Original subtitles

Life as a double agent can cause anyone to break.

The story of vladimir vetrov, high ranking kgb officer,

And secret operative for the french intelligence service,

Is one of the most bizarre to emerge from the cold war.

Part thriller, part charade, It's a tale of infidelity, Bravery and betrayal, that led to one

Of the most astonishing trojan horse operations In the history of espionage.

And ultimately helped hasten the collapse Of the entire soviet system.

Vladimir vetrov, the man who would become one Of the most important spies of the cold war,

Was born to modest means in 1932.

He grew up in central moscow, In a one room flat with his parents.

Yet from a young age, It appeared vetrov was destined for great things.

He was a very clever man.

Clever people are identified very early on In the soviet system.

So he was pretty early on directed to very good studies

And almost like programmed to become a kgb officer.

Intelligent, and an excellent sportsman, Vetrov was a popular young man.

He also had a big ego.

Vetrov graduated as an engineer From one of the country's top universities.

Then he was handpicked to join the kgb training school.

But he had bigger dreams.

Shortly after graduating, vetrov met svetlana barashkova, A renowned beauty and a top athlete.

The two hit it off immediately.

Within a year, they were married.

He's happy, he has the life, he has a nice woman, He has a nice job, this perfect life.

By the late 1960s, The cold war was beginning to thaw.

Both the u.S.A. And the soviet union were keen To build closer relations.

This era would become known as detente.

Richard allen worked in the nixon white house When the detente policy was adopted.

In the strictest sense of the word, detente means simply, A relaxation of tensions.

In that sense detente was good Because relaxing tensions is exactly What nations ought to do.

But for the russians, this was a smokescreen.

Behind the bravado of the arms race, The soviets were in deep economic trouble,

Falling behind america in almost every area.

They needed detente as diplomatic cover For their real mission, to steal western industrial,

Scientific and technological secrets.

And that's where vetrov comes in.

The kgb assigned him to a department Known as directorate t,

Responsible for industrial espionage on a massive scale.

Directorate t was home to a secretive ring Of industrial spies, known as line x.

It was a web of spies spread out Pretty much everywhere

In the world that was supposed to bring back home

Technology that the military industrial complex was using.

We knew that we were being ripped off by the soviets.

But I had no idea of the scale of the rip-off, The worldwide scale of the rip-off.

At the heart of the operation, Was vladimir vetrov.

As a rising star of the kgb,

Vetrov earned one of its most glamorous postings.

An important bridge-head between east and west,

Paris was a happy hunting ground for soviet intelligence.

It was also the dream posting For any kgb agent, and his wife.

They were coming from the ussr in the '60s It was pretty gray And they arrive in the gay paris.

In France was just the biggest time ever, The temps glorieuses as we call them,

Life was so easy here.

Wining, dining, and having fun was What vetrov enjoyed more than anything else.

Mikhail lyubimov was a kgb spy in london At the same time vetrov was in paris.

He knew how attractive western life could be For a young soviet officer.

He was a man who liked life,

A typical hedonist who likes wines, women,

Oh, a man who likes life very much, too much!

But it wasn't all champagne and oysters.

Vetrov had a crucial mission, To recruit french scientists to the soviet cause,

And to steal their secrets.

He was doing the job of getting acquainted To french scientists to extort them information,

He was an agent.

But it wasn't long before the bright lights And freedoms of paris made vetrov

And svetlana question the merits Of the soviet system they had left behind,

To the watching french intelligence service, The dst, this open criticism

Of the soviet regime was a red flag.

Raymond nart worked for the dst at the time.

He believed vetrov might be persuaded to defect to the west.

He instructed a contact, A man named jacques prevost, to monitor him.

The french watched and waited For the right time to make their move.

Then, vetrov got himself into a spot of bother.

Vetrov couldn't tell his kgb bosses About the crash,

It would have been catastrophic for his career.

Crashing the embassy car is something That could have brought you back to russia right away.

Overnight, the car was fixed, Painted and returned, good as new.

Prevost had made the problem go away.

Vetrov promised that one day He would repay the favor to his friend prevost.

Vetrov was now a spy who owed a debt To a member of a foreign intelligence service.

And in the world of spies, debts are always collected.

By July 1970, vladmir vetrov was one Of the top kgb spies in paris.

Enjoying everything the city had to offer.

But the good times were about to come to an end.

The kgb allowed their agents to stay abroad For just five years at a time.

Vetrov, and his glamorous wife svetlana, Had to return home.

But back in moscow, the cold war was a lot colder.

Life was hard, luxuries much more difficult to come by.

Their return was a bitter pill to swallow.

That was a kind of dream life And they were in paradise almost, And then they went back to hell.

Vetrov realized that the kgb was no longer

The meritocracy in which he had thrived as a younger man.

The big change that there was Between the soviet union of the '60s

And the soviet union of the '70s was That competence was not any more the issue.

Now, those at the top came From the party hierarchy, known as the nomenklatura.

Vetrov was side-lined into a dead end desk job.

He got totally put aside And all opportunity of promotion was over for him, He knew that.

He was enraged at the incompetence of the People above him

And the unfairness that has been done to him.

As vetrov's career crumbled, So too did his marriage.

You're going back home in a gray country, Of course the relationship

And the couple are gonna be not as ideal As it was during the dream life they had in paris.

Both he and svetlana became embroiled In a string of affairs.

Once the kgb's golden boy, Vetrov was now stuck in his office,

Bored, drinking himself into an early grave.

His punishment was kind of a chinese torture Of day to day going to the office

And having to obey to people That were a lot less bright than him.

And since he had a strong ego of course, That was just torture for him everyday.

But the kgb had made a crucial mistake.

Though pushed down the pecking order, Vetrov still had access to a treasure trove

Of secret documents from line x industrial agents.

Vetrov was in the unusual situation Of receiving stolen technology from around the world

And being more or less the distribution point for it, Whether it would go to the defense sector,

Whether it would go to the industrial sector, Whether it would go to the intelligence sector.

He saw all the collection done by the kgb Around the world on technology.

It funneled into him.

Vetrov was sitting on a gold mine.

It wasn't a very clever move from the kgb To put some frustrated guy at the heart

Of the entire spying network of the soviet union.

It's just giving an ak -47 to an angry kid.

Vetrov had reached his absolute limit, Both personally and professionally.

Something had to give.

In December 1980, Vetrov made the decision to cross the line To spy for the enemy.

Vetrov had decided to switch sides.

The only question, to whom would he turn?

One day, raymond nart, of the french intelligence service,

Received a letter from his contact jacques prevost.

Inside was a copy of an urgent note That prevost had received,

From his old friend vladimir vetrov.

Nart knew the name well.

A decade earlier, he had picked vetrov out As a potential defector.

By this time, Nart was head of the soviet section of the dst.

As the internal french intelligence agency,

It's the equivalent to mi5, or the fbi, but much smaller.

The french intelligence service is a joke,

Was a joke at least, with no experience of work in russia.

Yet the fact that the dst operated Only in France, meant that, unlike mi6 or the cia,

It had not been infiltrated by kgb moles.

Of course vladimir vetrov knew that, And this is why he chose them.

Now, for the first time, Raymond nart and the dst would have to run an operation,

In moscow, behind the iron curtain.

As they had no agents in moscow, how could they run it?

Well, at huge risk, they chose to approach a civilian.

The dst made contact with a man named xavier ameil.

In his late 50s, with no training in spy craft, Ameil was one of the few french engineers working

In moscow at the time.

When the dst came calling, Ameil immediately agreed to act as vetrov's handler.

So in March 1981, The french intelligence services sent ameil

Into the lion's den, to make contact with vetrov in moscow.

He could have fled to France, And would have been highly recognized

And celebrated as a hero of the cold war.

But that's not what he wanted.

What vetrov wanted was to be Where he could do most damage to the kgb.

And that was by remaining in his moscow post For as long as possible.

When ameil sent vetrov's documents back to paris, Raymond nart was stunned.

The dst believed these documents were Just the tip of the iceberg.

They instructed ameil To continue the operation, codenamed farewell.

Every meeting, vetrov would hand over a plastic bag, Stuffed full of state secrets.

Vetrov was giving him the most secretive documents Of the kgb on the Friday,

And it took xavier and his wife the whole weekend

To make copies and return them to commence on the Monday.

Ameil, the middle-aged engineer, Had found himself in the midst

Of perhaps the biggest spy operation of the cold war.

Nobody could suspect him, he was just an engineer.

It's because he took no precaution That the kgb didn't pay attention to him,

So it was the perfect cover.

French intelligence was pulling off A major undercover operation

In the world's biggest police state.

But there was one big problem.

As a civilian, ameil didn't have diplomatic immunity.

The dst knew they were placing ameil In danger of imprisonment, possibly even torture and death.

So they decided to pull him out.

But this couldn't be the end of the operation.

Vetrov was perhaps the west's most valuable double agent.

And operation farewell was about to go global.

On the may the 22nd, 1981, A frenchwoman known as marguerite was shopping

In moscow's cheryomushkinski market.

A housewife and mother of five, She was about to become embroiled

In one of the biggest spy stories of the cold war.

Two weeks earlier, The french intelligence service had withdrawn

Vladimir vetrov's first handler, the engineer xavier ameil,

Leaving the kgb spy out in the cold.

Now raymond nart, the man in charge of the case, Had to find a new handler for vetrov.

The french security services had No agents working in moscow.

So raymond nart turned to a friend.

What follows is the voice of a man codenamed paul

Who to this day can't appear on camera.

Paul wasn't a spy, But his job as a military attache in the french embassy

In moscow, meant he did have diplomatic immunity.

Yet before any meeting took place with paul, An increasingly volatile vetrov added a condition.

He insisted that the first contact should be With a woman and at a moscow market.

Simply because it would look more natural To take and deliver documents at the market.

So paul went back to moscow and asked his wife, marguerite.

Out of loyalty to the west, and to her husband,

Paul's wife marguerite agreed To a pre-arranged brush pass with vetrov.

But soon the strain was simply too much For marguerite to continue.

To protect his wife, paul himself stepped in.

Against his wishes, vetrov would have to meet with a man,

His third amateur handler in as many months.

In the 10 months following may 1981, Vetrov passed more than 4,000 classified documents to paul,

The largest cache of stolen information ever To emerge from the soviet union.

This information was known As the farewell dossier by french intelligence.

Its contents revealed the extraordinary depth Of the soviet's industrial espionage mission

Against the west.

More importantly, there were all the codes Of the radar coverage of the u.S.A.

So there was a direct threat To national security of the u.S.A.

As an added prize, Vetrov also provided a list of 250 line-x agents

Around the world, some of whom he had personally recruited.

With information this big,

The french had no choice but to inform their allies.

It was time to call the americans.

Ladies and gentlemen, The president of the united states.

Under the new president, ronald reagan, The cold war was heating up again.

In one speech, he coined a phrase That would become infamous.

To ignore the facts of history And the aggressive impulses of an evil empire,

In the struggle between right and wrong, and good and evil.

Ronald reagan thought That the russians did represent a threat.

He called it an evil empire.

Ronald reagan said "the soviets will lie, cheat and steal "to get whatever they want."

There was a collective gasp from the press corps In the east room of the white house.

I followed president reagan out to the doors.

He said, "the soviets, they do lie, cheat and steal

"to get whatever they want, don't they, dick?"

And I said, "they sure do, mr president."

And he said, "I thought so."

Reagan's instincts were right.

At the 1981 g7 summit, French president francois mitterrand revealed

Vetrov's intelligence to his american counterpart.

It was proof the soviets were stealing nuclear, military

And technological secrets from under the noses Of the american intelligence services.

They had such deep penetrations Of our technology world That they knew what we were doing

And they were one generation behind it.

This changed everything about how we deal with it.

The americans sensed an opportunity.

President reagan turned to me And asked me my advice about how to proceed,

And my advice was to take this ball and run with it.

They came up with a plan to use vetrov As a trojan horse, a source at the heart of the kgb,

Through whom they could feed faulty technology back To the russians.

We could bamboozle the soviets with technology

That wouldn't function correctly when deployed.

Over the next decade, Western spies fed this flawed information To line-x agents across europe,

Meaning dodgy computer chips were installed In military equipment, and defective blueprints

Undermined the soviet space program.

Some say sabotage by the u.S. Intelligence service led

To a catastrophic explosion in a siberian oil pipeline.

The cia's grand plan Fatally undermined soviet science and technology.

It was a critical step Towards the west's eventual victory in the cold war.

The whole project of misinformation Or disinformation worked very well.

We were able to disinform them And mislead them and I think that was critical.

But back in moscow, this entire plan hinged On an amateur spy, paul,

Picking up vetrov's crucial intelligence in plastic bags And photocopying and returning it

Before anyone noticed it was gone.

Vetrov and paul were running a huge risk,

And as the months wore on, they inevitably became friends.

But the huge pressure of working As a double agent was taking its toll on vetrov.

He was drinking heavily, And had begun a tempestuous affair with a kgb translator,

Named ludmila ochikina.

He is using paul almost as a shrink.

The cold war was becoming secondary.

Vetrov's friendship with paul wasn't enough To stop him spiraling out of control,

As their final meeting revealed.

And at the next scheduled rendezvous, Vetrov didn't show up.

Paul didn't know it then, But he would never see his friend again.

Working as a mole had placed vetrov under enormous strain.

But no-one could have predicted Just how spectacularly things would fall apart.

On February the 22nd, 1982, Russian double agent vladmir vetrov offered

To drive his mistress ludmila, A kgb translator, home from work.

Stopping in a lay-by on the outskirts of moscow, Vetrov surprised his lover with champagne.

Then, the story goes, he turned on her.

When a witness tried to intervene,

Vetrov lost control.

Miraculously, ludmila survived.

But the bystander, who had come to her aid, lay dying.

Vetrov's breakdown had played out In the most horrific way imaginable.

And now, perhaps the most valuable spy In the cold war was compromised.

The following day, vetrov was arrested, And charged with murder.

He refused to reveal what had driven him To commit such violence.

One theory is that ludmila, The kgb secretary, knew too much.

I think that in a very simple way, She was blackmailing him, because she knew.

I guess probably he was trying to negotiate with her, And it didn't work out,

And it turned into a sort of horrific scene.

Ludmila has remained mostly silent.

She testified she knew nothing of vetrov's betrayal, And that her lover simply lost his mind.

There was too much pressure on him, just too much.

Vetrov was tried, And sentenced to 15 years in prison for murder.

At that point, the soviet authorities still had No idea the man they'd imprisoned was one

Of the most important double agents of the cold war.

Locked up in the kgb's notorious lefortovo prison, Vetrov was no longer an active asset

For the u.S. Or the french.

The only contact he had with the outside world was Through his estranged wife, svetlana.

Sergei kostin believes These letters portray a man in total denial.

Vetrov even told svetlana, "my only regret is that I was not able to kill her."

Although locked away, Vetrov was still in great danger,

Because his cellmate happened To be a kgb counterintelligence agent, valery rechensky.

Rechensky had been trained In the art of extracting information.

And as time went on, his suspicions about vetrov grew.

Rechensky reported his suspicions To his superiors.

And the kgb began to question If vetrov was more than a murderer.

At once our people started to think, "oh, there is something else behind the whole affair."

So he got into the trap himself.

Then, in April 1983, something happened that In effect, signed vetrov's death warrant.

The french expelled 47 diplomats From the soviet embassy in paris.

Many of them were the same line x industrial agents That vetrov had informed on.

It was only a matter of time Before the kgb traced the source Of the intel back to vetrov.

They had to use the information And using the information

He had provided was condemning vetrov, and vetrov knew it.

That's why he knew he would die.

Vetrov was questioned and confessed all.

Instead of pleading forgiveness, He wrote a scorching condemnation Of the soviet system,

That he called "the confessions of a traitor".

He was able for once to tell them the truth, Tell them exactly that

They were betraying the country somehow, As well, much more than he was.

That was probably the greatest satisfaction He must have had.

Today, vladimir ippolitovich vetrov is Many things to many people.

Of course he is a traitor.

If you belong to some service you must work in this service

And if you want to become a traitor, be a traitor, right?

In my view, vetrov should be a major hero of the cold war.

He should have as many stars As he possibly could have surrounding.

One thing is clear, Vladimir vetrov had a major impact on the cold war.

Vetrov's case has accelerated the fall Of the soviet union by many years.

So very decisive historical moment Which makes of it, of course to me the greatest spy story

Of the 20th century.

In his prison cell, Vetrov knew that the kgb only had one way Of dealing with traitors.

Was he terrified in the moments before he was executed?

Yeah, probably.

But it's just possible That there was some small part of him that felt victorious.

Vetrov had always wanted to achieve great things.

And at the final moment, He knew that he had changed the course of history.