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During the Cold War, Jean Clémentin, journalist for the French satirical weekly, would have worked in a submarine for the Czechoslovak secret services, reveals an investigation by “L’Obs”.
The current management of the “Chained Duck” was flabbergasted when it learned that it had sheltered a spy in the pay of the Eastern bloc during the Cold War.
AFP
One of the pillars of the French satirical weekly “Le Canard enchaîné” worked in the 1960s for the secret services of Czechoslovakia, then a vassal of the Soviet Union, the French weekly “L’Obs” said on Tuesday. And this, for more than a decade.
Quoting a file from the StB, the Czechoslovak secret services, exhumed by the Czech historian Jan Koura, vice-rector at Charles University in Prague, the weekly reports that Jean Clémentin, one of the great feathers of the “Duck”, spied on behalf of this Eastern bloc satellite. “From 1957 to 1969, Jean Clémentin was also a paid spy for the Czechoslovakians, therefore from the Soviet camp”, explains “L’Obs” in its investigation.
“We are obviously not aware, we are flabbergasted”, affirmed Nicolas Brimo, current director of the “Canard enchaîné”, adding that “if there was something more to add, we will do it in our newspaper”.
Code name: “Pipa”
Between 1957 and 1969, “Pipa” (his code name) “delivered no less than 300 notes, during 270 meetings in France and abroad. He also participated actively – and consciously – in three disinformation operations, by publishing in “Le Canard enchaîné” articles designed by the StB”, affirms the investigation. “He was even sent to London and Bonn (editor’s note: then capital of West Germany) by the secret service for the purpose of gathering intelligence.”
Jean Clémentin, still according to the same survey, would have assumed his first sympathies for the Eastern bloc during his coverage of the Indochina war (1946-1954), where he was disgusted by the methods of the French colonial army. . It was on this theme that he began his collaboration with a member of the Czechoslovak Embassy in Paris, who would become his case officer.
French counterintelligence had doubts
The journalist admits his attraction for the “popular democracies” of the East, “but (…) there is also the lure of profit”, assures the investigation. “He loves money,” wrote his attending officer, noting that the man already married twice, who claims to have “five mistresses”, does not have sufficient income to support his lifestyle. “In total, in the first five years of his active collaboration, his dealing officers (…) will entrust him with 23,600 francs, or around 40,000 euros today”, explains “L’ Obs”, which also evokes “a house in Meudon, in the bourgeois suburbs of the capital”.
The investigation also indicates that in Paris, the Directorate of Territorial Surveillance (in charge at the time of counterintelligence) had many doubts regarding the role of the “Duck” executive, without ever initiating proceedings.
Jean Clémentin will retire in 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now 98 years old, he is protected from any prosecution by prescription.
(AFP)
