Speaker For The Dead
Giles Raymond Demourot is gone.
Giles Raymond Demourot died in Annecy, half an hour south of Geneva, late in the evening of the last Sunday in February, just fifty one minutes after being admitted to the hospital. I had known him, although not well, since about the time he survived a Russian assassination attempt on the streets of Paris, back in 2017.
As the only American handy when he was noticed to be missing, it fell to me to contact the embassy for a health and welfare check, and then to facilitate some of the other necessary activities.
There are some object lessons in his passing that I feel may benefit some of you, so I’m going to share a bit of his story and my views.
Attention Conservation Notice:
A spook’s death notice, both good and the bad, Speaker for the Dead style. As we’re entering a time when more of us will need to consider what must happen when we are gone, this is apropos, unless you’re still young enough to be indestructible.
Origin:
Giles had an American father who died at Monte Cassino two weeks before he was born, a French mother, and legend has it he came into the world aboard a Boeing Clipper over the Bay of Biscay, passing the Operation Overlord fleet assembled below in the Channel as they crossed into British airspace. His mother was French and went into labor in French Algeria, he was born over international waters, and they deplaned in the U.S. This not only got him dual citizenship, it’s also made tracking down his remaining family a puzzle; the only name we knew for him is a pen name, and the name of his son is impenetrably common.
His CV is extraordinary …
His stepfather (not Demourot) was a diplomat. Giles and I have a mutual friend who talked to him much more than I ever did, and based on those conversations he had fairly extraordinary access to things, based on interactions with various dinner guests over the years. He seems to have known Allen W. Dulles, whose book, The Craft of Intelligence, graces my BookWyrm Tradecraft shelf.
He went from ROTC to Vietnam, where he served in the Military Assistance Command, the forerunner of U.S. Special Operations. He later served a short stint in the INR, the most obscure of U.S. intelligence agencies. Based on his language skills and extensive time in the Arab world, he was called back by CENTCOM and promoted to colonel for Desert Storm, serving in J-2 (intelligence). There are other hints of intelligence work in France, but unless you’ve been right there it’s hard to be sure which duties are cover stories.
His civilian career included a law degree and work in both the petroleum and pharmaceutical industries. He also has an extensive list of publications, but much of it is drug industry journal material, which I’m finding impossible to locate, even when adding his unique last name to searches. This from 2001 is his only Amazon book.
Criticism:
Giles was mobility constrained, very sick with end of life troubles, and seldom away from his 64,000 member LinkedIn Group for more than eight hours. I was contacted when he’d been missing for sixty hours. If I had been consulted in advance, I’d have said sixteen hours would have been the limit before raising the alarm, and that there MUST be someone local ready to act when needed. I have such a person; they were asleep on my couch as I drafted this, a few days after Giles passed. We’d had some things to do the night before that ran late.
Keep in mind that Annecy, in the French alps, is basically the country home for the SVR operations in Geneva, as well as GRU Unit 29155. Given what a pain in the ass Giles was for the Russians, their proximity, the attempt on his life in Paris in 2017, and his history in the intel field, the lack of planning is really surprising.
An online group of associates knew his address, but there were no close family, just the estranged son in later middle years, several decades and an ocean away. The person nominally tasked to go to his place and collect electronics and papers is also retired and the lengthly drive proved too much for then. If something happens to me that aforementioned person is authorized to strip my space clean. Giles not having made that arrangement well in advance with someone able to execute promptly is … troubling.
Conclusion:
I don’t know much about GRM’s doings beyond what was public in the International Relations Professional Discussions group. I spent a few minutes looking for it just now and it appears the group was cancelled either shortly before or shortly after he died. Russians have always sniveled about it and I suspect other political pressure was at work as well. That comports well with the recent ban and prompt restoration of Ambassador Zaluzhnyi - a mob formed the minute his account was suspended and it took less than twenty four hours to reverse that.
Should I die, there are things that will die with me, for the safety of others and/or because it’s highly unlikely anyone else would know what to do with them after I depart. There are other things that are important … and arrangements are already in place with people safely out of the reach of the current U.S. administration. I remediate for flood, fire, burglary, raids, and the like.
Giles passing put me in a thoughtful mood. There are some things I can do better to ensure an orderly exit when the time comes. I wonder why he wasn’t more focused on that as well, given that he had quite a bit of advanced notice. I guess the best explanation is the nature of his demise - he was fighting a brain tumor.
I guess the boy scout motto is the right thing here - Be Prepared.
