DGSE: The French Spy Machine

The French intelligence service DGSE is recognized today as one of the most aggressive in the world. Once described by one of its former senior executives as "a little North Korea," it has also made a sinister reputation for itself for its readiness to kill, including its own. But it is lesser known for the secret war it wages against the United States since the end of the Cold War, and its obsession with domestic espionage spurred by a fear of Muslim terrorism and pervading American-style capitalism. On April 2000, French weekly Courrier international published the last words of ex-French President Francois Mitterrand, and between others he avowed for the first time, “France does not know it, but we are at war against the United States. A permanent economic war; a war without dead.” DGSE; The French Spy Machine is the biggest and richest book published to date on an intelligence service, detailing its current organization, methods, techniques and objectives. Dominique Poirier who worked for more than twenty years for the DGSE takes us behind the closed curtain of the French intelligence community, to reveals for the first time shocking realities on mass surveillance and domestic influence in France, assassinations, and secret operations against the United States laced with startling revelations. And he tells us how the discreet cooperation between French and Russian spies evolved since Time magazine at last reported it in April 1968 with the scandal of the Martel Affair, two years after France and the Soviet Union had signed a decisive agreement on science and technology sharing.