WASHINGTON, April 28 (UPI) -- The secret services of Europe are not accustomed to the high and controversial political profile which has long been the unhappy fate of America's CIA and FBI. But with the inquiries into the pre-war intelligence on Iraq provided to the British government by MI6, and the probes into the secret assistance provided to their American allies by German BND officials in Baghdad, the curtain of secrecy is lifting.
In France, thanks to the way the World War II Resistance and Charles De Gaulle's Free France operations from London inevitably mixed politics and secret work so closely together, that curtain has seldom been altogether closed. But the latest scandal over the Clearstream affair has opened extraordinary new vistas onto the venom and ruthless power plays and character assassinations that besmirch French political life.
The affair began in the summer of 2004, when French magistrates were sent anonymously a letter and CD purporting to show that a number of senior French politicians and top executives in Airbus and the EADS defense group held secret and illegal accounts with the Luxembourg-based bank Clearstream International.
General Philippe Rondot, legendary head of the DGSE intelligence service (akin to the CIA) and Bousquet de Florian, head of the DST secret service (more like the FBI), began to make inquiries about the list, which was soon found to be a forgery.
President Jacques Chirac initially thought this to be an American plot to destabilize France. But Nicolas Sarkozy, current favorite to be Chirac's replacement as conservative candidate in next year's presidential election, suspected that it was a plot to disgrace him since his name was prominent on the list of account holders.
Sarkozy, who has filed a civil lawsuit on the matter, also suspects that his arch political rival, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, was playing a murky role. And Sarkozy demanded in a meeting with Villepin and de Florian that his name be publicly cleared.
But the plot thickened as the intelligence services began to hunt 'le corbeau' (the crow), the shadowy person behind the forged CD. Suspicion fell on Prime Minister de Villepin's close friend, Jean-Louis Gergorin, a top executive at EASDS, which was undergoing its own power struggle that involved the future of Airbus and the French (and wider European) defense industry. Gergorin stoutly denies being 'le corbeau'.
Last month, the relentless magistrates searched the files of Defense Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie, after also searching the offices of the DGSE and of General Rondot, and of various Airbus and EADS figures. The magistrates are now reported in the French press to be about to search the offices of the prime minister, who is protesting his innocence of the whole affair and demanding a full inquiry.
But the prime minister, who claimed in a public statement Thursday never to have fingered Sarkozy in the matter, is now accused of being somewhat economical with the truth. The newspaper Le Monde published Friday the contents of a note seized by the magistrates from General Rondot's office, which said of the General's meeting with the prime minister: "Enjeu politique: N. Sarkozy. Fixation sur N. Sarkozy (ref. conflit J. Chirac/N. Sarkozy)". (Political stakes: N. Sarkozy. Fixation on Sarkozy (reflects the conflict between Chirac and Sarkozy.)
Since other leading politicians, including the former Socialist Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Khan, are equally infuriated to have found their names on the forged Clearstream list, the whole of France's political class and its media are currently obsessed with the affair. There is much meat for them to chew over, from the identity of le corbeau to the political implications in this bizarre period of the end of the Chirac regime, and for the effect on European relations of what seems to have been a French plot to dominate the Franco-German EADS group and control Europe's defense industry.
The Clearstream affair may be too complex to catch the imagination of the French public, except to confirm them in their suspicion that their leaders and their spymasters seem to have a nasty habit of playing vicious and unscrupulous power games. But the latest opinion polls published in Paris-Match show Sarkozy beating all comers in next year's elections, and crushing Prime Minister de Villepin by a margin of 63:37 percent.
This may have less to do with the Clearstream affair than with Villepin's disastrous mishandling of the labor law reform, which saw massive and sometimes violent street demonstrations followed by a humiliating surrender by the government last month. And it may also reflect Sarkozy's most recent statement on the immigration issue, which is never far from the concerns of French voters.
"If some people are troubled by France, they should not hesitate to leave a country they do not love," Sarkozy said last weekend. This is close enough to the "Love it or leave it" slogan of the Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen to convince the anti-immigrant vote that Sarkozy, the tough minister of the interior, is on their side. (Sarkozy's political aides have reminded their man that back in the 1970s, Margaret Thatcher won enough right-wing votes to become prime minister with a similar statement in which she said "I understand the feelings of those who feel swamped by an alien culture.")
Sarkozy's main problem now is that the most alien culture of all for France's democracy has less to with immigrants than with the debilitating way in which plots and spies and moles and 'le corbeau' and the secret services and the money and ambitions of the defense industry have become damagingly embedded in the structure of French politics.
