Vladimir Vetrov was born on 10 October 1932 and grew up within the Soviet Union. After college, where he studied
electronic engineering, he was enlisted in the KGB. He lived in
France for five years, beginning in 1965, when posted there as a
Line X officer working for the KGB's 'Directorate T', which specialized in obtaining information about advanced
science and technology from western countries. While there, he befriended Jacques Prévost, an engineer working with
Thomson-CSF. Vetrov returned to
Moscow at the end of his posting, with a subsequent posting to
Montreal, though Vetrov was recalled prematurely for reasons that are unclear. There, he rose through the ranks of Directorate T, eventually supervising the evaluation of the intelligence collected by Line X agents around the world, and passing key information to the relevant users inside the Soviet Union. Having become increasingly disillusioned with the
Communist system, he decided to pass important state secrets to the west for purely ideological reasons, though he eventually and reluctantly accepted 25,500
rubles (roughly equivalent to four years of his salary). he contacted Prévost, by then working in the Soviet Union, who operated as a liaison to the French
DST and offered his services to the West. Between the spring of 1981 and early 1982, Vetrov, code-named FAREWELL, gave the DST almost 4,000 secret documents, including the complete official list of 250 Line X officers stationed under legal cover in embassies around the world, causing a breakdown of the Soviet espionage effort to obtain scientific, industrial and technical information from the West. Members of the
GRU, the
Soviet Academy of Sciences and several other bodies all took part in such efforts. One report states that information provided by Vetrov "neutralized 422 KGB officers and 54 Western agents (Soviet moles) working for the KGB and the USSR bloc". KGB agents from France on 5 April 1983. Arrests were also made, including Pierre Bourdiol, whom he had himself recruited, which was considered a
faux pas in the espionage community, as it was considered a violation of protocol to burn one's own recruit. When a man knocked on the car window, Vetrov thought his spying had been discovered, so he stabbed and killed the man. He happened to be an auxiliary policeman, likely looking for a bribe from what he thought were two people having sex in a
highway median. News of his execution reached France in March 1985. == Legacy ==