The Spy Novelist

Who Knows Too

Much
By ROBERT F. WORTHJAN. 30, 2013
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Grard de Villiers, the author of the best-selling

S.A.S. espionage series. Denis Rouvre for The New
York Times
Last June, a pulp-fiction thriller was
published in Paris under the title Le
Chemin de Damas. Its lurid green-and-
black cover featured a busty woman
clutching a pistol, and its plot included
the requisite car chases, explosions and
sexual conquests. Unlike most
paperbacks, though, this one attracted
the attention of intelligence officers and
diplomats on three continents. Set in the
midst of Syrias civil war, the book
offered vivid character sketches of that
countrys embattled ruler, Bashar al-
Assad, and his brother Maher, along
with several little-known lieutenants
and allies. It detailed a botched coup
attempt secretly supported by the
American and Israeli intelligence
agencies. And most striking of all, it
described an attack on one of the Syrian
regimes command centers, near the
presidential palace in Damascus, a
month before an attack in the same
place killed several of the regimes top
figures. It was prophetic, I was told by
one veteran Middle East analyst who
knows Syria well and preferred to
remain nameless. It really gave you a
sense of the atmosphere inside the
regime, of the way these people operate,
in a way I hadnt seen before.
The book was the latest by Grard de
Villiers, an 83-year-old Frenchman who
has been turning out the S.A.S.
espionage series at the rate of four or
five books a year for nearly 50 years. The
books are strange hybrids: top-selling
pulp-fiction vehicles that also serve as
intelligence drop boxes for spy agencies
around the world. De Villiers has spent
most of his life cultivating spies and
diplomats, who seem to enjoy seeing
themselves and their secrets
transfigured into pop fiction (with their
own names carefully disguised), and his
books regularly contain information
about terror plots, espionage and wars
that has never appeared elsewhere.
Other pop novelists, like John le Carr
and Tom Clancy, may flavor their work
with a few real-world scenarios and
some spy lingo, but de Villierss books
are ahead of the news and sometimes
even ahead of events themselves. Nearly
a year ago he published a novel about
the threat of Islamist groups in post-
revolutionary Libya that focused on
jihadis in Benghazi and on the role of
the C.I.A. in fighting them. The novel,
Les Fous de Benghazi, came out six
months before the death of the
American ambassador, J. Christopher
Stevens, and included descriptions of
the C.I.A. command center in Benghazi
(a closely held secret at that time), which
was to become central in the controversy
over Stevenss death. Other de Villiers
books have included even more striking
auguries. In 1980, he wrote a novel in
which militant Islamists murder the
Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, a year
before the actual assassination took
place. When I asked him about it, de
Villiers responded with a Gallic shrug.
The Israelis knew it was going to
happen, he said, and did nothing.
Though he is almost unknown in the
United States, de Villierss publishers
estimate that the S.A.S. series has sold
about 100 million copies worldwide,
which would make it one of the top-
selling series in history, on a par with
Ian Flemings James Bond books. S.A.S.
may be the longest-running fiction
series ever written by a single author.
The first book, S.A.S. in Istanbul,
appeared in March 1965; de Villiers is
now working on No. 197.
For all their geopolitical acumen, de
Villierss books tend to provoke smirks
from the French literati. (Sorry,
monsieur, we do not carry that sort of
thing here, I was told by the manager at
one upscale Paris bookstore.) Its not
hard to see why. Randomly flip open any
S.A.S. and theres a good chance youll
find Malko (he is Son Altesse
Srnissime, or His Serene Highness),
the aristocratic spy-hero with a
penchant for sodomy, in very explicit
flagrante. In one recent novel, he meets
a Saudi princess (based on a real person
who made Beirut her sexual playground)
who is both a dominatrix and a
nymphomaniac; their first sexual
encounter begins with her watching gay
porn until Malko distracts her with a
medley of acrobatic sex positions. The
sex lives of the villains receive almost
equal time. Brutal rapes are described in
excruciating physiological detail. In
another recent novel, the girlfriend of a
notorious Syrian general is submitting
to his Viagra-fueled brutality when she
recalls that this is the man who has
terrorized the people of Lebanon for
years. And it was that idea that set off
her orgasm, de Villiers writes.
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The French elite pretend not to read
him, but they all do, I was told by
Hubert Vdrine, the former foreign
minister of France. Vdrine is one of the
unapologetic few who admit to having
read nearly every one of Malkos
adventures. He said he consulted them
before visiting a foreign country, as they
let him in on whatever French
intelligence believed was happening
there.
De Villiers with Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the rebel
group Unita, in Angola in 1982. Photograph from
Grard de Villiers
About 10 years ago, when Vdrine was
foreign minister, de Villiers got a call
from the Quai dOrsay, where the
ministry is based, inviting him to lunch.
I thought someone was playing a joke
on me, de Villiers said. Especially
because Vdrine is a leftist, and I am not
at all. When he went to the ministry at
the scheduled time, Vdrine was waiting
for him in his private dining room
overlooking the Seine.
I am very happy to join you, de Villiers
recalled telling the minister. But tell
me, why did you want to see me?
Vdrine smiled and gestured for de
Villiers to sit down. I wanted to talk,
he said, because Ive found out you and
I have the same sources.
De Villierss books have made him
very rich, and he lives in an impressively
grand house on the Avenue Foch, a
stones throw from the Arc de Triomphe.
I went there one day this winter, and
after a short wait on the fourth-floor
landing, a massive wooden door swung
open, and I found myself facing a
distinguished-looking man in brown
tweeds with a long, bony face and pale
brown eyes. De Villiers uses a walker
a result of a torn aorta two years ago
but still moves with surprising speed. He
led me down a high-ceilinged hallway to
his study, which also serves as a kind of
shrine to old-school masculinity and
kinky sex. I stood next to a squatting
woman made of steel with a real MP-44
automatic rifle coming out of her crotch.
That one is called War, de Villiers
said. In the middle of the floor was a
naked female figure bending over to
peek at the viewer from between her
legs; other naked women, some of them
in garters or chains, gazed out from
paintings or book covers. On the shelves
were smaller figurines in ivory, glass and
wood, depicting various couplings and
orgies. Classic firearms hung on the wall
a Kalashnikov, a Tommy gun, a
Winchester and books on intelligence
and military affairs were stacked high on
tables. Among the photos of him with
various warlords and soldiers in Africa,
Asia and the Middle East, I noticed a
framed 2006 letter from Nicolas
Sarkozy, praising the latest S.A.S. novel
and saying it had taught him a great deal
about Venezuela. He pretends to read
me, de Villiers said, with a dismissive
scowl. He didnt. Chirac used to read
me. Giscard read me, too.
After an hour or so, de Villiers led me
downstairs to his black Jaguar, and we
drove across town to Brasserie Lipp, a
gathering spot for aging lions of the
French elite. As we pushed through a
thick crowd to our table, a handsome old
man with a deeply tanned face called out
to de Villiers from across the room. It
was the great French nouvelle vague
actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. He grinned
and waved de Villiers over for a
conspiratorial chat.
Thats Table No. 1, de Villiers said as
we sat down. Mitterrand always used to
sit there. After a waiter rushed up to
help him into his seat, de Villiers
ordered a suitably virile lunch of a dozen
Breton oysters and a glass of Muscadet.
He caught me looking at his walker and
immediately began telling me about his
torn aorta. He nearly died and had to
spend three months in a hospital bed. If
you fall off your horse, you have to get
back on or you are dead, he said. He
was able to maintain his usual
publishing pace even while in the
hospital. There was only one real
consequence: he had used the real name
of the C.I.A. station chief in Mauritania
in his manuscript, and in the confusion
after the accident, he forgot to change
the final text. The C.I.A. was angry, he
said. I had to explain. My friends at the
D.G.S.E. [the French foreign-
intelligence agency, General Directorate
for External Security] apologized on my
behalf, too.
One of the many myths surrounding de
Villiers is that he employs a team of
assistants to help with his prodigious
turnout. In fact, he does it all himself,
sticking to a work routine that hasnt
changed in half a century. For each
book, he spends about two weeks
traveling in the country in question,
then another six weeks or so writing.
The books are published on the same
schedule every year: January, April,
June, October. Six years ago, at age 77,
de Villiers increased his turnout from
four books a year to five, producing two
linked novels every June. Im not a sex
machine, Im a writing machine, he
said.
De Villiers was born in Paris in 1929, the
son of a wildly prolific and spendthrift
playwright who went by the stage name
Jacques Deval. He began writing in the
1950s for the French daily France Soir
and other newspapers. Early on, during
a reporting assignment in Tunisia, he
agreed to do a favor for a French
intelligence officer, delivering a message
to some members of the right-wing pro-
colonial group known as la main rouge.
It turned out de Villiers was being used
as a pawn in an assassination scheme,
and he was lucky to escape with his life.
He returned to Paris and confronted the
officer, who was completely
unrepentant. The incident taught him,
he said, that intelligence people dont
give a damn about civilian lives. They
are cold fish. But rather than being
turned off, de Villiers found that blend
of risk and cold calculation seductive.
In 1964, he was working on a detective
novel in his spare time when an editor
told him that Ian Fleming, the creator of
James Bond, had just died. You should
take over, the editor said. That was all it
took. The first S.A.S. came out a few
months later. Although sales are down a
bit since his peak in the 1980s, he still
earns between 800,000 and a million
euros a year (roughly $1 million to $1.3
million) and spends summers at his villa
in St. Tropez, where he gads about on
his boat by day and drives to parties in
the evenings in his 1980s Austin Mini.
He has long been despised by many on
the French left for his right-wing
political views. We are all strangled by
political correctness, he told me, and he
used the word fags several times in our
conversations. But his reputation as a
racist and anti-Semite is largely myth;
one of his closest friends is Claude
Lanzmann, the Jewish leftist and
director of Shoah, the landmark
Holocaust documentary. And in recent
years, de Villiers has gained a broader
following among French intellectuals
and journalists, even as his sales have
slowed down. He has become a kind of
institution, said Renaud Girard, the
chief foreign correspondent of Le Figaro.
You can even see articles praising him
in Libration, the left-leaning daily.
De Villiers created Malko, his hero,
in 1964 by merging three real-life
acquaintances: a high-ranking French
intelligence official named Yvan de
Lignires; an Austrian arms dealer; and
a German baron named Dieter von
Malsen-Ponickau. As is so often the
case, though, his fiction proved
prophetic. Five years after he began
writing the series, de Villiers met
Alexandre de Marenches, a man of
immense charisma who led the French
foreign-intelligence service for more
than a decade and was a legend of cold-
war spy craft. De Marenches was very
rich and came from one of Frances
oldest families; he fought heroically in
World War II, and he later built his own
castle on the Riviera. He also helped
create a shadowy international network
of intelligence operatives known as the
Safari Club, which waged clandestine
battles against Soviet operatives in
Africa and the Middle East. He was
doing intelligence for fun, de Villiers
told me. Sometimes he didnt even pick
up the phone when Giscard called him.
In short, de Marenches was very close to
being the aristocratic master spy de
Villiers had imagined, and as their
friendship deepened in the 1970s, de
Villierss relationship with French
intelligence also deepened and lasts to
this day.
De Villiers has always had a penchant
for the gruesome and the decadent. One
of his models was Curzio Malaparte, an
Italian journalist whose best-known
book is Kaputt, an eerie firsthand
account from behind the German front
lines during World War II. Another was
Georges Arnaud, the French author of
several popular adventure books during
the 1950s. He was a strange guy, de
Villiers said. He once confessed to me
that he started life by murdering his
father, his aunt and the maid. (Arnaud
was tried and acquitted for those
murders, possibly by a rigged jury.) I
couldnt help wondering whether
Georges Simenon, the famously prolific
and perverted Belgian crime writer, was
also an influence. Simenon is said to
have taken as little as 10 days to finish
his novels, and he published about 200.
He also claimed to have slept with
10,000 women, mostly prostitutes. De
Villiers laughed at the comparison. I
knew Simenon a little, he said, then
proceeded to tell a raunchy story he
heard from Simenons long-suffering
wife, involving roadside sex in the snow
in Gstaad.
This seemed like a good moment to ask
about de Villierss own preoccupations.
Ive had a lot of sex in my life, he said.
Thats why I have so much trouble with
wives. In America they would say I am a
womanizer. He has married four
times and has two children, and now has
a girlfriend nearly 30 years his junior, an
attractive blond woman whom I met
briefly at his home. When I suggested
that the sex in S.A.S. was unusually
hard-core, he replied with a chuckle:
Maybe for an American. Not in
France.
One thing de Villiers does not have is
serious literary ambitions. Although he
is a great admirer of le Carr, he has
never tried to turn espionage into the
setting for a complex human drama. He
writes the way he speaks, in terse,
informative bursts, with a morbid sense
of humor. When I asked whether it
bothered him that no one took his books
seriously, he did not seem at all
defensive. I dont consider myself a
literary man, he said. Im a storyteller.
I write fairy tales for adults. And I try to
put some substance into it.
I had no idea what kind of substance
until a friend urged me to look at La
Liste Hariri, one of de Villierss many
books set in and around Lebanon. The
book, published in early 2010, concerns
the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the
former Lebanese prime minister. I spent
years looking into and writing about
Hariris death, and I was curious to
know what de Villiers made of it. I found
the descriptions of Beirut and Damascus
to be impressively accurate, as were the
names of restaurants, the atmosphere of
the neighborhoods and the descriptions
of some of the security chiefs that I knew
from my tenure as The Times Beirut
bureau chief. But the real surprise came
later. La Liste Hariri provides detailed
information about the elaborate plot,
ordered by Syria and carried out by
Hezbollah, to kill Hariri. This plot is one
of the great mysteries of the Middle
East, and I found specific information
that no journalists, to my knowledge,
knew at the time of the books
publication, including a complete list of
the members of the assassination team
and a description of the systematic
elimination of potential witnesses by
Hezbollah and its Syrian allies. I was
even more impressed when I spoke to a
former member of the U.N.-backed
international tribunal, based in the
Netherlands, that investigated Hariris
death. When La Liste Hariri came out,
everyone on the commission was
amazed, the former staff member said.
They were all literally wondering who
on the team could have sold de Villiers
this information because it was very
clear that someone had showed him the
commissions reports or the original
Lebanese intelligence reports.
When I put the question to de Villiers, a
smile of discreet triumph flashed on his
face. It turns out that he has been
friends for years with one of Lebanons
top intelligence officers, an austere-
looking man who probably knows more
about Lebanons unsolved murders than
anyone else. It was he who handed de
Villiers the list of Hariris killers. He
worked hard to get it, and he wanted
people to know, de Villiers said. But he
couldnt trust journalists. I was one of
those he didnt trust. I have interviewed
the same intelligence chief multiple
times on the subject of the Hariri killing,
but he never told me about the list. De
Villiers had also spoken with high-
ranking Hezbollah officials, in meetings
that he said were brokered by French
intelligence. One assumes these men
had not read his fiction.
What do the spies themselves say about
de Villiers? I conducted my own furtive
tour of the French intelligence
community and found that de Villierss
name was a very effective passe-partout,
even among people who found the
subject mildly embarrassing. Only one
of those I spoke with, a former head of
the D.G.S.E., said he never provided
information to de Villiers. We met in a
dim corridor outside his office, where we
chatted for a while about other matters
before the subject of de Villiers came up.
Ah, yes, Grard de Villiers, I dont know
him, he said, chuckling dismissively, as
if to suggest that he had not even read
the books. Then after a pause, he
confessed: But one must admit that
some of his information is very good.
And in fact, one sees that it has gotten
better and better in the past few novels.
Another former spook admitted freely
that he had been friends with de Villiers
for years. We met at a cafe in Saint-
Germain-des-Prs on a cold, foggy
afternoon, and as he sipped his coffee,
he happily reeled off the favors hed
done not just talking over cases but
introducing de Villiers to colleagues and
experts on explosives and nuclear
weapons and computer hacking. When
de Villiers describes intelligence people
in his book, everybody in the business
knows exactly who hes talking about,
he said. The truth is, hes become such
a figure that lots of people in the
business are desperate to meet him.
There are even ministers from other
countries who meet with him when they
pass through Paris.
A third former government official
spoke of de Villiers as a kind of
colleague. We meet and share
information, he told me over coffee at a
Paris hotel. Ive introduced him to
some sensitive sources. He has a gift a
very strong intellectual comprehension
of these security and terrorism issues.
It is not just the French who say these
things. De Villiers has had close friends
in Russian intelligence over the years.
Alla Shevelkina, a journalist who has
worked as a fixer for de Villiers on a
number of his Russian trips, said: He
gets interviews that no one else gets
not journalists, no one. The people that
dont talk, talk to him. In the United
States, I spoke to a former C.I.A.
operative who has known de Villiers for
decades. I recommend to our analysts
to read his books, because theres a lot of
real information in there, he told me.
Hes tuned into all the security services,
and he knows all the players.
Why do all these people divulge so
much to a pulp novelist? I put the
question to de Villiers the last time we
met, in the cavernous living room of his
Paris apartment on a cold winter
evening. He was leaving on a reporting
trip to Tunisia the next day, and on the
coffee table in front of me, next to a
cluster of expensive scotches and
liqueurs, was a black military-made
ammunition belt. They always have a
motive, he said, absently stroking one
of his two longhaired cats like a Bond
villain at leisure. They want the
information to go out. And they know a
lot of people read my books, all the
intelligence agencies.
Renaud Girard, de Villierss old friend
and traveling companion, arrived at the
apartment for a drink and offered a
simpler explanation. Everybody likes to
talk to someone who appreciates their
work, he said. And its fun. If the
source is a military attach, he can show
off the book to his friends, with his
character drawn in it. He also
suggested that if the source happens to
have a beautiful wife, she will appear in
a sex scene with Malko, and some of
them enjoy this, too. If you have read
the books, he said, its fun to enter the
books.
I asked de Villiers about his next novel,
and his eyes lighted up. It goes back to
an old story, he said. Lockerbie. The
book is based on the premise that it was
Iran not Libya that carried out the
notorious 1988 airliner bombing. The
Iranians went to great lengths to
persuade Muammar el-Qaddafi to take
the fall for the attack, which was carried
out in revenge for the downing of an
Iranian passenger plane by American
missiles six months earlier, de Villiers
said. This has long been an unverified
conspiracy theory, but when I returned
to the United States, I learned that de
Villiers was onto something. I spoke to a
former C.I.A. operative who told me that
the best intelligence on the Lockerbie
bombing points to an Iranian role. It is a
subject of intense controversy at the
C.I.A. and the F.B.I., he said, in part
because the evidence against Iran is
classified and cannot be used in court,
but many at the agency believe Iran
directed the bombing.
De Villiers excused himself to continue
packing for Tunisia, after cheerfully
delivering his cynical take on the Arab
Spring. (What this really means is the
empowerment of the Muslim
Brotherhood across the region.) His
views on other subjects are similarly
curt and disillusioned. Russia? Russia
is Putin. People fooled themselves with
Medvedev that there would be change. I
never believed it. And Syria? If Bashar
falls, Syria falls. There is nothing else to
hold that country together.
Girard and I poured ourselves more
Scotch, and he began reeling off stories
of his and de Villierss adventures
together. Many of them involved one of
de Villierss former wives, who always
seemed to show up in Gaza or Pakistan
in wildly inappropriate dress. One time
in the mid-90s, we went to a Hamas
stronghold together, and Grard had his
wife with him, wearing a very
provocative shirt with no bra, Girard
said. There were young men there who
literally started stoning us, and we had
to flee.
It was getting late, and Girard seemed to
be running out of stories. He is 83 years
old, and he is not slowing down, he said
before we parted. He still goes to Mali
and Libya, even after his heart troubles.
He paused for a moment, looking into
his Scotch. I remember one time during
the rebellion in Albania, in 1997, we
were sitting on a rooftop together, and
we started talking about death. He told
me: I will never stop. I will keep going
with my foot on the accelerator until I
die.