An influential French journalist and editor lived a double life as a “highly rated” KGB spy for 35 years, according to his former employer L’Express magazine.
Philippe Grumbach worked for French news outlets including L’Agence Francaise de Presse – now L’Agence France-Presse – and Libération, as well as the centre-Right news magazine L’Express, where he worked as editor, political director and editor-in-chief in the 1970s.
But L’Express has revealed that from 1946 to 1981 he was also in the service of the KGB under the alias “Brok”, feeding the Soviet secret service intel about his friends in high places, most notably François Mitterrand and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing during the French presidential election of 1974.
Grumbach was unmasked by a French PhD student who came across the journalist’s name while studying the Mitrokhin archives, a collection of highly classified documents smuggled out of Moscow and handed to British intelligence in 1992 by Soviet defector and senior archivist Vasili Mitrokhin.
In the papers, Grumbach was described as a well-connected journalist and “one of the most highly rated and longest-serving agents”.
An entry in the archive said: “‘Brok’, born in 1924, Jewish, citizen Frenchman, director of the newspaper L’Express, has collaborated since 1946.
“[He] has good personal relations with Edgar Faure, Mitterrand, the Minister of Affairs foreigners Schumann, Defferre and Servan-Schreiber, the latter entrusted him with the mission to resolve delicate issues, liaison with representatives and leaders of political parties and groups.”
