The DST on the Cold War Front

In 1944, amid the still-smouldering ruins of a Europe devastated by a conflict that claimed more than 50 million lives, another war began — silent, insidious.

A war of shadows and dirty tricks. A war in which these two great blocs — East and West — would confront each other: the USSR and its satellites on one side, the United States and its allies on the other. It would be called the " Cold War " — the war of intelligence, of disinformation. The war of anonymous soldiers.

In France, the DST would be in the front line, whether facing the KGB, the GRU or the services of the Eastern Bloc, until the fall of the Wall in 1989. Created in 1944, the DST started from nothing: the archives of the former Contrôle général de la Surveillance du Territoire had been destroyed on the arrival of the Germans four years earlier. It would take twenty years to recover. This did not, however, prevent it from achieving some notable successes, resulting in the expulsion of around one hundred Soviet officers in total, not counting their colleagues from the "fraternal" countries.

For the first time, this book speaks plainly about the difficulties faced by these French DST officials — these "counter-espionage agents" — these men and women, some of whom fell on the field of honour without their names ever being engraved on a war memorial.