When, in 2010, Maurice Dufresse published his memoirs of a quarter of a century working with in French intelligence, 25 Ans Dans les Services Secrets (‘25 Years in the Secret Services’), it prompted a judicial and administrative backlash against him that was unprecedented in the history of the French publishing business, despite the numerous previous memoirs published by spymasters and special service chiefs.
Dufresse is the former head of the technical support department of the French foreign intelligence service, the DGSE - a sort of real-life Gallic equivalent to Ian Fleming’s fictional ‘Q Branch’ within Britain’s MI6. As such, Dufresse had at his disposal 400 military and civilian personnel and a yearly budget of 61 million euros, all in the service of providing the best technology for the French intelligence operations around the world.
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He joined the DGSE, beginning in counter-espionage, after serving ten years in the French navy where he had the rank of officer. He ended his career in the intelligence agency in the post head of the technical support department, forced to step down after coronary artery bypass surgery in 2003 - although his official retirement from public service came in 2009.
In 2010, under the pseudonym Pierre Siramy, he published 25 Ans Dans les Services Secrets, which is a mixture of anecdotal memoirs and a critique of the functioning of the DGSE, co-written with Laurent Léger, an investigative journalist with Charlie Hebdo magazine.
The legal procedure against Dufresse began in April 2010, one month after the publication of the book, when then-defence minister Hervé Morin filed several complaints against Dufresse, his co-author and his publishing house, all relating to the violation of the secrecy of national defence.
A judicial investigation was opened into “violation of national defence secrets” and “violation of professional secrecy”, with the domestic intelligence agency, the DCRI, (now renamed the DGSI), appointed to carry out the investigation under the management of a magistrate.
On June 8th 2010, DCRI officers searched Dufresse’s home and seized his computer and a number of CD-Roms for examination. Apart from several different versions of the book, and correspondence with Dufresse’s co-author Laurent Léger, the DCRI found a total of 381 documents that were interpreted as potentially sensitive. The DGSE was asked to assess the documents, and reported that 63 of them were officially classified as secret when they were first created, and that some could still have been classified in June 2010. However, the DGSE did not identify the documents in question.
In its assessment of the documents, the DGSE told the investigation that there was a “compromising of national defence secrecy” in the fact that Dufresse held them “at his private home, after the definitive ceasing of his [professional] functions, which means without any legitimate title and in irregular conditions”.
Importantly, the same could be argued of General Philippe Rondot, a senior figure in French intelligence who had worked for both the domestic intelligence agency (when it was called the DST), and subsequently the DGSE. Rondot’s home apartment was searched by police in April 2006, four months after his retirement, in connection with the so-called 'Clearstream affair' centering on huge secret bribes paid in the sale of French frigates to Taiwan. During their search, the police officers discovered that Rondot possessed a significant number of classified documents in a safe in his home. However, the retired general never became the subject of legal action, nor even public criticism, for compromising national defence secrecy.
For five years, Dufresse has been placed under a particularly harsh form of judicial supervision, a constraining legal status broadly similar to restrictive bail conditions, the terms of which are decided by a magistrate in cases of suspicion of a serious crime. In the case of Dufresse, this also barred him from publicly discussing his case.
The judicial supervision is to last as long as the prosecution of Dufresse continues. The first of the cases against him was heard in June 2012, when Dufresse, his co-author Laurent Léger and his publishing house, Flammarion, appeared in court on charges of “revealing the identity of a public servant whose mission requires respect of anonymity”. This referred to two full names of DGSE directors which featured in the book.
But the full names in question – those of the DGSE’s general inspection chief, Georges Touchais, and that of its head of intelligence analysis, Patrick Perrichon – had already appeared in the press and official publications (not least in the Journal Officiel, the official gazette of the French administration and government, when the one and the other was awarded the Légion d’honneur).
“When this book came out, lightening struck Mr Dufresse in a very brutal manner,” Dufresse’s lawyer, Renaud Le Gunehec, told the court. “A complaint lodged by the [defence] minister, a house search, a helicopter to photograph his house, and held for questioning in [Paris suburb] Levallois[-Perret] in the building of [domestic intelligence agency] the DCRI, despite a fragile state of health.”
In their verdict delivered in September 2012, the court magistrates found all three defendants not guilty. But round two began last month, when the same Paris court on July 2nd heard the charges against Dufresse relating to his alleged compromising of national defence secrecy.
DGSE 'depends upon politicians' intentions, noble or not'
For reasons of his poor health, Dufresse, now aged 60, appeared before the Paris court in July via a video conference link from the Normandy town of Coutances, close to Saint-Lô where he now lives. According to intelligence staff cited during the hearing, Dufresse’s book revealed important professional secrets. The prosecution has called for Dufresse to be given a two-month suspended jail sentence and a fine of 5,000 euros. A verdict is due to be delivered on September 16th.
“I am accused of having revealed national defence secrets,” Dufresse wrote on his Facebook page, “I dumbly ask which. They answer ‘we cannot tell you, that’s covered by defence secrecy’”.
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25 Ans Dans les Services Secrets notably attracted the wrath of General Yves Mathian, a former DGSE technical director, who complained that Dufresse “uncovers everything about the service, which he criticises,” and that his “strongly exaggerated” criticism, which was “out of context” gave “a bad image of the management and hierarchy” of the DGSE. “What is written in the book reflects in no way the reality of the service today, the descriptions are totally surpassed, knowing that the author left the service in 2003,” Mathian, who now works in the private sector, declared.
Another DGSE director, André Le Mer, described the book as “detestable”.
“This book delivers a bad image of the service which appears entangled in political affairs and internal struggles,” testified General Dominique Champtiaux, who served as chief-of-staff to former DGSE chief Pierre Brochand, who took up the post one year before Dufresse left the technical support department in late 2003.
A statement by a ‘protected witness’ – someone who is judged to have legitimate grounds to testify anonymously – declared that it was “totally unacceptable on the part of a former member of the service to unveil the methods used in the handling of a source”, adding: “This book breaches all the engagements made by a public servant having belonged to the service. It should never have been published.”
A statement by another ‘protected witness’ told the investigation that “it is the first time that a book so detailed about our place [the DGSE] has come out”, and deplored that ‘it is the tumbling of all the values that we have been instilled with”. The male DGSE employee added: “Even once left, we never quit the service.”
In reality, Dufresse’s book is a critical assessment of the management of certain affairs - including the case of the murders of seven French Trappist monks in Tibhirine in Algeria, and the investigations into suspicions that former president Jacques Chirac held a secret bank account in Japan – and an attack on what he calls a “virtually inoperative control” of the service’s actions and the pretence of a parliamentary monitoring of its activities.
Dufresse writes: “More than any other administration, a secret service should be the object of rigorous surveillance, and not only because it engages public funds, but because the DGSE remains the only administration that can exonerate itself from law and lead clandestine operations.” He cites the scandal of the sinking of the Greenpeace boat Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour in 1985, and the failed attempt in 2003 to rescue Franco-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt who was held for six years by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla movement. “The failures that the [DGSE] House notched up over the years have the most often [been due to] the ludicrous orders given by espionage-o-crats who lost the sense of reality in the field,” Dufresse wrote. “With the measure of my years spent at the service of the DGSE, I feel able to demonstrate that its high command depends strictly upon the intentions of politicians, noble or not.”
But those who argue that Dufresse should, duty-bound, have kept an absolute secrecy concerning his knowledge of the workings of the DGSE appear, or pretend, to ignore the existence of a catalogue of books previously published by leading and lesser French intelligence and special services officers. These include books by Alain Chouet (Au cœur des services spéciaux), Pierre Martinet (Un agent sort de l’ombre), Jean-Pierre Pochon (Les Stores rouges), Pierre Marion (Mémoires de l’ombre), Jean-Pierre Lenoir (L'État trafiquant), Yves Bonnet (Mémoires d’un patron du contre-espionnage), Alexandre de Marenches (Dans le secret des princes), Marcel Chalet (Les Visiteurs de l’ombre), Paul Paillole (Services spéciaux 1935-1945).
It is not the first time that Dufresse, who was otherwise highly considered by senior directors of the DGSE, has angered the organisation’s hierarchy, even if it has become the most controversial. In the summer of 2008, before he retired, Dufresse was reprimanded by General Bertrand Ract-Madoux, chief of staff to the DGSE head Pierre Brochand, after Dufresse wrote a series of articles about the intelligence world, entitled ‘Voyage en barbouzerie’ (Voyage in Spookland), for French satirical website Backchich.info. Dufresse will be no doubt hoping this latest, five-year voyage finally comes to an end with the verdict of the Paris court magistrates in September.
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- The French version of this article is available here.
English version by Graham Tearse