Discovery
An engineer, Vetrov was assigned to evaluate information on Western hardware and software gathered by spies ("Line X") for Directorate T. However, he became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist system and defected at the end of 1980. Between the spring of 1981 and early 1982, Vetrov handed over almost 4,000 secret documents to the French DST, including the complete list of 200 Line X officers stationed under legal cover in embassies around the world.
It also led to the death of Vetrov. "Vetrov fell into a tragic episode with a woman and a fellow KGB officer in a Moscow park. In circumstances that are not clear, he stabbed and killed the officer and then stabbed but did not kill the woman. He was arrested, and, in the ensuing investigation, his espionage activities were discovered; he was eventually executed in 1985. CIA had enough intelligence to institute protective countermeasures."
In 1985, the case took a bizarre turn when information on the Farewell dossier surfaced in France. Mitterrand came to suspect that Vetrov had been a CIA plant set up to test him to see if the material would be handed over to the Americans or kept by the French. Acting on this mistaken belief, Mitterrand fired the chief of the French service, Yves Bonnet. The details of the operation were declassified in 1996.
Read more about this topic: Farewell Dossier
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“However backwards the world has been in former ages in the discovery of such points as GOD never meant us to know,—we have been more successful in our own days:Mthousands can trace out now the impressions of this divine intercourse in themselves, from the first moment they received it, and with such distinct intelligence of its progress and workings, as to require no evidence of its truth.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)