FRENCH AGENCY HAS A TOUGH REPUTATION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000504580002-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 3, 2012
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: August 27, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504580002-1
ARTICLE APPEAREq
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
27 August 1985
French agency has
a tough reputation
By John Morrison
PARIS [Reuters]-,France's se-
cret service, at the center of a
controversy. over the sabotaging of
the Greenpeace ship Rainbow
Warrior, is a military outfit that
has frequently hit the headlines for
its use of strongarm tactics.
The General Directorate for Ex-
ternal Security [DGSE], headed
by Adm. Pierre Lacoste, is ac-
cused by the French media of
masterminding the sinking of the
ship in the harbor at Auckland,
New Zealand, on July 10 in which
a crewman was killed.
The ecology movement's vessel
was to have led a protest fleet to
France's nuclear test area at
Mururoa Atoll.
. President Francois Mitterrand's
inquiry into the affair, headed by
Gaullist Bernard Tricot, absolved
the French secret service Tuesday
of involvement in the bombing.
However, the report did admit
that a man and woman currently
facing charges in connection with
the incident were' members of the
French secret service. The report
also identified four other men be-
lieved connected to the case as
secret service agents.
The DGSE, until 1982 known as
the SDECE, was built in the 1940s
by veterans of the wartime resis-
tance against Nazi occupation, a
brutal struggle with few rules.
"This job is not for choirboys,';
one of them said.
In a recent book on the service
by journalists Roger Faligot and
Pascal Krop, former French
agents recount tale after tale of
violent undercover exploits in the
1940s and 1950s.
"It's a hoodlum's trade carried
out by honest men. We kill only for
reasons of state," the authors were
told by Maurice Robert, a SDECE
veteran who later became ambas-
sador to Gabon.
In 1948, SDECE agents kidnaped
top Nazi commando Otto Skorzeny
from an American prison in Darm-
stadt in order to pump him for
information about the Soviet
Union.
"Of course, the operation was
only half-covered by headquarters
in Paris. But he [Skorzeny] knew
a lot about the Russians," Col.
Michel Garder told Faligot and
In the same year a SDECE pilot
flew secretly into Czechoslovakia
to bring out Hubert Ripka, an
opponent of the communists who
had just seized power in Prague.
In the early 19%s the strongarm
branch of the SDECE-the Service
Action [SA]-was expanded to
handle counterinsurgency. opera-
tions against the Viet Minh in In-
dochina. It had not only its own air
squadron but its own special
forces, the 11th Shock Airborne
Batallion whose symbol was a
black panther.
In the Algerian war, the SDECE
carried out assassinations, sa-
botage and psychological warfare
in France's ultimately futile eight-
year struggle against the National
Liberation Front (FLN).
According to the book, these op-
erations, though sometimes
disowned by embarrassed poll-
if they went wrong, were
all authorized at the top by the
governments of the Fourth Repub-
lic.
In October, 1956, after unsuc-
cessful attempts to assassinate
him-including a car-bomb in
Cairo which killed 30 people-the
SDECE captured FLN leader
Ahmed Ben Bella by forcing his
plane to land in Algiers on M light
between Morocco and Tunisia.
The operation caused a political
dispute in Paris and resignations
from the government of Guy Mol-
let. One minister who stayed on
was Mitterrand.
Between 1956 and 1%2, the
SDECE sank a dozen ships
bringing arms to the FLN and
killed several arms traffickers,
mostly West Germans.
These attacks were claimed by a
mysterious organization called the
"Red Hand"-in fact a front for
officers of the Service Action
trained at Cercottes near Orleans
in "homo" (homicide] operations.
After the end of the Algerian war
in 1962, the SDECE shifted the
center of its operations to Africa,
under the close supervision of de
Gaulle's legendary aide Jacques
Foccart.
Foccart's name became a
byword for cloak-and-dagger op.
erations in Africa, including the
supply of arms to the Biafran se-
cession' in Nigeria and attempts to
overthrow Guinean leader Ahmed
Sekou Tours,
In 1965, the SDECE was severely
shaken by the Ben Barka affair-
its involvement in the kidnaping
and presumed murder in Paris of
a Moroccan opposition leader.
De gaulle, wanting the service
kept under a tighter rein, trans-
ferred responsibility from the
f seer's office to the Do-
Since hen a new chief,
afire wept
away the old guardina~wpurge-ft
SDECE has tried with limited re.
sources to compete with the CIA
and the KGB in the sophisticated
world of East-West espionage. But
its image problem has hampered
recruitment of the best and
brightest.
"The chronic problem of the
French secret services is that, un-
like the Anglo-Saxons, they have
been unable to recruit scientists,
economists and linguists on cam-
puses," Faligot and Krop write.
Mistrust of the SDECE has been
widespread on the left. The 1972
opposition program signed by
Mitterrand and his communist al-
lies promised to abolish it, a
pledge later quietly forgotten.
Defense Minister Charles Hernu
persuaded Mitterrand to leave the
SDECE under the control of his
ministry and appoint his friend
Pierre Marion, a former aviation
industry executive with little expe-
rience in intelligence, as its new
chief.
The SDECE was renamed the
DGSE and barred from operating
within France. But Marion's
wholesale reorganization, purges
and prickly temperament had a
disastrous effect on morale and in
1982 he was replaced by Lacoste.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504580002-1