Sapphire Affair

The Martel affair, sometimes known as the Sapphire affair, was a spy scandal that took place in France in early 1962. It involved information provided by former high-ranking member of the KGB, Anatoliy Golitsyn, who defected to the United States in December 1961. Golitsyn stated that the Soviets had agents placed throughout French military intelligence and even within Charles de Gaulle's cabinet. He claimed that these agents had access to any NATO document on demand.

The news so alarmed President Kennedy that he sent a courier to hand deliver a message to Charles de Gaulle outlining the situation. Over the spring and summer of 1962, a team of French counter-intelligence officers interrogated Golitsyn for weeks. As his identity was closely guarded by the US, the French assigned him the code-name "Martel". Their interrogations overcame their initial suspicion that he was a CIA double-agent and they returned to France with grave warnings about the state of French security.

French-US relations were strained at this time due to de Gaulle's policy of "Politics of Grandeur", and in return, de Gaulle was highly skeptical of the US's motives. Believing the story to be a fabrication, French intelligence was very deliberate in their investigations, and no action had been taken by late 1962. This was to the amazement of the US establishment, who began to take measures to exclude France from the NATO reporting chain. This led to NATO becoming largely non-functional for a year. Ultimately there was a three-year breakdown in US-French intelligence sharing.

The story only became public some years later when the former French intelligence liaison at the French embassy in Washington, Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli, reported the story in an exposé in Life magazine in 1968. A friend of de Vosjoli, Leon Uris, used a highly fictionalized version of the Martel affair as the basis for the novel (and movie) Topaz.

In 1961, Anatoliy Golitsyn, a Major in the KGB, was assigned to the Helsinki embassy under the name "Ivan Klimov". On 15 December he defected to the US along with his wife and daughter by riding the train to the Swedish border. Golitsyn's defection so alarmed the KGB that orders were sent out to cancel all meetings with field agents for fear they would be identified.

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