Farewell Dossier

Who was Farewell Dossier?

The Farewell dossier was the collection of documents that Colonel Vladimir Vetrov, a KGB defector, gathered and gave to the French DST in 1981–82, during the Cold War.

Vetrov was an engineer who had been assigned to evaluate information on Western hardware and software gathered by the "Line X" technical intelligence operation for Directorate T, the Soviet directorate for scientific and technical intelligence collection from the West. He became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist system and decided to work with the French at the end of 1980. Between the spring of 1981 and early 1982, Vetrov gave almost 4,000 secret documents to the DST, including the complete list of 250 Line X officers stationed under legal cover in embassies around the world.

As a consequence, Western nations undertook a mass expulsion of Soviet technology spies. The CIA also mounted a counter-intelligence operation that transferred modified hardware and software designs to the Soviets. Thomas Reed alleged this was the cause of a spectacular trans-Siberian pipeline disaster in 1982.

Vetrov's story inspired the 1997 book Bonjour Farewell: La Vérité sur la Taupe Française du KGB by Serguei Kostine. It was adapted in the French film L'affaire Farewell starring Emir Kusturica and Guillaume Canet.