Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  Gilles Ménage, who was responsible for following the affair at the Elysée and had bombarded Mitterrand with notes, urging him to force Hernu and the DGSE to acknowledge what they had done and get it over with, later chronicled in great detail the President’s day-to-day reactions throughout the period.

  Ménage was a Mitterrand loyalist and his purpose was to defend the President against charges that he had organised a deliberate ‘strategy of lies’. The picture he painted, despite himself, was of chronic drift and paralysis. He wrote of the President refusing to respond to briefings, of ‘a manifest lack of lucidity and authority’, of ‘a state of vacuity and doubt’, of ‘political decisions which have too long been put off’, and of the President’s conduct being ‘marked by a strange distance [given] the reality of what he had always known about . . . the real scenario of the operation’.

  Mitterrand’s predilection for allowing crises to ripen, rather than biting the bullet and dealing with them at once, may have played its part too. It was what he had done both during the schools row and when he had been grappling with the austerity programme.

  But in the case of the Rainbow Warrior the root of the problem was arrogance.

  Mitterrand refused to understand that it was not a small matter but, if only in terms of its effect on his own legacy, a huge political misjudgement. Just as the Ben Barka Affair remained a stain on de Gaulle’s presidency, so the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior would become indelibly associated with Mitterrand’s time in power. Thirty years later, in the popular imagery of his life as a politician, the two egregious errors which stood out were the Rainbow Warrior and the Observatory Affair. Although very different in their causes and contexts, both left a reek of malfeasance which he was never able to throw off.

  The other consequence of the attack and the cover-up was to widen the already yawning gap of mistrust between Mitterrand and the French intelligence services. In August Yves Bonnet had been fired following the leak about Farewell. Now, barely a month later, Lacoste followed. It could not have happened at a worse moment. After a year of relative calm, Middle Eastern terrorism was once more exploding on to the world stage. Mitterrand was no longer confronted only with bomb attacks. He faced a problem to which no Western leader would ever find an adequate solution: hostage-taking.

  Despite the withdrawal of the Multinational Force from Lebanon, the Americans had continued to be a target of the nebulous radical Shiite movement associated with the Hezbollah, the ‘Party of God’. In Beirut, three American citizens, including the CIA station chief in Lebanon, William Buckley Jnr., had been kidnapped. In each case, Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.

  The goal, like the method, was new. Hostage-taking was a means to put pressure on foreign governments to make concessions on issues unrelated to Lebanon itself. Before long France and Britain would feel the consequences. But first there was a curtain-raiser.

  In July 1984 an Air France passenger jet was hijacked from Frankfurt to Teheran. The hijackers demanded the freeing of Anis Naccache and his accomplices in the attempted assassination of Shapour Bakhtiar. In Paris, Roland Dumas had a lengthy meeting with the Iranian chargé d’affaires. Instead of discussing the hijacking, the diplomat insisted on reviewing other long-standing grievances: France’s failure to repay a $1 billion loan agreed in the 1970s by the Shah for a French uranium enrichment facility; and the activities in France of Massoud Radjavi and the Mujahideen, who, he said, were still conducting acts of terrorism against Iran. The last point would be tragically underlined two weeks later when twenty-eight people died and more than 300 were injured in a Mujahideen bomb attack on the Teheran railway station. Without addressing the substance of his remarks, Dumas replied that France might soften its stance if the passengers and crew were released and the aircraft returned. Under those conditions, he added, the government would also be willing to examine the situation of Naccache and his companions if the Iranian authorities so requested.

  The exchange opened the way for an end to the hijacking but marked the beginning of a lethal misunderstanding. To the Iranians, Dumas’s offer meant that the imprisoned Iranian commandos would soon be freed. To Dumas it meant simply that the government was willing to study the issue within the limits of what was possible under French law, which, in the case of men serving life sentences, was not very much.

  By December, the French began to realise that Naccache was no ordinary prisoner. He and his companions had come to kill Shapour Bakhtiar because they had been ordered to do so by a fatwa, or religious decree, issued by Ayatollah Khomeini himself. To the Iranians, that made their mission not only lawful but sacred. But no one in Paris understood that the fate of Naccache and his companions was not just one grievance among many: it was Teheran’s primary demand, beside which all the rest was secondary. Two cultures, with diametrically opposed views of the same set of events, were set to clash head on. As Gilles Ménage wrote later:

  Who in France, at the end of 1984, could understand that refusing to free five assassins, convicted . . . after due process of law, could provide serious grounds for unleashing a terrorist campaign? . . . How could one give credit to these threats of reprisals which seemed beyond all common sense? . . . Acts of terrorism in France against public buildings and department stores, against . . . trains and airlines, . . . the assassination of military and civilian figures, kidnappings and hostage-takings in France and Lebanon? It would need the threats to start to be implemented before our disbelief would yield to the evidence.45

  To muddy the waters further, another group had France in its sights. In October 1984, the DST had arrested in Lyon an individual using the name Abdu-Qadir Saadi, who was soon identified as Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, the head of the FARL, the Armed Revolutionary Lebanese Fractions, which had been responsible for attacks on Israeli and US diplomats in Paris in 1982 and the deaths of two French policemen. The French were still uncertain what the FARL represented. But they knew that Abdallah’s lieutenants would not sit idly by and allow their leader to remain in prison indefinitely. The problem was what to do about it? The government was in two minds. The DST was instructed to contact its usual interlocutors – the Algerian, Syrian and Palestinian special services – to urge Abdallah’s friends to be patient while the political authorities tried to find a solution.

  Not all the news that year was bad. In July, with Mitterrand’s approval, the DST had begun secret talks with Abu Nidal’s organisation, resulting in an agreement to continue the truce which had been reached with the help of the Syrians eighteen months previously.fn5 In November, the President visited Damascus and, in six hours of talks with Assad, whose intellectual finesse he appreciated better than the brutality of his regime, laid the basis for a more constructive relationship. Syria was committed to the destruction of Israel, to supporting Iran in the war against Iraq and to maintaining its suzerainty in Lebanon. But closer ties with the Syrians offered the prospect of a back-channel to Teheran, which, given the tension between France and Iran, might prove extremely helpful.

  The bigger picture, however, was grim. Tensions in Lebanon peaked after the CIA detonated a car bomb on March 8 1985, just after Friday prayers, outside the home of Sheikh Fadlallah, a revered Shia leader regarded as the spiritual leader of the Hezbollah. The bomb attack, in which Fadlallah was unhurt but 172 people died and more than 250 were injured, many of them women and children, provoked brutal factional conflict. It had been ordered by William Casey in retaliation for Islamic Jihad’s attack on the marines.

  Over the next two and a half weeks, eight American, British and French nationals were taken hostage in Beirut, more than in the whole of the previous three years. On the morning of March 22, the French Vice-Consul, Marcel Fontaine, was kidnapped, followed a few hours later by another diplomat, Marcel Carton, and his daughter, Danièle, an embassy secretary. The next day, Saturday, the head of the French Cultural Centre in Tripoli, Gilles Peyroles, disappeared. In the next four years, ninety more hostages would follow, mainly Americans, French
and British, but also Swiss, West Germans, Italians, Russians and citizens of Arab countries.

  The FARL issued a communiqué, claiming responsibility for the kidnapping of Peyroles and offering to free him, but not the other three, in return for the release of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah. With the help of Algeria, a trade-off was worked out. At that point Abdallah had been charged only with using false papers and membership of an illegal organisation, both relatively minor offences. The deal was that he would be brought to trial swiftly, given a short prison term and, taking account of the time he had already served, expelled a few months later. In return the FARL would release Peyroles.

  Ten days later the FARL kept their side of the bargain: Peyroles was freed. But France found itself unable to honour its commitment. A few hours after Peyroles had arrived at the French Embassy in Beirut, the DST raided an apartment in Paris which Abdallah had been renting. Inside they found a veritable arsenal. Among the weapons was a gun, which forensic experts found to have been the firearm used in the murders of two of the diplomats killed in Paris in 1982. To free Abdallah had become impossible. Instead he would have to be charged with murder.

  Was the timing of the discovery a coincidence? Or had the DST acted in bad faith, negotiating with the Algerians while already knowing that Abdallah was likely to face much more serious charges?

  In the end it made little difference. The fundamental error lay elsewhere. Mitterrand had known from the start that Abdallah headed a movement responsible for terrorist killings in France. But instead of stating clearly that no compromise would be permitted, he had equivocated. While the DST continued investigating, seeking evidence of Abdallah’s guilt, the political authorities had been casting around for a way to get him off their hands before a terrorist campaign was launched to free him.fn6

  The mishandling of the FARL leader’s case should have taught Mitterrand a lesson. It did not.

  Four months later, in the autumn of 1985, he agreed to free Abu Nidal’s followers who were serving prison terms in France for murder. The Justice Minister, Robert Badinter, protested:

  These are two terrorists with blood on their hands . . . whom we are putting back into circulation, in other words, to be active again. Freeing them now will be contrasted with the attitude of firmness adopted by [others]. A violent campaign will be launched on the theme: the French government is always weak towards terrorism; it’s negotiating with Abu Nidal and giving way to him . . . Politically that will be difficult to answer . . . And above all, morally, I am revolted by the idea that murderers like this should get away with seven years in prison. So they can start over again?46

  Mitterrand went ahead anyway. Abu Nidal kept his word. His group never attacked France again and, contrary to Badinter’s fears, the two terrorists who were freed did not rejoin the movement. But it set an appalling precedent. Five weeks after their expulsion, the wife of one of the French hostages in Lebanon told the President:

  France made a deal with Abu Nidal. Isn’t that negotiating with terrorists? . . . Abu Nidal blackmailed France and France freed two of his followers. Why, for my husband [and] the others, has France said no?47

  What could he possibly answer? Ten days later, at a meeting at the Elysée, he let his bad conscience show, accusing the DST of having put him in an ‘impossible’ position by negotiating an accord with Abu Nidal ‘without informing me at the time’. ‘I was very reluctant [to agree],’ he said, ‘I wasn’t pleased at all, and that’s a euphemism’. It was completely untrue. He had been informed from the outset. But he preferred to deny – or did not have the courage to admit – that it had been his decision.

  Mitterrand’s inconsistencies reflected the insoluble dilemma which all democracies face when confronted with terrorism.

  On the one hand he believed that the State had an overriding duty to succour its citizens in distress. In 1980, when Jimmy Carter had authorised an airborne raid into Iran in a failed attempt to free the US Embassy hostages, Mitterrand had been one of the few to support him. ‘For myself,’ he said, ‘I think when a foreign country seizes our fellow citizens, our compatriots, for whatever reason it may be – if they were French, this is how I would react – my duty would be to use every means at my disposal to free them . . . From instinct I won’t criticise someone who tries to save his brother.’

  On the other hand he was adamantly opposed to any action implying a surrender of sovereignty under pressure from a foreign State, and still less a terrorist group.

  The position that resulted was both ambiguous and illogical.

  France would ‘do anything except yield’, Mitterrand declared. If it did yield, as in practice it often had to, it must be in a manner and at a time which he alone, as Head of State, would choose. Outside the President’s own narrow circle of advisers, who all, with the exception of Robert Badinter, endorsed this contorted logic, even the most charitable observer would find it hard to see anything other than a dubious attempt to save face. It meant that the principle of a trade-off between, on the one hand, the release of convicted terrorists, like Abu Nidal’s followers or Naccache, and, on the other, the promise that France would be spared future terrorist attacks or that its hostages would be released, was perfectly acceptable, so long as the forms were observed and the French President, rather than the hostage-takers, determined how it was worked out.

  Mitterrand’s only consolation was that, in different ways, most other Western leaders were doing the same.

  France’s reputation for weakness, to which Badinter alluded, dated from 1977, when Giscard had expelled Abu Daoud, who had masterminded the killing of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, ignoring extradition requests from both Israel and West Germany. But that was no different from the Italian government’s decision, during the Achille Lauro affair, to put the Palestinian terrorist, Abu Abbas, discreetly on a plane to Yugoslavia rather than risk the complications of putting him on trial. Reagan liked to insist that he would never deal with terrorists, but when a Trans World Airlines jet on a flight from Athens to Rome was hijacked in the summer of 1986, he backed down. To secure the release of the 39 American hostages, the White House reached a secret agreement with Israel whereby more than 700 Shiite and Palestinian prisoners would be freed in exchange.

  ‘Terrorism worked, it functioned,’ Mitterrand told the French Cabinet afterwards. ‘On the American side, there was only an appearance of strength’.

  ‘Irangate’ was the same. The Reagan administration purchased the release of three American hostages with arms supplies and a ransom.48 Even Israel, whose reputation for intransigence is unequalled, exchanged – and continues to exchange – thousands of Palestinian prisoners, including convicted terrorists, for captured Israeli soldiers.

  Only Margaret Thatcher, in a country where public opinion was more stoical than elsewhere, could afford the luxury of an iron refusal ever to cave in. British policy was to refuse to negotiate on the grounds that doing so would confirm the hostages’ value and encourage the kidnappers to raise the stakes. It was a far tougher stance than that of any of Britain’s partners. Did the casuistry of other nations serve their hostages better? The evidence is inconclusive but it seems probably not.

  In 1985, Mitterrand paid the price for his weakness.

  The Iranians felt he had cheated them by failing to follow through on what they interpreted as a promise to release Naccache and his companions. In Lebanon his refusal to release Georges Ibrahim Abdallah after the freeing of Peyroles was taken as meaning that France could not be trusted to keep its word. The negotiations with Abu Nidal were seen as proof that he would buckle if sufficient pressure were applied.

  The group which had abducted Marcel Fontaine and Marcel Carton and his daughter was of a very different calibre from the FARL. Islamic Jihad said they would be released once ‘France stops intervening directly and indirectly in the war’ between Iran and Iraq. No one in Paris realised that that statement meant exactly what it said. Nor did anyone read correctly the signals coming out
of Teheran. The Chief of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohsen Rafiqdoust, told the French chargé d’affaires, Jean Perrin, that ‘it was time to bring to an end’ the problem of Naccache and his companions who ‘had only been carrying out their religious duty’. Arafat passed on a message that Khomeini himself was ‘pulling the strings’ and that the release of Naccache would unblock the situation. In a conciliatory gesture, Marcel Carton’s daughter was released.

  The Iranians soon saw that they were wasting their time. No one in France understood what they were trying to say. To Mitterrand, the hostages in Lebanon and the possibility of improved relations with Iran were two different things. It was simply inconceivable that there could be a link between them.49

  On May 22, Teheran stepped up the pressure. Two more hostages were taken: Jean-Paul Kauffmann, a journalist for a French weekly, and Michel Seurat, an Arabist.

  But at the Elysée it was not until September that the truth finally dawned.

  Two messages were received in Paris that month: one, unofficial, through a Lebanese journalist in Teheran; the other, official, from Assad, but conveyed orally by an emissary as the Syrian President was unwilling to put it in writing. Their substance was the same. The French hostages would be released when France agreed to free the Iranians who had tried to kill Shapour Bakhtiar.