“The third life”, by Fabrice Arfi, Seuil, 256 p., 20 euros, digital 15 euros.
Are ghosts born in a gray town in Romania where spies were once taught the art and way of life in the West before being infiltrated into the “free world”? In 1969, when a Romanian industrial designer named Vincenzo Benedetto arrived with his wife in the Lyon region, it was, officially, to join his family of Italian origin, whom he did not know. After obtaining the visa, after many difficulties, in a country ruled with an iron fist by the evil Ceausescu couple, he no longer leaves France, where he leads a peaceful existence. But, eleven years later, five agents of the French counterespionage police knocked on his door, convinced that the quiet Mr. Benedetto was an agent of the Romanian secret services, a covert “ghost.” Imprisoned for a few months and then released thanks to the intervention of Maurice Faure, ephemeral guardian of the seals of the first government of François Mitterrand, newly elected President of the Republic in May 1981, this enigmatic man will never be spoken of again. .
Fifteen years, between two investigations into the Libyan financing of Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign or the Bettencourt affair, the journalist Fabrice Arfi, pillar of the information site Half partwill try to reconstruct the common thread of Benedetto’s existence. An inevitably red thread around this question: is it possible that the former socialist Minister of Defense Charles Hernu, convicted of espionage for the benefit of the Eastern bloc until 1963, continued his occult activities for much longer? What if Benedetto had been his treating officer?
A past in shades of gray
To get to the bottom of the matter, the journalist “whole blackened notebooks (…)visited archive centers in Paris, Vincennes, Lyon, Villeurbanne, traveled to Romania ». The Internet does not help in this search in which you have to decipher the clues between the lines of the “blank spaces”, those anonymous notes established by the intelligence services. Sheets of pulp paper buried in dusty archival boxes reveal a gray-toned past, populated by silhouettes in wide-lapeled jackets and eyes squinting behind tortoiseshell glasses. There we meet former minister Charles Fiterman and high-ranking Romanian defector Ion Mihai Pacepa, foie gras-trafficking Securitate spies, and plump socialist leaders huffing and puffing beneath the waterline of the “Black waters of the reason of State”.
You have 29.49% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
