Honeytraps do not work on French spies because their wives are used to them having affairs, a television documentary about France’s equivalent of MI6 has revealed.
Intelligence agents in the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE) said that their Russian enemies came to realise that blackmail over taking lovers was ineffective.
The stock phrase in response was “Go ahead, my wife already knows” one agent said in the Making of Secret Agents, a 90-minute documentary that gained unprecedented access to the spy agency over several weeks. It was set to air on French public TV channel France 2 on Tuesday night.
The agent known only as Nicolas, whose voice and face were blurred, says: “Defectors from the Soviet Union used to talk about the ‘French paradox’, namely if you surprised a Frenchman with a mistress by telling him, we’ve caught you red-handed with a 22-year-old called Tatyana, work for us or we’ll tell your wife, it didn’t work.
“That was because he generally said: ‘Go ahead, show her, she’ll understand,’ or ‘she already knows about it’.”