L'éclaireur - Serguei Jirnov (In french)

You don't choose to join the KGB, the KGB chooses you." When he joined the State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) in Moscow at the age of seventeen, Sergueï Jirnov was far from imagining that his steps would soon be guided by the KGB. And yet, the latter chose him to integrate the supreme elite of his herd of spies: the “scouts”. This is how we designate the “illegals”, those whose mission is to infiltrate in depth and over time the Western enemy by posing as one of his own. It is a clandestine training that takes place outside the traditional circuits, forcing the chosen one to lead in his own country the classic course of a citizen coupled with that of a secret agent. When the service deems him ready, the scout joins the School of the Forest, the most mysterious place in the USSR, in order to follow the course common to KGB officers. Little by little Sergei will learn to lie, to deceive, to manipulate, until he infiltrates the ENA, in Paris, to identify the potential "targets" that this nursery of future French and foreign senior officials conceals. From his childhood to his missions, we follow the extraordinary daily life of Sergei Jirnov in an immense 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 the techniques of espionage, the kompromat, the spetsnaz and the traitors that we execute. Finally, since nature abhors a vacuum, Sergei Jirnov will see the Chekist hydra reborn with the creation of the SVR and the FSB. Since then, he has taken a sharp look at the use of the secret services in the Russia of Vladimir Putin, a troubled man whose paths he has crossed several times. If you really want to understand Russian espionage past and present, you have to read "L'Éclaireur".