The real reason French spies aren’t caught in honeytraps

French spies are impossible to blackmail in honeytraps because their wives already know they’re having affairs. And if you believe this, I have a tower in Paris to sell you.

The source for this story is wafer thin yet nevertheless it has attracted prurient attention worldwide. It was ‘revealed’ on Tuesday night in a documentary screened on France 2 and has subsequently been repeated on news platforms worldwide. ‘Ooh la la! Those saucy Frenchies!’ That’s the general line, improbable as it may seem.

An agent, ‘Nicolas’, who appeared anonymously on the show, said that Soviet defectors talked of the ‘French paradox’ – that if you tell a Frenchman with a mistress ‘“we’ve caught you red-handed with a 22-year-old called Tatyana, work for us or we’ll tell your wife,” it didn’t work.’

Perhaps this claim is entirely invented or perhaps it merely reflects the sexual conceit of those employed by the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), whose 7,200 agents work ‘in the shadows to identify and anticipate threats of all kinds,’ according to the agency’s website.