Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  When the G7 met in Bonn in May 1985, the chairman, Helmut Kohl, found himself torn between his principal European partner, France, and Germany’s global protector, the US. Reagan agreed to withdraw the US text on SDI. But no compromise was reached over GATT. After the other five leaders had approved the American position, Mitterrand said tersely: ‘Not me’. He then launched into a tirade unlike any to which that august gathering had been subjected before:

  It is unhealthy that our allies dictate our policy. Some accept that. Not me . . . I hear it being said that no one here wishes to isolate France. Very good. But the fact is that [France] is isolated in this room. It’s not healthy. Just as it’s not healthy that Europe’s affairs should be judged by countries which are far from Europe. If this goes on, I am ready to start a public debate . . . We have to put an end to all this endless paperwork. If these summits don’t return to their original conception, France will no longer take part . . . Some of you reached agreements [secretly] between yourselves on [certain] topics before the summit [even] began . . . I don’t accept a fait accompli. More generally, we are not the directorate of the world’s affairs . . . Nor are we a tribunal to judge friends and allies. If that were the case, I would take care not to put my country in such a situation. If France were treated like that, I would put an end to it. I would not come any more. [We had] warned you since February that on SDI and GATT our answer would be no. So why have we had to talk about it again here?30

  In the shocked silence that followed, the Canadian Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, came to Mitterrand’s defence. Afterwards he took Reagan into a corner. ‘You’ve got to stop this,’ he said. ‘What do you think you’re doing? You are treating François Mitterrand as an adversary! [France] is our best ally!’

  It was Williamsburg all over again but worse. No sooner were relations between Paris and Washington back on even keel than the US forgot the lesson that Vernon Walters had drawn: France was a good ally ‘so long as you treat her as an equal’. Two short years later, ‘Star Wars’ had brought back the Great Power syndrome with a vengeance.

  The French President’s stand was approved by all shades of opinion at home and by many elsewhere in Europe. Even the normally hostile Quotidien de Paris conceded that ‘Mitterrand is not wrong about everything’.

  But the Reagan administration still did not get it.

  On the eve of Gorbachev’s first visit to the West, which brought him to Paris at the beginning of October, the White House announced – as usual, without prior consultation – that Reagan was inviting all the G7 leaders to New York later that month to discuss the West’s position on SDI before his own forthcoming meeting with the Soviet leader in Geneva in mid-November. Mitterrand was outraged. ‘To announce that publicly, two days before Gorbachev’s arrival! . . . It’s crazy.’ At the following morning’s Cabinet meeting, he explained why France would reject the invitation:

  It’s not normal that the Seven pretend to lord it over the planet . . . The situation which is being created de facto by these [improvised] summits is dangerous . . . Either [France] submits to [the others’] proposals . . . or she doesn’t and is treated as a bad ally. To go to New York in these circumstances would be to recognise America’s imperium.31

  Gorbachev had chosen to come first to Paris precisely because France was the most independent-minded of the major Western countries. Mitterrand had told the Japanese Prime Minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone, that summer: ‘Great Britain, no matter what qualities Mrs Thatcher might have, is too linked to the United States. The Soviets might just as well talk to Reagan. West Germany has no autonomous defence policy. France is a loyal ally of the US, but its policy is not that of the US.’ To Gorbachev, whose primary concern was to prevent an expensive new arms race which the Soviet Union could not afford, it made sense to seek an understanding with Mitterrand, whose reservations about ‘Star Wars’ echoed his own.

  Mitterrand, on his side, was not oblivious to the charms of the unspoken ‘special relationship’ with Moscow of which his predecessors had dreamed. He had told Gorbachev in March that France and Russia shared ‘permanent interests’. The phrase contained an element of wishful thinking. The ties between Paris and Moscow would always be tributary to the imperatives of superpower accommodation.32 But it was a starting point for both sides to explore the shape of a future which promised to be very different from the past. Gorbachev’s signature programmes of perestroika and glasnost (‘reconstruction’ and ‘transparency’) were still many months away. Already, though, he had dropped hints of a tantalising new departure.fn3

  Their discussions focussed on the disarmament talks in Geneva, which had resumed that spring after a fifteen-month hiatus. The Russians insisted that the negotiations must include SDI. The Americans refused, arguing that they should be limited to strategic and intermediate nuclear forces. Mitterrand opened by stressing that he intended to speak frankly.

  MITTERRAND: I’m not looking for tension with the United States, but I have a straightforward opinion on each problem which relates to war and peace . . . President Reagan’s conception of SDI is either . . . daydreaming or propaganda . . . If it’s daydreaming, the American Chiefs of Staff will realise that. I believe a compromise [at Geneva] remains possible . . . [But] one may also conclude that the Americans are seeking a position of dominance, and in that case no argument will sway them.

  GORBACHEV: The United States feel certain that in space . . . they will be able to outstrip and dominate the USSR . . . But the real question is where is all this leading? If it continues, productive negotiations will be impossible and in space there will be no safeguards.

  MITTERRAND: Actually there are two risks: that the one who is ahead is tempted to take advantage of it, and that the one who fears the lead of his opponent is tempted to try to stop him . . .

  GORBACHEV: In my opinion, if we don’t act together, the Reagan administration won’t budge.

  MITTERRAND: I don’t know what will make them budge. They are not very malleable . . . The Americans don’t have much understanding of Europe . . . The climate which prevails is one of mistrust.33

  This turned out to be the case. The Americans refused to budge until the Chiefs of Staff – and through them, the rest of the administration – were forced to recognise that the technological obstacles to ‘Star Wars’ were such that it would never be a practical proposition.

  More intriguing was a passage in Mitterrand’s opening remarks which Gorbachev did not pick up on. Twice the President noted that France was presently an ally of the United States. He went on:

  Given the balance of forces in the world, I think things ought to remain that way . . . But that is a current political reality rather than a perspective for the future . . . Strengthening Western Europe . . . is a perspective for the future [and] not one that should be seen as detrimental to the USSR. I don’t want a Europe which is the auxiliary of a United States that is on the offensive . . . If new possibilities for a modus vivendi with the USSR emerge, it would be a good thing.34

  The thought was not new in itself. Mitterrand had said several times since his election in 1981 that the division of Europe agreed between Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta could not continue for ever. He did not expect the division to end in his lifetime. No one in the mid-1980s foresaw that in the next five years the Soviet empire would implode. He was thinking rather of a possible convergence between the two halves of Europe. But the fact that he alluded to it in a conversation with Gorbachev suggested he was already wondering whether the Soviet leader could be the man who would make that convergence possible.35

  After Gorbachev’s departure, Mitterrand sent a lengthy account of his impressions to Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl. He found the new master of the Kremlin convincing, he told them, not only about internal reform but also about disarmament and an eventual Soviet disengagement from Afghanistan. However the proof of the pudding would be in the eating. To the Cabinet he said Gorbachev was ‘conciliatory but not soft’ and could be expected to remain in
power for a long time to come.

  The French nuclear weapons programme was beyond the reach of the Soviet and American negotiators at Geneva but not of human stupidity.

  On July 10 1985, a Wednesday, shortly before midnight, two explosions, three minutes apart, reverberated around the harbour in Auckland, New Zealand. The Rainbow Warrior, a 40-metre fisheries inspection vessel which had been bought from the British government and refitted by the environmental organisation, Greenpeace, had been holed by two charges of plastic explosive. It had been about to set out at the head of a small flotilla to protest against the resumption of French nuclear testing on the atoll of Mururoa in French Polynesia, 800 miles south-east of Tahiti. Between the two explosions, a Dutch photographer, 35-year-old Fernando Pereira, had returned to the ship to retrieve his camera equipment. The second blast had killed him.

  The first news agency despatch arrived on Mitterrand’s desk that same evening, Paris time, seven hours after the attack. The President demanded an immediate report. He was told that France had not been involved.

  It was the beginning of a very long charade.

  Both Mitterrand and those who reported to him were aware from the outset that it could only have been a French operation. Greenpeace and French military intelligence had been playing a cat-and-mouse game in the South Pacific for years.36 The propellers of Greenpeace vessels had mysteriously come loose, ships’ food supplies had been tampered with and vessels boarded and escorted away from French territorial waters. But the Rainbow Warrior posed a different problem. Its size and the fact that it had a reinforced hull meant that it would be difficult for the naval vessels France had at its disposal in the area to intercept it ‘peacefully’ and, since it was equipped with satellite transmission equipment, any attempt to do so would be broadcast live around the world. In April, the Prime Minister, Laurent Fabius, had been informed by the head of the DGSE, Admiral Lacoste, of plans to ‘anticipate’ the Greenpeace campaign so as to prevent any of its vessels reaching Mururoa.37 But nothing had been said about sinking the Greenpeace flagship. The only member of the government who was aware that the DGSE’s ‘Action Service’ was planning such an operation was the Defence Minister, Charles Hernu, who kept the Prime Minister in the dark.38 Although Lacoste was unenthusiastic, the Minister was in favour of going ahead and the ‘Action Service’ itself, stung by its failures in Lebanon two years earlier – the botched car bomb attack on the Iranian Embassy and then the poor choice of target for the French bombing raid in the Bekaa Valley – was eager to show its mettle.

  On May 15, Lacoste had had a meeting with Mitterrand at which the President had emphasised the importance of keeping Greenpeace away from Mururoa and approved the ‘neutralisation’ of the Rainbow Warrior. What exactly was meant by that term?fn4 Lacoste would only say later, ‘I did not go into greater detail . . . because the authorisation was sufficiently explicit’.39

  Once the operation had been bungled, Mitterrand proceeded to dig himself into a very deep hole.

  The problem was that not only he but Lacoste, Hernu and a dozen or more others knew exactly what had happened. Hernu had told him on July 14, four days after the explosion, that the DGSE was responsible. But in public all of them continued, more and more implausibly, to deny that they had any knowledge of it.

  The pantomime continued until September.

  Information leaked out in dribs and drabs, painting a picture of muddle and incompetence on the part of the French secret service worthy of a 1920s silent comedy. Within 48 hours of the attack, two ‘Swiss tourists’ were arrested in Auckland and, on being allowed to telephone home, called a number at the French Defence Ministry in Paris. Next it was discovered that a second group of French agents had been seen on a yacht the day before the explosion. Finally, on September 17, Le Monde reported that a third team, comprising two DGSE frogmen, had carried out the actual attack.

  The pantomime was turning into farce. Hernu, who had been in on the plan from the start, issued a statement that night insisting: ‘No service, no organisation, under my Ministry, was ordered to carry out any attack.’ Next morning, Mitterrand, who had known the truth for weeks, told the Cabinet: ‘They have lied to us enough. I want to know!’

  It was the signal for the denouement. Summoned to confirm in writing that he had known nothing about the attack, Admiral Lacoste, realising that the political authorities were about to throw him to the wolves, wrote with considerable dignity – one of the few people in the whole affair who showed any – ‘My duty requires me not to respond to these questions . . . I recognise the risks and consequences that my attitude implies, and I am ready to assume them.’ The following day he was fired. Hernu resigned, still claiming, improbably, that his subordinates had misled him. Despite intense pressure from Fabius, who needed a credible scapegoat, he refused to acknowledge that he had given what he now called the ‘stupid order’ to sink the Greenpeace ship. It was left to the Prime Minister, after revealing on television the ‘cruel truth’ that the DGSE had indeed carried out the attack, to announce that the decision to sink the vessel had been taken ‘at the level of’ Lacoste and Hernu and that, as minister, Hernu was responsible.

  There the matter ended. The ‘Swiss couple’, identified as French agents, were sentenced in New Zealand to ten years’ imprisonment for manslaughter. Soon afterwards they were sent to a military base in French Polynesia to serve out the remainder of their sentences, an arrangement facilitated by French warnings that the renewal of EEC preferential tariffs for New Zealand agricultural produce might otherwise be blocked: Henri Nallet, the Agriculture Minister, told the Cabinet, ‘It’s our prisoners against their butter and lamb.’40 France paid compensation to Greenpeace, to the New Zealand government and to the family of the dead photographer. The other French agents involved were never officially identified.

  The puzzle of the Rainbow Warrior affair is not why it happened. All intelligence services commit blunders.41 As Mitterrand himself said afterwards, if no one had been killed, there would have been no problem.

  The puzzle is why the President let it fester. From the start, many of his advisers, including Ménage and Attali and the Interior Minister, Pierre Joxe, had urged him to come clean. If France admitted responsibility, they argued, public opinion would understand that it was a matter of national security. It would be a two-day wonder, the flow of revelations would be staunched, the opposition would be disarmed and in due course compensation would be negotiated through diplomatic channels, which is what would have to happen in any case. Mitterrand refused. The result was that the truth emerged anyway and he and his government were tarred by having clung to an obvious lie.42

  None of the reasons that have been advanced for his adopting this attitude is convincing. It was said that he wanted to protect Hernu, who had been loyal to him at a time when his fortunes were at rock bottom after the Observatory Affair in 1959. It was true that he was reluctant to let Hernu go and he went out of his way afterwards to show that their friendship was unaltered. But he had realised early on that if things went badly the Defence Minister might have to resign.43

  More credible is the view that he thought the government would get away with it. Until the middle of September, the New Zealand authorities had no proof that would convince a court of law that French agents had sunk the Rainbow Warrior. The ‘Swiss couple’ could and did argue that their mission was limited to surveillance, and the crew of the mysterious French yacht seen shortly before the blast was already safely back in France. But Mitterrand had not reckoned on the endless rivalry between the two hierarchies – Defence and Interior, DGSE and DST, gendarmes and police. The crucial evidence of French involvement in the attack emerged not in New Zealand but in France, when Le Monde disclosed the existence of the third team of DGSE frogmen.44

  Mitterrand had known about the third team for a month but had refused to take action. Once it became public, further denial was impossible.

  Were other factors involved? It is legitimate to wonder. All
Western leaders at times, in the words of the British Cabinet Secretary, Robert Armstrong, paraphrasing Edmund Burke, are ‘economical with the truth’: de Gaulle was less than honest about Algeria, Reagan tried to bury the Iran-Contra Affair, George W. Bush lied about ‘weapons of mass destruction’. But Mitterrand’s dissimulation in the case of the Rainbow Warrior is harder to explain. It was a ‘big lie’ about a small matter. Why did he take the risk?

  Paradoxically, the fact that it was a small matter may have been part of the answer. Throughout the crisis, Mitterrand repeatedly compared his position to that of de Gaulle, twenty years earlier, when the Moroccan opposition leader, Mehdi Ben Barka, had been kidnapped in Paris, with the complicity of elements of the DGSE (then known as the SDECE). De Gaulle had described the service’s implication in the Ben Barka Affair as ‘vulgar and subaltern’. On September 11, Mitterrand told the French Cabinet that, by comparison with France’s strategic interests, the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior was ‘a secondary matter, of no great interest, whose importance has been much exaggerated.’ A week later he asked his ministers: ‘Do people really think that the President of the Republic has to be informed of what this or that special agent may do anywhere in the world?’ New Zealand was a small and distant country. In terms of French domestic politics, what had happened to Greenpeace was not going to sway any votes in the forthcoming elections. If Mitterrand refused to get involved, it was partly because, as President, he thought it beneath the dignity of his office. It was not clever. As de Gaulle had said after the Ben Barka Affair, ‘it’s all very fine and good not to want to get your hands dirty. But the result is that the State is dirtied instead.’