-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: The Great Heroin Coup - Drugs, Intelligence, & International Fascism Henrik Kruger Jerry Meldon, Translator South End Press©1980 Box 68 Astor Station Boston, MA 02123 ISBN 0-89608-0319-5 240pps - one edition - out-of-print Orginally published in Danish Smukke Serge og Heroien Bogan 1976 --[4]-- FOUR THE FRENCH INTELLIGENCE ZOO Trying to make sense out of French intelligence activities is like trying to find one's way out of a maze knowing there's no exit. All told, there are four intelligence services, and at various times they work together, independently, and against one another in an atmosphere of scandal and intrigue. The four are: the foreign espionage agency, Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre Espionage (SDECE); the domestic security agency, Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST); the police intelligence force, Renseignements Generaux (RG); and the Gaullists' para-police force, Service d'Action Civique (SAC). Charles de Gaulle reigned over the Golden Age of French espionage. The president was enamored of cloaks and daggers and could not get enough security from the dangers left and right. . . including those responsible for his security. Though he determined overall policy, de Gaulle kept his own hands off intelligence activities, leaving the nuts and bolts to loyal followers. The rules had been written during World War II, when de Gaulle and his followers were located in London's Free French house. De Gaulle saw a double agent in every unannounced Channel crosser and, not infrequently, had that individual executed without regard to the petty details of justice. After the war, anonymous corpses were exhumed from the cellar of the London abode. The SDECE emerged shortly after World War II. It consisted of seven departments that handled intelligence analysis, Eastern and Western Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, and America. In addition there is a special action group within the SDECE, the Service d'Action du SDECE. It's not to be confused with SAC, though it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between their operations. The SDECE employs some 2000 men and has a yearly budget fixed at $25 million. Another $50 million can be tapped from a secret reserve.[1] Its headquarters are next to a large bathhouse in the Paris suburb of Les Tourelles. The French call it "the swimming pool." In its thirty years of existence the SDECE has had six chiefs. De Gaulle's first, General Grossin, lasted until 1962. General Paul Jacquier, his replacement, was dropped without so much as a handshake following the 1965 Ben Barka affair. The next chief, General Eugene Guibaud, didn't last much longer. He left in 1970 when Georges Pompidou became the president. Pompidou was convinced that SDECE figures had led a smear campaign to keep him out of Charles de Gaulle's shoes. He chose the aristocratic pro-U.S. Alexandre de Marenches to purge the intelligence agency. A dynasty of military officers has run the various SDECE departments. The names heard most often in connection with assassination, kidnaping, and other scandals are: Colonel Rend Bertrand alias Beaumont, Colonel Nicolas Fourcaud, Colonel Marcel Leroy alias Leroy-Finville, Colonel Paul Ferrer alias Fournier, and Colonel Marcel Mercier, who headed the neo-Fascist Red Hand that was responsible for a string of political murders.[2] The SDECE story is one of continuous scandal. Murder plots, kidnapings, drug deals, and extensive collaboration with the underworld have been brought to light, but are only part of the story. France has never shown the tendency toward open government that has, for example, produced public hearings in the U.S. on CIA and FBI crimes. What light has been shed in recent years is due mostly to Phillipe Thyraud de Vosjoli, a former SDECE agent in Cuba and Washington. His books, Lamia and Le Comite, raised a furor in France. It was he who tipped off the United States about the presence of Russian rocket bases in Cuba while stationed there as a French agent. He was fired in 1963. According to de Vosjoli, under de Gaulle a murder committee existed consisting of the president's closest political allies and intelligence officers. It plotted extreme measures against nations or individuals who threatened de Gaulle or his policies. At one point, the hit list included as many as thirty names. They included Guinea's chief-of-state Sekou Toure and Tunisia's Habib Bourgiba, both of whom survived. Others did not, though their deaths have been recorded as accidents. SDECE agents working for the committee, according to de Vosjoli, were responsible for the 1962 plane crash which took the life of Italian oil magnate Enrico Mattei. Mattei, then Italy's strong man, was on the verge of engineering an Italian takeover of French oil interests in Algeria. A French agent code-named Laurent tinkered with Mattei's aircraft, which crashed en route from Catania to Rome. William McHale, a Time magazine reporter writing a series about Mattei, was among the other dead. Apparently a similar fate awaited the journalist Mauro de Mauro who, while investigating the Mattei affair in 1970, disappeared without a trace. The committee also had tasks other than murder. When a newly designed Russian military jet broke down during a visit to France and was to be sent home over land, Marcel Leroy of the SDECE went into the moving business. He was hired to move the jet from the airport to the freight train the Soviets had rushed to Paris. As unsuspecting Russian guards sat in a car trailing the freight truck, the jet was placed in a second truck identical to the first, in which French agents scampered about with cameras. The two trucks were switched back when the Russians were delayed at an intersection. During a 1961 conference in Cannes, an SDECE agent broke into the hotel room of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State George Ball, and photographed all his documents while Ball snored peacefully. Similarly, an agent once rummaged through the baggage of the Moroccan ambassador to France. His eyes lit up when he opened the lock of an attache case. Inside were nothing but pornographic photos and an ivory penis together with a user guide, in a package addressed to Madame Oufkir, the wife of the notorious Moroccan security chief, Mohammed Oufkir. In his first book, Lamia, de Vosjoli also claimed that the de Gaulle regime for a long time chose to ignore the presence of Soviet spies on French soil, and perhaps even fed them information. De Gaulle, with nationalistic pride over France's development of an A-bomb, ignored John F. Kennedy's warnings about the Russian agents. He was tired of listening to Washington. With France about to become a great power again, the United States became its number one rival. De Gaulle also had ideas of his own on how to win the Third World over to France. At one time France was the greatest colonial power in Africa. However, in 1961-62 de Gaulle gave autonomy to nearly all its African possessions. His policy of creating a French "Commonwealth" was clever in principle. But the man to whom de Gaulle entrusted his Third World plans was intelligence whiz Jacques Foccart, the Gaullist Grey Eminence. The policies carried out by Foccart bore little resemblance to de Gaulle's guidelines and the newly created French Community of Nations soon fell apart at the seams. Behind Jacques Foccart was the loyal core of his own espionage ring, and the entire SAC staff, which he'd gradually expanded into an apparatus that permeated French society and foreign locales as well.[3] SAC had appeared in 1958, the crisis year in which de Gaulle assumed power by a coup d'etat. The RPF became the official Gaullist party, and SAC became its security force. The men who founded SAC were for the most part those who had also dominated the SO du RPF: Foccart, Frey, Ponchardier, Sanguinetti, Bozzi, Comiti, and Charles Pasqua.[4] Comiti and Charles Lascorz were the first to direct the para-police force. However, ultimate control always remained in the hands of Foccart. The official task of SAC was to protect Gaullist politicians in travels and at meetings. However, by the end of its first year of existence, 1958, SAC had joined the battle against the Algerian revolutionary movement, FLN, and even then it was studded with gangsters. In the final phase of the war in Algeria, SAC agents-les barbouzes -were pitted against the mutinous Secret Army Organization (OAS) whose murderous, resistance was choked off with equal brutality. When de Gaulle granted Algeria its independence in 1962, the barbouzes turned their wrath against de Gaulle's political enemies. They became the instruments for the dirtiest of Gaullist tricks. Murder, corruption, industrial espionage, election fraud-SAC agents could do it all. Foccart assigned his best SAC men to key posts on French commissions for developing countries, and in offices charged with the allotment of public funds. He also dispatched them to infiltrate African regimes, where pro-French governments allegedly paid them enormous kickbacks in return for economic assistance from Paris. At its peak SAC comprised a core of 120 directors in immediate contact with Foccart, plus some 20,000 associates, three-quarters of whom were estimated to have been criminals, many of them heroin smugglers.[5] (French intelligence has frequently been accused of having both organized and profited from the trafficking of heroin.) SAC was used at home to instigate and then crush left wing disturbances, such as the time a SAC agent took potshots at a peaceful demonstration in La Mure and struck down a renowned athlete, and tile knifing of a left wing activist by a SAC agent in Drancy.[6] Foccart's SAC agents are especially active at election time. In Socialist and Communist-dominated areas they've often been caught stealing and burning ballots. In 1968 SAC terrorized the student rebellion. The DST handed its SAC colleagues lists of suspected de Gaulle foes in Marseilles, Lyons, and Grenoble, as part of a SAC plan to detain political "subversives" in stadiums and camps, similar to what happened in Chile.[7] Through the years Jacques Foccart was not only in charge of SAC, but he also had many of his top men assigned to key positions in the SDECE. While many SAC agents were also SDECE agents and vice versa, there were always SDECE men opposed to Foccart (as there are now), and that has long been a source of intrigue. In de Gaulle's time both SAC and the SDECE worked against the CIA, though several French agents played footsy with the Americans. The criminal elements were available to anyone for the right price. Under Pompidou, and more so now under Giscard d'Estaing, the goal has been centralization of intelligence activities. The U.S. is no longer considered the number one enemy, and the SDECE has been ordered to cooperate with the CIA. Pompidou fired 7000 of SAC's crooks. Although Giscard d'Estaing would like to eliminate SAC altogether, he dares not legislate it out of existence.[8] At 66 Jacques Foccart hangs on as one of France's most powerful men. After the deaths of de Gaulle and Pompidou, he had thousands of documents destroyed, documents that would have exposed the Gaullists' dirtiest tricks. But Foccart has not shred all his papers. He allegedly has a file on every French politician and officeholder since 1974, which puts him in a position to blackmail many of them. In 1974 Giscard d'Estaing replaced Foccart, as his advisor on African affairs, with Foccart's underling, Rene Journiac. Foccart retired after an additional number of years in a similar position with Omar Bongo, the corrupt ruler of Gabon. On 6 February 1980, Journiac perished in a mysterious plane crash in Northern Cameroon.[9] pps. 45-50 --[Notes]-- 1. J. Hoagland, Politiken, 14 June 1976. 2. P.T.deVosjoli: Le Comite (Editions de l'Homme, 1975); A. Jaubert: Dossier D ... comme Drogue (Alain Moreau, 1974); N. Fournier and E. Legrand: Dossier E ... comme Espionage (Alain Moreau, 1977). 3. P. Chairoff :Dossier B ... comme Barbouzes (Alain Moreau, 1975). 4. UDR member Charles Pasqua held a seat in Parliament and chaired a 1969 committee investigating France's narcotics problem. From 1952 to 1967 he held various high-ranking positions in the big wine firm, Ricard Pastis. When the known heroin trafficker Jean Venturi came to Montreal in 1962 to establish a new smuggling network, his cover was as a representative for Ricard Pastis, where his immediate superior appears to have been Pasqua — see The Newsday Staff: The Heroin Trail (Souvenir Books, 1974). 5. Chairoff, op. cit. 6. Jaubert, op. cit. 7. Chairoff, op. cit. 8. As late as the summer of 1976 Marseilles' Socialist mayor Gaston Deferre, and other left wing politicians, charged in Parliament that the Gaullists were about to rebuild SAC, and that murderers and thieves were again being recruited out of prison as in 1961. In the last few years, however, the Gaullists have lost much ground, whereas France's non-Gaullist Right, with OAS figures in the fore, has gotten a shot in the arm. Many former SAC goons are allegedly currently working for this movement. 9. E. Ramaro: "Un Petit Mort Sans Significance," Afirique-Asie, 3 March 1980. For a review of French dirty work in Africa pre- and post-Foccart, see K. Van Meter: "The French Role in Africa", in Dirty Work 2, The CIA in Africa, edited by E. Ray, W. Schaap, K. Van Meter and L. Wolf (Lyle Stuart, 1979). --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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