The Athanor Affair: French Intelligence Veterans Ran a Masonic Murder Ring

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

France is watching one of its own monsters crawl out of the shadows. In a sealed Paris courtroom, twenty-two men sit in the dock. They stand accused of turning a quiet Masonic lodge into a private murder-and-intimidation franchise. The indictment reads like a disturbing merger between active officers from the DGSE, France’s foreign-intelligence service (the French CIA), veterans of the DGSI, the domestic-intelligence agency often compared to the FBI, street cops, ex-spooks now posing as “security consultants,” lodge bigwigs, businessmen, and hired muscle. What started as men in white gloves calling each other “brother” allegedly became a shadow service that sold surveillance, beatings, and killings to anyone with a grudge and enough cash.

It blew open the morning two supposed “agents” were caught sitting in a blacked-out Renault in Créteil, fake plates on the bumper, gloves on, a pistol fitted with a homemade suppressor, and a GPS tracker ready to go. Their target was Marie-Hélène Dini, a business coach who’d crossed the wrong people. When police swarmed them, the pair claimed they were on a classified DGSE op and that Dini worked for Mossad. Officially, the DGSE is banned from running lethal operations on French soil. The story fell apart almost instantly. What stayed behind was a straightforward contract killing and the realisation that men tied to French intelligence and a Masonic lodge had been ready to pull the trigger.

A pattern of violence

Once that hit squad was exposed, the same names and methods started leaking across other case files like blood under a door. Racing driver Laurent Pasquali, deep in debt after a sponsorship deal soured, was found shot through the heart in his garage. Local councillor Jean-François Le Helloco was dragged from his car outside his house in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés and beaten bloody in a vicious political power play. Factory technician Hassan Touzani, a Yellow Vest regular who wanted to start a union, was quietly slated for “neutralisation.” Every single case traced back to the same pattern: a client with money and rage, an intermediary with Masonic contacts and an intelligence résumé, and a crew of operators who still moved and talked like they were on official state business.

This is the Athanor affair, named after the Puteaux lodge at its centre, and it is forcing France to stare at its own rotten reflection.

The brokers of Athanor

At the centre sits Frédéric Vaglio, the slick ex-intelligence type who ran a string of “strategic intelligence” firms in France and Switzerland. Inside the Athanor lodge, he played the broker, turning respectable contracts for audits and crisis management into black-bag jobs. Need the new mayor in Saint-Maur spied on? Done. Want a troublesome councillor taught a lesson on his own driveway? Handled. Racing driver won’t pay up? Assets “recovered”, one bullet to the chest. Union activist getting loud at a plastics plant in Oyonnax? Fold him into a risk assessment and put him on the list.

Daniel Beaulieu, a former senior figure inside domestic intelligence, supplied the institutional gravitas. As a high-ranking DGSI man, he once ran authorised operations in the name of national security. After retiring, he kept speaking the language of the state, missions, national interest, necessity, while allegedly building operations that escalated from watching targets to applying pressure to putting them on the ground. He recruited the trigger-pullers, including underpaid corporals from the DGSE’s Cercottes base who thought they were doing off-the-books work for the Republic.

Jean-Luc Bagur, the Venerable Master of the Athanor lodge and a business coach himself, allegedly provided the private chamber where it all happened. In that Puteaux apartment, under the protection of ritual and secrecy, intelligence veterans, cops, and clients could launder personal vendettas into what they called counter-intelligence operations. Dini wasn’t simply a rival coach. She was reframed as a Mossad asset. A petty turf war in the coaching world became a national-security threat worthy of a hit team.

Clients in the shadows

The intermediaries and street muscle believed it, or desperately needed to. Men like protection specialist Sébastien Leroy spent years doing surveillance and clean-ups, convinced they were serving France through unofficial channels. The DGSE soldiers told themselves the same comforting lie. On the stand, they’re still clinging to it. They were lied to. They’re patriots. This was never supposed to be criminal. Prosecutors have the chats, the payments, and the complete lack of any official paper trail. No orders from headquarters at Boulevard Mortier, where the DGSE is based. No green light from the Interior Ministry. Just cash, lodge dinners, and encrypted instructions from private companies.

The clients look even more damning precisely because they look so normal. Wealthy motorsport sponsors who lost money on Pasquali. Factory owners in Plastics Valley annoyed by a mouthy technician. Local political allies of an ex-minister and mayor locked in a knife-fight with rivals on the right. None of them had to meet gangsters in back alleys. They sat in offices with men who still carried the scent of the state, flashed the right acronyms, wore the right lodge ring, and spoke the soothing language of security. Violence arrived gift-wrapped in consultancy jargon.

The warning

Now the courtroom is stripping the wrapping off. Dini recounts the terror of learning two armed men had been waiting for her outside her home. Le Helloco describes the ambush at his gate and the warning about his wife and kids. Touzani talks about discovering his boss’s complaint had escalated into a plan to make him disappear. Pasquali’s mother waits for answers about her son’s burned car, the months of silence, and the remains found in a forest.

This isn’t one rogue lodge. It is a warning shot about an entire ecosystem, the revolving door between French intelligence and private consulting, the way state tools and secrecy culture get privatised, the parallel economy of repression available to mayors, CEOs, and anyone rich enough. Freemasonry’s broader networks will protest it’s just one bad apple. Maybe so. But the image of aprons and gavels in a murder trial is going to linger.

When the verdicts come, some will walk and some will go down. The real test is whether Paris treats this as a freak accident or the visible tip of something deeply systemic. Because if the revolving doors keep spinning, the lodge apartments stay private, and ex-spooks keep selling their black arts to the highest bidder, Athanor won’t be the last time French intelligence veterans decide to run their own private death squad on the side.

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Source: https://21stcenturywire.com/2026/06/04/the-athanor-affair-french-intelligence-veterans-ran-a-masonic-murder-ring/