The Secret Life of France

by Lucy Wadham

  ‘The tradition was banned during the Revolution as monarchistic,’ Yves explains as I bite down on the fève.

  ‘Well done!’ Michelle exclaims. ‘What is it?’

  We all conclude that it is a shepherd.

  ‘People took no notice of the ban of course,’ Yves goes on. ‘And in true French style, Napoleon authorised it again.’

  ‘You have to choose your King,’ Michelle says with a smile.

  I put the paper crown on the ex-spymaster and we all dig in.

  After tea, Yves and I and his new golden retriever, Voyou (Rogue – I presume as in State), move into the study. I want him to tell me about his insights and experiences, not because I haven’t heard them before but because this time I wish to write them down.

  *

  Yves Bonnet, former head of the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, French counter-intelligence), is a freethinker, a rare species in France. Protestant on both his mother’s and father’s side, he is, like many Huguenots, a passionate Anglophile, a sceptic and an iconoclast. Among his most recent ideas is a campaign to rehabilitate Pierre Cauchon, the collaborationist bishop who burnt Joan of Arc.

  ‘He made a sensible decision,’ he argues. ‘The English would have done a much better job of ruling France than the imbeciles who came after that lunatic Charles VII. Just imagine, Lucy. With the Plantagenets at the helm, ruling Britain and France as one, what a great nation we would have made.’

  As a spymaster operating towards the end of the Cold War, Yves says that he came to depend heavily on the English. He refers to La Six (MI6) as ‘still by far the best agency in the world’. Mistrustful of his sister house, the DGSE – which still, three decades after the Rainbow Warrior fiasco, drags around a reputation for incompetence – he quickly got into the habit of applying to the English for foreign intelligence.

  ‘My external service is MI6,’ he told a commission of inquiry investigating the lack of coordination between France’s intelligence services. ‘If I need to know anything, in China, in Pakistan, I’ll call the English.’

  ‘Do you know what you’re saying?’ the investigator asked him.

  ‘Perfectly. If you want to work properly in this field, you work with the English.’

  Yves recalls with satisfaction MI6’s station chief in Paris, Kenneth Wright.

  ‘With his perfect French, his finesse and his Cambridge-style distinction, the man seemed to have walked straight out of a John Le Carré novel.’

  Yves notes that this was often the profile of agents working for La Six, which, as he puts it, employs a ‘better calibre’ than MI5. Despite his affection for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Yves did work closely with MI5 on ‘the Irish’.

  ‘We went very far for the English over Ireland. We were MI5’s annexe in Paris, intercepting arms for them, tapping phones. The Irish work took up thirty to forty French inspectors all year round, paid for by the Republic,’ he adds. ‘We’re not a big agency so this was no small thing, but we were happy to do it.’

  Ever since his time as head of the DST, Yves will not have a word said against British intelligence, which he believes offers ‘in an imperfect world, a model of conduct, due to the simplicity of its structures, its coherence and its checks and balances’.

  It must be said that Yves’s experience of the United Kingdom dates back to the early eighties and was limited to his brief visits to The Travellers Club on Pall Mall, courtesy of Colin Figures, then head of MI6. When I mention some other, more contemporary aspects of British society, he stops me, as if reluctant to have his idyll marred.

  ‘I know, I know. Les Hooliganes,’ he says quaintly. ‘It seems that in Britain the very best coexists beside the very worst. France does not have such contrasts. I suppose if I had to,’ he concludes, euphemistically, ‘I would choose the civilisation of the grape to that of the hop.’

  A former Prefect and centre-right MP, Yves was nominated to head the DST by the socialist president François Mitterrand because he knew that this Protestant maverick would carry out vitally needed reforms to a sclerotic service without bowing to pressure from any faction. Yves remembers entering Mitterrand’s study at the Elysée for the first time and discreetly craning his neck to see who was occupying the only photo frame on the president’s desk. To his amusement and admiration it was not his wife, Danielle, or his daughter, Mazarine, but … Ronald Reagan.

  Separated by their politics, Yves and his president were united by a common mistrust of orthodoxy. Champion of the underdog, Yves’s alliances are broad and eclectic. A friend, like Mitterrand, to the Serbs and the Iraqis, he has always fiercely opposed sanctions, which he calls ‘the rich man’s terrorism’. He has been a loyal friend to the Algerian military regime since their intelligence service (SM) helped him organise the release of Gilles Sydney Peyrolles, one of the first French hostages to be taken in Lebanon.* Yves has dined twice with Saddam Hussein, whom he described as ‘logorrhoeic’, and believes that Iran, a regime he despises, not only already has nuclear capability, but is perfectly entitled to it.

  At this point, I tell Yves that I find it difficult to listen to him talking about geopolitics with that paper crown on his head.

  Anti-Americanism and La Force de Frappe

  ‘We are at war with America,’ Mitterrand said in an interview with journalist Georges-Marc Benamou in 1995. ‘A permanent war, a war without death. They are very hard, the Americans – they are voracious. They want undivided power over the world.’

  This, as I would discover, is the conviction of a large number of French people, both young and old. Like many visceral antipathies, French anti-Americanism has its roots in history. When I detected it, even in my own children, I became eager to understand its origins.

  The week the British and Americans declared war on Iraq, I went to see Yves. I knew that he would provide a useful perspective on this new breach between France and the Anglo-Saxon world. We sat in his flat near the Eiffel Tower, surrounded by his wife’s luminous oil paintings and a posse of Scottish terriers. His response was more laconic than I had expected.

  ‘I’m afraid that all they are doing is taking the noose from around Iran’s neck,’ he said. ‘With the Sunni regime destroyed, the mullahs will simply have a huge playground in which to extend their Islamic Revolution.’

  A man of the Cold War, Yves has little patience with the politics of interference inaugurated by Clinton (or rather, rehabilitated by him), drooled over by Blair and harnessed, most successfully, by G. W. Bush. For people like Yves, better the dictator you know.

  ‘The only thing that surprises me in all this’, he went on, ‘is the attitude of the English. Americans can be forgiven for their ignorance but the British have a sense of History. They know the region. Surely they can foresee the chaos that is to come.’

  I relayed the theory that I had read in the editorial of a major British broadsheet, that Blair hoped to control Bush, act as a kind of moderator once in the theatre.

  Yves said he thought this sounded like vainglory.

  ‘I do not think this invasion makes sense but I will say one thing,’ he said. ‘France has behaved very badly.’

  Did he not think that Dominique de Villepin’s speech to the UN was rather magnificent?

  ‘Magnificent and ridiculous,’ he replied. ‘That is what we French do best: hover between the sublime and the absurd. But that is not what I am talking about. I am referring to Chirac’s behaviour. Giving the impression that he is working with his English allies to find a diplomatic solution, then at the last minute threatening to use his veto. How embarrassing for Blair. It is unacceptable. I will go further, I believe it was Chirac’s shabby manoeuvre that finally drove Blair into Bush’s arms.’

  Few French men or women took Yves’s rigorous position on their country’s pre-war diplomacy. Most did not see beyond the simple fact that their leaders had been right not to involve them in a dubious and protracted conflict that has left the world a good deal less safe. I rea
lise that the fact that the French may have been right about Iraq does not endear her to most Britons and Americans – in spite of the fact that the war has become increasingly unpopular in both countries.

  *

  When I asked Yves why he was so forgiving of the British and so tough on the Americans, he answered: ‘If you asked that question to anyone in the French intelligence community, their answer would be the same: history.’

  When Yves became head of French counter-intelligence he discovered a deeply Anglophile environment in which anti-American sentiment was not only permitted but encouraged. The American secret service is seen as big and cumbersome, with more money than sense.

  ‘The Americans are overly reliant on technical intelligence,’ he told me. ‘And the standard of their analysis is very poor. The CIA is an enormous machine which produces very meagre results.’

  And yet Yves is more generous than many inside the ‘Ring of Secrecy’ for whom the CIA’s blunders have seriously endangered the West, the most disastrous of which is nowadays held to be Peshawar† and the ensuing rise of Islamic militancy.

  With regard to the intelligence pointing to Iraq’s so-called weapons of mass destruction, Yves, who has remained friends with Sir Richard Dearlove,‡ beleaguered head of MI6 at the time of the invasion, insists – memos and reports notwithstanding – that MI6 was not at fault.

  ‘It was simply not possible that British intelligence would ever make a mistake of that magnitude,’ he said.

  Far beyond any particular grievance, however, French anti-Americanism appears to stem from a deep cultural incompatibility. Like de Gaulle, Yves and his kind consider the Americans as uncultured and unsubtle, vices that for the French are unforgivable.

  This disdain for the Americans and admiration for the British makes Yves particularly sensitive to what he sees as Britain’s servitude to US interests. He, like many French people, was excited by the prospect of Tony Blair governing Britain. A French-speaker with a home in France, he would surely turn towards Europe, perhaps even offer France a welcome alternative to her rather uncomfortable partnership with Germany.

  If Blair’s fantasy, on taking office, was to build a foreign policy that would bestride both Europe and America, he soon recanted. His decision to ride shotgun with Bush into war with Iraq put an end to any possibility of a bipartite policy. Agreeing with Nelson Mandela’s remark that Blair was ‘the foreign minister of the United States’, it is Yves’s understanding that all of history since the First World War has led ineluctably to this rather unsatisfactory role for Britain. And like many Frenchmen of his generation, he watches from the sidelines, clutching his head in despair.

  Yves’s analysis, shared by many French people, is that the US has a history of conning Europe, often with an accompanying naivety that only makes the sting more humiliating. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson arrived at the Paris Peace Conference brandishing the idealism of a young nation just starting to flex its muscles. He presented his ‘fourteen points’ for peace to the imperial powers of Britain and France, represented by two old men, Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau. Neither Clemenceau – whose nation had lost more than one and a half million souls – nor Lloyd George – who had lost almost a million – liked Wilson’s plan, which, as they saw it, left them insufficiently compensated for their losses and still exposed to further aggression. Neither of them appreciated being lectured on the evils of colonialism by a nation that was emerging as the world’s new and indeed only economic superpower. The principal difference in the positions of these two old men was that Lloyd George was cannier in disguising his distaste than his fiery French counterpart, who, despite having lived in America and been married to an American woman, stubbornly refused to speak anything to Woodrow Wilson but French.

  What is certain is that Wilson irritated both men. Sigmund Freud, in his rather strange collaborative biography of the American president, Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study, also confessed to have been irritated by his subject: ‘His career from 1876 at Princeton to the day he was received in Paris as the Saviour of Mankind offers a remarkable example of the power of the Super-Ego to drive to success a man of weak body and neurotic constitution.’

  This home-schooled son of an overbearing Presbyterian preacher did not learn to read until he was twelve – an idea that would have shocked the French. He had then spent the rest of his life trying to prove himself to his father. His apparently contradictory policies (towards both war and peace) were, Freud argued, born of an inner conflict between a heady and aggressive urge to contest the internalised father figure (by going to war) and the desire to placate it (by playing the Prince of Peace). Freud’s reading might equally apply to another cowed son, who would also decide to play global gendarme but for much higher stakes.

  At the time of the Treaty of Versailles, Woodrow Wilson was extremely popular with the peoples of Europe, who were exhausted and traumatised by the war. Both Clemenceau and Lloyd George, however, saw the American president as an ingénue, whose idealism masked – perhaps even to himself – a dangerous will to power. Wilson’s decision to send his peace terms directly to the Germans without first consulting his French and British allies was to them a clear sign of his sense of entitlement.

  From a French perspective Britain, in spite of her vanished empire and her weak economy, was, by virtue of her role in the Second World War, firmly in the victors’ camp and as such entitled to aspire to a certain status in the world.

  ‘Britain won that war,’ Yves says. ‘Or at least enabled us not to lose it. The Americans entered late because they had no choice. In the end, Britain was the nation that paid most dearly for US involvement. She sacrificed her independence.’

  After Hiroshima, it was clear that nuclear capability held the key to status and independence in the world. Notwithstanding his legendary differences with his British hosts, de Gaulle strongly admired British culture and disliked America. He was deeply mistrustful when he saw the United States trying, as he saw it, to lock down the nuclear industry. In 1953 the general would have heard President Dwight Eisenhower’s rallying ‘Atoms for Peace’ speech to the UN and reminded himself that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

  ‘It is with the book of history,’ said Eisenhower, ‘and not with isolated pages, that the United States will ever wish to be identified. My country wants to be constructive, not destructive. It wants agreement, not wars, among nations. It wants itself to live in freedom, and in the confidence that the people of every other nation enjoy equally the right of choosing their own way of life.’

  Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme was, ostensibly, a plan to supply friendly nations (which at the time included Iran and China) with atomic materials and technology, to be used to civilian ends.

  ‘To the making of these fateful decisions, the United States pledges before you – and therefore before the world – its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma, to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.’

  Eisenhower’s offer carried with it the right of the United States to verify that the transferred materials were being used for peaceful purposes. Any nation joining the programme would therefore have to relinquish nuclear military independence, an idea that would have been unacceptable to de Gaulle. He interpreted Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ initiative as the vehicle through which an already dominant America would organise and control the world nuclear market.

  If Eisenhower’s intention was peaceful, the result of his ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme was an opening up, to other participants, of the arms race (atoms for peace, through reprocessing and plutonium extraction, can quite easily become atoms for war). It also led to an increase in the tempo of the race and a hardening of the Soviet resolve. Eisenhower’s focus on the peaceful uses of atomic energy, hugely popular with US and international public opinion, in the end worked to camouflage
his own administration’s rapid build-up of atomic weaponry.

  For this reason, de Gaulle, who had returned to power in 1958, would watch with suspicion as President Kennedy and Harold Macmillan, nearly a decade later, went into negotiations on the matter of nuclear interdependency.

  The Nassau Agreement signed in December 1962 between Kennedy and Macmillan was proof to de Gaulle that he had been right to distrust the Americans. As far as he was concerned, the agreement simply swindled the British out of their nuclear independence. De Gaulle’s reading of Nassau is highly questionable but it does offer an insight into the French perspective, which as events would show, still dictates much of her foreign policy.

  Back in March 1960, Harold Macmillan had left a meeting at Camp David with Eisenhower, confident that Britain had secured an independent nuclear capability. In a secret quid pro quo deal, Macmillan offered Eisenhower the use of Holy Loch, Scotland, as a base for America’s Polaris missile submarines, in exchange for which Britain would receive delivery, as soon as it was ready, of the weapon then being developed by the US Airforce. This was not a bomb, but a nuclear air-to-ground missile called Skybolt. Skybolt could be used in conjunction with British Vulcan bombers to penetrate Soviet airspace. After the Camp David meeting, a joint project office was set up between the RAF and the US Airforce to develop the weapon.

  The following year, when Kennedy came to power, he met a barrage of resistance to the Skybolt programme. His secretary of defence, Robert McNamara, headed the campaign. McNamara criticised the whole idea of Skybolt, judging that ‘limited nuclear capabilities, operating independently, are dangerous, expensive, prone to obsolescence and lacking in credibility as a deterrent’.§ In the same speech McNamara rejected the notion of small nations like Britain even possessing an independent nuclear deterrent: ‘In particular, relatively weak national nuclear forces with enemy cities as their targets are not likely to be sufficient to perform even the function of deterrence.’