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Sascha Ingber
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Sascha Ingber
Hey Damian, I know that it's afternoon there for you. It's morning for us. You're in the Hague at your office. Thank you for joining.
Damian Van Pouveld
Thanks, Sasha. Thanks for having me.
Sascha Ingber
So let's start off by discussing how this service, its origins, trace back to World War II. What led to the start of the DGSE in particular?
Damian Van Pouveld
Yeah, you're right. The origin story of French foreign intelligence service, the Directorate General of Exterior or External Security, can be traced back to the Second World War. So France had foreign intelligence capabilities before the Second World War as a great power up to then at least. And the Second World War is just the first time that these capabilities were moved, not just into or used not just into a military setting, but moved under civilian authority of the French government in exile. And so around 1943, actually it's the first time in French history that you have a single civilian agency that does foreign intelligence, counter espionage, covert action in that integrated model under civilian authority. And that can be considered as the kind of early origins of the dgse.
Sascha Ingber
Now you've also described how the agency ties its history back to World War II, when personnel finish up Their training, What do they do and why?
Damian Van Pouveld
Yeah, I mean, so to this day, actually, the agency has put a lot of emphasis in its external communications, but also the internal communication around the Second World War. It's a useful way to give a sense of identity to the people that joined the agency. And so they've created a sort of affiliation between the heroes of the Second World War in France, the resistance movement, and the people that are remembered for being part of the resistance movement, and every new generation of officers that finish the training at the dgse, that are considered as a cohort that will be named after one of these kind of Second World War heroes. So that's very present in the identity of the agency. And it's a strong motivating factor. I mean, and also it is linked to the emphasis that the DGSE puts on operations. And it gives that direct sense of purpose. Okay. We working covertly to protect the national interests, and our predecessors did it under even harsher conditions than we're doing. It's kind of a motivating factor to join and to stay at the agency, too.
Sascha Ingber
And I think it's interesting that in the 1980s, once the DGSE is established, that its paramilitary branch, which translates to Action Service, actually is able to bring back a Nazi and achieve a little bit of justice from World War II. Can you talk about that?
Damian Van Pouveld
Yes, of course. So in 1982, the DGSEA is established, and one of the early wins, you could say, that is public. There must be many, many wins that are not public. And also possibly some failures is the support that the DGSE gave to bring back Klaus Barbie, who was a Gestapo chief in Lyon, one of the major French cities during Nazi occupation. Infamous in France for being a torturer and for sending thousands of Jews and Resistance members to Auschwitz, most infamous in France. Also for the torture of the leader of French Resistance, Jean Moulin, who was tortured to death, actually by him. And at the end of the Second World War, Clovis Barbie escapes Europe, actually is recruited as an anti communist informant by the Americans. There's French pressure to extradite him, and then he disappears and reappears somewhere in bolivia in the 1950s. But at that time, anyway, in the 1950s, Parby works in Bolivia, where he's far from retired. Actually, he's helping the local security service with repression of political dissidents. And in the 1970s, Nazi hunters activists, Serge and Beat Klarzfeld track him in Bolivia. They identify him, they launch a campaign to try to bring him to justice. Doesn't really work because he's being protected politically and even legally by the regime in Bolivia. Early 1980s, 1982, there's democratic election with new regime arriving in Bolivia, so better conditions, they start working together with the French to extradite Barbie on tax evasion charges. Actually, it's kind of a legal story here. And the DGSE here plays a role in the transfer of close Barbie and keeping that kind of COVID up until it becomes public that he's flown back to France, going through actually French territory in Cayenne, French Guiana in Latin America, and then eventually going back to mainland France, where he's tried, sentenced to prison and eventually dies in prison.
Sascha Ingber
So that is a real victory in France's history. But some of the DGSE's work in the 1980s is also rather humiliating for the service. Can we start by talking about an incident in Lebanon?
Damian Van Pouveld
That's right. So we are one year later, or even less than one year later in Lebanon, as you mentioned, in October 1983, there's a major attack on a French military barrack which is bombed in Beirut, Lebanon, and 58 French paratroopers are killed.
Sascha Ingber
And this is amid the civil war in Lebanon.
Damian Van Pouveld
That's right. So it's a bit of a coordinated attack on two different kind of military barracks. You could say the French are targeted, as I mentioned, on the other side, the Americans are targeted. So 241 US Marines are killed in parallel close to Beirut International Airport. This is a shock for France, also for the Americans, of course, for France, a shock in terms of loss of life for the military not experienced since the Second World War. So quite major from that perspective. It's around that time, actually that Hezbollah is emerging. So it could say that it's like proto Hezbollah type of organization that is behind that. And therefore most of the Western intelligence services would align the attack to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and to Iran. So according to the memoirs of a former DGSE director, the Service Action. So the paramilitary branch of the DGSE is then tasked with. We can interpret that it is sending a signal, a strong signal to Iran. And they place a car with a bomb in front of the Iranian embassy in Lebanon. But the car doesn't explode, the bomb doesn't detonate, and the device inside the car is eventually traced back to France, which poses a major problem. On one side, you could say that France is still sending a signal that they're unhappy with Iran and that that message has been communicated whether or not the car explodes. But it was not what the DGSE really intended to do. And that leads to problems back home. And so actually, the head of the action Service, that paramilitary branch, is removed as a result of this failure in 1983. So you could say that this mishap shows a bit the danger of using covert action, especially when it doesn't work and it becomes public.
Sascha Ingber
Now, this failure pales in comparison to what happens in New Zealand. This is the Rainbow Warrior affair. Take us through that.
Damian Van Pouveld
Yeah, we're now, in 1985, Greenpeace, the ecologist organization, had been protesting against nuclear testing. Actually, they have a long history of protesting against nuclear tests, whether they're American tests or in this case, French tests. The French tests at that time, they were done in the Pacific Ocean. And the French government and authorities are obviously unhappy with the disruptive potential of Greenpeace. And so there's an order that comes from the top, from the presidency, from President Mitterrand to disrupt. DGC has quite a few options. Eventually, they end up going for infiltration of Greenpeace in New Zealand to understand what they're doing and sinking the Rainbow Warrior. That was the flagship of Greenpeace that was supposed to disrupt physically the test by going into a protected zone where the nuclear test was supposed to happen. So the aim of the operation is to disable and sink the ship. They do some reconnaissance work. Eventually, the French divers working for the dgse, for that paramilitary branch, place a couple of mines on the ship in the evening. They wanted there to be a first small explosion that sends a signal to anybody who is in the Rainbow Warrior so that they would leave it. And the second one was supposed to just sink the ship in the harbor. But what they hadn't planned for was that between the first and the second explosion, one member of the Greenpeace crew came back on board. That was their photographer, a man named Fernando Pereira. Understandably wanted to recover his material and went back to the ship and sank with the ship and lost his life. So, big disaster in terms of loss of life. And on top of that, in the days that follow, New Zealand police and security service launch an investigation. In fact, they treat this as a terrorist incident, the first on their soil. And they start finding an unusual French couple that is supposed to be there on honeymoon. So they interrogate them and the COVID story unravels. And it becomes clear, in fact, that they are tied to French foreign intelligence. The French government, meanwhile, continues denying any sort of knowledge or engagement or involvement in this operation. And eventually the evidence is such that the French government has to Acknowledge responsibility. So major diplomatic crisis with New Zealand leading to resignation of the French Defence Minister and eventually the dismissal of the DGSE director. France eventually had to pay reparations to New Zealand that were negotiated under the UN Secretary General. So a big kind of diplomatic debacle. But also I would say in terms of public image of the dgac, really bad moment that has left an imprint on the agency, nearly like a trauma on the agency. I think within the agency and in France, also in the public perceptions that French people have of the DGC and then internationally. I mean, if you talk about the dgse, that's one of two or three things that people will know about that agency, that it was involved in that crazy sabotage operation against Greenpeace. That makes it sound like the DGSE is a very rough service, which it can be, obviously.
Sascha Ingber
Right. So state sponsored terrorism essentially in New Zealand with the French Defense Minister resigning, the head of the DGSE resigning. I know that France also had to pay the family of Fernando Pereira, this Portuguese Dutch freelance photographer who went back to grab his equipment, as you say, and then drowned on the ship when it sank. But what exactly was this French couple allegedly on their honeymoon? What had they been doing that got them caught?
Damian Van Pouveld
Yeah, I mean, first they arrived a couple of weeks before, before the operations in New Zealand. And they did reconnaissance. Yeah. So they would be. They rented a camper van, actually staying in the area around the harbor, potentially taking photographs, keeping tabs, doing basic surveillance to keep tab on who's getting in, who's getting out of the ship and so on. And eventually kind of didn't make sense to the New Zealand authorities that they would stay in that area with a campervan when they got arrested. They had also kept all of their tickets for absolutely everything. So all of the bills and so on, which is not the behavior of a couple of honeymoon. You know, people tend to just spend without paying too much attention, I would hope, on honeymoon. But they were just kind of like perfect bureaucrats in a sense, keeping tabs so that they could get debt, proof that, that they hadn't gone over their expenses. And that's actually bits of information that are in the New Zealand Security Service reports that have been made public in the 2010s where they just say it was so unusual. There were issues with the numbering of their passport when they got interrogated. They had the right to do a phone call after one of the two spouses called back a number that was then linked back to the French Ministry of Defense. And apparently that operator was kind of freaking out about what happened and somebody had died and so on. And so all of that was just suspicious and more and more suspicious behavior. They couldn't really explain what they were doing there, why they would stay there as a kind of destination to just stay around the harbor. So just suspicion, really unusual people that make them stand out and tipped, in a sense. The New Zealand Police and Security Service.
Sascha Ingber
Not exactly stellar tradecraft right there. So after these incredibly embarrassing blunders, you've said that in 1989 is when real reform occurs under the service's first civilian appointed leader, who was appointed by the President, Francoise Mitterrand, who is this new director and what does he do?
Damian Van Pouveld
That's right. So the first few DJC leaders in the 1980s are more of a military background. And then Claude Silbersin is a senior civil servant, Prefet, we say, in France. So that's interior affairs background. And he actually became interested in the DGSE from the outside because of the Rainbow Warrior affair and realized that there was a misfit between an agency whose capabilities are needed by the state, but that was struggling to find a good distance and a good relation to policymaking circles in France and in the rest of the public administration. He's remembered to this day as probably one of the most, if not the most important, Director General of the agency because he brings stability and modernization at the dgse. He really kickstarts the kind of normalization of the DGSE from an agency that sometimes felt a bit too crazy or rough in a sense, to one that becomes really more part of the normal French administration. And he tries to streamline the dgse, doing an internal reorganization and really to again normalize the agency. So he turned what was a troubled service into something that was more of a governable institution, you could say, brought credibility, discipline, internal coherence, integration into the apparatus of the French state. And he's remembered for that. His reform inside the DGSE, organizing it around five directorates, lasted for 30 years. And so that's one measure perhaps of the success of the reform, that the agency had the same internal structure that he established for 30 years. So all small administrative reforms that taken together, really solidify and make it a more robust, more modern, more competitive agency.
Podcast Announcer
When we come back, Damian talks about the DGSE's work in the past two or so decades and and an international intelligence sharing alliance named after Abeer.
Sascha Ingber
So let's fast forward to the early 2000s, when the US goes to invade Iraq in 2003, the DGSE is saying we aren't sure that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
Damian Van Pouveld
That's right. That's one of the few areas actually where I was able to get access to some DGSE reporting and documents. Now, I didn't find a smoking gun in the archives or anything like that. You're right to say that the DGSE was more careful in its assessments, more careful than the Americans, more careful than the British claims about the presence of WMDs in Iraq. So the DGSE didn't conclude that Iraq had a large active WMD stockpile. It didn't conclude either that Iraq didn't have anything. It just said that there's an absence of evidence here and that means the situation is uncertain. And indirectly that suggests to the policymakers that the British and the American position is a bit too forceful or a bit too confident about the presence of WMDs in Iraq as a justification for. For the US led invasion and following war there. The intelligence says it's uncertain, but it's a French positioning also. French leaders like to be positioned in a kind of autonomous way or presenting themselves as also mattering on the world stage and not always having the same position than their Anglophone partners. And that matters to France.
Sascha Ingber
In the documents that you accessed, what did you find that was surprising, that hasn't come out before?
Damian Van Pouveld
Well, there were of two kinds. One kind was very technical. It shows the depth of expertise. It nearly reads like a scientific paper to look at evidence on aluminium tubes, for example, and whether they can be used in centrifuges and so on. And that really requires a technical expertise which is not available in every services across the world. It's definitely available in the US community, but that's not for every community. And here maybe there's a story to be told that France has that understanding also because it's a nuclear power. So the level of technicality on the one and then on the other hand, sometimes it was a bit banal. Actually, there was type of intelligence that was in these documents that was a bit more like what some practitioners might call rumor intelligence. So we hear that the delegation of inspectors, the last delegation of inspectors that was sent to Iraq is discussing this, this and that today. They feel that, you know, they might or might not be WMDs, but it was just rumors. It just felt like reading reporting of humor. So kind of raw intelligence from that perspective, more than Finnish products that really present a detailed evaluation.
Sascha Ingber
The service also played a role in alerting the world to bashar Al Assad's use of chemical weapons on his own people. What did DGSE operatives do?
Damian Van Pouveld
In 2013, France publicly released an intelligence synthesis. So that's the equivalent of a National Intelligence Estimate, if you want, that brings the entire community together that attributed chemical weapons used to the Assad regime. And in that document, it becomes quite clear what are the different sources that were used by the French government to kind of take a public stance and do a public attribution of intelligence to actually justify French strikes on the Assad regime. The documents and additional documentations actually make it quite clear that the DGSE sends service action officers on the ground, or send at least some of its officers on the ground in Syria to collect samples, biomedical samples, environmental samples, munitions, related material, including sarin, gas grenades that they brought back all the way to France. The idea here is that if the President is going to take a decision and go public on something that is as important as that, they cannot just rely on hearsay or interrogating human sources, not even just on satellite imagery, videos, or what partner services might tell the French. They want their own independent evidence, and they want the supply chain for that evidence to go straight from Syria all the way to France with their own people, so that they have 100% certainty of what they're doing.
Sascha Ingber
How do you bring back sarin gas grenades? That sounds incredibly dangerous. I understand that they wanted that tangible evidence, but what a ride that must
Damian Van Pouveld
have been, I would imagine. We don't have details yet, to be honest, on the kind of logistics of this. Now you can imagine that they're transporting a biohazard, so that's one thing already. And then the extraction. Also my guess, the simplest way would be to go through the Mediterranean and then kind of bring it back, shipping it back to France straight away like that, so that you don't have to cross other countries or bring it in a plane. But I honestly don't know how they brought it back. Is the logistics of covert operations, sources and methods. Definitely something that is still classified right now.
Sascha Ingber
Let's also talk a bit about the way the DGSE operates with other countries. They aren't in the five eyes, but you've told me that they do have an alliance and it is named after a beer.
Damian Van Pouveld
Yes, that's right. The alliance is called the Maximator alliance, which you could then refer to the beer alliance, because Maximator is a German beer. It was, I think, three officers from like three different countries, including Germany, drinking a beer in Germany at the end of a meeting, a cooperation meeting between intelligence agencies that were drinking that beer and that were like, okay, how should we call this initiative? Well, we're just drinking this German beer called Maximator. So let's call this alliance Maximator. And then France actually requests to join later on in the 1980s and joins, I think, in the mid-1980s. And the alliance is basically a signals intelligence alliance, I think, looking mostly at sharing the burden of some of the technical platforms and sharing know how in terms of cryptanalysis, so deciphering, if you want, of messages and so on. So it's one of the alliances you mentioned. Also, the DGSE is not a member of the five eyes, but it does cooperate with the five eyes, and there are different formats to cooperate with the five eyes, the nine eyes, the 14 eyes and so on, which French intelligence will also contribute to.
Sascha Ingber
Right. And they, of course have good relations with major powers to include the United States and the uk. But there are still some other partnerships that I found surprising, and one of those was China. What were those partnerships? Why would they partner with China of all countries these days?
Damian Van Pouveld
Yeah, there's not much out there on DGSE cooperation with China. We know that the DGSE has a formal representation in China, so they have a chief of station, if you want to know the equivalent of a chief of station in China. And they've had one for a while. And that has actually in some ways historically caused more trouble to the dgsc. We don't know about what that DGSE representation does, but we can imagine that they do share intelligence to a certain extent or that when there are sensitive situations that can be used as a channel that is not a diplomatic channel. And that can make conversations easier. It could be about common threats or common problems in the region, or just to send messages more informally. As I mentioned, we also know that it has caused problems because the GSE representatives in China in the 1990s have been turned by the Chinese services. And that has actually recently led in the last few years to one of the very rare cases where a French court was suing DGSE officers. A former DGSE officer that was working in China was recruited by the Chinese, was kicked out of the agency, recruited his stepson that was still in the agency after so a big counterintelligence and counter espionage failure from the dgse, they decided to go publicly. While usually they never go public with these kind of stories again, I think to send a signal, to send a signal to their own employees and possibly also to send a signal to partners and adversarial services that, okay, this had crossed a certain level and that they're just very unhappy about it.
Sascha Ingber
Right. It wasn't just that in years past that some DGSE officers ended up working for China's Ministry of State Security. But China also allegedly was targeting France's military and Starlink networks earlier this year. Yet you told me that inside the DGSE there has been some frustration that China hasn't been prioritized.
Damian Van Pouveld
China is a major emerging threat for a lot of Western countries. But most of the DGSE resources, from what we understand on the outside, are still focused on the traditional zone that is around France that they call the arc of crisis from Mauritania all the way to Central Asia and now increasingly, of course, also towards Eastern Europe and Ukraine, given the situation there at the moment and the threat that Russia is posing. So that's like, in terms of general strategic orientation of the service, that there might be some frustration. We should maybe focus on the longer term. But the reality is DGSC has limited resources, and it's kind of normal that it focuses on the threats that are closer to home geographically. Now, on the Chinese operations in France, that is actually a matter for the dgsi, the Interior Service, to work on, the equivalent of the FBI, and that's the way that's what they've done. Yes. So we know from public reporting that two Chinese engineers and two other individuals were arrested in the south of France because the DGSI found a house with a kind of radar system that was in the garden, so kind of using a dish antenna in the garden that was spotted and that is believed to have been used to spy on communications with satellites. Encrypted communications with satellites, possibly. And so there's a kind of current case against these individuals in France, so that's more of a domestic kind of concern. But in the world of intelligence partners, adversaries can sometimes become adversaries or friends, and vice versa. It's much more kind of pragmatic, in a sense. It's not because China, and you know China, is spying on you, trying to get some of your economic secrets or your intellectual property or even kind of some of your more sensitive information penetrating your agency. That doesn't prevent intelligence agencies to still cooperate on other issues that are of common interest. The rise of terrorism, for example, with cooperation between the DGSE and Russian services on counterterrorist issues historically. And in China, we can imagine that sometimes they might exchange some intelligence about Russia. I mean, I don't know, frankly, or
Sascha Ingber
North Korea, perhaps even now, with France's legacy as having one of the largest colonial empires in the world, spanning parts of Africa, Middle east, even the Caribbean. Is that legacy manifesting today? I'm curious to understand how that might play into the service.
Damian Van Pouveld
Yeah, I think the service has always kept strong ties and strong presence in Africa and in the Middle East. France had a mandate around Syria, ties to Lebanon also. And then of course, all the francophone Africa countries that claimed their independence in the 1950s, 1960s, depending on which country. But it has always kept a presence there. And I think that is one of the main interests for other countries intelligence agencies to cooperate with the dgse, that they've had these ties, these links, this geographical kind of presence there. And so the French service has always been known to have these ties and perhaps a bit more accessible to human sources in these political networks in various African countries historically. But recent history kind of goes a bit the other way in these countries around the Sahel region.
Sascha Ingber
Yeah, ISIS has been growing in the Sahel, major hotbed.
Damian Van Pouveld
That's right. France was involved in a war there, in a conflict there for years, Operation Serval, and eventually was kicked out when there was a change of regime in a series of countries. There was, and that was a major kind of failure, or it was interpreted as a major failure of the DGSE that it is said has failed to anticipate regime change in Mali and surrounding countries. And then eventually that led to French military presence being kicked out of the country, quite possibly also the kind of more formal chief of station type of positions, the diplomacy of intelligence being kicked out from a range of countries in the region. And we think basically that the previous director of the DGSE lost his job over that failure. And what we had then to replace the French presence has been Wagner, Russian supported, not called Wagner anymore, but Russian supported presence in the region. Africa Corps, that's right.
Sascha Ingber
Now more closely and publicly tied to the Russian military complex. What has been, in your eyes, one of the DGSE's most audacious operations?
Damian Van Pouveld
I mean, I'll mention a couple of them. One that worked, one that didn't work. Historically, the DGSE sent combat divers, specialized divers to recover a piece of a Soviet submarine during the Cold War and just bring it back to take a look at the stealth technology. So you would imagine that would have been pretty stressful for the divers to go and cut a little piece of a Soviet submarine and then just extract themselves back to. Back to France again to get this analyzed. There was a daring Operation that didn't turn well with Denis Alex, who's a DGSE paramilitary officer that was kidnapped by Al Shabaab. And the DGSE launched a massive operation with its paramilitary branch to recover him. They made too much noise in their approach to the site where Dani Alex was located and held hostage, and his captors just killed him. And in the advance towards that position, a DGSE operator was also killed.
Sascha Ingber
I'm curious to know how a hit TV show called the Bureau has affected the DGSE domestically as well as internationally. Because it is quite known to people who follow these things.
Damian Van Pouveld
That's right. I think for me, the Bureau did a fantastic job at humanizing the dgse. You have to kind of take into account the public perception of intelligence and of the DGSE in France. For a very long time. Public understanding of the DGSE was really marked by these kind of big public failures that we mentioned before, mostly the Rainbow Warrior affair. Spies in France have a reputation as like a dirty job that you find that in other democracies. But you know, in most democracies that have evolved, if you look at the US and the UK that had evolved into a more positive views of the role of spies as, you know, being kind of freedom fighters if you want, or like taking massive risk to defend their country, to protect their country. It wasn't much like that in France, I would say. And people were still wondering, okay, what are they doing? You know, are they just like rogue people that are just doing crazy things on our behalf? And what the Bureau did is just showing normal people that spies are also just normal people. They have stress, they have families, they have relationships. Life is difficult, work life, balance is difficult. And it did make the DGSE look cool to an extent too. They're doing some pretty crazy kind of operations in hot spots against bad guys. You could say it has a bit contributed to a form of public prestige. If you've seen a TV show, then TV show looks very realistic. Actually, even the setting of it is inspired by how the DGSE looks within the offices of the dgse. But of course, the plot is a bit out there.
Sascha Ingber
Right. They always take liberties with these sorts of shows for entertainment purposes. I'll leave it to them to figure out. Well, I know this is the first book that talks about this intelligence service in English, so we are happy to have you on. Thank you so much, Damian.
Damian Van Pouveld
Thank you for having me.
Sascha Ingber
Thanks for listening to this episode of Spycast.
Podcast Announcer
If you like the episode, give us a follow on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating or review. It really helps. If you have any feedback or you want to hear about a particular topic, you can reach us by email@spycastpymuseum.org I'm your host Sasha Ingber, and the show is brought to you by N2K Network's goat rodeo and the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC.
SpyCast Episode Summary
Podcast: SpyCast
Episode: The Triumphs and Failures of France's Foreign Intel Service
Host: Sasha Ingber
Guest: Damian Van Pouveld (author of "The DGSE")
Date: July 21, 2026
This episode dives deep into the history, evolution, and operations—both triumphant and disastrous—of France’s foreign intelligence service, the DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure). Host Sasha Ingber interviews Damian Van Pouveld, drawing on his extensive research and access to new documents to trace how the DGSE emerged from its World War II roots, suffered very public failures in the 1980s, underwent major reform, and now plays a complex role on the international intelligence stage.
Lebanon Barracks Bombing (1983):
Rainbow Warrior Affair (1985):
Maximator Alliance (“Beer Alliance”):
China:
Resource Allocation & Geographic Focus:
Summary Takeaway: This episode charts the uneven but modernizing journey of the DGSE: from WWII roots and Cold War exploits, to damaging blunders and necessary reforms, to its contemporary role navigating alliances, collecting evidence on the world’s most dangerous regimes, balancing old colonial networks, and confronting an evolving risk landscape—while also becoming a (reluctant) cultural icon at home and abroad.