Azerbaijan, France
Baku hunts for DGSE informers amid diplomatic jousting with Paris

The exchange of unfriendly communiqués between the French and Azerbaijani foreign ministries has brought back the thorny issue of Martin Ryan, a French national accused by Baku of spying for France and imprisoned since 4 December 2023. The French foreign ministry published a warning on 4 September for French travellers to Azerbaijan, stating that they ran the risk of "arrest, arbitrary detention and unfair trial". A spokesman for the Azerbaijani foreign ministry retorted that this was "a distortion of reality" and specified that "only one French citizen, Martin Ryan, has been arrested in Azerbaijan".

This came a week before the film set designer and artist Théo Clerc was sentenced to three years in prison by an Azerbaijani court for spraying graffiti in Baku (IO, 25/06/24).

Ryan, whose pre-trial detention has been renewed until 4 January next year, is not the only human source with whom members of France's DGSE foreign intelligence agency working under diplomatic cover in the country have interacted (IO, 11/01/24). One of them, an Azerbaijani journalist now in exile, Etibar S, has directly challenged the DGSE. 

An Azerbaijani informer?

Etibar S, who has been seeking asylum in France since December 2021 after fleeing his country, claims to have cooperated with DGSE officers in Baku in 2018 and 2019, but says that he did not at the time know they were working for the spy agency. This cooperation led to his arrest by the police and the Azerbaijan state security service, the DTX.

According to documents provided by Etibar S as part of his asylum application, he was asked to identify Russian networks, hacker networks and telephone numbers on several occasions. The instructions for these tasks were sent to him on the letterhead of a company called UE IT Consulting.

Yet no trace of UE IT Consulting is visible online, and the email address it used is no longer active. But several documents consulted indicate that it was a partner of Eurogroup Consulting, a firm based in the Paris suburb of Courbevoie. When contacted by Intelligence Online, Eurogroup Consulting said it knew of no company called UE IT Consulting.

Etibar S mentioned two UE IT Consulting contacts who allegedly introduced themselves as "Ludovic Martin" and "Dany Buck". At the time of Etibar S's arrest, the Azerbaijani authorities described them as officers of the French services. 

DGSE keeps its distance

On 22 January, in the context of Etibar S's asylum application, which was rejected, his lawyer sent a letter to the DGSE requesting protection for him. The letter, which Intelligence Online has seen, was acknowledged but received no reply. The lawyer wrote that Etibar S carried out "various cybersecurity missions and identified the owners of telephone lines in exchange for payment". He was then "identified by the Azerbaijani authorities" and "forced to identify French diplomats in Azerbaijan using photographs".

Ryan's family also sent a letter to the DGSE on 17 May in which they criticised the "casualness" of the officers of the service under diplomatic cover with whom the entrepreneur had dealings, and who were expelled from Azerbaijan last December.