How French defence firm Thales placed a mole inside the UN

TheThe location is New York and the date is July 16th 2017. In the glass tower that houses the United Nations, Major Philippe Schifferling was fretting more than ever. This officer in the French air force reserve had a problem: his secondment from France's Ministry of Armed Forces to the UN was due to end in two months and he still did not know what he would be doing next.

Major Schifferling wanted to stay in his current post but he also knew he might be obliged to return to Paris. “These uncertainties obviously create stress that I really don't need. My job is difficult enough by its nature and because of the risks,” he complained to his superiors by email. However, those superiors were not, as one might have imagined, his senior officers in the military. Instead they were his bosses at Thales, the giant French defence and electronics firm for whom he was in reality working.

For Major Philippe Schifferling was a hidden spy. As far as his office colleagues in New York were concerned he was simply a retired military officer paid by the French state and provided free of charge to the UN by France. In fact, he was being secretly paid by Thales for a mission to infiltrate the department in charge of IT, telecoms and security for UN peacekeeping missions. This service has handed out tens of millions of euros in contracts of which Thales has been the ultimate beneficiary.

This extraordinary undercover mission should have stayed secret. Its revelation now threatens this powerful group, which is headed by CEO Patrice Caine and which is jointly controlled by its major shareholders, Dassault Aviation and the French state. As the online publication La Lettre A recently revealed, at the end of 2020 France's financial prosecution unit, the Parquet National Financier (PNF), opened a judicial investigation for alleged “corruption” and “influence peddling” in relation to Thales and its activities at the UN.

The documents handed over as part of the judicial case, which Mediapart has had access to, show how from 2015 to 2017 Thales infiltrated one of the UN's strategic services involved in buying equipment. They also highlight the overlapping interests that exist between France's defence industry and the French state.

According to internal emails Philippe Schifferling's role was known to several senior managers at Thales and also to senior officials at France's Ministries of Defence (now the Armed Forces) and Foreign Affairs who approved his cover. The Thales agent wrote that he was also an “informer and an influencer” for France's permanent delegation at the UN. He was in direct contact with the military advisor to the former French UN ambassador, François Delattre, who is today the secretary general or top civil servant at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris.

Philippe Schifferling's post proved a considerable advantage for Thales. Week after week during his mission at the UN from September 2016 to September 2017, the agent sent first-hand information describing contracts that were being drawn up, and even boasted of having changed invitations to tender in favour of Thales, according to documents seen by Mediapart. Approached several times, he has not responded to Mediapart's requests for an interview.

The reservist officer had been seconded to the Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT) division, which among other tasks draws up contracts to help provide security for UN peacekeeping missions, including the MINUSMA mission in Mali where 122 Blue Helmet peacekeepers have lost their lives since 2013. To protect the peacekeepers there the OICT bought a secured communications network and surveillance equipment (cameras, detectors of enemy rockets) from Thales for the UN's camps in Gao and Kidal, jihadist strongholds in the north of the country.

As a former air force major specialising in information technology, Philippe Schifferling had been hired at the end of the 2000s by Thales SIX GTS, the group's division dealing with information, communications and security systems. He remained an officer in the air force reserve. Inside Thales SIX he was seconded to the 'services' division headed by Florence Gourgeon, daughter of the former head of Air France Pierre-Henri Gourgeon and who was in the same year as Emmanuel Macron at the elite École Nationale d'Administration (ENA) school.

Before him, from September 2015 to September 2016, another retired officer employed by Thales, Philippe Maucotel, a colonel in the army reserves, had already been seconded to the OICT by France while also being secretly paid by the French group. “From 2015 to 2016 I was over there for the Ministry of Defence in my capacity as a reserve officer,” the former army officer told Mediapart, while also confirming that a “protocol” had been signed between Thales and the ministry before he was sent to New York.

Contacted several times, the ministries of the Armed Forces and Foreign Affairs declined to comment on the situation. The current minister for foreign affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, who was minister for defence under President François Hollande (2012-2017), responded that neither he nor his office had “ever been informed of the information in question”.

The UN secretary general's office explained that as part of an agreement signed with the French government the latter “supplied two agents free of charge”. However, the UN said it had “no knowledge of the details of payments to this member of personnel” and thus knew nothing about the role played by Thales.

The French group itself said that the secondment of its employees to the UN was set out on the French side by an “agreement relating to the terms and conditions of the contribution of operational reservists taken on to serve in the Thales Group that was agreed between Thales and the Ministry of Armed Forces”. The group added: “The first support agreement for military reserve policy between the Ministry of the Armed Forces and Thales was signed in 2006.” Through this Thales was “involved in supporting the armed forces in its operation” and “helped export operations relevant to the defence sector”. The group also said that the seconded personnel “were not linked with the UN purchasing department and did not take place in any way in decision making”.

Since 2015 Thales SIX has clinched several deals relating to the security of the MINUSMA mission, and has thus in a sense been involved at both ends of the process. At one end the OICT had signed deals using the 'letter of assist' (LOA) procedure which allows UN members states, by mutual agreement, to provide goods to a UN operation with no tendering process. Philippe Schifferling monitored the drafting of these LOAs, intervening in particular on important technical points, before the OICT handed them on to France to be carried out.

The LOAs were signed between the UN and Expertise France, the development agency that reports to the ministries of Finance and Foreign Affairs. Expertise France then entrusted the service provision itself to Thales without any tendering process. Documents seen by Mediapart show that the civil servant at Expertise France who was in charge of the contracts for Mali was informed of Philippe Schifferling's problematic situation.

In a report on its work for MINUSMA, published in January 2018, Expertise France congratulated itself for having used the “French institutional network (Foreign Affairs, Economy and Finance, Defence)” and for having been able to “forge a close relationship” with the UN.

Asked about the circumstances in which the LOAs were drafted and the subsequent awarding of the contracts to Thales, Expertise France did not respond to Mediapart's questions, despite several requests and despite the fact that it had promised to reply.

Thales, meanwhile, said that the LOAs had been signed within the framework of an intergovernmental agreement reached in 2013 between the UN and the French state, which allowed France to help the UN by supporting the MINUSMA peacekeeping mission.

It was in this context that a “GME (Temporary Grouping of Enterprises) was put in place by the French authorities between Expertise France … and some suppliers selected for their competence” and that Thales SIX GTS was chosen “in agreement with the ministries of the Armed Forces and Foreign affairs”, said the group.

In the labyrinthine institutional complexity of the United Nations, the interventions made by Philippe Schifferling, who also had a Thales email address and was in touch with the group's lobbyists, were often invaluable. For example, on October 29th 2016 he emailed several executives at Thales with the biography of a German lieutenant-colonel, Stefan Lemm. This officer had just become the new head of the Military Operations Unit at the OICT a month earlier.

Philippe Schifferling summarised Lemm's career but also gave some details on his private life, describing the German as “geographically single”, as his family had stayed in Europe. Schifferling said that given the German officer “wasn't a Comms/IT engineer” and did not have “great technical-operational knowledge and experience of the area” he relied a lot on his deputy “but also now on myself”. The French officer then congratulated himself for having established a “special relationship of trust and closeness” with Lemm.

Every week, in reports headed 'Report on the week' and addressed to Jean-Pierre Maingam, the executive in charge of the 'communications and security' department at Thales, and his assistant Emeric Tamboise, the undercover agent gave a quick update on the progress of different LOAs of interest to Thales, using an insider's language stuffed full of acronyms.

On July 27th 2017, for example, in report number 29, Philippe Schifferling informed Thales management that the draft of the “letter of assist” about making the camp at Gao secure was “still waiting to be approved by MINUSMA CITS [editor's note, the head of the communications and information technology section at the UN peacekeeping force in Mali] and DMS [editor's note, the mission support division]”.

“The delay in validation by CITS is more to do with identifying the necessary budget than with the content of the LOA,” reassured Philippe Schifferling, who announced that the draft included “an option for the provision of a 45m mast by France at a cost of 495,000 euros”. He told them: “CITS and OICT have asked EF [Expertise France] for an estimate for the optional supply of a less expensive 45-metre mast, with CITS accepting lower stability specifications.”

At other times the agent claimed that he had influenced the drafting of contracts on behalf of Thales. In June 2017 the UN launched a process to establish a “framework agreement” for a system to detect ballistic missiles and send an alert, a so-called “Sense and Warn system”. At the time the OICT was drawing up a “statement of work” or “SOW” detailing its requirements.

Philippe Schifferling sent Thales not just non-public information on the drawing up of this document, but also claimed that, working in coordination with the French group, he was able to modify the SOW in line with the company's needs. The changes related in particular to the GA10 system (sold by Thales) which could have been disqualified from consideration on technical grounds in the original draft. “Statement of Work still in the process of finalisation at DFS OICT … After internal coordination I was able to include in the draft SOW some technical elements … without which the GA10 could have been excluded from the potential suppliers,” wrote the agent in his report on July 16th 2017.

On July 2nd 2017 Philippe Schifferling flew to the Mali capital Bamako where he had to run a working session on security equipment with senior staff at MINUSMA and a delegation from Thales. The UN staff were not supposed to notice that Philippe Schifferling knew the French group's team.

He had barely arrived when he told several Thales executives that the “letter of assist” (LOA) for camp security at Gao was due to be approved soon and that MINUSMA was envisaging extending the secure communications network operated by Thales. “Must maintain total discretion on this issue with the UN representatives. The French delegation at the UN has been informed of this statement of requirement which remains to be confirmed,” he wrote.

Nicolas Ferrier, the salesperson at Thales responsible for the UN, congratulated him for “this promising information” and for his “performance” during the working seminar at Bamako. “Your talents at presentation, while staying in your official position, have been appreciated by everyone.” Philippe Schifferling replied: “Thank you so much for your much-appreciated comments and for your awareness of the difficulty of my task, which I hope contributes to the development of the business.”

Tensions with the Ministry of the Armed Forces over contract renewal

On August 10th 2017 Philippe Schifferling sent crucial new information by email: a “Scope of Work” or SOW was being drawn up for the supply of protection, warning and surveillance systems for all of MINUSMA's camps in Mali.

A great deal was at stake for Thales. This new procedure was aimed at setting up a competitive global tender process to replace the various private contracts from which Thales currently benefited, thanks to the LOAs. The idea was first to deploy the equipment in Mali and then roll it out in other countries where the UN had Blue Helmet peacekeepers. It was potentially an enormous deal.

Attached to his email Schifferling sent a preliminary 28-page version of the SOW on which UN officials were working on in secret, together with his own notes. This was privileged information as the tender process was not launched publicly until February 2019, a year and a half later.

This meant Philippe Schifferling's mission was more important than ever for Thales. But by now it was the summer of 2017 and time was running short; his secondment by France to the UN was due to expire on September 14th. And the Ministry of Armed Forces, which ensured his cover by making it look as though he was paid by the French state, was reluctant to extend his posting.

At the time Philippe Schifferling confided his concerns to General Thierry Lion, the head of military at the French delegation at the UN and thus defence advisor to the French ambassador there. The general had “given his agreement” to an extension but had “still not got confirmation”.

On July 16th 2017 Emeric Tamboise, an executive at Thales SIX, expressed concern to his bosses Jean-Pierre Maingam and Florence Gourgeon. He highlighted “P. Schifferling's key role, that it would be desirable to extend by six months. For that we have to get the agreement of DGRIS [editor's note, the Direction Générale des Relations Internationales et de la Stratégie at the Ministry for Armed Forces] and the human resources department” of the air force.

On July 21st a crisis conference phone call was arranged between Emeric Tamboise, Philippe Schifferling, General Lion and his deputy. Jean-Pierre Maingam, who was not able to take part, told the general: “I obviously remain very concerned about this very important project and we are seeking with Emeric and you the most appropriate option to extend Philippe's assignment.”

But the situation soon became more complicated, as Jean-Pierre Maingam explained on August 2nd in an email to several executives in the group, General Lion and the official at Expertise France who was the intermediary between the UN and Thales over the awarding of contracts.

The human resources department “wants to have a more conventional process ...” wrote Maingam. “Moreover, apparently there is a risk this issue will go to the minister's office [editor's note, the armed forces minister Florence Parly] which will probably compromise the future of the mission.”

The Thales executive took the matter up with a senior figure in the weapons procurement agency at the ministry who “well understood the concern” and apparently agreed to try to convince the ministry's civil servants “not to involve the minister's office”. Maingam concluded: “Thales confirms its desire to do all it can to facilitate the continuation of the mission.”

Despite these efforts, the bad news dropped on September 4th 2017: the ministry had refused to extend Philippe Schifferling's secondment to the UN. Now that his cover was gone, he had to pack his bags just ten days later. “That's not how you treat an officer, especially one who's been made available to the Ministry of the Army by Thales. Let that be known diplomatically,” he complained to his superiors. Major Schifferling said that his departure would have negative consequences for France. “The defence mission at the French delegation at the UN is losing an informer and an influencer.”

So in mid-September 2017 Philippe Schifferling returned to Paris and rejoined the team at Thales. Then in April 2018 he managed to get a position in the operational support department for UN peacekeeping missions. But this time he was employed as a United Nations official and paid directly by them.

The reserve officer had barely returned to New York when he resumed his work for the French defence and electronics group. He was in contact with several executives via Citadel, the secure message system operated by Thales. Major Schifferling, who plays golf, used the pseudonym “Woody Tiger”, in reference to the American golf legend Tiger Woods.

Schifferling was in contact with the Thales lobbying department that dealt with the UN, NATO and the European Union, and which was headed by Marc Cathelineau. In an internal email the latter reminded staff about the “rules set out by the group” in relation to the confidentiality of the information supplied by Philippe Schifferling: only Emeric Tamboise, from Thales SIX, and the head of security Pierre-Jean Lassalle should receive it, “it's down to them to transmit it to the people in charge of SIX who have to know about it confidentially and to delete all reference to the sources”.

On June 26th 2018 Paul Houot, one of the lobbyists managed by Cathelineau, sent to Emeric Tamboise some confidential UN documents that Schifferling had photographed, noting they were “not to be shared widely nor outside Thales please”. It involved screen grabs of documents signed on May 9th 2018 by General Jean-Paul Deconinck, commander of the MINUSMA military force, approving the extension of the mission. A pleased Paul Houot said that the file “finally” made its way to the office of the director in charge of supporting the mission, who had to send it to the OICT in New York to secure the involvement of Expertise France, and thus Thales.

But for an agent Philippe Schifferling was a little too talkative. In December 2018 he had a discussion in New York with Vincent de Raucourt, a salesperson at Thales who dealt with the UN, and asked him to send a message to the head of “services” at Thales SIX, Florence Gourgeon.

Vincent de Raucourt sent it by email on January 7th 2019 and copied in several executives: “Philippe has told me that his contract with the UN was annual, that his boss was happy with him and that he was thinking he'd be kept on during the next 2 to 3 years. However, for information, he asked me to remind you of your commitment to rehire him at SSC [editor's note, Thales SIX's old name] if necessary.”

“There was no commitment on my part and from memory there is nothing specific on the subject in his contract (tbc), but a positive message about his past and current experience would be in Thales' interest,” responded Florence Gourgeon.

Vincent de Raucourt replied to her that he would relay the message to Philippe Schifferling but with this warning: “It's certainly not going to reassure him but will drive him to maintain his position at the UN. The risk is that he doesn't hold to the informal commitments that he has got from you, and also that he gives vent to his anxiety by continuing to open up imprudently to others.”

In short, Philippe Schifferling could stop his intelligence mission. Emeric Tamboise, who dealt with him at Thales, intervened in the email conversation. “We'll both talk about it please so we can agree on the language,” he wrote, referring to the tone of the reply to Schifferling.

Three weeks later there was a dramatic development: the senior management at Thales ordered all contact to be cut with the undercover agent. That was the message in an email sent by Marc Cathelineau on February 1st 2019 to nine executives at the group who dealt with UN contracts.

“As agreed with the group's management, I met Philippe Schifferling in New York on Tuesday 29/1,” wrote Cathelineau. “I informed him of the need to bring to a halt professional relations with employees of the group. He completely understood and in front of me he immediately left the different Citadel 'rooms' in which he took part. As a result please make sure that your teams no longer have professional relations with him.”

“To follow up on certain rumours passed on by some Thales employees” about the fact that Schifferling “was expecting to be taken back on … at the end of his UN mission”, the lobbyist said that Thales “has no further obligations in his regard”. He wrote: “Please make sure that the content of the present email absolutely does not go beyond those to whom it's addressed.”

Did Philippe Schifferling stop his mission following this email? Four months later he was certainly continuing to extol the virtues of his former employer. On June 9th 2019, during a working meeting with the commanders of all the UN peacekeeping missions, Schifferling praised the “success story” of the electronic equipment “supplied by the French government” - and especially Thales - in 2017 to protect the MINUSMA camp at Kidal in the north of Mali.

“The security technology of the camp showed itself to be very effective. It has been universally acknowledged since 2017 that this technology … has contributed to the better protection of our peacekeepers and has saved numerous lives,” the ex-employee of Thales said.

In the meantime Thales had responded to the tender bid for supplying protection, warning and monitoring systems at all MINUSMA camps, about which Philippe Schifferling had sent preliminary information in the summer of 2017. Details of the tender process had finally been published a year-and-a-half later, with a deadline for bids on March 8th 2019 and the opening of sealed bids on April 5th 2019. “Thales SIX GTS lost this tender process in July 2020 to a group of three Israeli companies,” the French group told Mediapart.

A former Thales executive raises the alarm and is later sacked

What happened during the implementation of this complicated tender process? An executive at Thales, who was in charge of developing export markets, and who had warned her managers for two years about the Philippe Schifferling case, flagged her concerns to the Thales ethics committee in March 2019; she wrote to the then-director of ethics at the group, Dominique Lamoureux, who was replaced three months later by Jean-Baptiste Siproudhis.

In her report this now former executive said that when he left for the UN in April 2018 Philippe Schifferling had not resigned, as had been announced internally, but had been given a “redundancy contract with compensation” as well as a six-month unserved notice period from which the money was “paid [to him] into a separate account created for this purpose even though he had already been hired by the UN”.

When contacted by Mediapart Thales disputed what it called the “false allegations made by this former employee” and said it intended to “file a complaint with the relevant judicial authorities for defamation”.

On October 5th 2021 Thales told the news agency AFP that, having looked at the case, its ethics committee had judged that the whistleblower's “allegations” concerning Philippe Schifferling were “without foundation”. That is not true: in an internal document seen by Mediapart the ethics committee said it had sent “formal written reminders in July 2019, to the people involved, of the group's ethical rules”.

Thales' ethical committee had thus acknowledged there had been a problem but did not mete out any punishment, and it certainly did not refer the case to prosecutors. In short, Thales buried the case even though the group boasts about its great anti-corruption action plan, launched in 2019, and despite the fact that its former director of ethics, Dominique Lamoureux, sits on the strategy committee of France's anti-corruption body the Agence Française Anticorruption.

Though the whistleblower had directly approached Dominique Lamoureux on March 13th 2019, the latter told Mediapart that he had retired from the company “on March 31st 2019 after a six-month unserved notice period”. He continued: “I thus ended all activity at my former employer from October 1st 2018. I never had to deal with the case to which you are referring.” His professional email address was still active, however, when the alert was sent by the whistleblower on March 13th 2019.

The whistleblower at Thales was finally dismissed in May 2020; she regarded it as an act of retaliation linked to her report to the ethics committee. She sought to have the sacking annulled by taking her case to an industrial tribunal at Nanterre, west of Paris, arguing that Thales had breached its legal obligations under France's 'Sapin II' law to protect whistleblowers. Her case was rejected at first instance and then on appeal, but after appealing again against the verdict it will now be considered afresh by a tribunal.

However, during the initial appeal process the whistleblower did receive some support; from the UNSA union representing Thales employees, from the whistleblowers support association the Maison des Lanceurs d'Alerte (MLA) and from the independent citizens' rights ombudsman the Défenseur des Droits (DDD). The ombudsman, Claire Hédon, ruled in October 2020 that the former Thales executive was indeed a whistleblower under the criteria of the Sapin II law, that she had acted in “good faith” and that she had been dismissed “in retaliation” for her actions.

Thales said that during the appeal process the justice system had “noted … that there was no obvious link between 'the fact of having raised the alarm and the dismissal for real and serious cause, and that there had not been a breach of the status of protector that is applicable to whistleblowers'”. The group said that it had dismissed the employee solely for “reasons of serious and persistent differences with her management”. It was this very “management”, though, that had been put under the spotlight by the whistleblower's report.

When contacted by Mediapart the whistleblower's lawyer, Frédéric Benoist, said his client wanted to stay anonymous in order to avoid reprisals and refused to make any comment on the case of alleged corruption involving Thales because of the ongoing judicial investigation.

In relation to the tribunal case Frédéric Benoist said it was “false to state, as Thales had, that the jurisdictions to which the matter had been referred had considered that there was no link at all between the dismissal of my client and the alerts that she raised”. The courts who dealt with the matter on appeal had not examined the full facts and merits of the case, he said.

In the summer of 2020 the whistleblower referred the matter to the Agence Française Anticorruption (AFA). The agency's director, Charles Duchaine, told Mediapart that an inspection of Thales was already in progress at that time, which he had told the Parquet National Financier (PNF) about at the time. The PNF had requisitioned documents from the AFA, and on the basis of that it opened a preliminary investigation in November 2020 for corruption and influence peddling.

The aftermath seems to indicate a certain embarrassment on the part of the authorities over this sensitive case. Mediapart understands that the PNF informed Thales of the investigation shortly after it began, but has still not searched the group's offices after eleven months, despite the risk of losing evidence.

Questioned by Mediapart, the PNF said that at the start of the investigation it had decided to send “several requisitions to the company Thales to which the latter responded”. This is a less severe way to obtain documents than a search. The PNF declined to comment further “as it concerns an ongoing investigation”.

As for the AFA, it has the power to punish companies that fail in their legal anti-corruption obligations as set out in the Sapin II law. But more than a year after it started, the inspection of Thales has still “not finished” said AFA director Charles Duchaine, even though he has been keen to reduce the sometimes “excessive” length of its proceedings. He declined to say more to Mediapart because of “professional confidentiality”.

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• The original French version of this report can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter