‘De Gaulle Aide A Soviet Agent’

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31655, 16 April 1968, Page 15

‘De Gaulle Aide A Soviet Agent’

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) PARIS, April 15. Fears that France’s State security system is in danger are mounting in Paris after allegations by a French newspaper that one of President de Gaulle’s closest collaborators is a Soviet agent.

The allegations are pub-| lished in the current issue of “Le Canard Enchaine,” a satirical weekly known to be frequently well-informed on political and State affairs. It says an account of the affair has been written by Colonel Thiraud de Vosjoly, an officer who provided liaison between the French counterespionage service, S.D.E.C.E., and America’s C.1.A., and is to be published by the magazine, “Life.” The source of the revelations is reported to be Anatol Dolnytsin, a former Soviet K.G.B. agent who defected to the C.I.A. seven years ago. According to “Le Canard Enchaine,” Vosjoly’s account appeared last year in fictional form in “Topaz,” a novel by the American author, Leon Uris. The novel tells-of a Soviet spy ring in Paris headed by two Soviet agents—one, a senior French official in N.A.T.O. and the other, a close collaborator of President de Gaulle. The newspaper identifies the first of these men as Georges Paques, who was sentenced ta life imprisonment

|in 1964 on charges of spying for the Soviet Union. The second man is described as one of President de Gaulle's most trusted aides who was in charge of the under-cover French security service, known popularly as “Barbouzes.” Leon Uris’s novel, published by McGraw Hill in the United States, never found a publisher in France, and senior French officials have dismissed as rumours reports that it was founded on fact. The "Sunday Times" in London will begin publishing Colonel de Vosjoly’s story next week. It says it has checked what he had written, and adds: “It is true—and dynamite.” The “Observer” says Vosjoly “defected” to the C.I.A. after Paris had demanded bis recall from America because of his too-close liaison with the C.I.A. at the time of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. “His latest reported move, to publish his story in ’Life.’ is seen by some French sources as a C.I.A. propaganda campaign to discredit de Gaulle’s regime,” the “Observer” saysi