1983. From then on he knew the identities and details
of all the main American agents within the Soviet system, as well as some of the British and European ones. Less than two years afterwards he was recruited by the Russians.
I can no longer work in an organisation in which satisfaction of bureaucratic superiors is more important than superior analysis, in which the key analytic question often is 'what does the boss really want?' rather than 'what is really of significance to US foreign policy and national security?'
In terms of the morale of its officers, the treasons and defections from the early 1980s onwards have probably been most damaging: the list of renegades (which even now may not be complete) includes Edwin Wilson, Jonathan Pollard, John Walker, Edward Lee Howard and Aldrich Ames, the son of an early CIA officer and the most serious case of all.
The Ames story is a terrible tale of poor security and croneyism, comparable only with the worst days of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, in the 1950s and early 60s. Ames, habitually drunk and careless, was turned down for the job of deputy chief of station in the Colombian capital, Bogota, but for unexplained rea- sons was then given the far more important post of chief of the counter-intelligence branch of the Soviet division. That was in Any government has the right, indeed the duty, to gather intelligence abroad and to try to influence the policies of other countries. The CIA, or something like it, will continue to exist; but its loudest critics in the Senate, Daniel Moynihan, John Warner, Dennis DeConcini and Bob Gra- ham, will at the least demand heavy cuts 01 the agency's staffing and budget and may prove successful. President Clinton's own Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, head- ed by the former Secretary of Defence Les Aspin, has been asked to make recommen- dations for the CIA's future.
As for the unfortunate James Woolsey, who after only two years in office bears lit- tle of the guilt but most of the blame for the collapse of the agency, he will be pub- lishing his own proposals for change in the course of the next few weeks. They are not difficult to forecast: some slimming down but nothing too savage, more public accountability but not too much, tighter yet imprecise controls on the conduct of the CIA's officers and staff, vague offers to co- operate more closely with the agency's institutional enemy, the FBI. The mere fact that these proposals come from the direc- tor's office will be enough, in the present climate, to ensure that they will be greeted with derision. The mood, as so often in Washington at times of setback, will be for something radical to be done. The CIA, as it is at present, is too ineffi- cient, too penetrated, too damaged and too low in morale to be left to its own devices any longer.
John Simpson is an associate editor of The Spectator and foreign affairs editor of the BBC. Paris "AND THEN,' oozed Le Monde, 'the Pres- ident of the Republic proceeded to evoke the question of death and transcendence.' Mitterrand was completing a lengthy tele- vision interview in which he had confessed to his youthful right-wing affiliations, and the reports the next day were appropriate- ly deferential. am fascinated by the prob- lems of transcendence, but,' he admitted, I have still not found the key.' Asked what ,he would say on his deathbed, he intoned, I would say that eternity is a long time.' Mitterrand has been much obsessed with death for years, and has frequently offered his musings on it to his private entourage. Now it was the French public's turn to benefit from his reflections. But, with his °wn death approaching, Mitterrand also seemed to want to ensure his eternity — in hi story if not in heaven — by publicly turn- ing attention to the beginning of his 50- year career in politics, and thereby presenting himself as the incarnation of France herself over that long period. The book, with whose publication he co-oper- ated, was not called A French Youthtime for nothing. For this man, the leader of the United Left, the only Socialist president since the war, had just admitted that in the late- 1930s he had been on the nationalist light. The man, whose autobiography °mits all mention of his 18 months in the `Vichy administration, had just opined, Many senior officials in Vichy were impeccable from a patriotic point of view.' The suggestion seemed to be that because he served both Petain and de Gaulle (the latter, albeit with reluctance) he could pre- sent himself, just as they both had done, as the man of 'national reconciliation'. But, like many people with a guilty con- science, Mitterrand's public self-justifica- tion went a little too far. He claimed to have known nothing about the Vichy gov- ernment's anti-Jewish legislation while working for the regime. Even more extraordinarily, he referred to that legisla- tion as having been only 'against foreign Jews', a sinister blunder. To cap it all, he had said that Rene Bousquet, the police chief who had been his friend until the
WERE YOU ALL RIGHT, JACQUES?
M. Mitterrand's Vichyite past has recently been exposed. John Laughland examines what his chosen successor; M Delors, was up to at the time mid-1980s, and whose prosecution for crimes against humanity he admitted that he had deliberately obstructed, had been a nice guy.
Mitterrand's attempt to become a syn- thesis of the whole nation is based on his belief that the French find a leader appealing who is 'neither Right nor Left'. This slogan has been successfully employed by Socialists, Fascists, Catholics, Monarchists, Main, de Gaulle and Mit- terrand himself, for the fractious French are perennially frightened of the division which results from their penchant for vicious ideological dispute. It was fitting, therefore, that he presented Vichy as a parenthesis in French history, as if it had been only a part of the eternal seesaw of fortunes between France and Germany, rather than a movement inspired by an inherently European, including French, ideology. By playing down the ideological aspect, as well as the evils of collaboration, Mitterrand was trying to hide the fact that his own career makes him the very embod- iment of the striking ideological similarity which exists between certain currents of thought in the 1930s, Vichy itself, and pre- sent-day French politics. illustrates something more intriguing. It is the link between the extreme Right and the centre-Left. These two political families are united by their rejection of both free-mar- ket liberalism and Marxism, and by their search for a 'third way' between the two ideologies, capitalism and communism. Indeed, Vichy itself was little but an authoritarian and technocratic left-wing government with a traditionalist patina. Its hallmark was precisely that, pretending to be above ideology, it blurred the distinction between right and wrong, as Mitterrand himself has so often done.
It is therefore in keeping with this trend that the political opinions of the third most prominent politician of the French Left, Jacques Delors, the man Mitterrand hopes will succeed him as president, also point in this same, very French direction. After the defeat of 1940, the 15-year-old Delors, like many of his compatriots, felt a desire to regenerate his country. He joined a youth group called the Compagnons de France, which had just been created by the Vichy government. As Delors has himself admit- ted, and as a glance at any Vichy newsreel shows, the Compagnons in particular, and the cult of youth in general, were key ele- ments in the propaganda of P8tain's `National Revolution'. They exuded the kind of squeaky-clean youthful optimism which fascists find so endearing, and undertook good public works like bringing in the harvest or reclaiming land, while cul- tivating 'spirituality', obedience, and rever- ence for Marshal Main. They wore shorts, a beret and a blue shirt with the French cockerel emblazoned on it, and their salute, sometimes given kneeling, was not dissimilar to the Nazi one.
In 1975, Delors claimed that he joined the Compagnons because they were the only youth movement, but this is not so. On the contrary, youth groups were legion before and during the war. Instead of being the only one, the Compagnons de France was distinguished from the others by being the first to be officially created and financed by Vichy. Indeed, when Marshal Main visited the Compagnons on 15 August 1940, he told them there were to be `the vanguard of the National Revolution'.
Membership of the Compagnons was a formative political experience for the young Delors, although he denies having had any sympathy for Main or the Nation- al Revolution. The movement's principal political hue was left-wing Catholic, the sort of political creed which was to lead to Vatican II, and to which Delors has always remained faithful. Moreover, the Com- pagnons were overwhelmingly under the influence of the quasi-spiritual 'personalist' philosophy of Emmanuel Mounier, a man who is Delors' lodestar to this very day. In the semi-religious tones which Mounier's followers think appropriate to the man, Delors himself says, 'I am a disciple of Emmanuel Mounier.' Indeed, in 1952, Delors joined a group called Vie Nouvelle
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