Farewell Dossier - Background

Background

French President François Mitterrand made the information available to the United States and NATO by the KGB defector in place. Vetrov's information provided the means by which the United States used the Central Intelligence Agency to turn Directorate T into a weapon against the Soviet Union itself.

Vetrov was a 53-year-old engineer assigned to evaluate the intelligence collected by Directorate T. He had volunteered his services to France for ideological reasons. He supplied a list of Soviet organizations in scientific collection and summary reports from Directorate T on the goals, achievements, and unfilled objectives of the program. Farewell revealed the names of more than 200 Line X officers stationed in 10 KGB residences in the West, along with more than 100 leads to Line X recruitments.

The French president François Mitterrand told President Ronald Reagan of the United States of the spy Farewell and his information. On July 19, 1981, in a private meeting associated with the July 1981 Ottawa economic summit, Mitterrand told Reagan of Farewell and offered the intelligence to the United States.

William Safire said Mitterrand described the man as belonging to a section that was evaluating the achievements of Soviet efforts to acquire western technology. Reagan expressed great interest in Mitterrand's revelations and thanked him for having the material sent to the United States government. It was passed through Vice President Bush and then to CIA.

Reagan passed this on to William Casey, his Director of Central Intelligence. Casey called in Gus W. Weiss, then working with Thomas C. Reed on the staff of the National Security Council. After studying the list of hundreds of Soviet agents and purchasers (including one cosmonaut) assigned to this penetration in the US and Japan, Weiss counselled against deportation." "The Farewell Dossier also identified hundreds of case officials, agents at their posts and other suppliers of information through the West and Japan. Besides identifying agents, the most useful information brought by the Dossier consisted of the ‘shopping list’ and its aims in terms of acquisition of technology in the coming years."

The dossier, under the name of Farewell, reached the CIA in August 1981. It demonstrated that the Soviets had spent years carrying out their research and development activities.