(Paris) One of the pillars of the French satirical weekly “Le Canard enchaîné” worked in the 1960s for the secret services of Czechoslovakia, then a vassal of the Soviet Union, the French magazine said on Tuesday. The Obs.
Posted at 12:33 p.m.
Quoting a file from the StB, the Czechoslovak secret services, exhumed by the Czech historian Jan Koura, vice-rector at Charles University in Prague, the weekly reports that Jean Clémentin, one of the great feathers of the “Duck”, spied on behalf of this Eastern Bloc country, a satellite of the USSR.
Paid by the Soviet camp
“From 1957 to 1969, Jean Clémentin was also a paid spy for the Czechoslovakians, therefore from the Soviet camp”, explains The Obs in his investigation.
Between 1957 and 1969, “Pipa” (his code name) “submitted no less than 300 notes, during 270 meetings in France and abroad.
He also actively — and consciously — participated in three disinformation operations, publishing in The chained Duck articles designed by the StB”, says the survey.
“He was even sent to London and Bonn (Germany) by the secret service in order to collect information”.
The journalist is currently 98 years old. He is now protected from any lawsuit by prescription.
Mr. Clémentin, still according to the same survey, would have assumed his first sympathies for the Eastern bloc during his coverage of the Indochina war (1946-1954), where he was disgusted by the methods of the colonial army. French. It was on this theme that he began his collaboration with a member of the Czechoslovak Embassy in Paris, who would become his case officer.
The journalist admits his attraction to the popular democracies of the East, “but […] there is also the lure of profit, ”says the survey. “He loves money,” wrote his attending officer, noting that the man already married twice, who claims to have “five mistresses”, does not have sufficient income to support his lifestyle.
“In total, in the first five years of his active collaboration, his case officers […] hand in hand 23,600 francs, or about 40,000 euros (58,000 Canadian dollars) today”, explains the Obs, which also mentions “a house in Meudon, in the bourgeois suburbs of the capital city “.
The survey also indicates that in Paris, the Direction de la surveillance du territoire (DST, responsible for counter-espionage, provided today by the DGSI, General Directorate for Internal Security) had many doubts about the role of the executive du Canard, without ever prosecuting.
Mr. Clémentin will retire in 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall. That is 20 years after his last meeting with an officer from Czechoslovakia, now called the Czech Republic, a member of the European Union.