Thursday, October 21, 2010

DIRECTION DE LA SURVEILLANCE DU TERRITOIRE (DST)

France’s internal security agency, created in 1944 and first headed by Roger-Paul Warin, alias Roger Wybot, then age 32. Wybot ran the organization until he was replaced in 1958 by Christian Fouchet, supposedly because President Charles de Gaulle suspected his hotel accommodation in Paris had been the subject of DST surveillance.
Subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior and based in the rue Nelaton near Les Invalides, the DST fulfills counterespionage and counterterrorism roles. In June 1975 two unarmed DST officers, Raymond Doubs and Jean Donatini, were shot dead and Jean Harranz was wounded when they attempted to question Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as “Carlos the Jackal,” at his apartment in the rue Toullier.
In 1979 the DST successfully recruited a KGB Directorate T officer, Col. Vladimir I. Vetrov, and ran him in the Soviet Union under the misleading code name FAREWELL, chosen deliberately to attract attention away from the French assistant military attaché who had been assigned the task of handling his communications in Moscow. Vetrov’s value as a source, hemorrhaging scientific and technical data, came to an end when he was convicted of murdering his mistress in November 1982, but his detailed information about the Paris rezidentura enabled the DST to identify 47 KGB officers, who were expelled from France in April 1983.
The other heads of the DST have been Jean-Gabriel Eriau (1959–61), Daniel Doustin (1961–64), Tony Roche (1964–68), Jean Rochet (1968–72), Marcel Chalet (1975–82), Yves Bonnet (1982–91), Philippe Parant (1991–97), and the current director, Jean-Jacques Pascal.