New Storm Hits French Spy Agency : Greenpeace Ship Sinking Touches Off Latest Controversy

Twenty years ago, Mehdi Ben Barka, an opponent of King Hassan II of Morocco, was lured to Paris from his exile in Geneva for a meeting with some film makers interested in producing a movie about the end of the colonial era. He was kidnaped on arrival, spirited away to a mansion in the suburbs and never seen again.

The incident provoked furor and scandal in France. Ben Barka had surely been killed, and all the evidence made it clear that Moroccan agents of the king had committed the crime. But the guilt was not theirs alone.

Judicial investigations revealed that French intelligence agents knew about the conspiracy and connived in it. An official of the “dirty tricks” branch of the French intelligence agency was suspended and indicted, though he was later acquitted of charges that he had withheld evidence of a crime. One of his agents was sentenced to seven years in prison for taking part in the abduction.

President Charles de Gaulle was furious over the kidnaping. He described the French role as “a vulgar affair of underlings,” took the French intelligence agency out of the control of the premier’s office and moved it to the Ministry of Defense.

But the agency, now known as the General Directorate of External Security (DGSE) and now under military discipline, has not kept out of trouble. The agency is now embroiled in an embarrassing controversy over the sinking of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand.

French Press Skeptical

An official French investigation exonerated the agency of accusations that it planted the mines that blew up the ship July 10. But much of the French press is treating this official version with skepticism.

In the aftermath of the latest scandal, Premier Laurent Fabius has decided to take a hesitant step backward. Complaining that the government’s control over the intelligence agency “does not seem satisfactory to me,” Fabius ordered the minister of defense from now on to make annual reports to Parliament detailing the agency’s intelligence activities.

At the same time, Fabius ordered the minister of defense to investigate “important lacks in the functioning” of the agency that showed up in the official investigation, which was conducted by Bernard Tricot, a respected conservative who ran De Gaulle’s office as chief of staff of the presidency, starting soon after the Ben Barka affair.

Fabius did not say what these “lacks” were.

Agents Sent as Spies

According to Tricot, the two French intelligence agents now held in New Zealand had been sent there to spy on Greenpeace and find out whatever they could about the environmental organization’s planned protest of nuclear testing in the French South Pacific atoll of Mururoa. Three other agents, who returned to France before the New Zealand police could arrest them, had been assigned to take a sailboat around New Zealand to spy on Greenpeace and analyze whether it would make sense for a ship run by French agents to someday infiltrate a Greenpeace protest flotilla.

Tricot identified four of the five agents as intelligence agents trained as commando frogmen. The fifth was a woman captain who posed as the wife of one of the other agents.

Skeptics doubt that the intelligence agency needed to send frogmen to New Zealand if it only wanted information. According to the view of the skeptics, the agents probably sank the ship but bungled the job by killing a Portuguese photographer aboard and by getting caught, then lied to Tricot about their mission.

The intelligence service does not look much better to those French who accept the official report. They also believe the agents bungled their assignment; first, by getting caught, and, second, by failing, while spying, to uncover and foil the plot to sink the vessel, a plot that was sure to be blamed on France.

Agence France-Presse, the French news agency, says that the General Directorate of External Security has more than 2,000 civilian and military employees and an annual budget of more than 300 million francs ($37.5 million).

By 1970, a few years after the Ben Barka affair, the French intelligence agency was regarded as demoralized. President Georges Pompidou, who believed agents were trying to discredit him and his wife by spreading scandalous rumors about their social life, decided it was time for a true shake-up. He appointed Alexandre de Marenches as director of the agency.

Crisis Came in 1981

De Marenches is widely credited with making the organization more professional and restoring its morale and reputation. But a crisis came when Francois Mitterrand and his Socialist Party came to power with their Communist allies in 1981.

The Socialists, ever since the Ben Barka affair, had looked on the intelligence agency with great suspicion. In one past election, in fact, they had campaigned on a platform promising the abolition of the DGSE. In turn, officials of the agency had just as low a regard for the Socialists.

In 1981, Gen. Georges Grillot, chief of the Action Service, spoke out openly against Mitterrand, warning that the agency would be threatened if the Socialists were elected.

The problem was compounded when Mitterrand appointed Pierre Marion, an engineer, and a close friend of Defense Minister Charles Hernu--as director of the agency. A large number of top agents quit and some close associates of De Marenches were fired. By all accounts, the personality of Marion irritated other agents, and the morale of the agency reached another low.

Mitterrand finally fired Marion a little more than a year later and replaced him with Adm. Pierre Lacoste. The appointment of a nonpolitical officer evidently restored morale and efficiency, but Mitterrand has obviously still been displeased with some of the agency’s work.

Embarrassment Over Libya

The president was embarrassed a year ago when he accepted French intelligence reports that Libya had withdrawn its troops from Chad and, on the basis of these reports, defied the United States by conferring with Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi. The U.S. government then released satellite photographs proving that the Libyan troops were still there.

Despite the Greenpeace bungling, the Socialist government does not seem ready to shake up the agency once more. For one thing, most of the conservative opposition is treating the issue gingerly. As former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing put it, “Whether it be wrong or whether it be right, it’s my country.”