Fifty years since the arrest of brigadier Jean-Louis Jeanmaire

On 9 August 1976 the federal authorities arrested Jean-Louis Jeanmaire, a retired brigadier who had previously served as a colonel and chief of staff. Fifty years on, the case remains partly inaccessible.

The starting point goes back to 1959. During exercises in Ticino, Jeanmaire met Vassili Denissenko, a Soviet military attaché, a decorated veteran of Stalingrad and a representative of the GRU. According to the prosecution, the transfer of information began in 1962.

The Swiss authorities were warned from outside. In the autumn of 1974 it was US intelligence that flagged the case to Bern.

The military tribunal delivered its verdict on 17 June 1977. Jeanmaire was sentenced to eighteen years in prison, stripped of his rank and expelled from the army. The prosecution had asked for twelve.

A contested motive

In their reasoning the judges gave the motive as vanity, a desire for prestige and weakness of character. It is the passage that has fed criticism of the trial for decades.

The Geneva lawyer Jacques Barillon called it a miscarriage of justice. The historian Urs Rauber worked on the case, as did the Basel writer Urs Widmer, who turned it into a piece for the stage. The story has also been compared to the novels of John Le Carré.

Jeanmaire served his sentence at the Bellechasse penitentiary in the canton of Fribourg. Attempts to reopen the case in 1984 and 1986 were refused. He was released in 1988, after twelve of the eighteen years imposed.

On 5 March 1991 the Federal Council published the indictment and the verdict. The decision came during the work of the parliamentary commission of inquiry into the Federal Military Department. Federal Councillor Kurt Furgler, head of the Department of Justice and Police, had dealt with the case earlier.

Jeanmaire died in Bern on 29 January 1992, aged 81. The documents held in the Federal Archives remain sealed until at least 2028, which leaves open the discussion about how much was actually passed on.