French Premier Orders Review of Secret Service

Premier Laurent Fabius today ordered a sweeping reappraisal of the French secret service, accused of involvement in last month’s deadly bombing of the Greenpeace ship in New Zealand.

Saying he had found “serious shortcomings” in the functioning of the General Directorate for External Security, the French intelligence agency, Fabius also ordered the defense and interior ministers to provide Parliament with detailed annual reports of secret service activities.

Bernard Tricot, a special investigator appointed by the government of President Francois Mitterrand, in a report released Monday, said two teams of French intelligence officers were in New Zealand when the Rainbow Warrior was bombed July 10. But he said he found no evidence that the French intelligence agency ordered the ship sabotaged or that French agents were involved in the bombing.

Whitewash Charged

French newspapers criticized the report in headlines splashed across newsstands. One, the leftist Liberation, headlined it “Tricot Washes Whiter,” a take off on a detergent ad, and compared the report to Alice in Wonderland. The Communist daily headline said simply, “State Lies.”

The converted trawler Rainbow Warrior was sent to the bottom of Auckland harbor by two mines attached to its hull. A Greenpeace photographer was killed in the blasts.

The Tricot report acknowledged that a man and woman charged in New Zealand with murder and arson in the attack are French intelligence officers and that four men believed connected to the incident are members of the French secret service.

But Tricot said that, although three of the agents are diving experts, they did not plant the mines that sank the ship.