde de Moscou (‘In Moscow’s pay’) lifted the veil on many of their names after cross-checking the Czech archives. They range from Paul-Marie de la Gorce, columnist in the 1960s for Le Figaro and future head of Radio France’s diplomatic service, who wrote memos for the GRU (Russian military intelligence), to celebrated journalists for L’Express, the Canard Enchainé and Le Monde. Among top civil servants were the champion of Franco-Soviet friendship, the French ambassador to Moscow (1955-64), Maurice Dejean, caught in a venus flytrap, as well as France’s most senior civil servant at Nato headquarters, Georges Pâques.

Why does this matter today? Is it no more than an historical embarrassment like the ‘Magnificent 5’ Cambridge Spies for Britain, who betrayed at equally strategic levels? The Cambridge spies acted out of ideological sympathy for a Soviet Union that had defeated fascism, as indeed did many French spies. But the latter’s motivation also rested on – as it still does today – a century-and-a-half’s deep affinity for Russian culture among France’s elites that transcends political boundaries. For nearly a quarter of a century before the First World War, the cornerstone of French international security was the Franco-Russian alliance which provided insurance against an ascendant Germany. Then too Russian intelligence agencies generously bribed the French press to paint Tsarist Russia in a good light. General de Gaulle’s attitude to Russia, which he pointedly refused to call the Soviet Union, was notoriously ambivalent during the Cold War. And then there was the powerful French Communist Party, which for much of the Cold War represented up to 25 per cent of the vote, suffused academia and the intelligentsia, had ministers in De Gaulle’s post-war government and again in president François Mitterrand’s from 1981 to 1983.

Today, many in the French military retain a Gaullist perception of Russia, not to mention sections of the French right that see in her a bulwark against western decadence, wokeism and Islamism. The French far-left, in the form of Mélenchon’s France Insoumise party, opposes military support for Ukraine. Meanwhile, the centre cloys to Macron’s idea that Russia should not be ‘humiliated’. Little wonder then that France remains a privileged target for Russian intelligence agencies.