Directorate-General for External Security

History

Origins

Cold War–era rivalries

Political controversies

Organization

Divisions

• Directorate of Administration
• Directorate of Strategy
• Directorate of Intelligence
• * Political intelligence service
• * Security intelligence service
• Technical Directorate
• Directorate of Operations
• * Action Division

  Technical Directorate (or COMINT Department)

Action Division

Installations

Size and importance

• In 2007 the DGSE employed a total of 4,620 agents. In 1999 the DGSE was known for employing a total of 2,700 civilians and 1,300 Officers or Non Commissioned Officers in its service.
• It also benefits from an unknown number of voluntary correspondents, French nationals in a large majority of instances, both in France and abroad who do not appear on the government's list of civil servants. Those for long were referred to with the title of "honorable correspondant" or "HC," and since a number of years as "contact". Whereas the DGSE calls a "source" any French and foreign nationals this agency recruits indistinctly as "conscious" and willing or "unconscious or unwilling spy." While a DGSE's agent trained and sent to spy abroad generally is referred to as "operative" in English-speaking countries, the DGSE internally calls such agent "agent volant" by analogy with a butterfly. This agency, however, also colloquially calls "hirondelle" a female operative. And it collectively and indistinctly calls "capteurs" its contacts, sources, and flying agents.
• The DGSE is directly supervised by the Ministry of Defence.

  Budget

• 1991: FRF 0.9bn
• 1992: FRF 1bn
• 1997: FRF 1.36bn
• 1998: FRF 1.29bn
• 2007: EUR 450 million, plus 36 million in special funds.
• 2009: EUR 543.8 million, plus 48.9 million in special funds.

• 25% for military intelligence
• 25% for economic intelligence
• 50% for diplomatic intelligence

  Directors

• Pierre Marion
• Adm. Pierre Lacoste
• Gen. René Imbot
• Gen. François Mermet
• Claude Silberzahn
• Jacques Dewatre
• Jean-Claude Cousseran
• Pierre Brochand
• Erard Corbin de Mangoux
• Bernard Bajolet
• Jean-Pierre Palasset
• Bernard Émié

  Logo

Activities

Range

• Intelligence gathering:
• *HUMINT, internally called "ROHUM," which stands for Renseignement d'Origine Humaine, is carried on by a large network of agents and under-agents, contacts, and sources who are not directly and officially paid by the DGSE in a large majority of instances and by reason of secrecy, but by varied public services and private companies which are not all necessarily cover-ups by vocation however, and which thus cooperate through particular and unofficial agreements. But many under-agents, contacts and sources act out of patriotism and political/ideological motives, and they are not all aware to help an intelligence agency.
• *SIGINT,, internally called "ROEM," which stands for Renseignement d'Origine Electromagnétique, is carried on from France and from a network of COMINT stations oversea, each internally called Centre de Renseignement Électronique, CRE. And then two other names are used to name: smaller COMINT/SIGINT territorial or oversea stations, internally called Détachement Avancé de Transmission, CAT ; and specifically ELINT and SIGINT stations indifferently located on the French soil and overseas, each called Centre de Télémesure Militaire, CTM. Since the 1980s, the DGSE focuses much of its efforts and financial expenditures in communications interception abroad, which today has a reach extending from the east coast of the United States to Japan, with a focus on the Arabian Peninsula between these two opposite areas. In the DGSE in particular, those considerable and very expensive COMINT capacities are under the official responsibility of its Direction Technique, DT,. But as these capacities are rapidly growing and passively involve about all other French intelligence agencies in the context of a new policy called Mutualisation du Renseignement officially decreed in 2016, the whole of it is called Pôle National de Cryptanalyse et de Décryptement, PNCD since the early 2000s at least. Earlier and from 1987–1990 on in particular, the PNCD was called Centre de Transmission et de Traitement de l'Information, CTTI, and its main center is secretly located underground the Taverny Air Base, in the eastern Paris' suburb. Otherwise, the French press nicknamed the French COMINT capacities and network Frenchlon, borrowing to ECHELON, its U.S. equivalent.
• *Space imagery analysis: integrated in the "ROIM" general mission, standing for Renseignement d'Origine Image.
• Special operations, such as missions behind enemy lines, exfiltrations otherwise called Extraction, Coup d'état and revolution of palace and counter-revolutions, and sabotages and assassinations, with the help of the regiments of the Special Operations Command, COS.
• Counterintelligence on the French soil is not officially acknowledged by the DGSE, as this is officially part of the general mission of the General Directorate for Internal Security, DGSI, along with counter-terrorism in particular. But in reality, and for several reasons, the DGSE indeed since long is also carrying on counterintelligence missions on the French soil, which it more willingly calls "contre-ingérence" in this case, and much "offensive counterintelligence" operations abroad. As a matter of fact and for the record, the former name of the DGSE, the SDECE, means Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage. The particularity of counterintelligence activities in the DGSE is that they are integrated in a more general mission internally called "Mesures actives", directly inspired by the Russian Active measures in their principles. That is why offensive counterintelligence in the DGSE has multiple and direct connections with the other and different fields of "counter-influence" and influence , and also by extension with Agitprop operations.
• Active measures. In December 2015, Alain Chouet, Head of the Intelligence and Security Service of the DGSE from 2000 to 2001, specified during a conference at the French Senate that the service he once headed is in charge “of intelligence collection and of the implementation of the active measures outside of the French territory”. In August 2019, Dominique Poirier former employee of the DGSE from 1980 to circa 2001, revealed that since the early 1980, the DGSE actually adopted active measures as a doctrine regulating all its activities, and that it perfects it since then. According to Dominique Poirier, the DGSE is in charge of the implementation of actives measures in France in the context of domestic intelligence as abroad in foreign intelligence. The latter fact was implicitly confirmed by Alain Chouet during his speech in 2015, when he said that the Intelligence and Security Service of the DGSE is concerned with the implementation of the active measures “outside of the French territory” only. In his detailed account on the doctrine of active measures, Dominique Poirier further explains that the provision was imported from the Soviet Union in 1980 and definitively implemented in 1981, following the election of Socialist François Mitterrand as President of France in May the same year, and that its aims and particular nature impose their use in domestic politics, foreign affairs, and intelligence, simultaneously. The reasons justifying this extensive application of the active measures as a “doctrine”, he says, are

Essentially, influence, disinformation, and propaganda are about lying and swelling truths, whereas active measures consists in making yourself the lie in order to transforming it in a truth, hard to question therefore since thus the lie becomes a tangible reality. That is why and how actives measures go much farther than mere deception and disinformation.
To put it otherwise, the Russians of after 1991 resumed these interpretation and perception I just explained, but with a new approach defined and shaped entirely by actives measures, precisely. That is to say, a political and ideological commitment in which the formal aims and the real aims merge and coexist permanently to make one, so that their designers and practitioners themselves are compelled to believe the former in order to reach an unique goal. The Westerner would certainly calls this ʻdoublethink,ʼ which is one more step past the classic doubletalk of the average politician who does not practice active measures. In short, under the doctrine of active measures, the liar must believe his own lies, indeed, to reach the real aims, and he must ignore all contradiction between the two.
Actives measures are complementary to a security service in a government, or to a quality department in a company. They intervene at all levels of an organization to help it disguise everything it is doing, not to let others understanding how it is done and why it is done, exactly.

Known operations

1970s

• In Operation Barracuda, the DGSE staged a coup d'état against Emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa in the Central African Republic in September 1979, and installed a pro-French government.
• Between the early 1970s to the late 1980s, the DGSE had effectively planted agents in major U.S. companies, such as Texas Instruments, IBM and Corning. Some of the economic intelligence thus acquired was shared with French corporations, such as the Compagnie des Machines Bull.

  1980s

• Working with the DST in the early 1980s, the agency exploited the source "Farewell", revealing the most extensive technological spy network uncovered in Europe and the United States to date. This network had allowed the United States and other European countries to gather significant amounts of information about important technical advances in the Soviet Union without the knowledge of the KGB. However, former DGSE's employee Dominique Poirier contends, in his book he self-published in May 2018, that KGB Lt-Colonel Vladimir Vetrov code-name "Farewell" could not possibly reveal, alone, the names of 250 KGB officers acting abroad undercover, and help identify nearly 100 Soviet spies in varied western countries, at least by reason of the rule of "compartmentalization" or need to know.
• The DGSE exploited a network called "Nicobar", which facilitated the sale of forty-three Mirage 2000 fighter jets by French defence companies to India for a total of more than US$2 billion, and the acquisition of information about the type of the armour used on Soviet T-72 tanks.
• Operation Satanic, a mission aimed at preventing protests by Greenpeace against French nuclear testing in the Pacific through the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland, New Zealand on July 10, 1985. A French navy limpet mine exploded at 11.38pm when many of the crew were asleep, and blew a large hole in the ship's hull. A second limpet mine exploded on the propellor shaft when Fernando Pereira, ships photographer, returned to retrieve his camera equipment, he was trapped in his cabin and drowned. New Zealand Police initiated one of their country's largest investigations and uncovered the plot after they captured two DGSE agents, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter and arson. French relations with New Zealand were sorely strained, as they threatened New Zealand with EEC sanctions in an attempt to secure the agents' release. Australia also attempted to arrest DGSE agents to extradite them. The incident is still widely remembered in New Zealand. The uncovering of the operation resulted in the firing of the head of the DGSE and the resignation of the French Defence Minister.

  1990s

• During the Rwandan Civil War, the DGSE had an active role in passing on disinformation, which resurfaced in various forms in French newspapers. The general trend of this disinformation was to present the renewed fighting in 1993 as something completely new and as a straightforward foreign invasion, the rebel RPF being presented merely as Ugandans under a different guise. The disinformation played its role in preparing the ground for increased French involvement during the final stages of the war.
• During the Kosovo War, the DGSE played an active role in providing weapons training for the KLA. According to British wartime intercepts of Serbian military communication, DGSE officers took part in active fighting against Serbian forces. It was even revealed that several DGSE officers had been killed alongside KLA fighters in a Serbian ambush.
• Reports in 2006 have credited DGSE operatives for infiltrating and exposing the inner workings of Afghan training camps during the 1990s. One of the spies employed by the agency later published a work under the pseudonym "Omar Nasiri", uncovering details of his life inside Al-Qaeda.

  2000s

• A DGSE general heads the Alliance Base, a joint CTIC set up in Paris in cooperation with the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Alliance Base is known for having been involved in the arrest of Christian Ganczarski.
• In 2003, the DGSE was held responsible for the outcome of Opération 14 juillet, a failed mission to rescue Íngrid Betancourt Pulecio from FARC rebels in Colombia.
• In 2004, the DGSE was credited for liberating two French journalists, Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, who were held as hostages for 124 days in Iraq.
• DGSE personnel were part of a team that arranged the release on June 12, 2005 of French journalist Florence Aubenas, held hostage for five months in Iraq.
• DGSE was said to be involved in the arrest of the two presumed killers of four French tourists in Mauritania in January 2006.
• In 2006, the French newspaper L'Est Républicain acquired an apparently leaked DGSE report to the French president Jacques Chirac claiming that Osama Bin Laden had died in Pakistan on August 23, 2006, after contracting typhoid fever. The report had apparently been based on Saudi Arabian intelligence. These "death" allegations were thereafter denied by the French foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy and Saudi authorities, as well as CIA Bin Laden specialist Michael Scheuer.
• In June 2009, the DGSE uncovered evidence that two registered passengers on board Air France Flight 447, which crashed with the loss of 228 lives in the vicinity of Brazil, were linked to Islamic terrorist groups.

  2010s

• November 2010, three operatives from DGSE's Service Operations botched an operation to burgle the room of China Eastern Airlines' boss Shaoyong Liu at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Toulouse. Failure of the operation resulted in the suspension of all of SO's activities and the very survival of the unit was called into question. SO only operates on French soil, where it mounts secret HUMINT operations such as searching hotel rooms, opening mail or diplomatic pouches.
• In the year 2010/11, the DGSE has been training agents of Bahrain's National Security, the intelligence service which is trying to subdue the country's Shi'ite opposition protests. Bahrain's Special Security Force also benefits from a French advisor seconded from the Police Nationale who is training the Special Security Force in modern anti-riot techniques.
• March 2011, the DGSE sent several members of the Service Action to support the Libyan rebels. However, most of the agents deployed were from the Direction des Operations' Service Mission. The latter unit gathers intelligence and makes contact with fighting factions in crisis zones.
• In January 2013, Service Action members attempted to rescue one of its agents held hostage. The rescue was a failure as the hostage was killed alongside 2 DGSE operators.

  DGSE officers or alleged officers