It all starts with a funny feeling. This Saturday in November 2018, Benoît Quennedey has the impression of being followed. The 42-year-old senior official came to spend a few days with his parents in Dijon, time to do some shopping and take advantage of the “Black Friday” discounts.
Something abnormal is at play, he thinks as he walks through the city center of the Burgundian capital. There is the gaze of this passerby who insists then suddenly withdraws. And this man, crossed in a store, who pretends to covet a pair of leather shoes while he is dressed as if he was going for his jogging. Dull threat, wavering sense of disaster.
On Sundays, Benoît Quennedey packs his bags to return to Paris and its dear Latin Quarter, where he has lived and worked for fifteen years: he is an administrator at the Senate, in the direction of architecture, heritage and gardens. At the station, he is about to get on the platform when a group of plainclothes police handcuffs him and takes him to the Dijon police station. An anonymous life changes.
A candid in troubled waters
The next day, he was still in police custody, in the premises of the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) this time, in Levallois-Perret, in the Paris suburbs, when nearly 2 million viewers learned of his indictment. That evening, November 26, in the “Quotidien” program on TMC, Yann Barthès announced that he was going to reveal a “incredible deal”. “There would be a North Korean spy at the heart of one of our institutions: the Senate”, doe the animator.
One of the chroniclers evokes an event “Worthy of an episode of ‘Office of Legends'” : the senior official is suspected of intelligence with Kim Jong-un’s North Korea – facts punishable by thirty years in prison. He reportedly transmitted information “ultrasensitive” to the Pyongyang regime. And the journalist holds up a large format photo of Benoît Quennedey in front of the camera: seventies look, rectangular glasses, purple striped tie.
“Overnight, I was socially dead, I had to disappear”, sighs Benoît Quennedey almost five years later. This day in March 2023 when we find him, he is crammed into the sofa of a restaurant near the Pantheon. Still a little dazed by the rolls of ” the case “ and its half-hearted outcome. Since his indictment, justice has ruled: he was not a spy in the pay of North Korea.
A dismissal synonymous with the abandonment of the proceedings was pronounced on April 29, 2022. But the Senate, his employer, decided on his compulsory retirement for having “misunderstood his ethical obligations of loyalty and dignity”. In its rules, the Upper House requires its troops to “remain free from any dependence on private interests or foreign powers”.
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