7 SEPTEMBER 1985, Page 9

TELLING SECRET SERVICE SECRETS

Ronald Payne on the dirt

beneath the whitewash of the Tricot report

SECRET services are never more informa- tive than when they are being investigated, as the French one is, by some specially appointed outside figure. When they are busy trying to hide some shady action, their technique is to cover it in a mess of organisational detail and paper directives, the better to hide what outsiders should not be allowed to discover.

The British reports about intelligence failures in the Falklands war revealed more about the inner workings than had emerged for years. Suddenly HM Station- ery office was in a position to reveal how our spies work. Now the same thing has happened with the report of Bernard Tri- cot about the Greenpeace goings-on, though it avoids vulgar whodunnit police work.

For example, we now catch a glimpse of Lieutenant-Colonel Faberon, head of op- erations at the DGSE, the French secret intelligence service, and learn that the patron of Action is Colonel Emin. That may very well be an order of battle known to the KGB, but I should like to bet that had I looked in only a few weeks ago at headquarters in Boulevard Mortier, they would have told me politely that there was no such service as Action, and that for security reasons the names of department heads could not be revealed.

Merci, Monsieur Tricot, some you knit others you purl. But the wise and good official investigator has gone farther. Back in March, when various segments of the French government were very properly considering what to do about tiresome Greenpeace plans to disrupt nuclear testing in the Pacific, it was decided to send a number of agents to that area. Now it is revealed that because of the scale of counter measures planned, the secret in- telligence boys said they would need to hire a boat. Unfortunately, it seems that the petty cash account available to the Direction Gdndrale de Securite Exterieur de la France, their long-titled answer to MI6, did not actually run to such high expenditure. The service had to ask for a special grant of funds which could only be obtained with the written authorisation of a full general named Saulnier who was the President's personal chief of staff. So the presidential circle knew what was afoot. I am not in the habit of hiring sea-going yachts or despatching teams of agents to the south Pacific, but after taking expert advice I am assured that this would not have cost more than £100,000. The ques- tion which poses itself is, how ruthless can a secret service be when in order to get such a paltry sum it has to get a chit from the head of the French state at the Elysee? With conditions of work like that what intelligence service would be capable of mounting a really diabolical world plot?

Even so, the money was raised, because DIRCEN, one of those acronymic men who haunt state organisations, otherwise known as Admiral Fages, the boss of French nuclear testing, had learned from his men in the Pacific that the Greenpeace crowd had him in their non-nuclear sights. This must be taken to mean that the Admiral had his own intelligence organisa- tion to keep him informed about such special threats. It was his alarm signal which prompted Charles Hernu, minister of defence, to issue an order to the DGSE to 'intensify their intelligence gathering' translation, must try harder.

Admiral Lacoste, the first naval officer `Once upon a time. . . ever to be appointed head of the secret intelligence service, who, according to Paris gossip, is a friend of General Mitter- rand, a notable officer in the French nuclear strike force, and brother of the President, went to work on the basis of this order. But he was under the impression that he had been authorised to go a bit farther, and interpreted the order as mean- ing that his men on the spot should `infiltrate the organisation in question'. They were also invited to 'reflect upon ways and means of confounding the action of this organisation'.

Tut-tutting frantically at this point, M. Tricot declares that in no way could such reflections involve any kind of nasty rough stuff. Good heavens, no. But it is precisely here that the plot thickens, for the well- trained and patriotic young men sunning themselves on Pacific beaches were mem- bers of Action teams of the service, the equivalent of our own Royal Marines, Special Boat Service. And I can safely say, as an ex-Royal Marine, that we can easily, easily guess at the kind of 'reflections' such men might produce upon such invitation.

The nearest parallel in recent British history was in 1956 when the more gung-ho elements in MI6 mentioned to an ex-Royal Navy diver, Commander Crabbe, that he might like to take a look under the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikadze, which had brought Khruschev and Bulganin to Portsmouth harbour. He did so, and nothing more was heard until his mangled body was recov- ered some time later.

It is known that among the Action men were three long-service senior non- commissioned officers, all no doubt reli- able hands. Their plans were not so ambi- tious as Commander Crabbe's, but what they did have it in mind to do was to `infiltrate' Greenpeace, not by joining the organisation, but by attaching their boats to the Greenpeace flotilla as it prepared to harass French ships in the nuclear test operations this autumn. That is why well- trained boat men were sent there, accom- panied by a reservist doctor from Dieppe skilled in underwater casualty treatment. The job was simply to use their nautical and electronic communications skills to disrupt the seaborne disrupters.

All this seems to me a perfectly reason- able, if rough, tactic for use against the nuisance of protesters afloat. For ecologic- al demonstrators are by no means as peaceful as they like to make out. Five years ago their supporters blew up the Sierra, considered to be a pirate whaler, in the port of Lisbon; a conservationist named Paul Watson had earlier rammed that ship to stop the killing of whales, and at the time Greenpeace spokesmen came up with the traditional response — 'of course we are against violence, but we do understand these strong feelings. . .

But before battle commenced the admir- als were playing word games in which we can take part, courtesy of M. Tricot. The nuclear naval officer Fages had written: 'It has been suggested that the intensification of intelligence gathering on the movements of the Vega and the Rainbow Warrior is intended to forsee and anticiper the actions of Greenpeace.'

The report concludes that anticiper used transitively can mean to prevent. Indeed it can, and anyone familiar with French military jargon knows, furthermore, that it is customarily used even more strongly in the way that the Americans use `pre-empt'. The word had, moreover, been doubly underlined in the original document, so it is not surprising that a team of agents in place thought that here was a licence to take pretty drastic action, the more so if whoever gave the verbal orders did so with tone-of-voice double underlining.

Captain Dominique Prieur, the woman agent, and her pretend husband Alain Mafart, both now under arrest in New Zealand, were wrong-footed from the start because they travelled there with false Swiss passports, which are easy to detect. The only reason why the DGSE favours them for covert activities is internal. The federal capital in Berne is one of the few in Europe where the service has no 'legal' officer under diplomatic cover. The pri- vilege was taken away after scandalous behaviour during the Algerian war. French intelligence service reckoning was, if we get caught out, there is no officer of ours in Berne to take the blame. The disadvantage was that because the Swiss are efficient and deal with a small number of documents they are the world's fastest at sniffing out false papers.

Not until the New Zealand police finish their investigation and the French agents under arrest are brought to trial is any elucidation likely about the actual sinking of the protest ship. But the most striking feature apparent so far is the amateur nature of the attempt and the use of old-fashioned explosives.

There was no point in simply blowing a hole in the side of the ship, even if it did sink it. The easiest kind of ship repair is to weld new plates to the hull. Action team men specialising in under-sea warfare could have done a much more effective job by placing a well-balanced charge on the ship's screw, not only to destroy it, but to wreck the transmission and gearing as well. Such an attack could have immobilised the ship for months and have saved a great deal of bother.

This fact leads to suspicions that the actual operation was carried out, not by a professional sabotage man, but by an outsider to the service. On numerous occasions the DGSE and its predecessor service in France had made use of such stringers, known in their jargon as honor- ables correspondants, to do the dirty work. There is no shortage in France of veteran explosives men, either from the Resistance or Secret Army bombers left over from the Algerian war, many of whom have come to rest in French New Caledonia. Such men

would have been delighted to have a go at a target like Greenpeace, but they bungled the operation in an attempt to show these young chaps how to do it.

They are just the kind who have figured in earlier Paris espionage scandals, refer- red to in France as members of 'parallel networks', men more intent on making political mischief than on serving national interests. This is what the self-questioning M. Tricot had in mind when he wondered out loud whether other intelligence ser- vices might have been involved, not the British one, as was generally assumed, but other parallel French services anxious to discredit President Mitterrand.

Whoever was finally responsible, they have done French interests a disservice while cheering up and encouraging the anti-nuclear brigade. As the affair pro- ceeds, however, the French have one great advantage. The opposition, much though it would relish the fall of President Mitter- , rand, is taking an old-fashioned, my coun- try right or wrong attitude. Patriotism still lives in France and they are still proud that M. Chauvin was a Frenchman. Also the polls are showing that a big majority supports France as a nuclear power, and maintains the right of her secret service to ward off the unilateralist busybodies of Greenpeace and allied organisations.

Lucky France. Just imagine the dreadful outcry if the British secret service had been involved in such a thing.