Martel affair

The Martel affair, sometimes known as the Sapphire affair, was a spy scandal that took place in France in early 1962. It involved information provided by former high-ranking member of the KGB, Anatoliy Golitsyn, who defected to the United States in December 1961. Golitsyn stated that the Soviets had agents placed throughout French military intelligence and even within French President Charles de Gaulle's cabinet. He claimed that these agents had access to any NATO document on demand.

The news so alarmed US President John F. Kennedy that he sent a courier to hand-deliver a message to de Gaulle that outlined the situation. Over the spring and the summer of 1962, a team of French counterintelligence officers interrogated Golitsyn for weeks. As his identity was closely guarded by the US, the French assigned him the codename "Martel". Their interrogations overcame their initial suspicion that he was a CIA double agent and they returned to France with grave warnings about the state of French security.

French-American relations were already strained by de Gaulle's policy of Grandeur, and in return, de Gaulle was highly skeptical of the US's motives. Believing the story to be a fabrication, French intelligence was very deliberate in its investigations, and no action had been taken by late 1962, to the amazement of the US establishment, which began to take measures to exclude France from the NATO reporting chain. That led to NATO becoming largely non-functional for a year. Ultimately there was a three-year breakdown in American-French intelligence sharing.

The story became public only some years later, when the former French intelligence liaison at the French embassy in Washington, Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli, reported the story in an exposé in Life magazine in 1968. A friend of de Vosjoli, Leon Uris, used a highly fictionalized version of the affair as the basis for the novel and the movie Topaz.^[1]