A total of ten men, including an ex-senior civil servant and a former gendarme, were arrested across France early on the morning of Sunday June 24th. Some were arrested in the Paris region, others in the Gironde, Vienne and Charente départements (or counties) in south-west France and some on the island of Corsica. They are all from an far-right group called Action des Forces Opérationnelles (AFO) which was preparing attacks on Muslims in revenge for attacks by jihadists in France in recent years.
According to the television station LCI, which broke the news of the arrests, several firearms were found during searches by police officers. Meanwhile Mediapart understands that a secret laboratory for making explosives was found at the home of one of those arrested. It was the existence of this explosives lab that led to the wave of arrests in an investigation that has been going on for several months in the greatest secrecy.
The arrests are a tangible demonstration of what Mediapart revealed back on April 9th this year: that France's domestic intelligence agency the DGSI is worried about the resurgence of the far-right movement in the country. And that it had been keeping a close watch on “around 50 police officers, gendarmes and military personnel” because of their links with the “violent far-right”.
Since 2015 and the wave of bloody terrorist attacks in France, several self-defence groups have been set up to fight against the “Islamic danger” and to supplant the role of what they regard as a weak state, by getting ready to use violence ahead of what they see as a looming civil war. “Even if they remain embryonic in nature, these groups broadcast their desire to strike back and we're following this very closely,” one senior intelligence source said back in April in what was something of an understatement.
Mediapart understands that for several months now the DGSI and other intelligence services working for the interior and defence ministries have been investigating the activities of a group called Volontaires pour la France (VPF), and in particular its dissident branch whose members include gendarmes, special forces soldiers and members of the elite mountain infantry the Chasseurs Alpins.
The VPF was set up in mid-2015 but it only really got going after the Paris attacks of November 13th of that year – one of its founders lost a daughter in the attack on the Bataclan concert hall. Its aims are to “defend French identity” and to “fight against the Islamization of the country” and its membership includes around 50 soldiers and members of the forces of law and order.
When contacted by Mediapart at the start of April the group claim to have “close to 800 members, among them many retired soldiers, including a certain number of high-ranking officers and generals”. On its Facebook page the organisation insists that this fight must be carried out “only by all legal methods”.
But some members are more aggressive: in November 2015 one of them spoke about “fighting the Islamization of the country by concrete actions”. In July 2016 one young member said: “Prepare yourselves so that if the barricades go up it won't be the state who will deal with Islam”.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
An initial investigation by the DGSI in the summer of 2016 led the VPF to set itself up as an association. Since then the movement has draped itself in the trappings of legality. Its two figureheads put their photographs and CVs on the VPF website. Antoine Martinez is a retired air force general who lives in Nice on the Mediterranean coast, a self-professed “specialist in intelligence”. He is also chairman of the support committee for the retired general Christian Piquemal who had hit the headlines in February 2016 by being involved in an unauthorised protest at Calais against immigration policy. The former parachute regiment officer and one-time commander of the French Foreign legion was later acquitted but was removed from the official army lists, meaning that while he can keep the title of general he is now officially a civilian.
The second co-chairman of VPF is the former Member of the European Parliament for the far-right Front National (now 'Rassemblement National'), Yvan Blot, who claims in his profile to be a “former senior civil servant at the Ministry of the Interior in charge of terrorism issues”. This former FN member, who then joined the Mouvement National Républicain (MNR) run by former MP and MEP Bruno Mégret, was also the co-founder of the Club de l'Horloge ('The Clock Club'), a think tank that brought together senior civil servants from the Right and far right. The VPF told Mediapart in April that Blot is now “an advisor to the Valdai Discussion Club, which has close links to the Kremlin”.
On the VPF website it states that “Volunteers can learn, educate, study and train thanks to educational days, weekends or seminars organised by the organisation's managers and run by specialists in all areas”. In its email responding to Mediapart's questions, VPF insisted that it was “in no way a militia” nor was it “affiliated or associated with any political party”. The organisation concluded: “We are realistic and cautious mothers and fathers aware of the dangers and of the utopia of living together with a belligerent Islam, having already experienced them in external theatres of operation (Lebanon, Kosovo...).”
Enlargement : Illustration 2
In reality this veneer of respectability has caused internal frustrations and tension. The leaders' insistence on acting with full respect for the law, out of a fear of potential criminal proceedings, does not please all activists, some of whom are frustrated by the routine of association life and want to take direct action.
In the autumn of 2017 two VPF recruiters, Dominique Copain and Guy Sibra, set up a group called Action des Forces Opérationnelles (AFO), designed to carry out real clandestine operations. According to Mediapart's information, the two men are among the ten who are being held in custody. Sibra, who sells army surplus equipment and lives in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region of south-west France, used 'Richelieu' as his pseudonym.
Some senior figures in VPF later joined this new outfit, including Guy Boisson, who was in charge of the Hauts-de-France region of northern France for VPF, and Michel Herbreteau, who was the VPF representative in the Var département in the south. They apparently saw the new group as a revival of the old Gaullist militia Service d'Action Civique (SAC), created in 1960. However, Romain Petit, in charge of security issues for VPF, declined to move to AFO. Instead he set up a private security firm along with Gérard Hardy, the founder of Volontaires pour la France. Boisson, Hebreteau, Petit and Hardy are not involved in this series of arrests.
Action des Forces Opérationnelles (AFO) now sees itself as a VPF dissident movement and VPF members are not allowed to join it. The new group is very professional in the way it operates and members of the cell communicate via the encrypted message system Proton – whose Swiss-based servers send messages that are impossible to share with third parties – and respond to the orders of their “département commanders” who themselves take orders from their “regional commanders”.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
The group's first action was not of great consequence – the stocking of first aid pharmacy supplies in case of widespread confrontation – but points to the members' deep conviction as to the imminence of a civil war. This initiative can be explained by the presence in the group of representatives of the medical profession who are also linked to civilian security forces.
In an internal note that Mediapart has seen, the person in charge of training, who calls himself 'Garbo' and who is a non-commissioned officer in the gendarmerie at Mérignac Airport at Toulouse in south-west France, describes the list of items sent in the initiative. He says they are “first aid equipment” as defined in army first aid training, which are intended for “dealing with so-called hemorrhagic war wounds”. 'Garbo' also recently broadcast details about “self-defence training” which seeks to “offer solutions for clearing away rapidly someone who is in your personal space”.
More worryingly, in recent months Action des Forces Opérationnelles has been looking to stockpile arms and explosives in order to carry out direct actions. French intelligence services suspect that several arms dumps have been created among the eleven regions where this clandestine cell is present. The military police, the Direction du Renseignement et de la Sécurité de Défense (DRSD), has been observing several soldiers who belong to this group as part of their internal investigation into a break-in at air force base 125 in Istres near Marseille in September 2016. Several dozen pistols and rifles were taken. The crime remains unsolved and the weapons have not been recovered.
Traumatised soldiers back from Iraq and Afghanistan
The intelligence services alerted the authorities that AFO might become involved in direct violent action. In the autumn of 2017 the intelligence services had also warned more generally that the risk of seeing the “so-called far-right movement” resort to violent action had been “raised for the coming period”. In this context of plots and conflict on the far-right, the intelligence services were worried by the way that the VPF and the AFO were targeting members of the security services, adapting their message to attract their interest, and seeking to make the most of each new recruit from the gendarmerie or the army. These professionals are sought after both for their know-how in terms of maintaining law and order and their experience of security crackdowns.
So great was their concern that the intelligence services felt obliged to make several organisations and departments aware of the issue, including the different branches of the armed services, the police, gendarmerie, the customs and also the prison authorities. The aim was to improve the exchange of information about the officials under suspicion but also to send out a warning about recruiting any new police officer or soldier who had already been identified as being part of that movement. The “entryism” of the “violent far right” inside the security forces worries not just the DGSI but the regional intelligence network the Renseignements Rerritoriaux (RT) and the intelligence service covering Paris, the Direction du Renseignement de la Préfecture de Police (DRPP) de Paris.
Enlargement : Illustration 4
In March this year a senior figure in antiterrorism told Mediapart: “The far-right is organising itself in quite a worrying way. And it's true that we're finding lots of soldiers or former soldiers.” A former intelligence service officer says: “It's often soldiers who've returned from Afghanistan or Iraq. They come back traumatised, they need to be watched so that they don't continue their individual combat. Some create networks on social media or get radicalised between themselves, others take action.”
The example of Action des Forces Opérationnelles recalls the neo-Nazi network that was found inside the Belgian armed forces in 2006. Seventeen people, ten of them soldiers, were arrested at the time. Their leader belonged to the Flemish group Bloed, Bodem, Eer en Trouw (BBET) or 'Blood, Soil, Honour and Loyalty'. A number of weapons, explosives and detonators were found during searches.
Nor has France been immune in the past to such cases. In 2013 the mother of a French Air Force sergeant, Christophe Lavigne, who served two missions in Afghanistan, contacted the police .She was worried that her 23-year-old son was becoming radicalised. The former airman was arrested by the DGSI, who suspected him of planning to attack a mosque near Lyon in eastern France. A year earlier Lavigne had thrown a Molotov cocktail at a mosque in Libourne in south-west France. He was later convicted of “damaging a place of worship as part of a terrorist enterprise”.
On March 24th, 2013, six neo-fascist activists were also arrested near the university campus at Talence on the outskirts of Bordeaux in south-west France, armed with knuckledusters and pickaxe handles. They had just written some anti-immigrant graffiti. Among the group was a former officer in the Ministry of Defence's security agency the Direction de la Protection et de la Sécurité de la Défense, a Colonel Mochel, whose role in the incident still remains unclear. There have been similar incidents at Arras in the north of the country, and at Annecy in the east where some members of the 27th battalion of Chasseurs Alpins were implicated in a fire at a mosque.
During the protests against the planned law on 'marriage for all' in 2013, some radicalised soldiesr had already shown their intent. The collective group Printemps Français had sought to occupy the Champs-Élysées, an idea that was encouraged by Philippe Darantière, a former parachute regiment officer who later worked in economic intelligence. Meanwhile a far-right publication had called on leading Catholics – such as Bruno Dary, former military governor of Paris - to effect a coup d'État.
In fact, after the killings by Mohammed Merah, who in 2012 murdered three soldiers in Montauban and Toulouse in south-west France – the first time since the Algerian War and the abuses of the Organisation Armée Secrète or OAS that French soldiers on leave had been killed inside French borders – the far-right changed its propaganda inside the parachute regiment bases in the south west of the country. Several intelligence reports have noted attempts at recruitment inside the 1st Parachute regiment in Toulouse and the 3rd Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment in Carcassone. That was where a soldier, Victor L., had served before quitting the army and joining the ranks of the far-right Bloc Identitaire.
Today the traditional Catholic organisation Institut Civitas is carrying out a thorough attempt to attract supporters in certain Catholic military circles. A key figure in this has been General Dominique Chrissement, who before his retirement was the chief of the inter-service general staff in charge of managing emergencies in the Paris region. Civitas takes inspiration from Cité Catholique, an old traditional Catholic organisation that supplied the OAS with a number of its leading figures. At the time of the Algerian War, Cité Catholique had organised cells in several French military units based in Algeria with the help of the military's own psychological warfare section, the 5th Bureaux, and the military's psychological actions service.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter