Shades of Pierce Brosnan in the Tailor of Panama, methinks
A FRENCH counter-espionage agent has been hauled before a disciplinary committee after it was discovered that he fiddled expenses, invented information and used his undercover car to visit a prostitute, police sources said on Tuesday. The unidentified 49-year-old spy also offered to work for the Swiss intelligence service, the sources said, confirming reports first made by RTL radio and Le Figaro newspaper. According to the sources, the agent, who started with the Direction of Territorial Surveillance (DST) -- France’s domestic spy service -- in 1977, had long managed to hide his mendaciousness from his superiors and had even reached the rank of captain after being decorated with a medal of honour. But last year, his behaviour came under the scrutiny of an internal affairs police unit, which found he had been making up interviews with an informer whom he had stopped meeting, run up huge tabs on the agency’s account for supposed assignments and paid for sessions with an Egyptian prostitute he saw regularly in Geneva. Le Figaro said the head of the DST, Pierre de Bousquet, has demanded "exemplary sanctions" against the officer. |