by Philip Short
3. The Wednesday lunches, attended by Bérégovoy, Defferre, Estier, Fabius, Jospin, Joxe, Mauroy, Mermaz, Mexandeau, Poperen, Quilès, and sometimes Edith Cresson, Charles Hernu and Jack Lang, ended in November 1982.
4. After the June 1981 elections, Mitterrand enjoyed a majority in the National Assembly on a scale seen only three times before in 200 years – in 1815, 1919 and under de Gaulle in 1968. In the General’s case, moreover, although the elections marked a triumph for the Right, they coincided with a serious weakening of his personal position.
5. Meeting with Vice-President George Bush, June 24 1981, in CHAN, carton 5AG4 CD4.
6. Ibid.
7. Despite the DST’s claims to the contrary, it appears that Reagan had been informed by William Casey, the CIA Director.
8. According to Ménage, it was not proved conclusively until much later that the Russians were responsible for bugging the fax machines: in the meantime, the possibility that another intelligence service, perhaps even the CIA, might have been involved, could not be ruled out. The expulsion of the forty-seven Soviet diplomats was a consequence of Farewell’s revelations. The discovery of the bugging played an indirect role by convincing French officials, notably at the Foreign Ministry, which until then had been reluctant, that tough measures against the Russians were justified.
9. A small number of Soviet diplomats were also expelled from Britain and the United States and several American and British citizens were arrested for espionage on the Russians’ behalf. In France, some twenty Soviet agents were identified. Some were double agents who were left in place, but twelve were sent for trial or otherwise neutralised, among them a general in the engineering corps working on nuclear warheads for French submarine-launched missiles. Similar waves of arrests took place in West Germany, where a senior official at Messerschmitt, who had been working for the KGB since 1954, was among those detained, as well as in six other Western countries.
10. Was there more to it than that ‘official’ version suggested? ‘It’s a crazy story,’ Mitterrand said later. ‘I don’t have the key. But the way it ended seemed to me so singular that I stopped believing such nonsense.’ His suspicions that it might all have been a manipulation on the part of the CIA were mistaken. It was not a Soviet manipulation either. While it is possible that Vetrov’s end may have been different from that described, the account is coherent with everything that is known about his character: a womaniser, a romantic taking suicidal risks, an idealist. No one has ever produced a convincing reason to doubt it.
11. Mitterrand, Speech to the Bundestag, January 20 1983, in http://discours.vie-publique.fr/notices/847900500.html
12. The quotation is often rendered incorrectly as ‘The pacifists are in the West, the Euromissiles in the East’: in fact he said, ‘Pacifism, and all that it condemns, is in the West . . .’
13. Kissinger telephoned Attali on January 26, six days after the speech; Reagan wrote on January 28.
14. Mitterrand, Speech at Cancun, October 20 1981, in http://discours.vie-publique.fr/notices/817144500.html
15. De Gaulle’s comment was made at a news conference in November 1967. He condemned Israel for launching the war and said France would have condemned the Arab states had they initiated the hostilities. Israel’s military victory, he added, would inevitably be followed by ‘repression, oppression and expulsions’ in the occupied territories which would accelerate the spiral of violence and do nothing to bring Israel peace.
16. ‘Discours de François Mitterrand à la Knesset, 4 mars 1982’ in http://discours.vie-publique.fr/notices/827006800.html
17. Shultz telephoned Cheysson on September 19, the day after the massacre became known, to say that if France did not agree to send back its troops within 24 hours, the US Marines would go in alone. Diplomatically Cheysson refrained from reminding him that it had been the US administration, fearing American casualties, which had insisted on leaving in the first place.
18. ‘As long as Begin is there,’ he told his entourage in the summer of 1982, ‘nothing will be possible. His idea of “Greater Israel” makes all negotiation vain. There’s nothing to be negotiated.’
19. Bernard Vernier-Palliez, November 16 1984, valedictory telegram, in CHAN, 5AG4 CD74, Dossier 1.
20. Gilles Ménage, Mitterrand’s deputy Chief of Staff in 1982–88 with special responsibility for anti-terrorist measures, described the Israeli invasion as ‘the major event which started to change everything, . . . the final shock in a fatal chain of cause and effect whose terrible consequences would unfold over several years . . . The Israeli invasion of June 1982 created . . . lasting conditions for the birth, structuring and development of the nebula of Middle Eastern terrorism of which France would be the principal victim from 1982 to 1987.’
21. Ménage wrote that ‘no one [in 1981] had understood the extent of the facilities Lebanon offered at that time for every kind of terrorism . . . [The country was] an arsenal of weapons, [with] numerous training camps and large numbers of specialists, all accustomed to working underground, in rigidly compartmentalized groups, experienced in the most sophisticated techniques for handling explosives, not to mention financial means [and] ways of procuring false identities [and] passports . . . Beirut in 1981 was ready and waiting to be the crossroads of international terrorism.’
22. Nixon’s ‘limited incursion’ into Cambodia in May 1970 had exactly the same effect, giving a breathing space to US forces in Vietnam and helping to create the conditions for their withdrawal, but spreading the Vietcong, whom it had it been intended to eradicate, throughout Cambodia. That created the conditions for the Khmers Rouges to seize power. Begin’s invasion appeared to be more successful in the short term. It neutralised the PLO and blocked the peace process for the next decade. But the price was to spread Lebanese-based terrorism throughout the Western world. Moreover, as Yitzhak Rabin, later Israel’s Prime Minister, noted, the PLO’s place was soon taken by the Shiite Hezbollah, the ‘Party of God’, leaving Israel’s position in the region no more secure than before.
23. From 1970 to 1979, fatal attacks by Palestinian terrorists occurred in Austria, Belgium, Britain, Italy, West Germany, Norway, Switzerland and the US. In France, several attacks took place in the early 1970s, including two at Orly Airport in January 1975. But from then until 1980, only one major incident occurred on French soil: a shooting at the El Al counter at Orly on May 20 1978 in which four people, including the three Palestinian terrorists, were killed.
24. On March 29 1982, the ‘Organisation for Arab Armed Struggle’, a name sometimes used by Carlos and his associates, claimed responsibility for a bomb explosion on a train between Toulouse and Paris which killed five people and injured twenty-seven. A month earlier, the Venezuelan terrorist had written to the Interior Minister, Gaston Defferre, seeking the release of two members of his group, Bruno Breguet and Magdalena Kopp, who had been arrested in France in possession of arms and explosives. The French learned only much later that Kopp was Carlos’s wife. On April 15, the day the pair was due to appear in court, a French diplomat and his wife were assassinated in Beirut. The opening of Breguet and Kopp’s trial a week later coincided with the explosion outside Al watan al arabi.
25. Here and elsewhere French acronyms are used for the ‘Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia’ and the ‘Armed Revolutionary Lebanese Fractions’ since neither operated in English-speaking countries and both are best known by their French initials. In April 1982, the latter group, an extreme left-wing offshoot of Waddi Haddad’s branch of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, to which Carlos had at one point belonged, assassinated an Israeli diplomat, Yacov Barsimantov (actually an agent of Mossad) in Paris. Four months later two French policemen were killed trying to defuse a bomb placed by the FARL under an American diplomat’s car. In August 1982 the group blew up a car belonging to an Israeli diplomat, injuring him and his two passengers as well as more than forty pupils from a nearby secondary school. At the beginning of the year the FAR
L had assassinated an American deputy military attaché in Paris. The same group may also have been responsible for an unsuccessful attempt to kill the American chargé d’affaires, Christian Chapman, in November 1981.
26. The various terrorist campaigns peaked in different countries at different times. In Britain, IRA bomb attacks, which had reached a high point in the early 1970s, resumed from 1982 to 1984. In France tensions were at their height in the summer of 1982 and from late 1985 to 1986.
27. The attack in the rue Copernic was organised not by Abu Nidal’s Fatah–Revolutionary Council as such but by a related organisation, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–Special Command, led by Selim Abu Salem. Almost thirty years later, France sought the extradition from Canada of a Lebanese sociology professor, Hassan Diab, who it alleged had carried out the attack. The Canadian government approved the extradition order on April 4 2012, but Diab entered an appeal.
28. Ménage wrote later that it was ‘difficult to date with precision’ the moment when the government understood the significance of the attacks on Jewish interests in 1980 and 1982, but that at the time everyone concerned – political authorities, specialists on the Middle East, intelligence services – were ‘a hundred leagues away’ from appreciating the forces at work.
29. Ménage acknowledged afterwards that ‘the authorities in Teheran . . . were right to complain about this violation of the rules concerning the right of asylum’ because ‘the assurances we gave them ad nauseam to convince them of our determination to reduce their opponents to silence remained a dead letter’.
30. On May 24 1982, eleven people were killed and twenty-two injured by a car bomb at the French Embassy in Beirut. Responsibility was claimed by ‘Al Jihad’, apparently an early version of ‘Islamic Jihad’. The motive for the attack was never explained, but the explosion occurred two weeks after Anis Naccache and his companions were sentenced. If, as seems likely, the two events were related, no one in France – not even Ménage, writing fifteen years later – made the connection.
31. Shortly afterwards, ASALA claimed responsibility for two failed car bomb attacks on French diplomats in Teheran. The French press at the time speculated on the possibility of a Libyan role.
32. The name Islamic Jihad had first been used six months earlier, when a suicide bomber detonated a ton of explosives in a delivery van, killing more than sixty people at the US Embassy in Beirut in April 1983. There had been two previous attacks using this technique, both unsigned: against the Iraqi Embassy in Beirut in 1981, killing sixty-one people including the Ambassador; and against an Israeli Army base at Tyre in November 1982, killing seventy-four people.
33. Cabinet minutes, October 26 1983, in Ménage, Gilles, L’œil du pouvoir, Vol. 3, Fayard, 2001, pp. 207–8.
34. The Americans were equally at sea. A CIA report received by the French on October 26 said the attacks had been organised jointly by pro-Syrian Palestinians, opposed to Arafat, and pro-Iranian Shiites – a finding which subsequent investigations confirmed – but added that the responsibilities of the Syrian (and Iranian) authorities ‘cannot be clearly established’.
35. The full story of Arafat’s extraction from Tripoli has yet to be written. Mitterrand persuaded Reagan to put pressure on Israel to allow the convoy to leave. He also provided French good offices for an exchange on November 23 of 4,600 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel for six Israeli soldiers captured by the PLO whose lives were increasingly imperilled as Arafat’s position became more precarious. It is tempting to assume that the two events were linked, but the evidence is lacking. It was learnt later that the Soviet Union had exerted pressure on Assad to allow Arafat’s forces to leave, though whether it did so out of fear that a direct clash with the French might ignite a larger conflagration or because Moscow, too, recognised that Arafat was worth preserving, is not clear.
36. Only the Director of the Criminal Investigation Department, Michel Guyot, was eventually granted a reprieve.
37. As though that were not enough, Mitterrand appointed Joseph Franceschi, who had been his unofficial adviser on security matters before 1981, to second Gaston Defferre as Secretary of State for Security. It was not a good idea. Defferre, concentrating on his decentralisation programme and spending half of each week in Marseille, where he was mayor, failed conspicuously to bring the police to heel yet, jealous of his prerogatives, refused to allow Franceschi to do so either. The diarchy at the head of the Interior Ministry was allowed to continue for almost two years, ending only when both men were assigned new portfolios in a reshuffle in July 1984.
38. Less than ten days after Prouteau’s nomination, in August 1982, his deputy at the GIGN, Captain Paul Barril, announced with great fanfare the arrests of three Irish ‘terrorists’ in the Paris suburb of Vincennes. It soon emerged that some of the evidence against them had been fabricated. Barril, who benefited from a long friendship with Prouteau, was later banned from the Elysée on Mitterrand’s orders, but not before he had managed to embarrass the government in another case, this time related to Corsica.
39. Gamba, Daniel, Interlocuteur privilégié: J’ai protégé Mitterrand, JC Lattès, 2003, pp. 86–8.
40. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing likewise announced during the campaign of 1974 that he would publish regular health bulletins but after his election changed his mind.
41. Emblematic of the well-intentioned but slightly loopy side of the Socialists’ early forays into mass culture, it fell victim to budget cuts in 1983.
42. Jacques Attali quoted Mitterrand as saying in June 1981: ‘At this stage, what I am doing is politics. [For the rest] we will see later.’
43. In November 1981, a business survey found that 83 per cent of managers of small and medium-sized companies had no intention of taking on extra workers in the coming six months and 56 per cent ruled out any new investment.
44. Nonetheless, Mitterrand went further than he needed to. He insisted, over Mauroy’s objections, on reducing the working week from 40 to 39 hours without loss of pay, which was understandably popular with workers but nullified the effect of the measure in terms of job creation; and he decided – against the advice of Rocard and Badinter – that the State should take a 100 per cent stake, rather than 51 per cent, in the nationalised enterprises and banks. Both decisions were economically counter-productive.
45. The writer was among the 300 journalists present that day and must confess that, like his colleagues, he failed to recognise Mitterrand’s underlying message.
46. ‘The choice of the Socialists is to share wealth,’ Mauroy observed, ‘but socialism amid penury doesn’t make much sense.’
47. Mitterrand’s adviser on international economic affairs, Elizabeth Guigou, remembered: ‘When he arrived at the Elysée, [he] was not as familiar with monetary techniques as Giscard d’Estaing might have been. He sought to multiply his contacts to the maximum and hear all points of view. He did not want to be the prisoner of just one school of thought . . . He wanted to be sure he could explain things in simple terms.’
48. Unemployment passed the two million mark in May 1982 but then appeared to stabilise just above that level until the autumn of 1983.
49. The argument is as follows: had France left the EMS in March 1983, the French and German economies would have diverged; Mitterrand and Kohl would have followed different national policies; the British budget quarrel would at best have been papered over at Fontainebleau in 1984 and the EEC’s subsequent enlargement to include Spain and Portugal would have been delayed. By staying in the EMS, Mitterrand not only strengthened the Franco-German relationship as the locomotive of European unity but made possible the agreements at Fontainebleau and the Single European Act that followed. Beyond that it is impossible to speculate: there are too many variables at work. But, had France left the Exchange Rate Mechanism, it is hard to see how Maastricht, or its equivalent, could have come about. And without Maastricht, or something like it, there would have been no Euro.
50. It is often clai
med that Mitterrand had reached his decision well before the municipal elections but allowed the actors to play out their roles, as in a piece of theatre, until the denouement became clear. That is giving him too much credit. On February 21, Elizabeth Guigou had sent him a memorandum summing up the effects of a withdrawal from the EMS in terms almost identical to those Michel Camdessus would use to Fabius three and a half weeks later. To reinforce the message, the Elysée’s new Secretary-General, Jean-Louis Bianco, who had succeeded Bérégovoy, had minuted: ‘Mr President, leaving the EMS will put us in the hands of the IMF.’ If Mitterrand had accepted that judgement, the manoeuvring of the following weeks would have been unnecessary. Instead he continued to hope for a different outcome. The cacophony at the economists’ lunch on February 28 comforted him in the belief that an alternative might yet be possible.
51. Cited in Lacouture, Jean, Mitterrand: une histoire de Français, Vol. 2, Seuil, 1998, p. 63.
52. Jacques Toubon, an RPR MP with close ties to Chirac, noted that the change had been managed ‘without big difficulties. It’s very striking . . . Mitterrand can be grateful to Jospin for having got him through this turn without [much] pain. It was a masterstroke on the part of the Socialists.’
53. In 1974, the burden of direct and indirect taxation in France was 36.3 per cent. By the time Giscard left office in 1981, it had reached 42.9 per cent. In 1983 it was 44.7 per cent. By comparison, according to the OECD, the level in the USA in 1985 was 25.6; in West Germany, 36.1; in Britain, 37.6; and in Sweden, 47.8 per cent. In 1986, the tax burden in France fell back below 44 per cent and remained there for the following five years, only to climb again under the right-wing government of Édouard Balladur in 1993, reaching a peak in 1999 of nearly 48 per cent.
12: The Sphinx
1. Jacques Attali, who gave a less credible, variant – ‘the eyes of Stalin and the voice of Marilyn Monroe’ – claimed that Mitterrand was speaking after a meeting with Thatcher in London on September 10–11 1981 in which she had shown herself intransigent about the plight of the Irish hunger strikers.