Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  But whereas in the rest of Europe much of the terrorism was home-grown – the IRA and the Irish National Liberation Army in Britain, the Basque ETA in Spain and anarcho-Maoist groups like the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy – in France, almost every attack proved to have a Middle Eastern connection.fn3

  Gradually the DST began to find common threads. Both the attack on the synagogue in the rue Copernic, and that in the rue des Rosiers, two years earlier, were now recognised as the work of Abu Nidal.27 But what was the message behind them? The first had occurred shortly after an EEC summit in Venice had affirmed the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and recognised the PLO as their legitimate representative. The second came as Mitterrand was trying to save Arafat’s movement from annihilation in Beirut. Those accustomed to the coded language of violence in Beirut thought that the French would be able to figure out that they were a warning that support for the PLO would carry a heavy price. But who in the West, or even in Israel, in the early 1980s, was capable of understanding that attacks on a synagogue and a Jewish restaurant were actually aimed not at Jews or at Israel, but stemmed from the mutual hatred of two Palestinian organisations?28

  Mitterand’s journey to Israel in March and his support of the PLO had proved a lethal combination.

  If the French government was unable to decipher the message which Abu Nidal was seeking to convey, it had a shrewd idea of who might be behind him. Syria, Iraq and Libya were the Rejectionist Front’s main financial backers. In September 1982, François de Grossouvre arranged a meeting near Bordeaux between the head of the DGSE, Pierre Marion, and Rifaat al-Assad, the President’s brother and head of the Syrian intelligence service, who had come to France for eye treatment. In return for the promise of improved relations between Paris and Damascus, Assad promised that Syria would end its operations on French soil and restrain the activities of Abu Nidal and other rejectionist movements. Iraq, by then heavily dependent on France for military supplies in the war against Iran, also agreed to help.

  As though a giant switch had been thrown, the attacks abruptly ceased. For the remainder of that autumn and winter and through the following spring, France was calm again. But another, much more powerful force, whose role was even less understood in Paris than that of the Rejectionist Front, was lurking in the shadows: the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in Teheran.

  If the United States was the ‘Great Satan’ in the eyes of the Islamic Republic, France was the ‘Little Satan’. Although Khomeini had been given asylum in France in the months before the Shah’s fall, the Iranians were not pleased when Giscard accorded the same right to the Shah’s last Prime Minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, a French-educated academic who had fought with the International Brigades in Spain. In July 1980, Anis Naccache, a balding, mustachioed Lebanese in his thirties who had recently converted to Shiism, was sent from Teheran to assassinate Bakhtiar at his home in Paris. The attack was bungled. Bakhtiar was unharmed, but a policeman and a passer-by were killed and a second policeman paralysed for life. Naccache and four accomplices were arrested.

  A year later, the former Iranian President, Abulhassan Banisadr, who had been impeached after falling out with Khomeini, defected to France with Massoud Radjavi, the leader of the People’s Mujahideen, an Islamic revolutionary party of Marxist inspiration which had helped Khomeini to power but afterwards, suspected of disloyalty, had been ruthlessly persecuted. In the weeks between Banisadr’s fall and his defection, Radjavi’s followers had blown up the Islamic Republic Party headquarters, killing seventy people, including Ayatollah Beheshti, the most powerful leader after Khomeini. When it became known that they were in Paris, the Iranian authorities reacted with fury. The French Embassy in Teheran was encircled by Revolutionary Guards and the stage seemed set for a repeat of the American hostage-taking which had poisoned the last year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. In the end the Iranians backed off and the French community, comprising some 200 businessmen, diplomats and residents, was allowed to leave on August 12. Two and a half weeks later, another Mujahideen bomb attack killed Banisadr’s newly elected successor, President Mohammed-Ali Rajai, and his Prime Minister, and came close to killing Khomeini himself.

  For a ‘small Satan’, that was already a great deal of provocation.

  France had given asylum to Bakhtiar and Banisadr. If only by default, it was allowing the Mujahideen, who had made their headquarters at Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, a virtually free hand to organise terrorist attacks in Iran. Mitterrand had urged rather half-heartedly that the Mujahideen’s activities ‘at least when visible, should be forbidden’ but he did nothing to ensure the order was carried out.29 Moreover that spring, the President had agreed, albeit with some reluctance, to provide Iraq with five Super-Etendard attack aircraft equipped with air-to-sea Exocet missiles. It was a new contract and marked a significant escalation of French support for Baghdad.

  Mitterrand found Saddam Hussein antipathetic. His wife, Danielle, a militant supporter of Third World causes, was outraged by the repression of the Kurds. ‘I said to him: “François, why are you doing this? Why are you selling him arms?”’, she remembered. ‘He said to me: “If France doesn’t do it, it will be someone else and France won’t have the benefit”. I said: “But it’s a matter of honour”. He replied: “Yes, and that doesn’t put food on the table.”’

  There was another, more important reason. Mitterrand was convinced that unless Teheran was stopped, Islamic fundamentalism risked spreading throughout the Middle East. He wanted to maintain the existing balance between the Persian and Arab worlds, which meant supporting Iraq enough to prevent Saddam’s defeat but not enough to allow him to win. It did not endear him to the Mullahs.

  For Teheran the last straw came in May 1982 when Anis Naccache and his accomplices were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. No one in France paid much attention. It seemed a straightforward case. Only much later would it be understood that, for the Iranian theocracy, this was the biggest problem of all.30

  The Mullahs’ response was not long in coming.

  On July 15, a powerful suitcase bomb exploded at the Turkish Airlines counter at Orly, south of Paris, killing eight people and injuring fifty-two. At first sight it was simply another Armenian attack against Turkey, albeit on a larger scale than in the past. However the Armenian group, ASALA, which claimed to have been responsible, had close ties to Teheran. Could the explosion at Orly have an Iranian connection?31 At the Elysée, as Gilles Ménage later admitted, that thought never crossed anyone’s mind.

  A second warning followed in August, when an Air France plane was hijacked from Vienna to Teheran by a group of five Lebanese who said they had done so to protest against ‘the French government’s crimes in Iraq’ and specifically the sale of the French warplanes. Shortly afterwards, Iran stated that it ‘would not sit by with folded arms’ if the delivery of the Super-Etendards went ahead. It accused Mitterrand of ‘setting Lebanon on fire, pouring bombs on the Muslim population with the aid of Israel,’ and raised the spectre of an oil blockade.

  But Mitterrand had committed himself. Whatever the risks, there was no way France could back out without forfeiting its credibility in the Arab world.

  On October 8 1983, the five aircraft arrived in Iraq.

  Fifteen days later, in the early morning of Sunday, October 23, two enormous explosions reverberated across Beirut. At the US Marines’ base at Beirut Airport, a suicide bomber in a lorry packed with 900 kilograms of explosives killed 241 American soldiers and injured 105 others. It was the deadliest attack on US forces since the Vietnam War. A few miles away, on the seafront, a similarly loaded truck crashed through the concrete barriers protecting the HQ of the French paratroop detachment, killing fifty-eight soldiers and leaving fifteen more buried in the rubble. In Paris it was 4.20 a.m. Mitterrand was awakened and immediately despatched the Defence Minister, Charles Hernu, to the scene. That night he flew to Lebanon too, arriving at dawn on Monday morning. He told the Lebanese Pr
esident, Bachir Gemayel’s older brother, Amin: ‘France is staying in Lebanon, and will remain true to . . . its commitments’. It was not the words that mattered. Mitterrand’s presence signified that France would not be scared off.

  The question, as ever, was who was behind it all. Who had carried out the attacks and who had pulled the strings?

  The group which claimed responsibility, Islamic Jihad (Holy War), was at that time so little understood that the CIA thought the term was just a generic label used by multiple organisations carrying out terrorist activities.32 But there was a clue in the communiqué it issued: ‘We are Lebanese Muslims who follow the precepts of the Koran . . . We want no [foreign force] in Lebanon, neither Israelis nor Syrians. We want an Islamic Republic.’

  That was the signature of Iran. Only Teheran wanted an Islamic Republic in Lebanon. The American Defence Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, cottoned on faster than anyone else. Israel, as usual, blamed the PLO. Mitterrand admitted he was confused. On his return he told the Cabinet:

  Beirut is a city that is completely mad: everyone shoots at everyone else. What was the origin of the attack against [our troops]? People talk about the Iranians, linking their intervention to the problem of the Super-Etendards which we delivered to Iraq. But Khomeini did not wait for the Super-Etendards to step up his influence over the Shiite groups in Lebanon. Khomeini and the Iranian revolution exert an extraordinary attraction on these groups . . . [much] greater than that of Gaddafi . . . There is also the influence of Hafez al-Assad, who is trying to pose as Nasser’s successor. These three influences [Iranian, Libyan and Syrian] are both in collusion and rivals. They try to outbid each other . . . Mr Reagan envisages reprisals. On my side, if I knew who I were dealing with, I would not hesitate – but I refuse to hit back blindly . . . The Americans at the present time are artificially focussing their suspicions on Iran. I do not think the attack was ordered by Iran because if that had been the case they would not have destroyed the American base. Indeed, I wonder if it’s not to avoid overly antagonising the Syrians that the Americans are pointing the finger at Iran.33

  His statement, made in the secrecy of the Cabinet room, showed a government floundering about in the dark. No one in France understood what was happening in Lebanon.34 Mitterrand discounted Iranian involvement in the attacks because he knew that the Americans were already secretly supplying Teheran with arms – eighteen months before the official US investigation into what became the Iran-Contra Affair claimed that they had begun – and would not therefore have been a target. He repeated in an interview later the same day: ‘We are not at all Iran’s enemies . . . We have no reason to consider Iran . . . as an enemy.’

  No reason? A week later he knew better. The attack was traced back to Hussein Moussawi, the pro-Iranian Shiite leader whose headquarters were in the Bekaa Valley, east of Beirut. Yitzhak Rabin concluded sombrely: ‘We have let the Devil out of his box’.

  At the beginning of November, Mitterrand approved a riposte.

  It was a fiasco. When the DGSE tried to set off a car bomb outside the Iranian Embassy in southern Beirut, not only did the detonators fail but the attack had been mounted so clumsily that it had France’s fingerprints all over it.

  Ten days later the President tried again. French aircraft bombed a barracks at Baalbek used by Moussawi’s followers. Technically the attack succeeded: fourteen Iranian revolutionary guards and a dozen Shiite militiamen were killed. But the barracks turned out to have been half empty, and Reagan, who had urged Mitterrand to coordinate the attack with an American raid on the same day, backed out at the last moment, apparently to protect the emerging relationship with Teheran which he was nurturing with US arms supplies. What was supposed to be a graphic demonstration of Western resolve to punish pro-Iranian terrorism ended as a damp squib. Relations between Paris and Teheran were further envenomed. The Shiites’ hatred of France grew.

  Meanwhile another crisis was simmering. Yasser Arafat, who had imprudently returned to Lebanon that summer, was holed up with 4,000 armed followers in the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli, under attack from the sea by Israeli naval forces and from the land by dissident Palestinian militias backed by Syria, which was threatening to raze the city with artillery. The Israeli government of Yitzhak Shamir, who had succeeded Begin, was committed to Arafat’s destruction. Assad was opposed to the creation of a Palestinian State on the grounds that it would imply recognition of Israel and therefore wanted Arafat crushed on the grounds that he was the leader most likely to bring such a state into being.

  Mitterrand argued that removing the PLO chief would leave the field open to the Rejectionist Front and would unleash against Israel and its allies a terrorist onslaught far more violent than anything experienced before.

  In December 1982, after two months of negotiations, the Security Council passed a resolution allowing PLO units to leave Tripoli under the protection of the UN flag.35 In extremis, for the second time in eighteen months, Mitterrand had saved Arafat and his forces from annihilation. A few days before Christmas, five Greek merchant ships, escorted by ten French warships, including an aircraft carrier, set out for Tunis, carrying the Palestinian leader and his followers. Mitterrand had warned both Israel and Syria that any attack on the convoy would be repelled by force.

  It proved to be France’s swansong in Lebanon.

  A few weeks later, the civil war resumed. Beirut was once again divided between Christian East and Muslim West. The Multinational Force had reached the end of the road. First the Americans and British, then the Italians and finally the French returned home, licking their wounds, leaving Christians and Muslims to resume, under the watchful eyes of the regional power-brokers, Israel and Syria, a conflict which had begun many centuries before.

  For Mitterrand, this first exposure to the politics of the Middle East was a dolorous revelation. More than most Western leaders, he was at ease in complicated situations. The region fascinated him as the cradle of Western civilisation. But the impenetrable complexity of the tensions he found there left him bemused.

  The one clear lesson he drew was that the French intelligence services were not up to the job. Both the DST and the DGSE were products of the Cold War, enjoying close links to the French Right and to the Americans and locked into a logic of East–West rivalry which meant they were ill equipped to meet the challenges of the 1980s. His distrust was reinforced by a wariness of the police and the security services which went back to his experience as Interior Minister at the time of the ‘Leaks Affair’, thirty years earlier. To Mitterrand intuition and analysis were almost always more helpful in assessing the course of events than espionage and intelligence-gathering.

  In the autumn of 1982, shortly after the attack by Abu Nidal’s group in the rue des Rosiers, he decided to replace the heads of all the services responsible for the anti-terrorist struggle.36 Some, he felt, were incompetent. All showed ‘an absence of determination and preparation in a situation which completely overwhelmed them’. Moreover there was constant rivalry between the different forces involved – the police (answering to the Interior Ministry), the gendarmes (controlled by the Ministry of Defence), the DST, the Criminal Investigation Department, the DGSE and the Special Branch – which refused to share information and at times sabotaged each other’s operations.37

  To try to overcome these failings, Mitterrand announced the creation of an ‘anti-terrorist cell’ at the Elysée to coordinate intelligence from all the various services and undertake punctual operations of its own. It was placed under the authority of Commander Christian Prouteau, who headed the Gendarmerie’s highly regarded Special Intervention Force, the GIGN, equivalent to Britain’s SAS or America’s Delta Force.

  Prouteau had been recruited by André Rousselet a few months earlier to reorganise the President’s security detail. The unit he created, the GSPR (Special Group for the Protection of the President), consisted initially of thirty-six officers, operating in shifts to ensure round-the-clock security wherever Mitterrand m
ight be. Given the President’s complicated private life, Prouteau and his men had to watch over both his ‘official’ family at the rue de Bièvre, where Danielle – now no longer with Jean Balenci, who had decided that the time had come to establish a family of his ownfn4 – held court, and the ‘unofficial’ one, Anne and Mazarine, who, shortly after Mitterrand’s election, moved from their home in the rue Jacob in the Latin Quarter to a grace-and-favour apartment on the quai Branly, close to the Seine in a well-heeled area by the Invalides. Prouteau was told the move was for security reasons, but that was only part of the explanation. With the presidential election behind him and Mazarine growing up, Mitterrand had decided he should give priority to his second family rather than Danielle. In his eighteen years with Anne, it was the first time – apart from brief holidays at Gordes – that they had been able to share a home. ‘In the evenings he came back [from the Elysée],’ she remembered, ‘and we had a normal life. That means so much. We were together [not just occasionally] but every day . . . It was good.’ Looking back, years later, it was the simple things that stuck in her mind: shopping in the market for dinner for the three of them and, above all, the breakfasts they had together. ‘We did everything the other way round from normal people’s lives,’ she said. ‘Usually you start by living together and finish differently. For us it was the reverse.’

  The officers of the GSPR knew how to be discreet. During Mitterrand’s presidency, there was never a leak from that quarter about his private affairs. Gradually he became reconciled to what at first had seemed an intolerable intrusion. The ‘guardian angels’ were part of his life.