Two Intelligence Officers on Trial in France for Copying Secret Documents onto Flash Drives and Transferring Them to Foreign Countries

Two employees of leading intelligence agencies are on trial in France for copying secret documents onto personal flash drives and possibly transferring them to foreign countries.

This was reported by the newspaper Le Parisien.

On January 15, the Paris Criminal Court began hearing two high-profile cases involving the leak of secret data.

One of the defendants is an engineer with the French Ministry of Armed Forces’ Directorate General for External Security (DGSE), which is responsible for foreign intelligence. He is accused of copying and storing approximately 16 gigabytes of confidential data related to defense projects on a flash drive.

According to the investigation, in the fall of 2024, the 35-year-old engineer took tens of thousands of files from the DGSE headquarters, some of which he stored on a secure USB drive, and later transferred to his personal computer and unsecured storage devices.

The documents concerned a state defense contract and equipment for gathering intelligence through data interception.

The engineer, who had been working at the DGSE since 2018, traveled to Germany in January 2025 without telling anyone where he had rented an apartment. In March, he resigned from the special service and got a job at a European startup in the field of space technology.

The investigation suspects that, along with his personal belongings, he took abroad materials related to his work in French intelligence, as well as data to which he had no formal connection.

He is charged with transferring classified defense information that may be of interest to a foreign state.

During questioning, the engineer admitted to copying the documents but claimed that most of them were not classified.

Another case related to data leaks in the French special services concerns an IT technician from the General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI), which is responsible for counterintelligence.

According to the investigation, in June 2024, the technician copied about 2,300 secret documents onto an unprotected flash drive. During a search of his home, law enforcement officers found dozens of materials marked ‘secret’ and ‘confidential for defense.’