The Triumphs and Failures of France's Foreign Intel Service

Sasha Ingber: Welcome to SpyCast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and each week, I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.

The DGSE, or Directorate General for External Security, is France's foreign intelligence service. It's found inside the Ministry of Defense, but reports to the president, and it began in name in 1982, learning the hard way through a string of high-profile blunders how to conduct espionage. The service is responsible for all sources of intelligence and has benefited from a popular TV show about its inner workings. Damien Van Puyvelde, the author of the book The DGSE, draws on documents never before available and traces the agency's history from its early failures to its sweeping reforms and modern-day successes. 

Hey, Damien. 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. 

Damien Van Puyvelde: Thanks, Sasha. Thanks for having me. 

Sasha 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? 

Damien Van Puyvelde: 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 a civilian authority of the French government in exile.

And so around 1943, actually, is 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, um, early origins of, uh, the DGSE. 

Sasha 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, and why? 

Damien Van Puyvelde: Yeah, I mean, so to this day, actually, the, um, the agency has put, uh, a lot of emphasis in its external communications, but also the internal communication around the Second World War. It's, um, useful way to give a sense of identity to the people that join 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, 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, um, predecessors did it under even harsher conditions than we doing.

It's kind of a motivating factor to join and to stay at the agency too. 

Sasha 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? 

Damien Van Puyvelde: Yes, of course. Um, so in 1982, the DGSE 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, um, the, uh, uh, the support that the DGSE gave to bring back, uh, Klaus Barbie, who was a Gestapo chief in Lyon, one of the major French cities during Nazi occupation, infamous in France for, uh, being a torturer and for, uh, uh, sending, uh, thousands of Jews and resistant members to Auschwitz.

Most infamous in France also, uh, 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, Klaus Barbie escapes Europe, actually is recruited as an anti- anti-communist informant by the Americans. Uh, there's French pressure to extradite him, and then he disappears and reappears somewhere in Bolivia in the 1950s.

Damien Van Puyvelde: Uh, but at that time, anyway, in the 1950s, Barbie works in Bolivia, where he's far from retired, actually. He's helping the local security service with repression of, uh, political dissidents. And in the 1970s, Nazi hunters, activists, uh, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld 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, um, democratic election with, um, 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 Klaus Barbie and keeping that kind of covert 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, um, sentenced to prison, and eventually dies in prison 

Sasha 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? 

Damien Van Puyvelde: 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, a, a major attack on, um, a French military barrack, which is bombed in Beirut, Lebanon, and 58 French paratroopers are killed.

Sasha Ingber: And this is amid the civil war in Lebanon. 

Damien Van Puyvelde: 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, uh, Beirut International Airport.

This is a shock for France, also for, 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 you 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, uh, the memoirs of a former DGSE director, the Service Action, so, uh, 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, um, a car, uh, with a bomb in front of the Iranian embassy in Lebanon, but the car doesn't explode.

The bomb doesn't detonate, and the, uh, device inside the car is eventually traced back to France, uh, 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, uh, that leads to, uh, problems back home.

And so actually the head of the Action Service, that paramilitary branch, is removed as a result of, uh, this failure in 1983. So you could say that, um, this mishap shows a bit the danger of, uh, using covert action, especially when it doesn't work and it becomes public. 

Sasha Ingber: Now, this failure pales in comparison to what happens in New Zealand. This is the Rainbow Warrior affair. Take us through that. 

Damien Van Puyvelde: Yeah. We're now in 1985. Um, Greenpeace, the, uh, 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. Uh, the French tests at the time, they were done in the Pacific Ocean.

And, uh, 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, um, disrupt. Um, DGSE has quite a few options. Eventually, um, 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, um, disrupt physically the test by going into a protected zone where the nuclear test was supposed to happen.

Um, so the aim of the operation is to disable and sink the ship. Um, they do some reconnaissance work. Eventually, the French divers, uh, working for the DGSE, for that paramilitary branch, um, 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, um, their photographer, a man named Fernando Pereira. Understandably, he wanted to recover his material and, um 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, uh, they start finding an unusual, uh, French couple that is supposed to be there on honeymoon.

Uh, so they, um, interrogate them, and their cover 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 ev-evidence is such that the French government has to acknowledge responsibility, so major diplomatic crisis with New Zealand, leading to resignation of the French defense 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, uh, public image of the DGSE, a really bad moment that has left an imprint on the agency, nearly like, um, a trauma on the agency, I think within the agency and in France also, in the public perceptions that French people have of the DGSE.

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, uh, it was involved in that crazy sabotage operation against Greenpeace. That makes it sound like the DGSE is a very rough service, uh, which it can be, obviously. Hmm.

Sasha Ingber: Right. So state-sponsored terrorism, uh, essentially in New Zealand with the French, uh, 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.

Um, but what exactly was this French couple allegedly on their honeymoon, what had they been doing that got them caught? 

Damien Van Puyvelde: Yeah, I mean, first they arrived a couple of weeks, um, before, um, before the operations in New Zealand, and they did reconnaissance. Yeah, so they would be... Uh, they rented a, a camper van, actually, uh, 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, uh, eventually kind of didn't make sense to the New Zealand authorities that, um- they would stay in that area with a camper van. 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 on 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 that proof that they hadn't gone over their expenses. And that's actually, uh, 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 passports. Uh, 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. Um, 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. Um, so just suspicion, really, unusual people that, uh, that's m- make them stand out and tipped, in a sense, uh, the New Zealand, uh, police and security service.

Sasha 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 Francois Mitterrand. Who is this new director, and what does he do?

Damien Van Puyvelde: That's right. So the, the first few DGSE leaders in the 1980s are more, um, of a military background. Um, and then Claude Silberzahn is a senior civil servant, a prefect, we say in France, uh, so that's an 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.

Damien Van Puyvelde: 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, um, the kind of normalization of the DGSE from an agency that's sometimes felt a bit too, um, crazy or, or rough, in a sense, uh, to one that becomes really more part of the normal French administration.

And he tries to streamline the DGSE redoing 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.

Sasha Ingber: When we come back, Damien talks about the DGSE's work in the past two or so decades, and an international intelligence sharing alliance named after a beer.

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." 

Damien Van Puyvelde: That's right. That's one of the few areas actually where I was able to get access to some DGSE reporting and documents. No, I didn't find the smoking guns in the archives or anything like that.

Um, you're right to say that the DGSE was more careful in its assessment, 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, um, the presence of WMDs in Iraq as a justification for, uh, uh, 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 of 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. 

Sasha Ingber: In the documents that you accessed, what did you find that was surprising, that hasn't, uh, come out before?

Damien Van Puyvelde: Well, there were of two kinds. Um, one kind was very technical. It shows a depth of expertise. It nearly reads like a scientific paper to look at evidence, um, on aluminum 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, uh, 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 hands, 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 rumint, rumor intelligence. So we hear that the, uh, delegation of inspectors, the last delegation of inspectors that were 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, uh, finished products that really present a detailed evaluation. 

Sasha 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?

Damien Van Puyvelde: 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 document and, uh, uh, additional documentations actually make it quite clear that the DGSE sends Service Action officers on the ground, uh, or send at least some of its officers on the ground in Syria to collect samples, uh, biomedical samples, environmental samples, uh, 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.

Sasha 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 have been. 

Damien Van Puyvelde: I would imagine. We don't have details yet, to be honest, on the kind of, uh, logistics of this. Now, you can imagine that there are... They're transporting a biohazard, so that's one thing already, and then the extraction also.

Um, 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, as the logistics of covert operation sources and methods, definitely something that is still classified.

Sasha Ingber: Right. Now 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. 

Damien Van Puyvelde: Yes, that's right. The, the alliance is called the Maximator Alliance, um, uh, 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, a, a, a cooperation meeting between intelligence agencies that were drinking that beer, and they 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, uh, and joins, I think, in the mid-1980s. And the alliance is basically a signals intelligence alliance, I think looking mostly at, um, sharing the burden of, um, some of the technical platforms, and, uh, sharing knowhow in terms of cryptanalysis, um, so deciphering, if you want, of, uh, uh messages and so on.

Um, 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. Yeah, the Nine Eyes, the Fourteen Eyes, and so on, uh, which, um, French intelligence will, will also contribute to.

Sasha 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, uh, I found surprising, and one of those was China. What were those partnerships? Why would they partner with China of all countries these days? 

Damien Van Puyvelde: Yeah, there's not much out there on, uh, 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, or the equivalent of a chief of station in China, and they've had one for a while. Uh, and that has actually in some ways historically caused more trouble to the DGSE. 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, uh, because DGSE representatives in China in the 1990s have been turned by the Chinese services, and that has actually recently led, uh, in the last few years to one of the very rare cases where, um, a French court was, um, 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, uh, stepson that was still in the agency after. So a big counterintelligence and counterespionage 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, a signal to partners and adversarial services that, okay, this had crossed a certain level, and that they're just very unhappy about it.

Sasha 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.

Damien Van Puyvelde: 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, 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.

Um, 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 DGSE has limited resources, and it's kind of normal that it focus on the threats that are closer to home, uh, geographically. Um, 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, um, two Chinese engineers, um- And two other individuals, uh, were arrested in the south of France, um, because the DGSI found a house with a kind of radar system that was in the garden. Uh, so kind of using a dish antenna in the garden that was spotted, um, and that is believed to, uh, have been used to spy on, um, uh, communications with satellites, uh, encrypted communications with satellites possibly.

And so there's a kind of current, um, 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, um, your economic secrets or your, um, uh, 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 DGSI and Russian services on counterterrorist issues historically. Uh, and in China, we can imagine that sometimes they might exchange some in- some intelligence about Russia, I mean, I don't know, frankly, or North Korea perhaps even.

Sasha Ingber: 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- 

Damien Van Puyvelde: Hmm ... 

Sasha Ingber: is that legacy manifesting today? I'm curious to understand how that might play into the service. 

Damien Van Puyvelde: Yeah, I think the service has always kept strong ties and strong presence in Africa and in the Middle East.

France had a mandate, yeah, around Syria, ties to Lebanon also, and then of course all the Francophone Af- Africa, uh, countries that claimed their independence, uh, uh, in the 1950s, 1960s, depending on which country. But it has always kept a presence there, and I think that's, is one of the main interests for, um, um, other countries' intelligence agencies to cooperate with the DGSE that they've had these ties, um, these links, um, this geographical kind of presence there.

And so the French service has always been known to have these ties and perhaps a bit more access 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- 

Sasha Ingber: Yeah, ISIS has been growing in the Sahel, a major hotbed 

Damien Van Puyvelde: That's right.

France was involved in a war there, uh, in a conflict there, uh, for years, Opération Serval, and eventually was kicked out, uh, when the, there was a change of regime in, in a series of countries there. Um, and that was a major kind of, um, 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, uh, and surrounding countries.

And then eventually that led to French military presence being kicked out of the country, quite possibly also, uh, the kind of a more formal chief of station type of positions, the diplomacy of intelligence being kicked out from a range of countries in the region. And, uh, we think basically that the previous director of the DGSE lost his job over, over that failure.

And what we had then to replace the French presence has been Wagner, uh, a Russian, Russian-supported, uh, not called Wagner anymore, but Russian-supported presence, uh, in the region African Corps, that's right ... 

Sasha Ingber: which is 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?

Damien Van Puyvelde: I mean, I'll mention a couple of them, one that worked, one that didn't work. Historically, um, the DGSE sent combat divers, or specialized divers, to recover a piece of a Soviet submarine during the Cold War, um, 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, 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, um, with Denis Allex, 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, uh, to the site where, uh, uh, Denis Allex was located and held hostage, and his captors just killed him.

Uh, and in the advance towards, um, that position, a DGSE operator was also killed. 

Sasha 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 

Damien Van Puyvelde: That's right. Um, I, I think for me, The Bureau did a fantastic job at, uh, humanizing, uh, 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 have evolved into a more positive views of, um, the role of spies as, you know, m- being kind of a freedom fighters, if you want, or, or, like, taking massive risk to defend their country, uh, 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. Um, they're doing some pretty crazy kind of operations in hotspots against bad guys. You could say it has a bit contributed to a form of public prestige. If you've seen the TV show, then TV show looks very realistic, actually.

Even the setting of it, um, uh, is inspired by how the DGSE looks, uh, within the offices of the DGSE. But of course, um, the plots is, yeah, a bit, a bit, uh, out there. 

Sasha 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, Damien. 

Damien Van Puyvelde: Thank you for having me. 

Sasha Ingber: Thanks for listening to this episode of SpyCast. 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 wanna hear about a particular topic, you can reach us by email at spycast@spymuseum.org.

I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and this show is brought to you by N2K Networks, Goat Rodeo, and the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC.