Discovery
An engineer, Vetrov was assigned to evaluate information on Western hardware and software gathered by spies ("Line X") for Directorate T. However, he became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist system and defected at the end of 1980. Between the spring of 1981 and early 1982, Vetrov handed over almost 4,000 secret documents to the French DST, including the complete list of 200 Line X officers stationed under legal cover in embassies around the world.
It also led to the death of Vetrov. "Vetrov fell into a tragic episode with a woman and a fellow KGB officer in a Moscow park. In circumstances that are not clear, he stabbed and killed the officer and then stabbed but did not kill the woman. He was arrested, and, in the ensuing investigation, his espionage activities were discovered; he was eventually executed in 1985. CIA had enough intelligence to institute protective countermeasures."
In 1985, the case took a bizarre turn when information on the Farewell dossier surfaced in France. Mitterrand came to suspect that Vetrov had been a CIA plant set up to test him to see if the material would be handed over to the Americans or kept by the French. Acting on this mistaken belief, Mitterrand fired the chief of the French service, Yves Bonnet. The details of the operation were declassified in 1996.
Read more about this topic: Farewell Dossier
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“I have known no experience more distressing than the discovery that Negroes didn’t love me. Unutterable loneliness claimed me. I felt without roots, like a man without a country ...”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962)
“He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“As the mother of a son, I do not accept that alienation from me is necessary for his discovery of himself. As a woman, I will not cooperate in demeaning womanly things so that he can be proud to be a man. I like to think the women in my son’s future are counting on me.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)