Whispers of Blood and Borders: How France Backed Thaçi’s Rise

Behind Kosovo’s fragile independence lies a web of secret deals, assassinations, and foreign meddling. The Gunpowder Chronicles digs where no one else dares.

In France, there are stories that officials prefer remain untold. They do not unfold in the corridors of ministries or in the gilded halls of diplomacy. They take place elsewhere, behind the unmarked walls of an austere building in the northeast of Paris. Once a prison, now a fortress of silence, it houses the best-guarded secrets of the Republic. They call it “the boîte,” sometimes “the swimming pool,” but officially it is the Caserne Mortier, headquarters of the DGSE, France’s foreign intelligence service. Inside, they never say espionage, only renseignement. Espionage is what others do.

It was in the shadow of this culture that a small Balkan province became a theatre of French influence. Kosovo, once a region of Serbia, erupted into conflict in the 1990s. By 2008, amid war and devastation, it had declared independence. At its helm stood Hashim Thaçi, a man who embodied the contradictions of his country’s rebirth. Once known by his nom de guerre, “the Snake,” Thaçi was leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a paramilitary group of 15,000 men branded terrorists by the West, and later transformed into the nation’s first Prime Minister. He was, in the words of one former French intelligence chief, “turned into an agent.”

Pierre Siramy, who served 25 years at the DGSE, including as chief of staff for intelligence, described how the agency made a calculated choice: “It was decided at the highest levels of the State that we would support Thaçi. Yes, I can tell you that a French intelligence officer turned him into an agent.” He suggested that beyond diplomacy, the DGSE facilitated Thaçi’s access to weapons, discreetly, through channels shielded by official denials. The former minister of defence, Alain Richard, says he recalls nothing. But an arms dealer, caught on tape years later, claimed the DGSE gave him the green light to supply Thaçi’s fighters with RPG-7s and munitions. “It was French policy,” the man shrugged.

Thaçi’s rise was also stage-managed in subtler ways. In February 1999, at Rambouillet¹, where peace talks were meant to end bloodshed, the French state formally backed Ibrahim Rugova, a soft-spoken intellectual with a francophile heart. Yet Thaçi, representing the camp of war, edged into prominence. Arnaud Danjean, a young DGSE officer fluent in Serbian and now a European Parliament deputy, was assigned as Thaçi’s handler. He recalls it differently: “The France did not recruit him. He was a contact. A source. He would tell us things about his organisation. We would file reports. That was it.” He insists the relationship was informational, not operational. But the line between the two remains blurred, especially when those reports traveled up to the highest levels of the French state.

By the time NATO bombs fell on Belgrade in March 1999, Thaçi had transformed from “terrorist” to “interlocutor.” And when Serbian forces withdrew three months later, it was Thaçi who calmed Kosovar anger against French troops, viewed by many as pro-Serb. “The Snake had shed his skin,” one observer said at the time. Soon after, Thaçi became Kosovo’s first prime minister, his legitimacy cemented by the West.

Yet shadows clung to him. In 2010, a report by Swiss senator Dick Marty accused Thaçi of leading a mafia-style network that trafficked drugs, intimidated rivals, and even orchestrated the disappearance of hundreds of Serbs, Roma, and Albanians. The report alleged links to organ trafficking². “The heroin trade was violently controlled by Hashim Thaçi,” Marty wrote, describing him as “the most dangerous of Kosovo’s mafia bosses.”

Among his fiercest critics was Gani Geci, once a fellow KLA commander, nicknamed the “Rambo of Drenica.” In his village, Geci recounted how he narrowly survived an assassination attempt orchestrated, he believes, by Thaçi’s men. “They tried to kill me,” he said, lifting his shirt to show scars. “I lost two of my men, my friends. They died. I was shot, but I survived.” Geci named Thaçi’s uncle, Azem Sula, long-time head of Kosovo’s intelligence services, as the man who financed the attempt. “Here, you cannot trust anyone but family,” Geci said, flanked by his armed nephews.

Excerpt from the documentary at minute 21:44, featuring Gani Geci’s story. This segment is shortened by 2 minutes and 49 seconds from the original cut³.

Thaçi’s inner circle, including Kadri Veseli, later head of the Kosovo Assembly, were also accused in Marty’s report of leading what was described as a clan-mafia nexus. Veseli publicly denied the allegations, calling them “harmful to the image of Albanians and Kosovar politicians.” But the allegations lingered, reinforced by decades of rumour, by whispers that journalists, activists, and opposition figures had disappeared during Thaçi’s rule.

By 2007, Thaçi was elected Prime Minister. In 2008, he declared Kosovo independent. And for more than a decade, his grip on the country remained unshaken, reinforced by Western backers who preferred stability to inconvenient truths. Then, in 2020, Thaçi was indicted by the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague, charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Today, the question is not simply whether Thaçi was a French agent, or whether Paris looked away from his alleged crimes. The larger question is whether Kosovo’s fragile state, birthed in blood and shadow, has merely traded Serbian repression for rule by its own predators. Two decades after the war, Kosovo teeters between independence and renewed dependency, its political landscape still shaped by the ghosts of the KLA and the compromises of the West.

And so the questions cut like wire: if parts of Dick Marty’s most explosive claims were never substantiated in subsequent proceedings at The Hague, was the entire saga a DGSE provocation gone awry, a Serb operation by design, or the handiwork of undercover cut-outs we’ve yet to map?

Who choreographed the leaks, the denials, the strategic silences and why?

What we do know already is this: a dossier of Hashim Thaçi’s landmark policies and agreements with Belgrade praised by some as “normalisation,” condemned by others as quiet capitulation effectively widened Serbia’s leverage over Kosovo’s territorial, institutional, and economic arteries. And there is more. The revelations we have been given access to suggest that Thaçi’s “land-swap” territorial project was not his alone but part of a clandestine French plan, cultivated under President Emmanuel Macron’s support, in which Albania agreed to act as broker under Prime Minister Edi Rama in exchange for French backing of Albania’s EU membership bid. Right ahead of this project, the most serious opponent to its implementation Albin Kurti and his Movement for Self-Determination, faced an orchestrated attempt to crush his party from within. Senior officials defected en masse to the newly formed Social Democratic Party of Kosovo, the PSD, all but one. According to our sources, that last holdout refused and was killed, in prison. These revelations will lead to more unfolding unknown, unheard-of, but whispered and long unverified claims.