NOT AS FUNNY AS CLOUSEAU
Alasdair Palmer reports on the nefarious
activities of France's secret police forces, and, in particular, Renseignements Generaux'
IN ALMOST EVERY country, the end of the Cold War has led to a rapid reduction in the size of the state's secret apparatus. Even the right-wing police states of South America and South Africa have lost some of their coercive edge. Policemen in Paraguay or Chile are not the kind of peo- ple any sane individual would ever want to be left alone with. But they are not chuck- ing political opponents out of aeroplanes at quite the rate they used to.
But there is one country where the past five years have seen an increase in the size of an already prodigious secret police. It is surprising to discover that the country in question is not Serbia or Cuba. It is France.
France has a staggering number of secret organisations whose specific func- tion is to snoop on its citizens — more than any other democracy and more than most dictatorships. If the CIA, like Holly- wood, thought the only policemen in France were versions of Inspector Clouse- au, they could not have been more wrong. There are at least three different organisa- tions which monitor foreigners in France: the Direction de la Surveillance du Terri- toire, the equivalent of MI5, the Direction Generale des Services Exterieures, the equivalent of MI6, and the Secretariat General de la Defense Nationale, which has no UK equivalent. Founded only a couple of years ago in the aftermath of the Gulf war, French military intelligence also takes an interest in foreigners. Any one of those organisations could have been fol- lowing the hapless CIA officers whose bungled attempt at persuading French offi- cials and businessmen to betray their coun- try generated a diplomatic row last week.
But the most sinister secret organisation in France is the notorious `Renseigne- ments Generaux' or RG. The RG is a straightforward secret police force. It was originally set up in the 19th century: France's governors were alarmed at the arrival of railways, which allowed people to travel quickly from one end of the country to the other. The RG was instituted to find out who was travelling where and why. It remained a kind of train-spotters' backwa- ter until the Nazis invaded. In 1942, under the direction of the Vichy regime, the RG was given a much broader task: 'To inform the government on the actions of groups and persons which might have an effect on public morals and order.' The definition is so loose that it enables the RG to snoop on whoever it wishes. As its function makes explicit, there is no need that the target should be breaking the law, or.indeed be doing anything other than something the government doesn't like.
If that makes the RG sound like a French version of the Gestapo, it should, because that is what the RG is. The RG gets a copy of every publication, including every newspaper, before it hits the streets. It produces a daily dossier on what is going on in France. It had 5,000 officers in 1990, but its network of informers ensures that its tentacles reach far further than one would expect of an organisation of its size. Everyone who is asked by the RG to `keep an eye out' on his neighbours or friends ends up doing so, for the simple reason that they can make your life impos- I see that George Blake has done another runner.' sible if you refuse: you will find you have a sudden tax investigation, or a vital consign- ment of supplies will fail to be delivered to your business, or your house will be bur- gled.
The RG can be extremely ruthless. Four years ago, for example, the RG tried to blackmail a politician. They used a priest called Pasteur Douce, a well-known advo- cate of 'gay Christianity', who they thought was involved in a paedophile ring. The RG arrested Douce and questioned him. Sever- al months later, his bones were found in the forest of Rambouillet. No one doubts that the RG murdered Douce. Indeed, Charles Pasqua, France's Interior Minister, said as much himself. The RG also tried to force a 15-year-old male prostitute to entrap an inconvenient government minis- ter thought to have a fondness for young boys. When the boy refused, an officer from the RG took pot-shots at him through his letter-box. The effect was to persuade the boy to attempt suicide.
Those two incidents are merely the ones the French press has succeeded in at least partially uncovering. There are certainly many more. Yet there have been no minis- terial resignations, no sackings within the RG. There has not even been an official government inquiry. The bullying, lawless behaviour of the RG seems to be tolerated as a fact of French life. It is not one which the much vaunted European Court of Human Rights seems able to do anything about. But then the French President has his own secret police force, empowered to tap the phones and investigate the private life of anyone and everyone who it might be necessary to silence at some point. So, too, does the French Prime Minister. What Mitterrand does, Balladur does as well. Politicians, journalists, even actors and actresses — to say nothing of their lovers — have all been followed and had their phones tapped, the conversations recorded and logged in case they contain anything `useful'.
Even in its heyday, the KGB never came close to the range and scale of surveillance and snooping on French citizens which France's secret police execute as a matter of routine. It was always much more likely that a Frenchman would end up being blackmailed by officers of his own govern- ment than by anyone else. If that's what they do to their own people, what, I won- der, are they doing to us — Perfide Albion, the traditional enemy of France? As Gen- eral Pierre Marion, former head of the DGSE, explained to me, the full range of espionage techniques are now employed against economic competitors like Britain. The list of French secret service's list of `agents of influence' here is unlikely to be as extensive as the KGB's. But they have probably had more success in recruiting genuinely useful people.
Alasdair Palmer is homes affairs editor of The Spectator.
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