An Undercover Talleyrand

The road to espionage is rarely paved with good intentions. Most of the "agents" working the dark corners of the cold war were lured there by simple greed or forced there by blackmail. But in the case of French Spy Georges Paaques, the motive was sheer do-goodism, complicated by a dash of intellectual vanity.

Since the Suuretee blew his cover last year (TIME, Oct. 4), the chubby, urbane French press attachee to NATO had been busy preparing his rationale. Last week, at his trial before a state security court in Paris, he unveiled it. Posed imperiously in the box, with one hand resting lightly on a thick dossier and a thin smile playing across his face, Paaques took six hours to tell his tale of misguided intelligence. His 19-year career as an agent in the pay of the Soviet Union, Paaques argued, had been nothing more than a clandestine political seminar, an effort to explain the intricacies of French policy. By filling the Russians in on Western military strength, he also felt he could countervail the "excess of weight" of the Anglo-Saxons--particularly the U.S.--in Europe and Africa, and perhaps prevent war based on miscalculation.

A Bit Choosy. Paaques believed he was ideally suited for this role. After all, he was a normalien--a graduate, like French Premier Georges Pompidou and Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, of the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure, and thus a "certified intellectual." So, first in Algiers in 1944, later in Paris, where he served in a succession of government departments, Paaques began a series of "political conversations" with a changing list of Soviet embassy personnel.

The Russians were eager to learn, gladly put up with Paaques' innocuous profiles of government ministers and long-winded explanations of French diplomatic thinking until their instructor could provide them with more valuable information. For his part, Paaques insisted that his pupils at least be apt. When an embassy official named Lysenko became his contact in 1959, Paaques complained crabbily about the Russian's "lesser intellectual capacity" and Lysenko's banal insistence on teaching him how to use a microcamera.

A Message from Garcia. In 1962 the Russians found an ideal student for their French teacher. Vasily Vlasov, first secretary in the Soviet embassy, clucked sympathetically at Paaques' revelations of "the aggressive intentions of the United States," urged Paaques to turn down a job in French counterespionage in favor of one on NATO's information staff.

"He thought I had neither the character nor the temperament for counterespionage work," Paaques told the court. "He was interested in my fate."

Now Russian patience paid off. Using the code name Garcia, Paaques set up meetings with Vlasov in Meetro stations, cafees, the Bois de Meudon and a suburban church. During the ten months he served as NATO information officer, he handed over the Allied military contingency plans for the defense of Berlin, a document of NATO's military-force needs from 1958 to 1963, a top-secret military plan named Fallex, many NATO studies on the political situation in Soviet satellites, psychological warfare plans, and regularly briefed Vlasov on the NATO ministerial conferences he attended. It was all good, hard intelligence, for Paaques had a "cosmic" clearance--the classification in NATO second only to "cabale," the top status.

Paaques would have gone undetected except for a Russian defector who early last summer told the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency that Moscow had obtained the Allied contingency plans for Berlin from sources in Paris. The Suuretee immediately began tailing Paaques and 15 other suspects, rapidly narrowed the field to him. The charge against him was treason, which under the French penal code carries the death penalty. But as the court listened openmouthed to Paaques' naive self-justification last week, a spark of sympathy was struck. As his defense counsel put it: "He was a normalien, a man who thought he was capable of maintaining his own permanent summit conference with the Russians, a sort of undercover Talleyrand." For that reason they sentenced Georges Paaques to life imprisonment.

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