It's a well-known truism among counter-spies: Never believe that a case is completely solved. In an environment where the true and the false are constantly intertwined, you must always bear in mind that you may have been fooled, and that there is still information to be unearthed. With this in mind, in the late spring of 2024, Le Monde immersed itself in the KGB archives handed over to the United Kingdom in 1992 by an exceptional defector: Vasili Mitrokhin (1922-2004). The British government may have disclosed part of this enormous trove of documents from 1999 onwards, but it must have still been possible to unearth some old secrets.

Diving into the past of the Soviet intelligence services helps us to understand and better grasp the current methods of the Russian services, whether it be the attempted poisoning, in 2018, of a former agent, Sergei Skripal, based in the south of England, or, more recently, the actions of sabotage, political destabilization and manipulation of public opinion, carried out here and there after the invasion of Ukraine launched in February 2022. These modes of action come from afar, from the KGB school, of which the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was once a pupil.

The "Mitrokhin archives" echo recent revelations about the KGB's French moles during the Cold War. In October 2022, the book by three former heads of a former domestic intelligence agency, the Directorate of Territorial Surveillance (DST), La DST sur le Front de la Guerre Froide ("The DST on the Cold War Front"), offered a rare picture of Soviet interference during this period. In early 2024, the weekly L'Express revealed that one of its own former directors, Philippe Grumbach, who died in 2003, had long worked for the KGB. Finally, in March, in his book A la Solde de Moscou ("In the Pay of Moscow"), journalist Vincent Jauvert recounted that Eastern European "brother" countries had their own "moles" in France, notably journalists.

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