It involved information provided by former high-ranking member of the KGB, Anatoliy Golitsyn, who defected to the United States in December 1961.
The news so alarmed US President John F. Kennedy that he sent a courier to hand-deliver a message to de Gaulle that outlined the situation.
Their interrogations overcame their initial suspicion that he was a CIA double agent and they returned to France with grave warnings about the state of French security.
Believing the story to be a fabrication, French intelligence was very deliberate in its investigations, and no action had been taken by late 1962, to the amazement of the US establishment, which began to take measures to exclude France from the NATO reporting chain.
A friend of de Vosjoli, Leon Uris, used a highly fictionalized version of the affair as the basis for the novel and the movie Topaz.
[1] In 1961, Anatoliy Golitsyn, a major in the KGB, was assigned to the embassy in Helsinki, Finland, under the name "Ivan Klimov."
Golitsyn's defection so alarmed the KGB that orders were sent out to cancel all meetings with field agents out of fear that they would be identified.
[5] He also suggested the existence of a widespread network of KGB spies within the various branches of the French military and government offices.
Unable to trust any official communications network, he took the unusual route of handwriting a personal letter to de Gaulle and having it delivered directly to him by a courier.
After outlining the worrying information, the letter went on to offer to de Gaulle direct access to the agent by members of the French security services.
De Rougemont was the director of the Second Division of the National Defense staff, which had the task of co-ordinating the various intelligence services.
He flew to Washington, DC, in the spring of 1962 to meet with his contacts and was granted three or four days of personal interviews with Golitsyn, whose identity was still a highly guarded secret and so he was referred to only as "Martel."
He was upset to learn that previous meetings had taken place without his involvement and that the letter from Kennedy to de Gaulle, being nonspecific, had impugned the entire French establishment.
Since he claimed that he had personally seen a number of NATO reports in Moscow, the team provided Martel with a range of documents, some real and some fake.
They returned to Washington again to confirm their suspicions with Martel, who was able to eliminate many of their guesses and to suggest others that matched the details that he knew.
"[12] NATO had been strained in the early 1960s by an effort to form a multinational naval nuclear agreement that ended in acrimonious debate.
Critics pointed out that Martel's leads were generally for agents that had been in place for many years but were well past their prime in terms of having access to useful information.
[7] However, as the full weight of the information worked its way through various countries' intelligence apparatus, the conclusion that he was telling the truth became unavoidable.
Among the military alone, John Vassall of the UK Admiralty, Swedish Defense Ministry official Stig Wennerström, Canadian economist (working at NATO) Hugh Hambleton,[3] German Federal Intelligence Service operative Heinz Felfe, and US Army Sergeant (working at the National Security Agency) Jack Dunlap were all exposed as a result of Martel's reports.
[11] It is speculated that the critical political climate in France after the Algerian War had led de Gaulle to bury the story for fears of a right-wing coup.
His handpicked investigator, Clare Edward Petty, once concluded that it might be Angleton himself who was the spy, working in concert with Golitsyn, a double agent.
[14] In the early summer of 1962, de Vosjoli became aware of rumors of a Soviet buildup in Cuba, apparently of surface-to-air missiles.
[12] Jacquier called de Vosjoli to Paris in December and made two demands: for him to turn over the names of all his contacts in Cuba and to start setting up a network within the US to spy on its nuclear technology.
[14] In February 1963, de Vosjoli forwarded a lengthy report from one of his Cuban contacts containing details of Soviet forces in Cuba.
[1] French inaction on the Martel case, combined with de Vosjoli's very public dismissal, eventually led to a complete breakdown in French-US intelligence-sharing in 1964.