For some time, the world’s secret services have been making use of loose structures parallel to the official clandestine hierarchies for their more controversial activities. Fred Holroyd’s revelations have shown how the British state employed Loyalist paramilitaries for kidnap and assassination operations in Eire, whilst the Irangate hearings have exposed what is, so far, the classic example of a parallel secret service, in which the ‘invisible government’ makes use of politically reliable personnel reporting direct to the top for operations which cannot be entrusted to the official agency for reasons of confidentiality, deniability or political accountability.
The essential features of such parallel services – clear even before Colonel Oliver North agreed to tell all – can be noted in recent developments in the French intelligence community, fractured by rivalry, innumerable leaks and spectacular failures. It was perhaps to avoid this minefield that Chirac’s Interior Minister, Charles Pasqua, former founder of the Gaullist parallel police of the 1960s, the Service d’Action Civique, set up a hermetic cell to negotiate the release of French hostages in the Lebanon.
The hostages cell was led by former intelligence officer Jean-Charles Marchiani, a long-time confidant of right-wing Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. Marchiani, who used the alias of Alexander Stephani whilst negotiating in Beirut, reported directly to Pasqua – thus short-circuiting the Foreign Ministry, the Defence Ministry and President Mitterand. The only other member of the hostages structure was Michael Roussin, also a former intelligence officer, who had risen to become Chirac’s chef de cabinet.
The political accountability of the cell was underlined when Marchiani – personally responsible for the liberation of hostages, according to former hostage Roger Auquq – phoned Paris in December 1987 to announce his success in obtaining the release of two hostages. Having asked for Pasqua, he was connected with the Foreign Ministry, upon which he refused to divulge any information except to Pasqua in person. (Time 14 December 1987)
Reports by the Beirut magazine ash-Shira’s (which first broke the US arms-for-hostages story) that a Franco-Iranian hostages deal was imminent seemed to be confirmed by the release in March 1988 of terrorist suspect Mohamed Mouhajer, arrested in connection with the bloody spate of attacks in France following the imprisonment of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, leader of the Fraction Armee Revolutionnaire Libanaise (FARL), in 1984. Mouhajer’s release was ordered by Judge Gilles Boulouque, the judge who broke the Franco-Iranian diplomatic deadlock of 1987 by permitting the Iranian Embassy official (and probable SAVAMA officer) Vahid Gordji to emerge from his Embassy refuge and leave France in November. (Guardian 26 March 1988) Within a month Marchiani reported success from Beirut.
These moves by the Pasqua cell and Chirac’s ‘Colonel North’ have frozen out the official clandestine agency, the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure (DGSE), still in upheaval after the exposure of the ‘Operation Satanic’ sabotage of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in July 1985. The blowing of the Greenpeace operation resulted in the dismissal of DGSE head Admiral Pierre Lacoste and the resignation of Charles Hernu, the Defence Minister and responsible for DGSE. Socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius and new Defence Minister Paul Quiles gave former Chief of Army Staff General Rene Imbot the task of setting the DGSE house in order.
The problems facing Imbot were far more than just healing the scars of international exposure: the service had still not recovered from the shake-up carried out in 1981 by the Socialists’ first nominee to head the DGSE, Pierre Marion. Marion has had little experience in the intelligence field, but was a close friend of Charles Hernu – and like Hernu, a Mason. (Thus Hernu succeeded in keeping the DGSE under his Defence Ministry.) Marion symbolically removed the ‘Counter-espionage’ from the service’s title (up til 1982, SDECE: Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre-Espionnage), reining in a counter-espionage division that had clashed frequently in the past with the French internal security agencies, and redefining the renamed service’s role as an exclusively overseas one. (But see below re Mazurier…) Marion also centralised the DGSE around his General Directorate and dismissed or demoted some 100 of its estimated 2,000 personnel. Marion made himself still more unpopular by closing down the rich exchange between the DGSE and the South African Bureau of State Research (BOSS).
In an internal campaign of resistance to the then new Socialist administration, leaks to the press (almost a DGSE tradition) multiplied, particularly from a right-wing faction within the Action Service, the DGSE dirty tricks pool drawn from serving forces officers. Led by Action Service head, Colonel Georges Grillot, the dissidents began the destruction of compromising Action Service records when the Socialist victory was announced. The rebellion centred around the Action Service’s combat diving school in Aspretto, Corsica, whose Commander was Lt.-Colonel Louis-Pierre Dillais. Dillais purged one third of the NCOs said to hold left-wing sympathies, and ordered a policy of non-cooperation with the DGSE’s new political masters. The presidential portrait in the officers’ mess remained that of Valery Giscard d’Estaing.
Later theories that the Rainbow Warrior operation was deliberately blown (by leaving French Navy equipment at the scene of the crime) in order to ‘fix’ Hernu and the Socialist government drew substance from the fact that most of the active service personnel for the New Zealand operation were recruited from the Corsican base and had been involved in the revolt. Dillais himself commanded the Greenpeace operation from the Hyatt Hotel in Auckland. Major Alan Mafart, the leader of the captured ‘Satanic’ surveillance team, was Dillais’ former deputy commander at the diving school and one of the ringleaders of the 1981 rebellion. As a result of the Greenpeace operation Dillais was dismissed and Mafart forced to accept a routine post two years later. (Guardian 16 and 29 August 1985)
Resentment at the Mitterand/Hernu/Marion team persisted even after Marion’s replacement by Admiral Lacoste. One of Quiles and Imbot’s first post-Greenpeace steps was to shake up the Action Service. They closed the Aspretto base, ended recruitment from two parachute regiments and resurrected the DGSE (then SDECE’s) old strong-arm branch, the 11th Shock Regiment, disbanded by De Gaulle in 1962 for its close sympathies with the OAS who had attempted to kill De Gaulle on numerous occasions. (Guardian 3 and 7 October 1985. In reality, of course, the school later reopened, its 60 saboteurs absorbed into the 11th Shock under its new commander, Col. Jean-Claude Lesquer – the Action Service chief who had organised the Rainbow Warrior sabotage.)
Apart from the right-wing revolt from within the service, the DGSE had also come in for criticism for low productivity in intelligence-gathering. Its information on the Soviet Union or China is scanty and basic in comparison with CIA or MI6 material, and a report indicating a Libyan withdrawal from Chad in 1984 proved embarrassing when it became apparent the following year that the Libyans had actually been reinforcing their presence in the country. (Guardian 16 August 1985) The service blamed the situation on the failure of government to give it adequate resources or areas of responsibility, an isolation which continued after the election victory of Chirac’s RPR. The new right-wing administration preferred not to trust the ailing intelligence agency with sensitive operations, giving the cherry in the secret service piece – the Iranian negotiations – to the autonomous Pasqua cell, thus circumventing the DGSE/Defence Ministry hierarchy and avoiding the DGSE’s leaks and faction fighting.
The DGSE, it is true, has not had a lot of success in keeping its activities secret. In March 1987 lawyer Jean-Paul Mazurier, who represented ‘public enemy No I’, Georges Abdallah, and who served as a communications channel between the imprisoned FARL leader and his lieutenants, revealed that he had been a salaried DGSE agent since 1984 and had been regularly informing the DGSE of FARL’s exchanges. As if this were not all, Mazurier revealed that in the secret service war between the DGSE and the internal security agency, Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), the DGSE was systematically depriving the DST of information gained (on home ground) from its sources within FARL. (In British terms this would be as if MI6 had recruited Nesar Hindawi’s lawyer without informing MI5 or Special Branch.)
While the DST was seeking the bombers who had killed 13 and wounded 250 in attacks designed to pressure the French government into permitting Abdallah’s early release, the rivalry between the two agencies was such that the DGSE, not wanting to burn its Lebanese contacts to the Interior Ministry’s DST, kept silent about Mazurier’s role and about their direct contacts with Abdallah lieutenant Jacqueline Esber. (Esber is suspected of the murder of Yacov Basimantov, 2nd Secretary for political affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Paris, in April 1982).
The DGSE also withheld information confirming Abdallah’s key role in international terrorism, leading the DST to describe him as ‘small fry’ in evidence at his trial. (The Black Agent, Laurent Gally, Andre Deutsch, London 1988; Guardian 7 March 1987)
The DST did not have to wait long to get their revenge. The following month they broke the story that a cipher clerk in the French diplomatic service, Maurice Abrivard, had been a KGB spy for ten years up to his death in 1984, delivering diplomatic codes and important secrets about the installation of US Pershing missiles in Europe to the Soviet intelligence agency. It is the DGSE which is responsible for vetting embassy staff abroad. (Observer 12 April 1987)
After humiliation at the hands of the DST, the DGSE had to cope with a revival of the Greenpeace affair from within the Action Service. No doubt to draw attention to the two captured agents detained on the French island base of Hao, one of the two divers who had actually placed the limpet mines on the Rainbow Warrior published a detailed account of the operation in June 1987. The book, Mission Oxygene, by ‘Patrick de Morne-Verte’, notably praises Major Mafart as the “sacrificed praetorian” and “a brilliant officer”. (Sunday Telegraph 28 June 1987). The author is from the diving school and was involved in the revolt.
Apart from domestic rivalry and internal politics, the DGSE has also had some hard blows abroad where it is responsible for the safety of French officials. Losses have been particularly high in Beirut, scene of the hostages negotiations. Beirut has always been a dangerous place for French officials: In 1981 a DGSE cipher clerk and his wife was assassinated; and in September 1986, the French Military Attache, Colonel Christian Gouttiere, was shot on the steps of the embassy in an attack thought to have been carried out by the pro-Iranian Hezbollah party. There was a spate of attacks in late 1987, killing two French gendarmes in the Christian suburb of Dora on the 29th October, later claimed by the previously unknown ‘Tannios Chahine Armed Unit’.(Suddeutsche Zeitung 2 November 1987) The next victim was engineer Richard Gimpel, wounded in another attack in the same area on the 11th November. The Brussels paper Le Soir reported rumours that if Gimpel (who died of his wounds 13 days later) was not actually one of the DGSE Beirut station, he may well have been one of its “honourable correspondents” – a civilian who regularly volunteered information to the DGSE. (Le Soir 4 February 1988). If this is so, the damage to DGSE morale will be all the greater.
Then, in November 1987, Vahid Gordji – the Iranian Embassy official – was allowed to leave France and the decisive turn in the French vendetta came in December. From Beirut, Marchiani phoned Pasqua to announce the release of the first hostages. From the Pacific Major Mafart returned, repatriated “for medical reasons” much to the annoyance of the New Zealand Premier David Lange (Independent 17 February 1988) In Paris General Rene Imbot was informed that he had a month to clear his desk and hand over direction of the DGSE to General Francois Mermet, former director of the French nuclear testing group Centres d’Experimentation Nucleaires (CEN), which had co-ordinated the anti-Greenpeace operations. A Socialist appointee, Imbot had never got on well with the Chirac administration and, acting on his (and the DGSE’s) frustration at being frozen out of the hostages negotiations, had made several trips to Damascus and other Middle East capitals, visiting DGSE stations and local contacts without having obtained prior government approval. (Liberation 3 December 1987) Such muscling in on the action could not be tolerated – hence the appointment of General Mermet, who had many close friends among Chirac’s top military and political advisers. He would ensure that the DGSE knew its place.
On 2nd February 1988 another French citizen was killed in Beirut. He was Jacques Meurant, a travelling rep in tobacco or electronics, according to different sources. Despite Defence Ministry silence, other “official sources in Paris” were quick to confirm that the dead man was, in fact, Captain Jacques Merrin, DGSE deputy station chief in Beirut, responsible for liaison with the Lebanese security police. Returning from a meeting with head of Lebanese internal security, Jamil Nehme, three gunmen closed in on him and, in an unusual display of professionalism, shot him twice in the head with silenced pistols, killing him instantly, before making good their escape with a file he had been carrying. (Guardian 3 February 1988)
The story comes to a close in the final week before the decisive round of the French Presidential elections on May 8th. On May 4th Chirac declared to tumultuous applause from an election rally audience that the three remaining French hostages had been released to “Mr Stephani” in Beirut. On May 5th two members of the Action Service’s 11th Shock were killed during Operation Victor, a combined police/DGSE operation to liberate the 23 hostages (including the head of GIGN, the anti-terrorist police squad) held by Kanak FLNKS militants on the New Caledonian island of Cuvea. On May 6th the Defence Ministry announced the repatriation of Captain Dominique Prieur, the second DGSE agent confined to Hao atoll, and now conveniently pregnant. Although her baby is not due until the New Year, any pretext would do to allow for her return to France like her CO Major Mafart, now star pupil at the Ecole de Guerre…. (Le Monde 7 May 1988)
Postscript
Despite these last minute boosts to his campaign, Chirac suffered a decisive defeat in the election of May 8th. After Mitterand’s victory with 54% of the vote, the period of ‘co-habitation’ between Socialist President and Republican Prime Minister is over: Chirac resigned within a few days. The French vendetta starts a new stage back under a Socialist administration.
The new Socialist government will not have an easy time of things: all France clamours to know what price was paid for the release of the last three hostages. The DGSE is embroiled in another scandal like the SAS in Gibraltar. It seems that several of the FLNKS militants killed during Operation Victor were unarmed and had been shot down in cold blood. As in 1981, the DGSE may not be so obedient a servant for the Socialist government. After all, it is Chirac’s man, General Mermet, who has just taken over …….
Further Reading
La Piscine (1944-84), Roger Faligot and Pascal Krop, Seuil 1985 – the only in-depth work drawn from accounts of SDECE/DGSE staff.
Affaires d’etat 1981-1987, Henry Allainmat/Gilbert Lecavelier, Albin Michel, 1987 – two journalists sharpen their anti-Socialist axe in a useful if slanted resume of the scandals of the Mitterand period.