French centre-right magazine L'Express reveals former boss worked for KGB
The centre-right French l'Express magazine this week disclosed that its former director, Philippe Grumbach, served as a KGB agent from 1946 to 1981. But he may not have been the only one.
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Revelations published by French weekly L'Express show that one of its founders and former editor, Philippe Grumbach, who died in 2003, worked for the Soviet spy agency for 35 years.
L'Express based its information on documents found in the archives of Russian defector Vasili Mitrokhin, which are housed at the University of Cambridge.
Mitrokhin was a disillusioned senior archivist in the KGB’s foreign intelligence archive who smuggled thousands of files out of Russia, which were later compiled in the book "The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West".
The archives contain thousands of files and handwritten notes, and led to many spies being exposed – including Robert Lipka, an agent of the American NSA, and the British official Melita Norwood, who spied for Moscow over 40 years.
'No doubt'
In 2018, French PhD student Cyril Gelibter went to Cambridge to consult the Mitrokhin archives and stumbled across the name of the former L'Express editor, with the mention: "Grumbach, Philippe, born in 1924, Jewish, editor of the newspaper L'Express in Paris, journalist, close to Giscard d'Estaing, recruited in 1946."
In another document, he found information about an agent code-named Brok: "born in 1924, Jewish, French citizen, director of the newspaper L'Express, collaborates since 1946".
The file stated that Brok had "good personal relations" with a strong of prominent French figures, including then Prime Minister Edgar Faure, President François Mitterand and the co-founder of L'Express, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber.
"The latter entrusts him with the mission of settling delicate issues," according to the notes cited by L'Express, "liaising with representatives and leaders of political parties, and groups".
According to the magazine: "The description leaves no doubt: Grumbach is Brok."
Top spy
In fact, much of the information was already there for everyone to see with the publication of the first volume of "The Mitrokhin Archive" in 1999.
On page 615, the massive book recounts that "one of the residency’s most highly rated and longest-serving agents, 'Brok,' then a well-connected journalist" played a leading role in measures against then President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.
"Originally recruited as an ideological agent in 1946, 'Brok' had begun working for money within a few years to supplement his income as a journalist and to purchase a Paris apartment," according to the book.
"In the mid-1970s he was paid over 100,000 francs a year," it says (the equivalent of about €125,000 today).
The agent was highly regarded, with at least ten case officers, according to Mitrokhin.
"During the 1974 presidential election campaign, 'Brok' was provided, on [USSR leader Yuri] Andropov’s personal instructions, with a fabricated copy of supposedly secret campaign advice given to Giscard d’Estaing by the Americans on ways to defeat Mitterrand and Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Giscard’s unsuccessful Gaullist rival for the right-wing vote during the first round of the election.
"The forged document was then shown to Chaban-Delmas and others, doubtless to try to make collaboration between him and Giscard more difficult at the second round, when Giscard was the sole candidate of the right," the book states.
More French spies?
Further inspection of "The Mitrokhin Archives" by RFI found that L'Express was not the only French media outlet the defector said had been infiltrated by the Russians.
The documents mention Le Monde's reporting about the Vietnam War, saying that in July 1975, the paper used a "distorted account" of a speech by Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the United States to "smear him as a Nazi sympathiser".
Although there was "no proof" that the account was planted by the KGB, it was "entirely in line with disinformation which the KGB was seeking to plant in the Western press", the book says.
Mitrokhin also claimed that French news agency Agence France-Presse was successfully penetrated both in Paris and abroad. His notes identify six agents and two confidential contacts at AFP recruited between 1956 and 1980.
"The most senior, code name 'Lan', was recruited under false flag by a businessman, code named 'Dragun' in 1969 and paid 1,500 francs a month, which he was told came from the Italian company Olivetti, supposedly anxious to have inside information on French government policy," the records state.
The Mitrokhin archives have, over the years, proven correct. But the real identities of the other French journalists mentioned in the massive collection of documents remain unclear.
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