A veteran former agent of France's foreign intelligence agency (DGSE) has been arrested and charged with breaching national security secrets after describing in a book he wrote the pursuit of an Islamic terrorist operative of al-Qaeda in Africa.
The former agent published the book "Spy, 44 years at DGSE" in May under the pseudonym Richard Volange, in which he described his activities as a field agent. Among other things, he told about the pursuit in Djibouti of Peter Sharif, an al-Qaeda operative who was arrested in 2018 and extradited to France and who is suspected of having ties to one of the terrorists who carried out the attack on the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine in 2015.
According to the La Figaro report, the former intelligence officer was arrested by Internal Security Service agents on September 12 and charged. "The DGSE is just about to end the hobby that almost all former spies publish about their past activities in order to increase their income," said the agent's lawyer who made it clear that he intends to dismiss the accusations because "the DGSE is portrayed in a positive light and we are talking about very old facts."