(Paris) The list, read aloud, included only first names or pseudonyms. The French external secret services paid tribute on Monday, under the Arc de Triomphe, to their agents who died in operation in the presence of Prime Minister Jean Castex.
Posted yesterday at 4:26 p.m.
The head of government came to show the Nation’s gratitude to the agents of the General Directorate of External Security (DGSE), “who fell into the silent dignity of anonymity”, according to the terms of an official document. , in the presence of a handful of its agents, duly masked so as not to come out of the shadows, as well as former senior officials of the administration.
A few dozen family members of spies who fell for France then each laid a white rose in front of the flame of the unknown soldier, while the first name or pseudonym (unpublishable) of their missing loved one was called on the microphone by two young members of the service. , a civilian and a soldier.
Equipped with a sword, helped by a child and a teenager who came with their families, the head of government had previously, without a word, rekindled the flame. He was notably accompanied by the Minister of the Armies Florence Parly, and the boss of the DGSE Bernard Emié. Two wreaths were laid.
The ceremony took place in the year of the 40and anniversary of the creation of the DGSE in January 1982, on the ruins of the prestigious Central Intelligence and Action Bureau (BCRA), intelligence services of the Resistance to General de Gaulle.
“Our dead never go to the Invalides”, we remind the DGSE, as opposed to a soldier killed in action. “We honor them within the service. The tribute is official, but not public.
A demanding iron law, difficult for the relatives of those whom Pierre Brossolette, number two of the BCRA, called the “dressers of glory”. Because if pride is allowed to them, they do not have the consolation of seeing their father or mother, husband or wife, son or daughter enter the Invalides in front of the television cameras in a coffin covered with the tricolor flag.
The spies who died for France are also absent from the monument to the dead in external operations in Parc-André Citroën, in Paris, as from the frontispiece of official monuments erected almost everywhere in France.
“United in hiding”
The DGSE therefore inaugurated on November 8, 2019 a monument to the dead located inside the premises of the DGSE, a wall of seemingly anonymous cornflowers, but inside which appear the first name or pseudonym of the deceased. “Each family knows where their deceased’s blueberry is,” the agency said.
According to several sources, some 200 agents have died in service since 1982. But even their exact number remains confidential. “To claim an exact figure is already to come out of hiding. With each additional death, we would be obliged to update and therefore to explain”, we justify at the DGSE, nicknamed in turn “Mortier”, but also the “swimming pool”, the “central” or, more often still, “the box”.
Some came out of hiding post-mortem, like Jacques Merrin, killed in Beirut in his car in 1988, or Denis Allex, executed in 2013 by his captors in Somalia after a military operation to free him which had failed.
But most remain in the shadows. Their families are followed and helped. The spies “are united in hiding, in life and in death”, assures the DGSE, evoking a “fraternal solidarity”.
Along the way, the services also ensure that nothing in what the agent has left behind can compromise their mission. And the family is required to maintain the discretion to which it was bound during his lifetime. Because if an agent’s widow declares herself as such, “she will be attacked by the media, even buffered by a foreign service which will want to know a little more”, explains a former senior official of the “box”.
At the end of the ceremony, while military music sounded, the youngest of the two children appeared alone in front of the flame, impervious to protocol. To salute, in his childish way, a heroic father or mother, but absent forever, anonymous for eternity, whose commitment the country had just saluted.