by Philip Short
After much haggling, the Politburo approved a ‘programme of government’ with the Socialists and accepted four portfolios, one fewer than the Party had hoped for, all essentially technical and all potentially in the front line in the event of labour unrest: Transport, Health, Employment and the Civil Service.
That afternoon, Tuesday, June 23, three hours before the composition of the new government was made public, the Foreign Minister, Claude Cheysson, a veteran diplomat who had worked as a European Commissioner in Brussels, telephoned Reagan’s Secretary of State, Al Haig, to give him the news. Vice-President George Bush was due in Paris to meet Mitterrand next morning. Haig, an administration ‘hawk’, enquired whether the visit was still on, apparently hoping that the French would cancel. ‘Of course,’ Cheysson answered. ‘It was you who chose the date.’ Mitterrand, meanwhile, sent a personal message to Reagan on the ‘blue line’, the secure telex between the Elysée and the White House, assuring the US President that France would assume ‘all its commitments, [which] in the field of security are clear and precise, within the framework of the Atlantic Alliance [and] following the principles of an open economy’.
Bush arrived at the Elysée next day at noon, making a discreet entrance through the southern gate, the ‘Grille du Coq’, while the new ministers, Communists included, left through the main courtyard after a Cabinet meeting at which they pledged to put their government responsibilities before party loyalty.
The Vice-President, whose intelligence the French respected, had been briefed on the Communist–Socialist ‘programme’ and chose to make that the focus of his attack, rather than complaining about the presence of Communist ministers. The US, he said, was concerned that the wording of the accord between the two parties appeared to weaken France’s rejection of Soviet medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe; that it failed to make a forceful enough condemnation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; that it denounced US intervention to prop up a right-wing dictatorship in El Salvador but not Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia; and that its commitment to NATO was lukewarm.
It was the cue for Mitterrand to give him a magisterial dressing-down. On Soviet missiles, Afghanistan and Vietnam, the President assured him, France’s position was unchanged. The two-party agreement had been limited deliberately ‘to points which cause the Communists special difficulty’ and marked ‘an enormous climb-down’ on their part:
In France foreign policy is determined by the President of the Republic . . . In some respects you may think . . . that the President has too much power. But that is how it is and I intend to use that power. [The Communists] have agreed to humiliate themselves in exchange for four government posts . . . If they don’t do their jobs properly, I can fire them . . . There have been Communists in France for sixty years. This is the first time that a leader has been able to reduce their influence. That suggests that my method may not be so bad. You must distinguish between strategy and tactics. Tactically . . . with four Communists in government, in unimportant ministries, they find themselves associated with my economic policies and it’s impossible for them to foment social troubles . . . In a broader, long-term strategic perspective, the goal is [to weaken them and strengthen the Socialists]. In French politics there are no greater enemies than the Communists and the Socialists, [but] they are linked, because they represent the same social strata. The approach I have adopted is the only way to bring that about.5
He went on to speak of his own experience. He had joined the Socialist Party, he told Bush, not from love of Marxism but because it was a means for the Left to win power. The Communists had had disproportionate strength in France partly because of their heroism during the war and partly for cultural reasons:
You have to understand what communism represents in a Catholic country. Have you never been struck by the fact that communists are more numerous in Catholic than in Protestant countries? It is because the Roman Church instilled discipline among Catholics with the result that when they joined a different ‘church’ they did not question its orders. Protestants have to find their own salvation. There is no hierarchy to tell them what to think.6
He understood America’s difficulties, he said. ‘I realise that . . . you are worried about contagion in Italyfn2 . . . But my first task here is to resolve the problems of France.’
Bush returned the compliment. The presence of Communist ministers, he said – using that term for the first time during the meeting – had indeed alarmed America, but ‘thanks to your explanations we now see things more clearly’.
Back in Washington, Secretary of State Haig did not.
That night the State Department, with the approval of the White House, warned that ‘the tone and content of our relationship’ would be affected by the arrival of Communists in the French government ‘or in any government of our western European allies’. Unnamed officials were quoted expressing doubts as to whether France could be trusted with NATO secrets.
Bush, who received the text at the end of a banquet at the US Embassy, took Mauroy aside. ‘I’ll get this corrected,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He was as good as his word. But by then the damage was done. From the far Left to the far Right, the French were outraged. ‘Ronald Reagan is mistaken if he thinks France is El Salvador,’ thundered the right-wing Figaro, while the Communist newspaper, l’Humanité, declared, ‘France is . . . allied to the US. It is not an American protectorate.’ In a rare show of unity, the former Gaullist Prime Minister, Pierre Messmer, joined Cheysson in describing the American comments as ‘unacceptable’.
Only Mitterrand saw the lighter side. ‘They say: Mr Reagan is cross! So? Mr Reagan sneezes. So? . . . I didn’t ask myself whether my decision would be to the liking of this country or that . . . The American reaction is their business. My decision is my business.’
The President’s meeting with Bush and the tiff that followed were a first step towards changing the Reagan administration’s attitude to the new French regime. The next came in July when Mitterrand attended the G7 summit in Ottawa.
The summit itself was signally unproductive. ‘Is that what an international gathering is about?’ Attali wrote on his return. ‘A meeting where nothing is decided, where the discussions are empty, the communiqués so meaningless that everyone can agree to them, and where whoever is cleverest at manipulating the news media appears as the winner?’ But on the sidelines, in the gardens of the Montebello Hotel, Mitterrand had his first tête-à-tête with Reagan.
It started in classic Californian style: the US President was droll, charming and convivial, radiating his usual rose-coloured view of America in the midst of a hostile world. The US economy, he promised Mitterrand, would begin to recover the following spring and Europe would reap the fruits. As for the Russians, their days were numbered: their economy was seizing up and their oil industry going south.
At that point ‘François’ took the opportunity to tell ‘Ron’, as they were now calling each other, that he had learnt something which might be of interest. He had been briefed the previous week by Marcel Chalet, the head of the DST, the French counter-espionage service, about a sensational intelligence coup. In April, Chalet had told him, a senior official in the Soviet State Security Committee, the KGB, had made contact with a French businessman who was among the service’s correspondents in Moscow. The Russian, who had been given the code name, Farewell, had brought with him a sheaf of documents which the businessman had photocopied and sent back to Paris. They had been analysed by specialists. The verdict was unequivocal: they were genuine and unlike anything seen in the West before. France, Mitterrand told Reagan, was willing to share with the Americans the entire intelligence trove – already about a thousand top secret Soviet documents, which were continuing to come in at the rate of several hundred a month. They included operational directives signed by the KGB head, Yuri Andropov; ‘Eyes Only’ reports, marked with a code that indicated they were destined for the General Secretary in person; and annotations in Brezhnev’s handwriting.<
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Reagan would note soberly later that it was by far the biggest intelligence coup since the Second World War.
What Mitterrand did not know, because Chalet had neglected to mention it, was that the DST, whose remit was normally limited to France and which had no operational network in Moscow, had approached the CIA for help soon after Farewell had made his initial approach. The two services had been working together for several months and Reagan was already well aware of the value of what the French had found. Hollywood pro that he was, the US President did not let on, instead expressing admiration and amazement.7
If it was a test of France’s commitment to the alliance, Mitterrand had passed with flying colours. Three years later, when he learnt of the role the CIA had played, he reflected ruefully that ‘we must have looked very clever “revealing” the affair . . . in Ottawa’. But he was not the only one to have been wrong-footed. Al Haig’s decision a month earlier to have the State Department cast doubt on France’s ability to keep NATO secrets did not look very clever either.
By the time Farewell fell silent in February 1982, he had given his French handlers nearly 3,000 pages of documentation, most of it dealing with industrial espionage, including a list of 222 Soviet spies from ‘Line X’ of the KGB’s Directorate T, charged with gathering scientific and technological secrets, attached to embassies and trade missions in the US and nine other Western countries, and 170 officers from other KGB directorates. Armed with that knowledge, the CIA fed the Russians fake data, which derailed a number of important Soviet industrial programmes, and stalled others, contributing indirectly to the Soviet Union’s collapse and dismemberment eight years later.
Mitterrand spoke afterwards of having had ‘serious doubts’ whether ‘Farewell’ had ever existed. Might not the documents that the DST acquired, while genuine, have been planted by the CIA to verify his loyalty?
It was not as paranoid a theory as it might sound. Every high-profile double agent in history, from Mata Hari to Penkovsky, attracted suspicions of manipulation or ulterior motives, and the information Farewell had provided was so extraordinary that it invited disbelief. But when the full story became known, it was confirmed that he was indeed a genuine source. His name was Vladimir Vetrov, an electronics engineer who had been recruited by the KGB as a student and attached to the Soviet Embassy in Paris in the late 1960s to collect technical intelligence. On his return to Moscow he had been promoted to the rank of colonel but had gradually lost faith in the Soviet system. In December 1980 he had started putting out feelers to the French, leading to a meeting the following April with the businessman, a representative of the electronics firm, Thomson, whom he had known during his posting in Paris. He was what was called in the trade a ‘walk-in’, probably the most important in a century. It turned out that his sudden silence ten months later had had nothing to do with his espionage activities: he had been arrested after a fight with his mistress, whom he had tried to stab to death in a park, afterwards killing a policeman who came to separate them. His KGB superiors had initially treated it as manslaughter and he had been sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment. But at some point, a year or so later, the case was re-examined.
According to one version, he had mentioned in a letter to his wife a ‘big affair’ in which he had been engaged and this had caught the attention of the prison censors. In another version, he was inadvertently betrayed by a blunder on the part of the DST.
In January 1983, it was discovered that the Russians had planted bugs in the fax machines at the French Embassy in Moscow, which had enabled them to read all the diplomatic traffic to Paris for the previous seven years.8 Mitterrand then decided to expel forty-seven Soviet diplomats, trade officials and journalists whose names were on the list of KGB agents which Farewell had provided.9 ‘We have to make [the USSR] understand that [espionage] is a game, and if you are caught, too bad,’ he told the Cabinet. ‘The Russians must get used to the idea that . . . France is not for sale. [They] must realise they are not dealing with a country that is lily-livered. Once they take that on board, things will go better.’
When the Soviet deputy head of mission, Nikolai Afanassevsky, called at the Foreign Ministry to make the ritual protest customary on such occasions, Cheysson’s Chief of Staff, François Scheer, in order to demonstrate that France had serious grounds for its action, showed him the cover-sheet of a voluminous dossier from the Farewell file dealing with the KGB’s programme of scientific and technical espionage activities against the West. Afanassevsky saw it for only a few seconds, but it was long enough for him to read the Cyrillic code stamped on it which the DST had neglected to mask. Not only was it a Politburo document but it was a xerox of Brezhnev’s copy.
Whether because of Afanassevsky’s report or because of his own indiscretions, ‘Farewell’ was tried for high treason in December 1984, sentenced to death and shot a month later.10
The Farewell dossier laid to rest whatever lingering doubts the Reagan administration had about the French government’s loyalty, Communist ministers notwithstanding. But one more element was needed before the relationship with Washington would assume its final form. It would overturn yet another of the preconceptions that the Americans had entertained when Mitterrand came to power and in a manner which no one in Washington had anticipated.
On Sunday, May 24 1981, three days after Mitterrand’s inauguration, the West German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, became the first foreign leader to visit France under the new regime. Schmidt, a Social Democrat, had been close to Giscard. Although he had known since the previous summer that Mitterrand stood a good chance of winning, he had not hesitated to speak out on his friend’s behalf, declaring that Mitterrand’s victory would be ‘a misfortune’.
In diplomacy, however, interests trump emotions. The Franco-German tandem had been the driving force in Europe ever since de Gaulle and Adenauer had signed a Friendship Treaty in 1963, sealing the two countries’ reconciliation and committing them to mutual consultations on major political and economic issues.
Britain might have joined them to form a triumvirate, as Macmillan and Churchill had both hoped. But de Gaulle had opposed British entry into the EEC on the grounds that London was an American submarine and would torpedo efforts for unity. Ten years later, after Georges Pompidou lifted the French veto, that might have changed. It did not. Britain’s identity is rooted in its difference. Even a strong leader like Margaret Thatcher, who, sometimes despite herself, did more to strengthen Britain’s position in the European Union than any other Prime Minister before or since, did not change the mindset of a nation which always gave the impression of being dragged kicking and screaming into a political grouping where its every instinct proclaimed it did not wish to be. Britain was in but not of Europe. The French and the Germans were the locomotive.
The British would get on board, reluctantly if at all, Mitterrand said, only when they realised that the train was already leaving the station.
The talks that Sunday were not about the European Community, however. The subject was the balance of nuclear arms in Europe.
More than thirty years later, it is humbling to look back at the ignorance of the general public, and of the news media which informed it, about what was then the world’s cardinal issue. Ever since the 1950s, the nightmare in European capitals had been a decoupling of the US nuclear deterrent from the continent’s defence. Everything that happened over the next twenty years – first the NATO doctrine of ‘flexible response’ in 1967, which held that a conventional attack should be met by graduated ‘appropriate means’ covering the whole gamut of conventional and nuclear weaponry; then the SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) accords in 1971 and 1973, which guaranteed strategic parity and Mutual Assured Destruction – made Europeans feel safer, yet in fact made the continent more dangerous.
‘Flexible response’, Mitterrand wrote later, ‘is antinomic to the very idea of dissuasion . . . What kind of terror is it if it is used in moderation?’ It made the use of US strate
gic nuclear arms to defend Europe no longer automatic but hypothetical, which as President Carter acknowledged, really meant ‘improbable’. Given Mutual Assured Destruction, it was unthinkable for either superpower to employ the strategic weaponry it possessed. If war broke out, it was likely to remain confined to the European battlefield where the Russians had decisive conventional superiority.
At that point, however, the Kremlin overreached. Early in 1977, Moscow began to deploy mobile SS-20 intermediate-range nuclear missiles capable of hitting targets anywhere in Western Europe.
Helmut Schmidt was the first European statesman to react. In a carefully worded speech in London that October, he had called for urgent steps to ‘maintain the balance of . . . deterrence’. Two years later, President Carter approved what became known as the ‘dual track strategy’: either the Soviet Union must dismantle its 225 SS-20s – each carrying three independently targetable warheads with almost forty times the destructive power of the bomb dropped at Hiroshima – or in December 1983 NATO would deploy a matching force of 108 Pershing mobile intermediate-range nuclear missiles, based in West Germany, and 464 nuclear-armed cruise missiles, based in Belgium, Britain, West Germany, Holland and Italy.
Schmidt had come to Paris to ask whether the new French government supported this decision.
Mitterrand was categorical. As Schmidt had anticipated, he favoured deployment. That was not a surprise. The new President had been a late convert to nuclear deterrence, but he had publicly reproached Giscard for having hesitated to commit to the ‘dual track strategy’ lest it antagonise Moscow, a criticism with which Schmidt privately agreed. What the Chancellor had not expected was the robustness of Mitterrand’s stance. For decades French presidents had tried to singularise France’s relationship with Russia as a sort of ‘special relationship’, not at the same level as Britain’s with America but nonetheless marked by an affinity which other European nations did not have. De Gaulle, echoing Napoleon, had dreamed of a Europe reaching ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’, and insisted that French nuclear weapons were aimed not at Moscow but at any power which might threaten France (in theory including even the US). Giscard had called for a multi-polar world, free of superpower hegemony, and had tried to build a personal rapport with Brezhnev. Mitterrand was made of different stuff. His understanding of Russia came mainly from his long struggle with the French Communists and his reading of Russian literature. But that had been enough to convince him that the Kremlin responded best to the language of force.