Vladimir Volkoff: “Le Retournement” (“The Turn-Around”, 1979)

The work

According to the catalogue description of the Paris city libraries (Bibliothèques de la Ville de Paris), “Le Retournement” (Julliard – L’Âge d’homme, 1979; published in English as “The Turn-Around”) is a spy novel in which the intelligence services of France, the USSR and the USA clash, and the case allows espionage to be set against literature.¹

The narrator, Lieutenant Kiril Volsky, a French intelligence officer, handles liaison with British, American and West German intelligence in the early 1960s. Facing a transfer, he invents a top-secret operation – and then has to carry it out. The target is a KGB major in Paris, Igor Popov; Volsky’s former lover, the actress Marina, is to seduce and compromise him.²

Popov, however, undergoes a religious and political conversion and decides on his own to defect to the West. His defection threatens a well-placed French triple agent, so Popov has to die, and Volsky takes the blame.^2,3

The real background

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesAccording to “Conflits”, Volkoff served as an intelligence officer during the Algerian War and later – with the backing of the French services – exposed disinformation in his novels. The author of the article considers “Le Retournement” and “Le Montage” (published in English as “The Set-Up”) his best-known books on these techniques.³

The plot draws on real tradecraft concepts: recruitment, kompromat, the defector and the multiple agent – see the glossary for definitions.

What is accurate

The “Kirkus Reviews” critic praised the atmosphere and the ironic picture of a shabby intelligence headquarters where officers quietly write books of their own – the only aspect the review assessed for plausibility.²

What is invented

The operation, Popov and the triple agent are fiction. The reviewer called it “a serviceable, if unremarkable, plot”, and felt that the long passages on Popov’s background and the theological conversations with an Orthodox priest slowed the action down.²

We found no source linking the plot to a real defection by a KGB officer in France, and we assume no such link.