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| Agency overview | |
|---|---|
| Formed | 1944 |
| Dissolved | 1982 |
| Superseding agency | |
| Headquarters | France |
TheService de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage ("External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service"), abbreviatedSDECE (French:[zdɛk]), wasFrance's externalintelligence agency from 6 November 1944 to 2 April 1982, when it was replaced by theDirectorate-General for External Security (DGSE). It should not be confused with theDeuxième Bureau which was intended to pursue purely military intelligence.
Under theFourth Republic the SDECE was subordinated to thePresident of the Council. From the onset of theFifth Republic and until 1962, it was subordinate to Prime MinisterMichel Debré and its resources largely dedicated to theAlgerian War. Following theMehdi Ben Barka affair, GeneralCharles de Gaulle subordinated the service to theMinistry of Defence, and the service was gradually militarized.
The SDECE was founded in 1946 as a successor to the wartimeBureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action which was seen as too closely associated with theGaullists to properly serve the republic.[1] SDECE was known in France asla piscine (the swimming pool) because its HQ in Paris was located next to a public swimming pool.[2] The SDECE was officially responsible to theMinister of Defense, but in fact reported to the president acting through a special adviser on intelligence matters.[3] The SDECE was frequently involved in bureaucratic disputes with theDeuxième Bureau in Vietnam and Algeria, and within France with theSûreté Générale, which led successive directors of the SDECE to see their real enemies as the other branches of the republic concerned with intelligence.[4] As was usually the case with French intelligence, the division of responsibilities between rival agencies led to different arms of the French state to spend more time locked in bureaucratic disputes with one another than anything else.[5] In September 1949, SDECE played a prominent role in the "scandal of the generals", when theSûreté Générale revealed that the Army chief of staff had trusted confidential documents relating to the war in Vietnam to another general, who had given them to an SDECE agent who in turn had given them to theVietminh.[6] The French state tried to bury the story by ordering the newspapers not to print it, but the Paris correspondent ofTime had reported to the New York office ofTime.[7] Unknown to him, the French state was illegally listening in to dispatches filed by foreign correspondents from Paris.[8] The French embassy in Washington tried to suppress the story as embarrassing to France, but the U.S. government refused, citing the First Amendment, leading to the scandal of theGenerals' affair as once the news broke in the United States, it was picked up by the French media.[9]
In the 1950s, SDECE had a reputation for engaging in bizarre operations like stealing fuel from Soviet planes that had landed in France to analyze the antifreeze contents of Soviet jet fuel and for drugging Soviet espionage couriers on the Orient Express to rifle through the contents of their briefcases.[10] The cryptographic division of the SDECE was well regarded, having broken several Soviet diplomatic codes, but its attempts at playing the role of a para-military organization was less successful.[11] In 1951 SDECE created theGroupement de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés para-military organization in Vietnam, part of the "Action Service" (together with11th shock parachute regiment), to counter the Vietminh who were fighting for independence from France, but the general hostility of the Vietnamese to the French limited the appeal of fighting for France among the Vietnamese people.[12] The SDECE parachuted agents both in Vietnam and Eastern Europe, but the SDECE was well penetrated by French communists who provided Moscow with all the details of the operations.[13] In particular, the operations in Eastern Europe in 1950s were a complete disaster as every single agent parachuted into Eastern Europe was captured.[14]
As in Vietnam, during theAlgerian War, the SDECE played a prominent role in wagingla guerre sale ("the dirty war") against the enemies of the republic.[15] The 1950s-60s are remembered as the "era of political assassinations" by SDECE agents as one of the agency's main jobs was to assassinate members of theFLN.[16] The number of killings dramatically stepped up in 1958 whenCharles de Gaulle gave the SDECE's Action Servicecarte blanche to kill suspected members of the FLN under the cover of a pseudo-terrorist group called the Red Hand.[17] The first two murders took place in West Germany, where an arms dealer who sold arms to the FLN was killed when the SDECE planted a bomb in his car while an anti-French Algerian politician was killed in a drive-by shooting.[18] The fact that the variousLänder police forces of West Germany were ineffective in investigating the "Red Hand" assassinations committed by SDECE was the result of a secret agreement with GeneralReinhard Gehlen, the chief of theBundesnachrichtendienst under which the French and German intelligence were to share information in exchange for allowing the SDECE to commit murders on German soil.[19] One SDECE agent, Philippe L. Thyraud de Vosjoli, wrote in his 1970 memoirLamia: "Dozens of assassinations were carried out. Besides the use of guns or knives, more sophisticated methods had been perfected. Carbon dioxide guns ejecting small syringes had been purchased in the United States-but the SDECE people substituted the tranquilizing drug with a lethal poison. The victim showed all the symptoms of having suffered a heart attack".[20] Besides for members of the FLN, the SDECE killed left-wing French intellectuals who supported the FLN, arms dealers and other anti-French nationalists in Africa.[21] The SDECE also engaged in hijacking six ships bound for Algeria with arms for the FLN between 1956–61, and blew up one ship packed with weapons for the FLN in Hamburg harbor with a naval mine.[22] Within Algeria itself, the SDECE assassinated suspected FLN members and provided intelligence to the Army to indicate "disloyal" villages that were to be burned down.[23] Many of the assassins were pro-French Vietnamese who fled to France after Vietnamese independence, and were quite willing to kill and/or be killed for France.[24] In 1960, many of the Action Service's killers, including most of the Vietnamese, went over theOAS, leading to the Action Service to dispatch new agents to Algeria to assassinate the former Action Service assassins who joined the OAS.[25] In January 1961, the Action Service blew up the headquarters of the OAS's assassins.[26] In 1960, de Gaulle founded theService d'Action Civique (SAC), an organization linked to SDECE of about 8,000 that spied on his political opponents, broke up anti-Gaullist demonstrations and engaged in "dirty tricks" for the SDECE.[27]
In December 1961, the SDECE was rocked by scandal of theMartel affair (also known as the Sapphire Affair) when aKGB defector,Anatoliy Golitsyn revealed to theCIA the existence of the Soviet Sapphire spy ring within the SDECE.[28] PresidentJohn F. Kennedy wrote a letter to President de Gaulle, detailing Golitsyn’s revelations, which was handed to de Gaulle personally by the CIAstation chief in Paris.[29] De Gaulle, however, believed the claim that the Sapphire spy ring existed was a CIA plot to disorganize the SDECE, and ordered the SDECE to break off all co-operation with the CIA.[30]James Jesus Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence chief, seeing no French reaction to Golityn's information, ordered a"Black Bag job" (a break-in) at the French embassy in Washington to photograph the codebooks that were used to encrypt the Quai d'Orsay's radio messages, thereby allowing the Americans to know what the French were doing and to monitor the French reaction to Golitsyn’s revelations (theNSA apparently was not capable of breaking the Quai d'Orsay's codes in the 1960s).[31] When it was discovered the CIA had broken into the French embassy to steal the French diplomatic codes, the SDECE station chief in Washington was recalled to Paris in disgrace.[32] Despite de Gaulle's belief that the KGB Sapphire spy ring was CIA disinformation, it was later discovered that the Sapphire spy ring did in fact exist, and thatGeorges Pâques, the NATO press secretary, andAndré Labarthe (engineer) [fr], an aviation scientist, were both working for the KGB.[33] Pâques was convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union, receiving life in prison, which was later reduced down to 20 years in prison.[34] The Sapphire affair inspired the American novelistLeon Uris to write the 1967 novelTopaz about the Soviet penetration of the SDECE via the "Topaz" spy ring, which so closely resembled the Sapphire affair that many suspected the CIA leaked Uris information about the Sapphire case.[35]
In October 1965, the SDECE was involved in another scandal when two SDECE agents kidnappedMehdi Ben Barka, a left-wing Moroccan émigré, on the streets of Paris and handed him over to the agents of the Moroccan government to be tortured and killed.[36] KingHassan II of Morocco, a close ally of France, had long been annoyed at Ben Barka's criticism of his regime and had asked General de Gaulle to extradite him back to Morocco, but as Ben Barka had been granted asylum in France and was breaking no laws, it was not legally possible to return Ben Barka to Morocco, leading to alternative means to be deployed. Ben Barka's body was never found, but as he was last seen alive in Paris being handed over by two SDECE agents to Moroccan agents on 29 October 1965, he is generally believed to have been murdered by the Moroccans.[37] The revelation that the gangsters fromlemilieu (literally "the middle"; i.e French organized crime) had also involved in kidnapping Ben Barka further added to the scandal as many French people were shocked to discover that the SDECE often co-operated withle milieu. The Ben Barka affair briefly caused much public excitement as the SDECE had no powers of arrest, let alone to hand over a man who was legally living in France to be killed by the Moroccan state, but as the victim was a Moroccan Muslim, the public outrage soon subsided overL'affaire Ben Barka, and the scandal ended when the two SDECE agents who helped kidnap Ben Barka were convicted in 1967.[38]
A major area of SDECE activity in the 1960s was supporting theQuebec separatist movement.[39]Jacques Foccart, one of de Gaulle's most important aides directed the SDECE's operations against Canada, having SDECE fund Quebec separatists via the French consulates in Quebec City and Montreal.[40] In 1968, the Canadian prime ministerPierre Trudeau handed the French ambassador a diplomatic note of protest against SDECE agents operating in Quebec and several SDECE agents in Canada posing as diplomats were declaredpersona non grata.[41] De Gaulle had a deep, visceral hatred of Canada, which he viewed as a second-rate nation that from the French viewpoint had humiliatingly helped to save France, a would-be world power, in both world wars, and de Gaulle sought revenge by seeking to break up Canada.[42] Furthermore, de Gaulle was anAnglophobe and as Canada was a product of theBritish Empire, this gave him an additional reason to hate Canada.[43][editorializing] A sign of how much de Gaulle hated Canada because of Canadian sacrifices during both world wars can be seen in that de Gaulle snubbed the remembrance ceremonies for the 20th anniversary of theDieppe raid in 1962 and the 50th anniversary ofVimy Ridge in 1967 as he claimed he was too busy to attend; by contrast theGermanophile de Gaulle always found time for remembrance ceremonies involving German sacrifices in the world wars as Germany was a fellow would-be world power, meaning that German sacrifices to subjugate France were worthy of the respect and admiration of the French people in a way that Canadian sacrifices to liberate them were not.[44][editorializing]Marcel Cadieux, the undersecretary of state at the CanadianMinistry of External Affairs from 1964-1970, often wrote in his diary about de Gaulle's obsessive hatred of Canada and his willingness to break international law by meddling in the internal affairs of Canada.[45] From 1963 onward, a major concern for theRoyal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) was monitoring the SDECE agents who were supporting Quebec separatism by handing over bags of cash to separatists, and the RCMP viewed the French embassy in Ottawa much like the Soviet embassy; namely as a den of spies working for a hostile foreign power.[46]
During theNigerian Civil War of 1967-70, the SDECE supportedBiafra by supplying the Biafrans with weapons and mercenaries as de Gaulle wanted to break up Nigeria and have oil-rich Biafra in the French sphere of influence.[47] Furthermore, Nigeria, like Canada, was, also, a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic federation that was a product of theBritish Empire, giving de Gaulle another reason to want to see Nigeria broken up.[48] The SDECE hiredBob Denard, a French mercenary who usually fought for France inFrançafrique (France's sphere of influence in its former African colonies), and company to fight for Biafra.[49] In the fall of 1968, the SDECE hiredRolf Steiner, a German mercenary who had once served in the French Foreign Legion, who together with 4,000 of his men left for Nigeria on a French ship from Lisbon to Libreville, Gabon, from where they were flown into Biafra on French planes.[50] The SDECE often smuggled arms into Biafra onRed Cross planes that were supposed to be bringing food and medical supplies for the starving Ibos as the Federal Nigerian Army used starvation as a weapon to break Biafra.[51]
In 1970, PresidentGeorges Pompidou appointed the ComteAlexandre de Marenches SDECE chief with orders to clean up the agency.[52] Marenches described SDECE in 1970 as being more alike to an organized crime racket than an intelligence agency, writing: "Some agents were running drugs and guns; others were engaged in kidnapping, murder and the settling of the most bloody scores".[53] Marenches severed the links with the SAC (which was finally dissolved in 1982 after the SAC murdered a police officer and his family in 1981), fired half of SDECE's 1,000 employees, made the SDECE more professional and less politicised, changed the focus from assassinating enemies of the republic to intelligence gathering, and modernized the procedures for intelligence collecting and analysis.[54] Marenches is generally regarded as the most able of the SDECE directors, and the man who saved the agency from itself, turning what had been an thuggish outfit designed to murder enemies of the state into a more professional intelligence agency.[55] Marenches also restored the ties to the CIA that de Gaulle had broken off, and in 1975 the SDECE worked with the CIA and the government of Zaire to support theNational Liberation Front of Angola during theAngolan Civil War.[56] At same time, the SDECE continued with its traditional work of ensuring that the countries inFrançafrique stayed in the French sphere of influence.Ali Soilih, the president of theComoros, had proven hostile to French influence after taking power in a 1975 coup, and in 1978 the SDECE hiredBob Denard to stage a coup.[57] On the night of 13 May 1978, Denard and 42 other mercenaries landed onGrande Comore, almost effortlessly annihilated the Comorian forces and by the morning the Comoros was theirs.[58] President Soilih was high on marijuana and naked in his bed together with three nude teenage schoolgirls watching a pornographic film, when Denard kicked in the door to his room to inform him that he was no longer president and had Soilih taken out to be "shot while trying to escape".[59] In 1981, when the SocialistFrançois Mitterrand became president, he fired Marenches whom he viewed as too conservative and appointedPierre Marion, the former CEO ofAir France as the new intelligence chief of what was renamed theDirection Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (General Directorate of External Security) in 1982.[60]
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