28 SEPTEMBER 1985, Page 21

GALLIC SKULDUGGERY

The press: Will they find out why Hernu

went? By Paul Johnson WHAT fun the French press have! The defection of the KGB mastermind in Lon- don, by any standards the biggest British spy sensation for years, afforded Fleet Street not a single inside story, not the minutest genuine scoop: it was all official stuff, and the papers had to content them- selves with 'expert' comment compiled mostly from old clippings. By contrast, the Paris papers have been having the best silly season for many years with l'Affaire Green- peace, with high-level leaks galore all through July and August, culminating in some massive disclosures last week in Le Monde, the place where French Top Peo- ple, or le gratin, go when they wish to leak. This led directly to the resignation on Friday of M. Charles Hernu, the Socialist Defence Minister, and (an even bigger fish in the circumstances) the dismissal of Admiral Pierre Lacoste, the head of France's intelligence network, and then to the government's formal admission that its agents sank the boat. Talk about the power of the press!

Yet I wonder. Is the French press making the running, or is it being used? Some French newspapers have always had ambiguous relations with those in high places: both the ostensible rulers, the presidents and prime ministers, and the faceless high officials who operate behind the scenes. France is in a pre-electoral period. The ruling Socialists are expected to lose their majority next year, and the constitution of the Fifth Republic will then be put to its first big test, with the President forced to resign or work with a hostile majority and government. So a great many powerful people are beginning to manoeuvre for position, and the Green- peace business is, in this respect, beautiful- ly timed for exploitation. Even by the standards of French political affaires it is an unusually complex one, and clearly impor- tant. My guess is that it is only just beginning, and that the show will run and run.

To start with, it is curious to me that President Mitterrand himself has managed to keep off the centre stage of the business. He is no stranger to this kind of imbroglio. He has what the French call un gout de policier. Like most French politicians of his generation, he cut his teeth in the desper- ate atmosphere of cloak-and-dagger, plot and counter-plot, created by the Resist- ance, and the murderous struggle between the Gaullists and Vichy. His own little party, the UDSR, was born of the Resist- ance struggle. Mitterrand seems to like mysteries, or at any rate has been involved in them. In 1954, when he was Minister of the Interior, he was concerned in a murky and at times hilarious business called l'Af- faire des fuites, in which secret documents from the National Defence Committee were discovered to have been delivered to the French Communist Party. The accusa- tions against Mitterrand were disproved, but left their scars. Again, in October 1959, he was the central figure in an even more sensational business, known as l'Af- faire de l'Observatoire, in which he took refuge from an assassination attempt by hiding behind a privet hedge in the grounds of the Observatory, his Peugeot 403 being riddled by bullets. Later he was accused of having arranged the whole thing with the help of a former Poujadist deputy, in order to boost his popularity. It turned out that Mitterrand was the foolish victim of a complex plot, and after a great deal of blather two judicial decisions in 1966 cleared him by what the French lawyers call a non-lieu. But it was all very embar- rassing.

In the Greenpeace affair, it is odd that the chain of responsibility for an important intelligence operation, involving law- breaking in a friendly country, should stop at the Defence Ministry, with its political boss, M. Hernu, left to carry the can. After all, in most democratic countries, such as ours, the ultimate political responsibility

for the secret service is carried by the head of government, the Prime Minister. In France, under the constitution of the Fifth Republic, the head of government, the Prime Minister M. Laurent Fabius, is not really the boss, since the President can hire and fire him. The President, as an active, elective head of state, is much closer to the American President in terms of power, and especially in the field of national security. Such matters as the force de frappe are dealt with directly between the President and the Defence Secretary, rather than through the Prime Minister's office.

This, one imagines, applies particularly to the secret service, since the constitution of the Fifth Republic was written by de Gaulle, and operated by him personally in its first decade; and de Gaulle — the archetypal political product of the Resist- ance — always insisted on keeping the threads of intelligence in his own hands, and in those of his trusted personal staff at the Elysee Palace. It is hard to believe that the system has changed in any fundamental sense since his day, for neither of his successors, Pompidou and Giscard, was a man inclined to relinquish authority of any kind.

Nor is Mitterrand, with his taste for mysteries and his bitter experience of plots-within-plots, a chap to allow himself to be kept in the dark, if he can help it, by France's notoriously devious espionage networks. In any case, he had a timely warning of the skulduggery they can get up to when, during his last visit to Britain, French secret agents were caught by the British police 'testing security'.

Moreover, it is clear that the threads of French intelligence ultimately end at the Elysde since the official report by M. Bernard Tricot confirms that Admiral Lacoste, in charge of the various teams of French agents engaged in the Greenpeace operation (whatever it was: therein lies the dispute), had to seek approval for the funds needed to finance them from Gener- al Saulnier, who is now Commander-in- Chief of the French armed forces, but who was at the time the principal military assistant to President Mitterrand himself. Lacoste got Saulnier's approval, and are we to suppose that the President did not know about it?

What the French press, it seems to me, ought to be seeking is the answer to these questions, to all of which M. Fabius has still not answered frankly. Was Hernu forced into resignation because he knew or because he was deceived? Was his crime guilty knowledge or culpable ignorance? If the former, is it not likely that his patron, Mitterrand, also shared his knowledge? And if the latter, is not the President equally to blame for not knowing either? The third possibility, that Hernu did not know, but Mitterrand did, is also worth examining. At all events, Hernu looks like a sacrificial scapegoat, and the real test of the acumen and independence of the French press is whether they discover whom he is protecting.