World: An Undercover Talleyrand

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The road to espionage is rarely paved with good intentions. Most of the "agents" working the dark corners of the cold war were lured there by simple greed or forced there by blackmail. But in the case of French Spy Georges Paáques, the motive was sheer do-goodism, complicated by a dash of intellectual vanity.

Since the Suûreteé blew his cover last year (TIME, Oct. 4), the chubby, urbane French press attacheé to NATO had been busy preparing his rationale. Last week, at his trial before a state security court in Paris, he unveiled it. Posed imperiously in the box, with one hand resting lightly on a thick dossier and a thin smile playing across his face, Paâques took six hours to tell his tale of misguided intelligence. His 19-year career as an agent in the pay of the Soviet Union, Paâques argued, had been nothing more than a clandestine political seminar, an effort to explain the intricacies of French policy. By filling the Russians in on Western military strength, he also felt he could countervail the "excess of weight" of the Anglo-Saxons—particularly the U.S.—in Europe and Africa, and perhaps prevent war based on miscalculation.

A Bit Choosy. Paâques believed he was ideally suited for this role. After all, he was a normalien—a graduate, like French Premier Georges Pompidou and Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, of the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure, and thus a "certified intellectual." So, first in Algiers in 1944, later in Paris, where he served in a succession of government departments, Paâques began a series of "political conversations" with a changing list of Soviet embassy personnel.

The Russians were eager to learn, gladly put up with Paāques' innocuous profiles of government ministers and long-winded explanations of French diplomatic thinking until their instructor could provide them with more valuable information. For his part, Paâques insisted that his pupils at least be apt. When an embassy official named Lysenko became his contact in 1959, Paâques complained crabbily about the Russian's "lesser intellectual capacity" and Lysenko's banal insistence on teaching him how to use a microcamera.

A Message from Garcia. In 1962 the Russians found an ideal student for their French teacher. Vasily Vlasov, first secretary in the Soviet embassy, clucked sympathetically at Paāques' revelations of "the aggressive intentions of the United States," urged Paâques to turn down a job in French counterespionage in favor of one on NATO's information staff.

"He thought I had neither the character nor the temperament for counterespionage work," Paâques told the court. "He was interested in my fate."