How MI6 Used a Paris Wine Merchant to Mark Soviet Operatives for 10 Years

How MI6 Used a Paris Wine Merchant to Mark Soviet Operatives for 10 Years

Luxury wine merchant Jean-Pierre Moreau, supplying rare vintages to diplomatic corps including Soviet Embassy staff who appreciate French wines despite communist ideology, is recruited by French DGSE (sharing with MI6) after offering 15,000 francs monthly and appealing to French pride in defeating Soviet influence. For 10 years during Mitterrand’s complex Soviet relations, Moreau photographs clients using cameras hidden in his wine cellar’s temperature monitors, documents which Soviet officials purchase wines revealing their actual disposable income (corruption indicator), and notes purchasing patterns—expensive vintages before “vacations” indicating operational bonuses. He identifies 82 KGB officers over the decade through their wine pretensions, tracking those who understand actual vintages (trained in Western culture for deep cover operations) vs. those pretending (recent assignments), creating a sophistication profile of Soviet intelligence. His intelligence enables Western agencies to identify twelve deep-cover illegals and target recruitment operations—Moreau retiring in 1988 as Cold War ends with accumulated 1.8 million francs (€275,000), Paris wine community never discovering their respected sommelier spent a decade marking every Soviet spy who appreciated Bordeaux while transmitting their photographs through wine auction catalogues coded to indicate which bottles sold to intelligence targets, French civilization’s greatest luxury becoming weapon in an intelligence war where taste revealed training.

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