Shocker: French Weekly Outs One of the KGB's Major Spies During the Cold War — None Other Than Its Own Former Editor-in-Chief

Philippe Grumbach interviews François Mitterrand at Socialist Party HQs

A right-leaning conservative French weekly has uncovered one of the Soviet Union's top spies in France during the Cold War, and it turns out to be none other than its own editor-in-chief in the 1970s.

The former honcho at L'Express, Philippe Grumbach (1924-2003) was close to both François Mitterrand and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (VGE), indeed one of the latter president's closest advisers. (This brings to mind the Stasi's greatest coup during the Cold War, when the East Germans succeeded — also while VGE was growing in power — in placing a communist spy (Günter Guillaume) in Willy Brandt's West German cabinet.)

For 35 years, while (among other things) at the head of one of France's top five weeklies, and the most anti-communist of the lot (Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, Jean-François Revel, François Mauriac, Raymond Aron, etc…), Brok (as Philippe Grumbach was known by his Soviet handlers) spied for the Kremlin.

The revelations come after examination by France's DGSE spy fighters of the Vasili Mitrokhin archive in London, the vast treasure trove that the KGB archivist took with him when he defected to the West in 1992.

From the 1930s and the Cold War to the modern Putin era, Moscow's secret services never seem to have had trouble finding Frenchmen willing to spy for them, from NATO officers to some of the highest VIPs in la République.

It turns out that suffering from a bad case of ADS (America Derangement Syndrome), as it has for two or three centuries — anti-Americanism was one of the major reason for the founding of this very blog, 20 years ago — France was a nest for Russian spies.

As I quote a former KGB agent in my book on anti-Americanism in France, it was never hard to find traitors and spies in France, as they thought that, in truth, they and the Russians were on the same side, the real enemy being the devious and dastardly Uncle Sam. As for Philippe "Brok" Grumbach, it turns out that he was recruited at age 22 by the KGB in 1946, i.e., while Stalin was head of the USSR.

Minister for Air Pierre Cot (glasses, bow tie) in 1933 next to his chief of staff, Jean Moulin