The Farewell affair (Vladimir Vetrov)

Who ‘Farewell’ was

According to Gus W. Weiss, who dealt with computer export review and technology transfer in the US government, in 1981 French intelligence obtained the services of Col. Vladimir I. Vetrov, codenamed ‘Farewell’. Weiss describes him as a 53-year-old engineer assigned to evaluate the intelligence gathered by KGB Directorate T, and writes that he volunteered for ideological reasons.²

Vetrov photographed and supplied some 4,000 KGB documents. France’s National Audiovisual Institute (INA) describes ‘Farewell’ as the codename of Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov, who delivered documents to the DST.^1,3

Directorate T and ‘Line X’

According to Weiss, Directorate T was created in 1970 within the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence) to study Western research programmes and economies. Its operating arm in stations abroad was ‘Line X’, and their collection requirements came from the Military-Industrial Commission and the State Committee for Science and Technology.²

Vetrov’s documents named more than 200 Line X officers in 10 KGB residencies in the West, plus more than 100 leads to people they had recruited.²

The US government described the scale of the problem publicly in September 1985 in a Department of Defense paper: Directorate T was said to have about 1,000 officers, nearly 300 of them abroad, and in 1976–1980 more than 3,500 specific requirements for hardware and documents were satisfied. The paper does not say where these figures came from.⁴

From Paris to Washington

In July 1981, on the margins of the economic summit in Ottawa, President François Mitterrand told Ronald Reagan privately about the source and offered him the material. It reached the CIA through Vice President George Bush.²

Feeding the Soviets faulty technology

In January 1982 Weiss proposed to the Director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, that the Line X shopping lists be used to feed it doctored products, designed to appear genuine but to fail later, once in the USSR (see deception).²

Weiss lists computer chips that found their way into Soviet military equipment, flawed turbines installed on a gas pipeline, defective plans that disrupted chemical plants and a tractor factory, and misleading information on stealth aircraft and space defence. He writes that the programme was never detected.²

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesThe often-repeated story of a huge Siberian pipeline explosion in 1982 comes from Thomas Reed’s book At the Abyss. Weiss’s article does not mention an explosion. Peter C. Oleson, writing in the journal of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), points out that the US government has released no data confirming this version and that the dates given for the explosion vary.^2,5

Breaking up the network

Meetings organised by Casey with NATO intelligence services and European governments led, according to Weiss, to the expulsion or compromise of about 200 Soviet intelligence officers and their sources. Weiss writes that this meant the collapse of Line X operations in Europe.²

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesFrance expelled 47 Soviet ‘diplomats’ – Oleson and the French association of former intelligence personnel (AASSDN) agree on this figure. We were unable to open a government document giving it.^5,6

Vetrov’s fate and the consequences in France

In January 1982 Vetrov stabbed and killed a KGB officer in a Moscow park and wounded a woman. After his arrest his espionage came to light. Weiss writes that Vetrov was executed in 1983; the authority record of the National Library of France gives 1985 as the year of his death.^2,7

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesAccording to the AASSDN, Vetrov stopped attending meetings after February 1982, and the DST learnt of his arrest in the autumn of 1982 from the Americans.⁶

In 1985 information about the case surfaced in France, and Mitterrand dismissed the head of the DST, Yves Bonnet.²