Keeping the 2024 Paris Olympics safe represents a vast undertaking. In advance of the opening ceremonies this Friday, thousands of police officers and spies from many countries are working around the clock to prevent the Games from being marred by terrorism and espionage.
The U.S. intelligence community has discreetly supported Olympic security for decades, and the Paris Games are no exception. The U.S. Diplomatic Security Service also deploys agents and other staff to protect U.S. athletes.
Still, the threat level has never been higher, between increased terrorism concerns stemming from the war in Gaza, plus worries about espionage including cyberattacks. To prevent trouble, French authorities have vetted tens of thousands of people, rejecting access to the Games to 5,000 volunteers and workers, with some 1,000 being forbidden entry for possible espionage. A significant number of those turned away are Russians, including suspected spies masquerading as journalists. Fears of Russian espionage operations, including sabotage and terrorism, have grown acute. The recent raising of security on U.S. military bases in Europe was prompted by the Pentagon receiving intelligence that Kremlin spies and their proxies were planning terrorist attacks on American military personnel.
Now, French authorities have disrupted a major Russian intelligence operation designed to disrupt the Paris Olympics. On Wednesday, Le Monde reported in detail on the sensational case of a suspected Russian spy known only as “K.” due to European privacy regulations. Based on multiple European security sources, the report makes clear that a Russian provocation against the Olympics was just thwarted.
French police arrested the 40-year-old K. during a raid on his apartment in central Paris on Sunday. Two days later, French prosecutors, based on evidence found during the raid, opened an investigation into K.’s espionage “with a foreign power with a view to provoking hostilities in France,” which can be punished by up to 30 years in prison. The suspect was charged and remanded into custody.
The evidence against K. is said to include proof of K.’s Kremlin spy connections. This apparently involves documents linking the suspect to Russia’s Federal Security Service, the powerful FSB, specifically to one of its elite special operations units known for conducting sabotage and terrorism abroad (there are two such units, founded during KGB days, known as Alfa and Vympel).
K. lived in France for over a decade as a deep-cover FSB operative. The spy worked in finance in Moscow before moving to France in 2010, where he attended culinary school in Paris, then worked in high-end kitchens, including at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Courchevel, a ski resort in the French Alps that’s popular with wealthy Russians.
K. didn’t maintain a low profile. Claiming to work as a “private chef,” in recent years he’s appeared on several Russian reality and cooking shows, including on social media, where he has several thousand followers, mostly Russians. He didn’t excel at maintaining his culinary cover. In 2012, he informed his Parisian landlady that he needed to return to Moscow to work as an “official” in the “Russian government.” However, K. was back in France a year later to resume his clandestine FSB career.
Western counterintelligence was tracking K. and his movements for years. On May 8 of this year, in a vintage Russian move, a highly intoxicated K. was denied boarding a flight in Istanbul back to Paris. Therefore, he sobered up and caught a flight from Bulgaria to France. Along the way, K. telephoned his FSB handler, exclaiming, “The French are going to have an opening ceremony like no other.” Somebody was listening.
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That intercepted phone call was the tipoff to French authorities that they needed to shut K. and his operation down before the Olympics started. Parisian security officials tell journalists that the planned FSB attack wasn’t terrorism, per se, which hints at sabotage or perhaps a cyberattack. More will emerge as this breaking case moves forward.
The good news here is that effective counterintelligence work by several Western security services thwarted an attack on the Paris Olympics “left of boom” as the spies say. The bad news is that Vladimir Putin’s Russia is now waging an aggressive hybrid war against the West which includes espionage, sabotage, cyberattacks, and terrorism. The West is unofficially at war with Moscow, by the Kremlin’s choosing, whether we want to admit it or not.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
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