To his few friends in France, Kirill Gryaznov, 40, has always presented himself as a chef, trained at the Cordon Bleu, a Parisian culinary school. Occasionally, he would mention his stint on a Russian reality TV show that helped him gain a little notoriety back home. Several photos and a few Instagram videos, where he is followed by just over 10,000 people, detail his recipes for pancakes and tartiflette. He also starred in a Russian Bachelor-style show, in which six women tried to seduce him.

Gryaznov never mentioned to his French friends his former career in finance as a partner in a Russian investment fund, nor his stint with a Luxembourg-based mergers and acquisitions firm. Let alone his assignments for the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia's domestic intelligence service.

On July 21, Gryaznov was arrested in his apartment on Rue Saint-Denis. According to the Paris prosecutor's office, the search enabled investigators to find "diplomatic material," without specifying its nature. Two days later, Gryaznov was placed in detention and charged with "intelligence with a foreign power with a view to incite hostilities in France," a crime punishable by 30 years in prison.

Griaznov was noticed by several European intelligence services starting in May 2024. On May 8, in Turkey, the self-proclaimed "private chef" was due to board a plane from Istanbul to Paris. Except that the FSB agent had had too much to drink. Barred from boarding the plane, he took another flight from Bulgaria. On the way, in a restaurant, he called his superior from the Russian domestic intelligence service. Two months before the start of the Olympic Games in Paris, the young man blurted out that "the French are going to have an opening ceremony like no other"

A series of exclusive documents, obtained by Le Monde, Der Spiegel and Insider, enable us to retrace the agent's precise route to France and shed light on his long-standing close links with Russian intelligence services.

As early as the late 2000s, in his email inbox, which Le Monde was able to access, the young lawyer by training received emails asking him to "check" the profiles of certain Russian intelligence officers. In 2009, he received resumes, including that of Andrey Belyashov, a veteran of the Chechen war and a major in the Russian army. These messages contrasted with his official job in a Luxembourg law firm. Gryaznov, then in his 20s, bragged about these confidential emails to one of his superiors in the law firm.

Also among these emails, Gryaznov received another request in 2010: to verify information on a "senior economic security officer." This message was soon accompanied by a crudely produced photo montage, presumably for an official identity document.

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