L'ECLAIREUR - "You don't choose to join the KGB, the KGB chooses you."

L'Éclaireur — From recruitment to training, the true and astonishing story of the only KGB spy to have infiltrated the ENA in order to penetrate the French administration

"You don't choose to join the KGB, the KGB chooses you." When he entered the Institute of State International Relations (MGIMO) in Moscow at the age of seventeen, Sergei Jirnov was far from imagining that his steps would soon be guided by the KGB.

And yet, the KGB had chosen him to join the supreme elite of its spy network: the "scouts". This is the term used for the "illegals" — those whose mission is to infiltrate the Western enemy deeply and over the long term by passing themselves off as one of its own. It is a clandestine training that takes place outside the traditional channels, compelling the chosen one to conduct, within his own country, the classic path of an ordinary citizen alongside that of a secret agent.

When the service deemed him ready, the scout joined the Forest School, the most secretive place in the USSR, to undergo the common curriculum for KGB officers. Gradually, Sergei learned to lie, to deceive, to manipulate — until he infiltrated the ENA in Paris, there to identify the potential "targets" concealed within this nursery of future senior French and foreign civil servants.

From his childhood to his missions, we follow the extraordinary daily life of Sergei Jirnov in a vast country where communism still reigns supreme but whose days are numbered. We witness with him the collapse of the Soviet Union and its armed wing, the KGB. With him, we discover espionage techniques, kompromat, the spetsnaz, and the traitors who are executed.

Finally, nature abhorring a vacuum, Sergei Jirnov would witness the Chekist hydra reborn with the creation of the SVR and the FSB.

Since then, he has cast a sharp eye on the use of the secret services in Vladimir Putin's Russia, a shadowy figure whose path he has crossed on several occasions. If one truly wishes to understand Russian espionage yesterday and today, one must read L'Eclaireur.