History
According to a recently published book, the DST has never been infiltrated by any foreign agency in all of its history.
During the Algerian War (1954–62), the agency created the Organization of the French Algerian Resistance (ORAF), a group of counter-terrorists whose mission was to carry out false flag terrorist attacks with the aim of quashing any hopes of political compromise.
On 3 December 1973, agents of the DST, disguised as plumbers, were caught trying to install a spy microphone in the offices of the Canard Enchaîné newspaper. The resulting scandal forced Interior Minister Raymond Marcellin to leave the government.
Reporter Marie-Monique Robin, author of a book investigating relationship between the Algerian War and Operation Condor, said to L'Humanité newspaper that " French have systematized a military technique in urban environments which would be copied and pasted to Latin American dictatorships." Roger Trinquier's famous book on counter-insurgency had a very strong influence in South America. Robin was "shocked" to learn that the DST communicated to the Chilean DINA the name of the refugees who returned to Chile (Operation Retorno), all of whom were later killed.
One of the greatest success of the DST was the recruitment of the Soviet KGB officer Vladimir Vetrov. Between the spring of 1981 and early 1982 he handed almost 4,000 secret documents over to the French, including the complete official list of 250 Line X KGB officers stationed under legal cover in embassies around the world, before being arrested in February 1982 and executed in 1983.
Read more about this topic: Direction De La Surveillance Du Territoire
Famous quotes containing the word history:
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This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
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I not only have my own history to worry about
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Unfinished concepts that can never bring themselves to the point
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—John Ashbery (b. 1927)