“A brilliant journalist. But also a traitor to France who, for thirty-five years, worked for the KGB”
: the magazine
L'Express
reveals in its Thursday edition that its director in the 1970s, Philippe Grumbach, was a spy for the secret services of the USSR.
“His intimate entourage confirmed this occult relationship to L’Express.
Close to Mitterrand and Giscard, he was, unbeknownst to everyone, one of the greatest Soviet spies of the Fifth Republic
,” says the company's editor-in-chief Étienne Girard, who with Anne Marion signed a long-term investigation, conducted in the KGB archives.
Grumbach, who hid behind the alias
“Brok”
, died in 2003, at age 79.
“It was impossible not to reveal this gray area within a newspaper which, from Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber to Jean-François Revel, from François Mauriac to Raymond Aron, has always strived to combat utopias totalitarianism and the ravages of communism
,” write Étienne Girard and Éric Chol, editorial director, in the magazine’s editorial.
USSR undercover agents
Philippe Grumbach served as editor-in-chief from 1956 to 1960, before becoming editorial director in 1974. He was also editorial secretary at the French Press Agency (the former AFP) from 1946 to 1948. After a detour at Libération then Paris-Presse-l'Intransigeant, he joined L'Express in 1954 as editor.
He founded Pariscope in 1965, then directed Crapouillot.
He then returned to
L'Express
where, from 1971, he held the positions of political director, then editor-in-chief and editorial director.
Member of the High Audiovisual Council (1977-1981), he then became a film producer then returned to the press in 1984, at Le Figaro.
Was he a spy
“by ideology”
then
“by a taste for money?”
, questions the current editorial director of
L'Express
.
“On the field of dishonor, the name of Philippe Grumbach thus joins that of other agents of the East infiltrated in the highest spheres of the State or in the media, and now unmasked,”
he asserts, recalling in particular that,
"as early as 1996, L'Express had revealed how former minister Charles Hernu worked on behalf of the KGB and its satellites"
.
“This Soviet penetration into the spheres of power during the Cold War must constantly call us to a duty of vigilance
,” underlines Éric Chol, referring to recent attempts at foreign interference in France.