France had its own fair share of embarrassing secret service blunders. Many are described in an excellent documentary [1]. For instance when New Zealand arrest

France had its own fair share of embarrassing secret service blunders. Many are described in an excellent documentary [1]. For instance when New Zealand arrested the DGSE agents who sunk the Rainbow Warrior, the agents gave them the phone numbers of their “relatives” as part of their cover story. Instead of calling the numbers, the New Zealand police called their french counterpart to do a reverse lookup on the numbers, and the French police responded that the numbers belong to the DGSE... One of the biggest success of French secret services is Farewell, the code name for a Soviet officer providing valuable intelligence to the DST. Based on this intelligence, France expelled Russian agents. The Russian ambassador protested to the French foreign minister, who showed him some stolen document to prove that France was well informed. Having seen what document had been stolen, it didn’t take long to the Russians to identify the source and execute him. Or in the 80s in Lebanon. A huge explosion killed dozens of French UN soldiers. France suspected Iran was behind the attack and decided to respond in kind. They left a jeep loaded with explosives in front of the Iranian embassy but the bomb didn’t explode. They then tried to shoot on the jeep to make it explode, no luck. It didn’t take long to the Iranian to find who purchased the jeep... [1] first part (the others must be on youtube too): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JQijy9P7M_4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JQijy9P7M_4