Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage

The ("External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service"), abbreviated SDECE (), was France's external intelligence agency from 6 November 1944 to 2 April 1982, when it was replaced by the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE). It should not be confused with the Deuxième Bureau which was intended to pursue purely military intelligence.

Under the Fourth Republic the SDECE was subordinated to the President of the Council. From the onset of the Fifth Republic and until 1962, it was subordinate to Prime Minister Michel Debré and its resources largely dedicated to the Algerian War. Following the Mehdi Ben Barka affair, General Charles de Gaulle subordinated the service to the Ministry of Defence, and the service was gradually militarized.

History The SDECE was founded in 1946 as a successor to the wartime Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action which was seen as too closely associated with the Gaullists to properly serve the republic.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 497. SDECE was known in France as la piscine (the swimming pool) because its HQ in Paris was located next to a public swimming pool.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 498. The SDECE was officially responsible to the Minister of Defense, but in fact reported to the president acting through a special adviser on intelligence matters.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 497. The SDECE was frequently involved in bureaucratic disputes with the Deuxième Bureau in Vietnam and Algeria, and within France with the Sûreté Générale, which led successive directors of the SDECE to see their real enemies as the other branches of the republic concerned with intelligence.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 497. As was usually the case with French intelligence, the division of responsibilities between rival agencies led to different arms of the French state to spend more time locked in bureaucratic disputes with one another than anything else.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 497. In September 1949, SDECE played a prominent role in the "scandal of the generals", when the Sûreté Générale revealed that the Army chief of staff had trusted confidential documents relating to the war in Vietnam to another general, who had given them to an SDECE agent who in turn had given them to the Vietminh.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 497. The French state tried to bury the story by ordering the newspapers not to print it, but the Paris correspondent of Time had reported to the New York office of Time.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 497. Unknown to him, the French state was illegally listening in to dispatches filed by foreign correspondents from Paris.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 497. The French embassy in Washington tried to suppress the story as embarrassing to France, but the U.S. government refused, citing the First Amendment, leading to the scandal of the Generals' affair as once the news broke in the United States, it was picked up by the French media.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 497.

In the 1950s, SDECE had a reputation for engaging in bizarre operations like stealing fuel from Soviet planes that had landed in France to analyze the antifreeze contents of Soviet jet fuel and for drugging Soviet espionage couriers on the Orient Express to rifle through the contents of their briefcases.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 497. The cryptographic division of the SDECE was well regarded, having broken several Soviet diplomatic codes, but its attempts at playing the role of a para-military organization was less successful.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 497. In 1951 SDECE created the Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés para-military organization in Vietnam, part of the "Action Service" (together with 11th shock parachute regiment), to counter the Vietminh who were fighting for independence from France, but the general hostility of the Vietnamese to the French limited the appeal of fighting for France among the Vietnamese people.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 497 The SDECE parachuted agents both in Vietnam and Eastern Europe, but the SDECE was well penetrated by French communists who provided Moscow with all the details of the operations.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 497. In particular, the operations in Eastern Europe in 1950s were a complete disaster as every single agent parachuted into Eastern Europe was captured.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 497.

As in Vietnam, during the Algerian War, the SDECE played a prominent role in waging la guerre sale ("the dirty war") against the enemies of the republic.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 497. The 1950s-60s are remembered as the "era of political assassinations" by SDECE agents as one of the agency's main jobs was to assassinate members of the FLN.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 497. The number of killings dramatically stepped up in 1958 when Charles de Gaulle gave the SDECE's Action Service carte blanche to kill suspected members of the FLN under the cover of a pseudo-terrorist group called the Red Hand.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 pages 497-498. The first two murders took place in West Germany, where an arms dealer who sold arms to the FLN was killed when the SDECE planted a bomb in his car while an anti-French Algerian politician was killed in a drive-by shooting.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 498. The fact that the various Länder police forces of West Germany were ineffective in investigating the "Red Hand" assassinations committed by SDECE was the result of a secret agreement with General Reinhard Gehlen, the chief of the Bundesnachrichtendienst under which the French and German intelligence were to share information in exchange for allowing the SDECE to commit murders on German soil.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 498. One SDECE agent, Philippe L. Thyraud de Vosjoli, wrote in his 1970 memoir Lamia: "Dozens of assassinations were carried out. Besides the use of guns or knives, more sophisticated methods had been perfected. Carbon dioxide guns ejecting small syringes had been purchased in the United States-but the SDECE people substituted the tranquilizing drug with a lethal poison. The victim showed all the symptoms of having suffered a heart attack".Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 498. Besides for members of the FLN, the SDECE killed left-wing French intellectuals who supported the FLN, arms dealers and other anti-French nationalists in Africa.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 498. The SDECE also engaged in hijacking six ships bound for Algeria with arms for the FLN between 1956–61, and blew up one ship packed with weapons for the FLN in Hamburg harbor with a naval mine.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 498. Within Algeria itself, the SDECE assassinated suspected FLN members and provided intelligence to the Army to indicate "disloyal" villages that were to be burned down.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 498. Many of the assassins were pro-French Vietnamese who fled to France after Vietnamese independence, and were quite willing to kill and/or be killed for France.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 498. In 1960, many of the Action Service's killers, including most of the Vietnamese, went over the OAS, leading to the Action Service to dispatch new agents to Algeria to assassinate the former Action Service assassins who joined the OAS.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 498. In January 1961, the Action Service blew up the headquarters of the OAS's assassins.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 498. In 1960, de Gaulle founded the Service d'Action Civique (SAC), an organization linked to SDECE of about 8,000 that spied on his political opponents, broke up anti-Gaullist demonstrations and engaged in "dirty tricks" for the SDECE.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 498.

In December 1961, the SDECE was rocked by scandal of the Martel affair (also known as the Sapphire Affair) when a KGB defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn revealed to the CIA the existence of the Soviet Sapphire spy ring within the SDECE.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 487. President John F. Kennedy wrote a letter to President de Gaulle, detailing Golitsyn’s revelations, which was handed to de Gaulle personally by the CIA station chief in Paris.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 487. De Gaulle, however, believed the claim that the Sapphire spy ring existed was a CIA plot to disorganize the SDECE, and ordered the SDECE to break off all co-operation with the CIA.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 487. James Jesus Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence chief, seeing no French reaction to Golityn's information, ordered a "Black Bag job" (a break-in) at the French embassy in Washington to photograph the codebooks that were used to encrypt the Quai d'Orsay's radio messages, thereby allowing the Americans to know what the French were doing and to monitor the French reaction to Golitsyn’s revelations (the NSA apparently was not capable of breaking the Quai d'Orsay's codes in the 1960s).Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 487. When it was discovered the CIA had broken into the French embassy to steal the French diplomatic codes, the SDECE station chief in Washington was recalled to Paris in disgrace.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 487. Despite de Gaulle's belief that the KGB Sapphire spy ring was CIA disinformation, it was later discovered that the Sapphire spy ring did in fact exist, and that Georges Pâques, the NATO press secretary, and , an aviation scientist, were both working for the KGB.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 pages 487-488. Pâques was convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union, receiving life in prison, which was later reduced down to 20 years in prison.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 487. The Sapphire affair inspired the American novelist Leon Uris to write the 1967 novel Topaz about the Soviet penetration of the SDECE via the "Topaz" spy ring, which so closely resembled the Sapphire affair that many suspected the CIA leaked Uris information about the Sapphire case.Pomar, Norman & Allen, Thomas The Spy Book, New York: Random House, 1997 page 487.