The Farewell Dossier was the collection of documents that Colonel Vladimir Vetrov, a KGB defector "en place" (code-named "Farewell"), gathered and gave to the Direction de la surveillance du territoire (DST) in 1981–82, during the Cold War.
Vetrov was an engineer who had been assigned to evaluate information on NATO hardware and software gathered by the "Line X" technical intelligence operation for Directorate T, the Soviet Union directorate for scientific and technical intelligence collection from the West. He became increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system and decided to work with the French at the end of the 1970s. Between early 1981 and early 1982, Vetrov gave almost 4,000 secret documents to the DST, including the complete list of 250 Line X officers stationed under legal cover in embassies around the world.
As a consequence, Western nations undertook a mass expulsion of Soviet technology spies.
Vetrov's story inspired the 1997 book Bonjour Farewell: La Vérité sur la Taupe Française du KGB by Serguei Kostine.[1] It was adapted in the French film L'affaire Farewell (2009) starring Emir Kusturica and Guillaume Canet.[2]