The Sapphire Affair: The True Story Behind Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz
In October 1962 it looked to millions of people like the politicians of the United States and Russia were determined to push the other across the fatal line of launching a nuclear strike. The fate of the world hung on Cuba, a troubled island state in the Caribbean.
Woven through the dramatic events in and around Cuba was a quieter but perhaps equally dangerous scandal – an enormous, deeply embedded network of Soviet spies at the heart of the NATO alliance. A senior KGB defector had revealed that his agency had penetrated the highest levels of the French government, military and intelligence services – but when a French agent tried to act he found himself blocked at every turn by his own superiors.
Alfred Hitchcock was so impressed by the fictional novel about the events (Topaz by Leon Uris) that he decided to adapt it into a movie. But fiction, as is often the case, only got half of the story. This book tells the remarkable true account of one of the greatest espionage scandals to rock the Cold War.
Woven through the dramatic events in and around Cuba was a quieter but perhaps equally dangerous scandal – an enormous, deeply embedded network of Soviet spies at the heart of the NATO alliance. A senior KGB defector had revealed that his agency had penetrated the highest levels of the French government, military and intelligence services – but when a French agent tried to act he found himself blocked at every turn by his own superiors.
Alfred Hitchcock was so impressed by the fictional novel about the events (Topaz by Leon Uris) that he decided to adapt it into a movie. But fiction, as is often the case, only got half of the story. This book tells the remarkable true account of one of the greatest espionage scandals to rock the Cold War.
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Excerpt
Introduction
Sir Alfred Hitchcock was probably the best known movie director of the 20th century. Born in England in 1899, he directed his first film in Germany in 1922 and moved to Hollywood in 1939. By the late 1950s he was at the peak of the profession and his 1960 Psycho is one of the most iconic movies of all time. During his long career he specialized in suspense stories – tightly plotted thrillers that at their best could generate an incredible level of tension. It’s no surprise that during the Cold War he turned his talent for suspense to the genre of espionage. Another characteristic of Hitchcock’s work was that much if it was based – sometimes loosely, sometimes much more accurately – on real events. His murder classic Rope was inspired by teenage murderers Leopold and Loeb while Frenzy was partly inspired by the London serial killer Jack the Stripper. For the second of his two spy dramas he took on novel based on an extraordinary story of defection, treason and betrayal that had played out during one of the most dramatic events of the 1960s – the Cuban missile crisis.
When the Cold War ended in 1990 the atmosphere of terror that it inspired dissipated with remarkable speed. The 21st century has its own worries, including environmental catastrophe, climate change, globalization, poverty and international terrorism, and most people worry about at least some of these to some degree. None of them match the threat of nuclear war that hung over the world from the 1950s to the fall of the Berlin Wall. With tens of thousands of nuclear weapons on a hair trigger a single mistake could have demolished most of what human civilization has built in the last 5,000 years. If scientists like Carl Sagan were right, and a major strategic exchange would cause a nuclear winter, the planet could have been wiped clean of all life more complex than a cockroach. Not since the last ice age had there been such an overwhelming danger to the human race. In October 1962 it looked to millions of people like the politicians of both superpowers were determined to push the other across the fatal line of launching a nuclear strike. The fate of the world hung on Cuba, a troubled island state in the Caribbean.
Woven through the dramatic events in and around Cuba was a quieter but perhaps equally dangerous scandal – an enormous, deeply embedded network of Soviet spies at the heart of the NATO alliance. A senior KGB defector had revealed that his agency had penetrated the highest levels of the French government, military and intelligence services – but when a French agent tried to act he found himself blocked at every turn by his own superiors.
Pieced together by bestselling author Leon Uris, a personal friend of the man at the center of the spy scandal, the novel Topaz told the story of how the KGB had spread its influence so deeply into a major European nation that even when the plot was discovered it was impossible to do anything about it. Hitchcock was intrigued, and in 1969 he turned the story into a movie. Critics view Topaz as one of his less successful works but as a classic Cold War spy thriller it still has a lot to offer.
If you’ve seen Topaz and want to know more about the events that inspired it you could have a struggle on your hands. The missile crisis is well documented but the spy scandal – the Sapphire affair – has pretty much sunk into obscurity. There is information available if you know where to look for it though – some is buried in the dusty archives of intelligence agencies, but a lot of it can be found in equally dusty corners of the internet. If you have the time to hunt down and read grainy scans of old magazine articles and obscure books you could build up a good picture of what happened. If you don’t have that much time, read on…
Part 1: The French Connection
Almost every country has an external intelligence service, but the power and resources they have varies. Countries that follow an isolationist path don’t tend to pay much attention to foreign intelligence gathering – until the Second World War the USA had no organized intelligence agencies at all, for example. European colonial powers, who needed to keep up to date on often rebellious foreign possessions, tended to take it a bit more seriously. Britain had set up the Secret Service Bureau in 1909 but had been running intelligence networks out of its embassies for centuries. Their traditional rival, France, also had a long history of spying; the Revolutionaries had a secret police force at home and sent intelligence collectors throughout Europe. Later, when France gained colonies around the world, they developed a global reach. France’s military and intelligence services were practically wiped out by the German invasion in 1940, but when the Free French returned to France in 1944 they quickly established a new agency. Officially its purpose was to collect information to help with liberate Europe from Nazi rule; in practice it spent most of its time spying on French colonies as well as the British and American allies who were doing all the actual work of liberating France. The new service quickly became notorious for both its lack of scruples and its effectiveness. It was called the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service), which was quickly shortened to SDECE.
The SDECE was formed on April 19, 1944 by André Dewavrin, better known by his codename “Colonel Passy.” Dewavrin had escaped to Britain to join de Gaulle’s Free French army and had become head of a special intelligence unit, the BCRA. This unit was mostly responsible for working with the French Resistance, and Dewavrin sometimes had to parachute into occupied France to meet with Resistance leaders. In late 1943 the BCRA was merged with the remains of the Deuxième Bureau, which had been the main French intelligence agency from 1871 until the German occupation, and the new organization was named DGSS. At first this was led by Deuxième Bureau chief Jacques Soustelle, but Dewavrin took command in October 1944 and became the first head of SDECE at the next reorganization.
The Resistance had been split into two factions; the Free French were aligned with the Gaullist faction, but there was also a strong communist Resistance movement. During the war the two cooperated most of the time but it was an uneasy alliance that sometimes broke down into open conflict. When the Allies invaded the Gaullists quickly began working to reduce communist power, and the SDECE was strongly anti-communist right from the start. After the Germans withdrew from France much of the agency’s energy went to fighting against communist influence in the new government. They had many successes, but some covert communists slipped through the net. Some, it later emerged, had slipped into the SDECE itself.
In the early 1950s the SDECE began to turn its attention to the situation in Algeria. The North African nation had been colonized by the French in 1848 and was classed as a region of France itself. When decolonization gathered speed after the war many Algerians began demanding independence, which the French didn’t want to give them. Violence broke out in 1954 and within a few years a full-scale civil war was raging between armed rebel groups, French settlers and the military. The SDECE, especially the notorious paramilitary Action Service, was dragged into the conflict. The counter-espionage side of the organization increasingly focused on hunting down insurgents and, after 1961, the anti-Gaullist Organisation Armée Secrète; looking for Soviet spies slipped steadily down their list of priorities, and the KGB wasn’t slow to notice. They had a strong incentive to exploit the situation, too. As well as their constant effort to collect intelligence on western countries there was a chance to hammer a wedge into a crack in the NATO alliance.
Sir Alfred Hitchcock was probably the best known movie director of the 20th century. Born in England in 1899, he directed his first film in Germany in 1922 and moved to Hollywood in 1939. By the late 1950s he was at the peak of the profession and his 1960 Psycho is one of the most iconic movies of all time. During his long career he specialized in suspense stories – tightly plotted thrillers that at their best could generate an incredible level of tension. It’s no surprise that during the Cold War he turned his talent for suspense to the genre of espionage. Another characteristic of Hitchcock’s work was that much if it was based – sometimes loosely, sometimes much more accurately – on real events. His murder classic Rope was inspired by teenage murderers Leopold and Loeb while Frenzy was partly inspired by the London serial killer Jack the Stripper. For the second of his two spy dramas he took on novel based on an extraordinary story of defection, treason and betrayal that had played out during one of the most dramatic events of the 1960s – the Cuban missile crisis.
When the Cold War ended in 1990 the atmosphere of terror that it inspired dissipated with remarkable speed. The 21st century has its own worries, including environmental catastrophe, climate change, globalization, poverty and international terrorism, and most people worry about at least some of these to some degree. None of them match the threat of nuclear war that hung over the world from the 1950s to the fall of the Berlin Wall. With tens of thousands of nuclear weapons on a hair trigger a single mistake could have demolished most of what human civilization has built in the last 5,000 years. If scientists like Carl Sagan were right, and a major strategic exchange would cause a nuclear winter, the planet could have been wiped clean of all life more complex than a cockroach. Not since the last ice age had there been such an overwhelming danger to the human race. In October 1962 it looked to millions of people like the politicians of both superpowers were determined to push the other across the fatal line of launching a nuclear strike. The fate of the world hung on Cuba, a troubled island state in the Caribbean.
Woven through the dramatic events in and around Cuba was a quieter but perhaps equally dangerous scandal – an enormous, deeply embedded network of Soviet spies at the heart of the NATO alliance. A senior KGB defector had revealed that his agency had penetrated the highest levels of the French government, military and intelligence services – but when a French agent tried to act he found himself blocked at every turn by his own superiors.
Pieced together by bestselling author Leon Uris, a personal friend of the man at the center of the spy scandal, the novel Topaz told the story of how the KGB had spread its influence so deeply into a major European nation that even when the plot was discovered it was impossible to do anything about it. Hitchcock was intrigued, and in 1969 he turned the story into a movie. Critics view Topaz as one of his less successful works but as a classic Cold War spy thriller it still has a lot to offer.
If you’ve seen Topaz and want to know more about the events that inspired it you could have a struggle on your hands. The missile crisis is well documented but the spy scandal – the Sapphire affair – has pretty much sunk into obscurity. There is information available if you know where to look for it though – some is buried in the dusty archives of intelligence agencies, but a lot of it can be found in equally dusty corners of the internet. If you have the time to hunt down and read grainy scans of old magazine articles and obscure books you could build up a good picture of what happened. If you don’t have that much time, read on…
Part 1: The French Connection
Almost every country has an external intelligence service, but the power and resources they have varies. Countries that follow an isolationist path don’t tend to pay much attention to foreign intelligence gathering – until the Second World War the USA had no organized intelligence agencies at all, for example. European colonial powers, who needed to keep up to date on often rebellious foreign possessions, tended to take it a bit more seriously. Britain had set up the Secret Service Bureau in 1909 but had been running intelligence networks out of its embassies for centuries. Their traditional rival, France, also had a long history of spying; the Revolutionaries had a secret police force at home and sent intelligence collectors throughout Europe. Later, when France gained colonies around the world, they developed a global reach. France’s military and intelligence services were practically wiped out by the German invasion in 1940, but when the Free French returned to France in 1944 they quickly established a new agency. Officially its purpose was to collect information to help with liberate Europe from Nazi rule; in practice it spent most of its time spying on French colonies as well as the British and American allies who were doing all the actual work of liberating France. The new service quickly became notorious for both its lack of scruples and its effectiveness. It was called the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service), which was quickly shortened to SDECE.
The SDECE was formed on April 19, 1944 by André Dewavrin, better known by his codename “Colonel Passy.” Dewavrin had escaped to Britain to join de Gaulle’s Free French army and had become head of a special intelligence unit, the BCRA. This unit was mostly responsible for working with the French Resistance, and Dewavrin sometimes had to parachute into occupied France to meet with Resistance leaders. In late 1943 the BCRA was merged with the remains of the Deuxième Bureau, which had been the main French intelligence agency from 1871 until the German occupation, and the new organization was named DGSS. At first this was led by Deuxième Bureau chief Jacques Soustelle, but Dewavrin took command in October 1944 and became the first head of SDECE at the next reorganization.
The Resistance had been split into two factions; the Free French were aligned with the Gaullist faction, but there was also a strong communist Resistance movement. During the war the two cooperated most of the time but it was an uneasy alliance that sometimes broke down into open conflict. When the Allies invaded the Gaullists quickly began working to reduce communist power, and the SDECE was strongly anti-communist right from the start. After the Germans withdrew from France much of the agency’s energy went to fighting against communist influence in the new government. They had many successes, but some covert communists slipped through the net. Some, it later emerged, had slipped into the SDECE itself.
In the early 1950s the SDECE began to turn its attention to the situation in Algeria. The North African nation had been colonized by the French in 1848 and was classed as a region of France itself. When decolonization gathered speed after the war many Algerians began demanding independence, which the French didn’t want to give them. Violence broke out in 1954 and within a few years a full-scale civil war was raging between armed rebel groups, French settlers and the military. The SDECE, especially the notorious paramilitary Action Service, was dragged into the conflict. The counter-espionage side of the organization increasingly focused on hunting down insurgents and, after 1961, the anti-Gaullist Organisation Armée Secrète; looking for Soviet spies slipped steadily down their list of priorities, and the KGB wasn’t slow to notice. They had a strong incentive to exploit the situation, too. As well as their constant effort to collect intelligence on western countries there was a chance to hammer a wedge into a crack in the NATO alliance.
