There were images of the real Pascal Balmy in my dossier. In one, taken in a Parisian bar among friends, Pascal’s haircut looks to be an exact replica of the signature hairstyle of Guy Debord in the 1950s and ’60s—short, even bangs over a high forehead. The faces, and the expressions, of Pascal and the younger Debord before his dissolution were similar: sensitive features, a supple mouth, a well-formed chin, a gaze that was both dreamy and penetrating.
The most curious photo in the dossier, which at first I took to be Pascal as a toddler, was of a beautiful baby about a year old. The baby gazes off to the right, with clear, bright eyes, a dark etched line around each iris. The curls of the baby’s hair are as lustrous as a silent screen star’s. His little pursed mouth suggests knowledge of things unsaid. The bottom of the photo is faded out, so that the baby seems to rise from a kind of ether—an intended studio effect. The ether gives the baby a diaphanous wisdom, as if it occupies not this earth but some eternal plane of peace and harmony. Later, I found this same photo online and its caption was “Guy Louis Debord, 1932.” Either my contacts in Paris were interchanging their files, or Pascal had passed this off as his own baby picture, or it was no one’s baby picture and everyone’s baby picture, a kind of commons of innocent purity that could be borrowed and passed around.
Most of the images in the dossier of grown-up Pascal had been taken at long range, as surveillance, with a telephoto lens, from crowd scenes at a G8 summit in Genoa, back in 2001. Pascal during a street melee with Italian riot police, his figure circled in each image.
Another set of photos, which were my favorites, because no one in them has any idea they are being photographed (at a G8 summit, everyone knows they are being photographed), were profile views of Pascal and seven or eight other people walking down a city street in a loose group. These photos were of individuals from a network of climate activists who had converged for a “meeting” in Times Square of New York City in 2008. Pascal Balmy had entered the United States at the Canadian border, having been driven from the border down to New York City by a “comrade” who was in fact an undercover agent for the UK police, and this comrade had tipped off the FBI about the meeting, whose purpose, this undercover agent said, was to plan an act of terrorism to take place in Times Square.
The photos show young men in sunglasses and army parkas with cool haircuts walking on a brisk morning down 44th Street. Pascal is there, in a horsehide leather jacket and checked scarf, his wire-rimmed glasses. He’s holding the hand of a petite young woman in a Fair Isle cap and a peacoat. They are seen walking past bodegas and pretzel carts and delivery trucks, passing under construction awnings, stepping over steam-exhaling sidewalk vents. You can see that it’s cold from the amount of steam being generated but also by their body language, the way they are bent forward, as if to conserve warmth, their hands in their coat pockets, with the exception of Pascal, who holds the girl’s hand. The girl is nice-looking in a meekly bourgeois and Parisian manner, but she gives the impression, in her knit cap and her peacoat, her unwashed hair tumbling down her back, that she has tried to distance herself from her pedigree and good looks, from the luck of wealth, of being “from a good family.”
It is obvious that none of these people on 44th Street have any idea that a slow-moving vehicle is snapping images of them. They think they alone hold the key to the meaning of their purpose, the key to their association as a group. They believe they have a secret, and that their secret is safe, an electricity only they can sense, invisible as winter static as they walk through the dry cold on a bright morning in Times Square.
But their secrets have already been shared by the UK undercover agent who is in the photos, right behind Pascal and his petite chérie. They are on a stage as they walk down 44th Street, their secrets already known to four governments—French, British, American, and Canadian.
The UK undercover agent reported, after the meeting, that disagreements among the group led to a cancellation of plans for action. (Curiously, he said his hidden microphone stopped working when they began their meeting.)
A few days after that meeting, an army recruitment center in Times Square was bombed. No one was hurt.
Arrests were made, but not of Pascal Balmy or his female companion. Those two had reentered Canada and from there flown back to Paris before the bombing occurred. They had been stopped and searched at the Canadian border, either by random luck or on account of the communications between the UK police and Canadian authorities. Photos of Times Square had been found in Pascal Balmy’s backpack. Pascal told authorities he was a tourist.
“Why were you photographing Times Square?” Canadian border agents had asked him.
“For the same reason as millions of other tourists who go there,” Pascal told them. “To take pictures of the most photographed tourist site in the world.”
It was just after this incident that Pascal decamped from Paris to the Guyenne and took with him the most committed of the young anarchists from the little scene he’d cultivated.
It turned out that this UK undercover agent who had tipped off the FBI about the meeting was himself the bomber of the army recruitment center, and that he had acted alone.
That agent’s name was Marc Cutler, though he had been using the name Marc White while undercover.
Marc Cutler, aka Marc White, was apparently in love with Pascal Balmy’s girlfriend (I mean Pascal’s girlfriend at the time, the one in the Fair Isle hat; in the file there are short biographies of thirteen women with whom Balmy has been romantically associated in the last few years). Cutler sued the UK Metropolitan Police for failing to protect him from ultraleft indoctrination, and failing to protect him from falling in love.
Because that girlfriend of Pascal’s was the daughter of a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Justice, she was scrubbed from French police files.
I had figured out her name. It wasn’t difficult.
She was married last April at Sainte-Chapelle with a reception afterward on the banks of the Seine. I had seen on the internet a spring fête of refined-looking people who own country estates and dabble in charity work, ladies in big hats, men of all generations in soft linen blazers, the older ones smoking their pipes, the younger gleaming with good looks and bright futures.
The groom graduated from a grande école and works as an EU consultant. The bride is an assistant editor at the venerable and snobbish old publisher Gallimard. Her wool cap is in a landfill somewhere, her hair as shiny and fresh as her dossier.
THE CASE OF MARC CUTLER, the British agent who was himself the bomber, erupted into a public relations nightmare around the same time as some other calamities for UK intelligence. The stories were building into something like a backlash against police spying across Europe, and were causing a lot of paranoia, well-founded as it was, among subversives like Pascal Balmy and Le Moulin.
The first undercover officer ensnared in public scandal had been a married British professor named Bob Lambert, who was outed by multiple women with whom he’d had affairs while surveilling them, in one case fathering a child with an activist under an assumed identity and then disappearing. That child, now an adult, had filed a lawsuit against the Metropolitan police, citing psychological distress after learning that his father was a fictitious person.
A female agent by the alias Lynn Watson had been exposed on “Cop Watch,” an online database with Vimeo footage of her with a theater troupe of “climate clowns.” She’s wearing clown makeup and protesting outside the perimeter fence of a coal-fired power plant. To me this Lynn Watson looks quite obviously like a cop under the clown makeup: straitlaced, and with an ROTC physique (fit, tall, square-shouldered), but apparently she had managed to slip away from the climate clowns before they confronted her.
This is what agents do—slip away, disappear, move on to their next assignment. Afterward, those they infiltrated come to believe that this person who showed up out of nowhere and later melted back into nowhere either: (1) fell in love and ran away, (2) had a mental breakdown, or (3) was a cop all along.
While Lynn Watson’s real name was not made public, her visage was. I doubt she was a valuable agent. She was scamming a paycheck by pretending that people who dressed as clowns were a threat to the energy sector. But she won’t be able to work undercover now that everyone knows what she looks like. Even with the clown makeup, it’s obvious.
Marc Cutler, it turned out, had become romantically entangled with eight different women from various groups in the UK and Germany that he’d surveilled, by the time he’d gone to New York with Pascal, in 2008. It seemed he could not help himself. These women had begun sharing stories, information, and some of them were suing both Cutler and the UK police.
When you work for government entities, as Cutler did, as I once did, there are rules about how you conduct yourself. You have a boss, a supervising officer, and a logbook. Every time Cutler bedded down with some activist, his supervisor was listening to the whole thing.
Just as my supervisor heard me suggesting to the boy with the chin-line beard that he and I should be a couple, but that first we had important work to do together for the movement.
After the boy unexpectedly got off with an entrapment defense, someone involved in that undercover operation had to be sacrificed. It wasn’t going to be my supervisor, and it wasn’t going to be the Feds. It would be me, but in many ways, it was a relief to be in the private sector now, where there are no supervising officers, no logbooks, and no rules.
When Marc Cutler had first glommed onto Pascal, back in the Paris years, the mid-aughts, before Times Square, Cutler was what Lucien described to me as an eco-hippie: ponytail, earrings, Guatemalan surf pants, a dopey tattoo of a sun in sunglasses in the middle of his chest. But overnight Cutler had renovated his appearance in accordance with international black-bloc-style anarchism: short hair, black clothes, kept his tattoos hidden. Lucien said he found this weird, but a lot of people around Pascal were sycophants, and Cutler discarding his old style and adopting the look of his new milieu would have seemed to Pascal like a person coming to his senses. Plus, Lucien said, a lot of them had come from other social milieus and had tattoos from earlier lives, since people who change affinities are the same kinds of people who are attracted to the permanence of tattoos.
Cutler had used as his alias his real first name. Like those breeds of little dog who don’t have the mental capacity to respond to their name, perhaps Cutler was afraid he would forget a made-up one on emergency reflex. This kind of small-brained intelligence officer might say their birthday is January 1, or that their birthday is Boxing Day, or Christmas. As if it is beyond them to memorize a date. I have never experienced these issues with names or details or birthdate or astrological sign or place of origin or family background or anything else I’ve manufactured to convince. If you have a good memory, and if you don’t get in the way of your constructed self, it’s not hard, even under duress, to remember who you are supposed to be.
Often, the sloppier undercover agents are obvious to the activists, who later say, “We knew.” They suspected, they sensed a cop in their midst, but they staunched their suspicions for one reason or another, despite shadowy backstories and unfurnished apartments, despite unexplained absences and access to abundant cash with no clear source. Marc Cutler had all those things, plus a van, among people who were always having to borrow some car that turned out to have a dead battery or a blown radiator, and here was this new guy with a late-model van, and money for gas, and energy to pursue direct action, to do things.
I knew some of this from Lucien. Lucien explained Pascal’s fears and his secrecy as personal, and the betrayal of Pascal by Marc Cutler as also personal.
According to Lucien, after the story about Marc Cutler became public, Pascal began to see that Cutler had been too eager, too assertive. Always volunteering for projects, taking everything Pascal uttered as gospel. Only in retrospect did Pascal and the Moulinards recognize that Cutler’s hunger for acceptance was driven by the fact he was a narc, and not because he was obsequious and loyal. Forever after, they would keep an eye out for signs in outsiders: too much zeal, not enough backstory, too many unanswered questions. Anyone who showed up wanting to attach might be a Marc Cutler.
And this was why Pascal was so keen to work with people who were carefully vetted, who came from inside, people like me.
PASCAL ASKED ME RIGHT AWAY about Lucien, as I expected he would. They were still close, even as they’d gone in different life directions.
Their biographies overlapped in crucial ways. Same social class (Lucien’s father was a banker, Pascal’s a lawyer). Neighborhood (sixteenth arrondissement). Family structure (only children). Ancestral country homes in the Guyenne. Elite education (Lycée Henri-IV). Academic promise followed by disappointment (intelligent boys who were uneven students). And finally, they shared in their teenage years an obsession with film, although Lucien said that Pascal would dismiss that now, might not admit he ever cared about this bourgeois art form. But once upon a time they had cut class for ten a.m. showings of John Cassavetes and Marguerite Duras, lined up in the rain with old women in plastic bonnets and rubber galoshes designed to fit over their block-heeled shoes, dowagers married to avant-garde cinema.
Lucien had wanted me to understand that Pascal, despite his infamy as a left-wing subversive, was a person who came from somewhere, who had a past, had been, like Lucien, a boy who loved movies, even if it was a movie that marked a turn for Pascal away from all that. Pascal and Lucien had gone to see Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle in the Latin Quarter. Lucien found it grating and pompous. Pascal was electrified by the scathing tone, the use of film clips and advertising and seduction to excoriate cinema and advertising and the promise of sex. By the time Lucien went to film school, Pascal had decided that throwing yourself into any project in this society was useless, except for the project of destroying this society.
I told Pascal that Lucien was shooting a film in Marseille, and Pascal made a dismissive comment about entertainment.
Lucien had said he would do that. “He likes me on account of loyalty. Movies are marketplace trash to Pascal.”
