Jean-Louis Gergorin is a French cybersecurity expert, strategy consultant, former diplomat, and former executive vice president of EADS—the giant European aerospace company that controls and has been subsequently known as Airbus. He was at the origin of the Clearstream 2 incident in France; a significant occurrence in French political life from 2006 to 2010. He was later found in this case guilty of slanderous denunciation, and use of forgery.
Education
Gergorin was educated at two top French schools, the École Polytechnique and École Nationale d'Administration. Gergorin was also a research fellow at the RAND Corporation and Harvard Kennedy School and is a graduate of the Executive Education Program at Stanford Business School.
Career
In 1973, Gergorin was cofounder and deputy head of the Policy Planning Staff of the French Foreign Ministry. From 1979 to 1984 he was Director of Policy Planning, reporting directly to the French Foreign Minister.
In November 1984 he joined the aerospace group Matra as Senior Vice President for Strategy, starting a close association with CEO Jean-Luc Lagardère that lasted until Lagardère's sudden death in March 2003. Between 1998 and 2000, together with Lagardère and Co-CEO Philippe Camus, Gergorin played a major role in the series of national and transnational mergers that led to the formation of EADS—the world's second largest aerospace company.
During his time at EADS, Gergorin served as Executive Vice President for Strategy, member of the executive committee, and as a member of the Shareholder's Committee (Board of Directors) for its Airbus subsidiary. In this final capacity, Gergorin was particularly active in the expansion of EADS in the U.S. and U.K. markets.
Strategy and Cybersecurity Consultant
On 26 April 2007, Jean-Louis Gergorin founded the company JLG Strategy, which provides strategy consulting focusing on the fields of aerospace, defense, and cybersecurity. In 2014, he founded and became a member of the steering committee of the French American Cybersecurity Conference. In November 2018, with Léo Isaac-Dognin, he published "Cyber, la guerre permanente", a book which offers a geopolitical analysis of both the main cyber incidents since the beginning of the 2000s and the stakes involved in the attacks. The book was reviewed in the French press at the time of its publication. He was invited to speak on these issues in 2019 and 2021 at the Word Policy Conference, an IFRI initiative; he also spoke at the Normandy World Forum for Peace in 2020 and 2021. In 2020, he joined the scientific committee of the International Cybersecurity Forum. From 2020 through early 2022, he co-authored four op-eds in the newspaper Le Monde with Bernard Barbier, former technical director at DGSE, and admiral Edouard Guillaud, former Chief of the Defense Staff of the French Armed Forces, about the current and future importance of cyber-related issues (e.g., the vital need for a national cyber strategy, the need to implement the concept of cybercoertion as a deterrent, the lack of preparation against cyber threats within Europe—highlighted namely by the Pegasus affair, and the need for Europe to stop being strategically impotent in particular by implementing a proactive deterrence and retaliation strategy against ransomware attacks). He has been quoted by the Washington Post on the Biden administration's evolving cyber doctrine.
The Affaire Clearstream
Background
In May 2006, Gergorin admitted that he had anonymously sent a list of various political figures and businesspeople who were allegedly involved in a large money laundering scheme to the French Investigating Magistrate, Renaud Van Ruymbeke, in 2004. The case, known as Clearstream 2, was widely followed in the press in France, driven by the fact that the list contained the name of future French President, Nicolas Sarkozy (Sarkozy name was later found to have been added to the list). Gergorin has stated publicly that he and Magistrate Van Ruymbeke met and agreed on this course of action for security concerns.
Gergorin was subsequently put under investigation for transmitting these lists and the investigation proved that many of the names in Gergorin's transmission had been fabricated. This discovery caused Gergorin to leave his position at EADS.
Throughout this matter, Gergorin has maintained that he sent the information to the magistrate in good faith because he was totally convinced of the authenticity of his information and the truthfulness of his source—a mathematician turned computer expert named Imad Lahoud.