Farewell Dossier

The Farewell Dossier was a collection of documents containing intelligence gathered and handed over to the French DST by the KGB defector Colonel Vladimir Vetrov (code-named "Farewell") in 1981-1982, during the Cold War.

An engineer, Vetrov was assigned to evaluate information on Western hardware and software gathered by spies ("Line X") for Directorate T, the directorate for scientific and technical intelligence collection from the West. 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 250 Line X officers stationed under legal cover in embassies around the world.

This information led to a mass expulsion of Soviet technology spies. The CIA also mounted a counter-intelligence operation that transferred modified hardware and software designs over to the Soviets, resulting in the spectacular trans-Siberian incident of 1982. The details of the operation were declassified in 1996.

This story inspired the 2009 french film "L'affaire Farewell" with Emir Kusturica and Guillaume Canet.

Background

French President François Mitterrand made the information available to the United States and NATO by the KGB defector in place . Vetrov's information provided the means by which the United States used the Central Intelligence Agency to turn Directorate T into a weapon against the Soviet Union itself.

Vetrov was a 53-year-old engineer assigned to evaluate the intelligence collected by Directorate T, an ideal position for a defector in place. He had volunteered his services for ideological reasons. He supplied a list of Soviet organizations in scientific collection and summary reports from Directorate T on the goals, achievements, and unfilled objectives of the program. Farewell revealed the names of more than 200 Line X officers stationed in 10 KGB residents in the West, along with more than 100 leads to Line X recruitments.

Into the receptive climate of the Reagan administration, aggressively fighting the Cold War, came French president François Mitterrand, bearing news of Farewell—that is, Colonel Vetrov. On July 19, 1981, in a private meeting associated with the July 1981 Ottawa economic summit, he told Reagan of Farewell and offered the intelligence to the United States.

William Safire said Mitterrand described the man as belonging to a section that was evaluating the achievements of Soviet efforts to acquire western technology.

Reagan expressed great interest in Mitterrand's delicate revelations and also thanked him for his offer to have the material sent to the United States government. It was passed through Vice President Bush and then to CIA. The door had opened into Line X.

Reagan passed this on to William Casey, his Director of Central Intelligence, who Safire says is "now remembered only for the Iran-contra fiasco. Casey called in Gus W. Weiss, then working with Thomas Reed on the staff of the National Security Council. After studying the list of hundreds of Soviet agents and purchasers (including one cosmonaut) assigned to this penetration in the US and Japan, Weiss counseled against deportation." "The Farewell Dossier also identified hundreds of case officials, agents at their posts and other suppliers of information through the West and Japan. Besides identifying agents, the most useful information brought by the Dossier consisted of the "shopping list" and its aims in terms of acquisition of technology in the coming years."

The dossier, under the name of Farewell, reached the CIA in August 1981. It made it quite clear that the Soviets had been spending years carrying out their research and development activities. Given the enormous transfer of technology by radar, computers, machine-tools and semi-conductors from the United States to the Soviet Union, one could say that the Pentagon was in an arms race with itself.

"Seven years later, we learned how the KGB responded."

CIA response

While Vetrov was recruited by the French, the Western counter-reaction came from the US.

Safire was writing a series of hardline columns denouncing the financial backing being given Moscow by Germany and Britain for a major natural gas pipeline from Siberia to Europe. That project would give control of European energy supplies to the Communists, as well as generate US$8 billion a year to support Soviet computer and satellite research.

"Intelligence shortcomings, as we see, have a thousand fathers; secret intelligence triumphs are orphans. Here is the unremarked story of "the Farewell dossier": how a CIA campaign of computer sabotage resulting in a huge explosion in Siberia -- all engineered by a mild-mannered economist named Gus Weiss -- helped us win the Cold War."

Under normal circumstances, success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan; in the world of intelligence gathering, nothing could be further from the truth. Weiss worked down the hall from me [Safire] in the Nixon administration. In early 1974, he wrote a report on Soviet advances in technology through purchasing and copying that led the beleaguered president -- detente notwithstanding -- to place restrictions on the export of computers and software to the USSR.

The CIA mounted a counter-intelligence operation that transferred modified hardware and software designs over to the Soviets. They instigated an operation of disinformation and faulty technology transfer. The most famous incident was the sabotage of the new trans-Siberian pipeline, which delivered natural gas from the Urengoi gas fields in Siberia into the West.

The Soviets needed sophisticated control systems to automate the operation of the pipeline's valves, compressors, and storage facilities. As the United States was unwilling to provide the necessary technical infrastructure to operate the pipeline, a KGB operative was sent to infiltrate a Canadian software supplier in an attempt to steal the needed software.

The CIA was tipped off by Farewell and informed the Canadians about the attempted theft. The U.S. then delivered doctored software through Canadian software firms into Russian hands. This software, designed to run the pumps, turbines, and valves, was a logic bomb programmed to malfunction after a period of smooth running. The malfunction would reset the pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures that were far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints, and welds.

The result, in the summer of 1982, was the greatest non-nuclear explosion ever seen from space. There were no casualties of the pipeline explosion, but it has been argued that significant damage was made to the Soviet economy. In time, the Soviets came to realize that they had been stealing faulty technology, but this only exacerbated the situation. As they did not know which technology was sound and which was doctored, all became suspect.

Implications of technology transfer

In [his] book, Reed, also former secretary of the Air Force, raises the curtain on an incident in the early 1980s that demonstrated, in his opinion, the importance of American technological superiority in defeating the Soviets in the nuclear game that never turned hot. "There are several lessons learned from the Cold War that count today," Reed said in a recent interview. "Number one is pay attention to what goes on overseas. Don't let the Hitlers and Stalins proliferate." "Number two," he said, "is technology counts." According to an unpublished document known as the Farewell dossier, the United States supplied the Soviet Union with faulty software that eventually led to a major pipeline disaster. Reed said such a ploy would never have been undertaken if the Soviet secret police, the KGB, had not been engaged in the theft of Western technology. "The U.S. was not in the business of polluting technology it sold abroad, but Farewell was about the Soviets stealing technology," he said. "Once you get into that business, you pay the consequences."

Counterintelligence response

Another result was that the United States and its NATO allies later "rolled up the entire Line X collection network, both in the U.S. and overseas." Weiss said "the heart of Soviet technology collection crumbled and would not recover." "Mikhail Gorbachev became furious when arrests and deportations of Soviet agents began in various countries, since he was unaware that the contents of the Farewell Dossier were in the hands of the main heads of NATO governments. In a meeting of the Politburo on October 22, 1986, called to inform colleagues about the Reykjavik Summit, he alleged that the Americans were "acting very discourteously and behaving like bandits". Even though he showed a complacent face to the public, privately Gorbachev would refer to Reagan as "a liar".

"During the final days of the Soviet Union, the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the USSR had to work blind. Gorbachev had no idea about what was happening in the laboratories and high technology industries in the United States; he was totally unaware that Soviet laboratories and industries had been compromised and to what point."

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 executed in 1983. 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 all along 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.

Further analysis

The campaign of countermeasures based on Farewell's Dossier was an economic war. Even though there were no casualties in terms of lives lost because of the gas pipeline explosion, significant damage was made to the Soviet economy. As a grand finale, between 1984 and 1985, the United States and its NATO allies put an end to this operation which ended with efficacy the capacity of the USSR to capture technology at a time when Moscow was caught between a defective economy, on one side, and a US President determined to prevail and end the cold war on the other.

See also

• Trans-Siberian Pipeline
• Siberian pipeline sabotage

Further reading

• Gordon Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Birds: Soviet Post-War Defectors (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, New York, 1989) pp. 311–327