The Martel affair, sometimes known as the Sapphire affair, was a spy scandal that took place in France in early 1962. It involved information provided by former high-ranking member of the KGB, Anatoliy Golitsyn, who defected to the United States in December 1961. Golitsyn stated that the Soviets had agents placed throughout French military intelligence and even within French President Charles de Gaulle's cabinet. He claimed that these agents had access to any NATO document on demand.
The news so alarmed US President John F. Kennedy that he sent a courier to hand-deliver a message to de Gaulle that outlined the situation. Over the spring and the summer of 1962, a team of French counterintelligence officers interrogated Golitsyn for weeks. As his identity was closely guarded by the US, the French assigned him the codename "Martel". Their interrogations overcame their initial suspicion that he was a CIA double agent and they returned to France with grave warnings about the state of French security.
French-American relations were already strained by de Gaulle's policy of , and in return, de Gaulle was highly skeptical of the US's motives. Believing the story to be a fabrication, French intelligence was very deliberate in its investigations, and no action had been taken by late 1962, to the amazement of the US establishment, which began to take measures to exclude France from the NATO reporting chain. That led to NATO becoming largely non-functional for a year. Ultimately there was a three-year breakdown in American-French intelligence sharing.
The story became public only some years later, when the former French intelligence liaison at the French embassy in Washington, Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli, reported the story in an exposé in Life magazine in 1968. A friend of de Vosjoli, Leon Uris, used a highly fictionalized version of the affair as the basis for the novel and the movie Topaz.
Anatoliy Golitsyn In 1961, Anatoliy Golitsyn, a major in the KGB, was assigned to the embassy in Helsinki, Finland, under the name "Ivan Klimov." On 15 December, he defected to the US, along with his wife and daughter, by riding the train to the Swedish border. Golitsyn's defection so alarmed the KGB that orders were sent out to cancel all meetings with field agents out of fear that they would be identified.
Golitsyn was flown to the US and interviewed by David Murphy, the head of the CIA's Soviet Russia Division. After some time, Golitsyn began making increasing demands of the US and complaining about his treatment. Considering him to be unreliable, Murphy passed him on to James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's director of counterintelligence. Golitsyn's description of a traitor in the CIA, whom he knew only as "Sasha", led Angleton to embark on a multiyear manhunt that accused many members of the CIA of being the spy. The entire affair is still highly controversial.
Golitsyn's information ultimately led to the identification or the confirmation of Soviet spies throughout the Western world, including Kim Philby, Donald Duart Maclean, Guy Burgess, the potential double agent Aleksander Kopatzky, and many others. He also claimed that their contacts had so infiltrated NATO that they were able to produce any secret document within a few days. So much information had been received that the KGB was using NATO's own document numbers to catalog them. He could not identify the NATO mole directly but knew that he spoke French. He also suggested the existence of a widespread network of KGB spies within the various branches of the French military and government offices.
Kennedy's letter Kennedy was alarmed by the implications of a French spy within NATO. Unable to trust any official communications network, he took the unusual route of handwriting a personal letter to de Gaulle and having it delivered directly to him by a courier. After outlining the worrying information, the letter went on to offer to de Gaulle direct access to the agent by members of the French security services.
The letter arrived at a time when US-French relations were at a low point. In the postwar period, both the US and the UK had set up spy networks in Paris with the explicit aim of spying on the Soviets but also with the secondary role of keeping an eye on political developments in France. The French were well aware of those networks but tolerated them until the 1950s. However, de Gaulle's policy of grandeur demanded for France to be able to keep its own secrets, and he began a policy to attempt to break down those networks. He ordered the SDECE to begin those efforts in January 1962.
De Gaulle expected there to be some sort of reprisal on the part of the CIA, and he went as far as falsely believing that the US might be behind the Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS), which tried to assassinate him. All of that was taking place while Kennedy's letter arrived. That led the French to believe that the entire affair might be a CIA-led effort to discredit and shake up the French services, but a personal letter from the US president could not be ignored.
French interrogations De Gaulle responded by placing Jean-Louis de Rougemont in charge of determining whether it was true that Martel was a Soviet defector. De Rougemont was the director of the Second Division of the National Defense staff, which had the task of co-ordinating the various intelligence services. He also had deep personal contacts with his counterparts in the US establishment. He flew to Washington, DC, in the spring of 1962 to meet with his contacts and was granted three or four days of personal interviews with Golitsyn, whose identity was still a highly guarded secret and so he was referred to only as "Martel." Initially believing Martel to be a ride, created by the US, de Rougemont was convinced otherwise by his meetings.
De Rougemont made his report directly to Étienne Burin des Roziers, the Secretary-General of the Élysée, who organized a meeting with the heads of the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE) and the Direction de la Securite du Territoire (DST), responsible for external and internal security. They had been aware of rumors that a high-ranking defector was in CIA hands, and des Roziers told them that the defector was real, he was as important as the rumors suggested, and his information about French security demanded an immediate detailed debriefing by counterintelligence experts.
A mission was quickly arranged and arrived in Washington, DC, in May. Liaising with the French intelligence attaché, de Vosjoli, a safe house was provided for the team. He was upset to learn that previous meetings had taken place without his involvement and that the letter from Kennedy to de Gaulle, being nonspecific, had impugned the entire French establishment. He initially believed that Martel might be a double agent on a mission of upsetting French-US relations. However, the team's reports, which he forwarded to Paris, quickly convinced him otherwise.
In one particularly telling series of questions, the French officers attempted to trap Martel. Since he claimed that he had personally seen a number of NATO reports in Moscow, the team provided Martel with a range of documents, some real and some fake. Martel was able to identify a few of them as having been personally seen by him, but he identified all of those that were real he stated every one of the fake documents as not having seen them. That development was extremely worrying. He then went on to provide a complete description of the organization and the operation of the SDECE, including details of a secret reorganization in 1958.
When pressed for details on the identities of agents, Martel was able to provide only details of their operations and general descriptions. He had only seen their reports and was not involved in their actual operations, but he was aware, in general terms, of what positions they held. Returning to France after two weeks of interrogations, the team looked over the interviews and attempted to identify various details. They returned to Washington again to confirm their suspicions with Martel, who was able to eliminate many of their guesses and to suggest others that matched the details that he knew. That led to the identification of widespread networks within the Ministry of the Interior; Defense and Foreign Affairs; a member of de Gaulle's cabinet; an entire network of twelve agents, known as "Sapphire," operating within the SDECE and a second network within the SDECE that was specifically tasked with passing on US nuclear secrets.
Increasing suspicion It was the last item that led to intense distrust of the information within French intelligence. Martel claimed that the nuclear network had been created by the KGB in 1959. Although there was such an effort taking place, it had been created by the French in 1960. The plan was started by Louis Joxe, tasked by de Gaulle with building the force de frappe, France's nuclear efforts. Joxe had concluded that France could not make a modern force on its own and needed to steal US designs. That led the SDECE to believe that the CIA had become aware of French plans and so had planted the story with Martel to scare the French into canceling them. As one official put it:
US agents sat in on the French debriefing meetings, but that curiously further strained relations. Every time that the French team attempted to confirm or to deny a name as one that Martel had heard of, the US became highly suspicious of that name. Since the team tried many names, the US was concerned that the entire French government was involved. That was, however, minor compared to anger over news that the French were apparently setting up a nuclear intelligence team.
General Paul Jacquier, who had recently been appointed as head of the SDECE, arrived in Washington on 5 October 1962. His mission was to inform the US that France would be expanding the SDECE to a worldwide organization that would operate against both the East and the West. The British intelligence services had arrested Vassall and were in the process of rounding up many of the other agents who had been alluded to by Martel. The French, on the other hand, had done nothing. At a formal dinner in Jacquier's honor, the US made it clear that its patience was at an end and that it expected action soon. One agent went so far as to state to Jacquier, "Your service is infiltrated. We know that you are not at fault, because you are new in your job and new at this business. But you must take the right measures."
Major effects but little action NATO had been strained in the early 1960s by an effort to form a multinational naval nuclear agreement that ended in acrimonious debate. It was into that environment that the Martel affair exploded. By the autumn of 1962, the affair had largely ended the flow of information with NATO, with only the most basic information, which was needed to keep it running, being exchanged.
That led to the first suggestions outside France that Martel might be a double agent. Critics pointed out that Martel's leads were generally for agents that had been in place for many years but were well past their prime in terms of having access to useful information. However, that information was responsible for the near-collapse of NATO.
However, as the full weight of the information worked its way through various countries' intelligence apparatus, the conclusion that he was telling the truth became unavoidable. Among the military alone, John Vassall of the UK Admiralty, Swedish Defense Ministry official Stig Wennerström, Canadian economist (working at NATO) Hugh Hambleton, German Federal Intelligence Service operative Heinz Felfe, and US Army Sergeant (working at the National Security Agency) Jack Dunlap were all exposed as a result of Martel's reports.