In the early 1980s, a high-ranking KGB analyst, Sergei Grigoriev, disillusioned with the Soviet Union regime, decides to pass Soviet secrets, including a list of Soviet spies, to the government of France, then under the newly elected President François Mitterrand, a Socialist Party (France) in coalition with the French Communist Party. Grigoriev (code-named ''Farewell'' by the Direction de la surveillance du territoire) hopes to force change in the Soviet Union by revealing their extensive network of spies trying to acquire scientific, technical and industrial information from the West. He uses Pierre Froment, a naïve French engineer based in Moscow, as his unlikely intermediary. After the first transfer of information, Pierre confides in his wife Jessica, who is adamant about his stopping to preserve their family. Grigoriev persuades Pierre to continue without telling Jessica. He will accept neither money nor defection as a reward, but sometimes requests small gifts from Pierre's trips to France, such as a Sony Walkman and Queen (band) cassette tapes for his son, some Cognac (brandy), or books of French poetry. As Farewell's prodigious output blossoms, the French are bewildered by the sheer scale and yield of top Western technology transferred covertly to the Soviets.