Iraq agreed a payment of 1 million dollars to fund the 1974 presidential election campaign of the late French socialist leader François Mitterrand, according to a document drawn up by the secret services of the former West Germany and obtained by Mediapart and German weekly Der Spiegel, who are partner members of the journalistic consortium European Investigative Collaborations (EIC).
The document, a summary report delivered to the West German chancellery, provides further evidence indicating the close secret links between Iraq and French political parties and leaders of both Left and Right over a period of several decades.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The May 1974 report was a regular weekly information summary prepared for the chancellery by the BND, the West German intelligence services, in which the then-BND deputy director Dieter Blötz refers to the interception of a message “of May 2nd 1974 from the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Iraqi embassy in Paris for the payment of one million dollars for the electoral campaign of Mitterrand”.
The BND document, which was prepared shortly after the reported interception of the message, added that the information had been passed on to the head of the French secret services.
The reported date of the message sent by the Iraqi foreign affairs ministry to its embassy in Paris was just three days before the first round of France’s 1974 presidential elections, when the frontrunners were Mitterrand, representing a broad coalition of the Left, and the centre-right candidate Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Both men garnered the most votes and went through to a second-round playoff two weeks later, on May 19th 1974, which was won by Giscard d’Estaing.
Mitterrand was to have his revenge in the next elections in 1981, when he became France’s first socialist president and went on to serve two seven-year terms in office.
It remains uncertain whether the French intelligence services acted on the information passed on to them in early May 1974 by their West German colleagues, or whether the outgoing French government was informed. The French political scene had been unsettled by the death one month of Gaullist President Georges Pompidou, which had prompted the election.
Few potential witnesses to any such transaction within the Socialist Party remain alive today. A number of people from different political camps who were active in French diplomatic circles at the time have told Mediapart, speaking on condition of anonymity, that illegal funding of French political parties by African and Middle East dictatorships appeared then to be a common occurrence. They concurred that the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who became president of Iraq in 1979, provided secret financial support for both the French Left and Right and, later, even the far-right, and notably so during the 1980s.
One source said Iraq became one of the principal funding sources from the Middle East region for French political parties, along with Saudi Arabia, Libya and Israel.
“It is possible that there were propositions from the Iraqis,” said veteran socialist Pierre Joxe, 83, who served as treasurer of the French Socialist Party from 1979 to 12981. “Intermediaries presented themselves. But it seems to me improbable that that was concretised.”
Links between Bagdad and the French Left were already established before the spring of 1974. Within the Socialist Party was a notably pro-Iraq leftist group called the CERES (for ‘Centre of socialist studies, research and education) among the ranks of which was Jean-Pierre Chevènement, who later served thrice as a minister under the presidency of François Mitterrand, and who resigned his post of defence minister in January 1991 in protest at French military involvement in the first Gulf War. He did not respond to Mediapart’s request for an interview.
“If their efforts mainly targeted the Gaullists, the Iraqis also looked at the Left,” wrote French journalists Claude Angeli and Stéphanie Mesnier in their 1992 book Notre allié Saddam (Our ally Saddam). “Even before the creation of the Socialist Party in 1971, the young socialists within the CERES, notably Jean-Pierre Chevènement and Didier Motchane, opened up relations with the Ba’ath party. They would develop them over 20 years.”
The ruling Iraqi Ba’ath Party, formed from the Arab Socialist Ba’ath party, was regularly invited to the French Socialist Party’s congress meetings. In parallel, French political delegations were invited to Iraq. In their book, Angeli and Mesnier recount that, during the 1970s, “the ambition of the Iraqis was to create in France a diverse network of friendships to facilitate their relationships with the political actors, present and future, as well as also the press”.
This strategy of developing ties with the government in place and also the opposition is illustrated by the West German intelligence document obtained by Mediapart and its EIC partner Der Spiegel. For in 1974, François Mitterrand appeared to be on the threshold of the presidency. In the second-round playoff of the elections on May 19th that year, he lost by the narrowest of margins, garnering 49.19% of votes cast compared to Giscard d’Estaing’s 50.81%.
At the time, political party funding in France was largely unregulated or investigated. “Be careful not to employ an anachronism and not to judge by the standards of today,” commented a former French diplomat, speaking on condition his name was withheld, who during the 1970s served in a post in the Arab region. “Lots of suitcases circulated during those years. For political parties, every means of finding funds were valid.”
When France became a co-belligerent in the Iraq-Iran war
The moment when the West Germans intercepted the message from Baghdad to its embassy in Paris corresponded with the beginning of a golden age in French-Iraqi relations. Under the presidency of Georges Pompidou, France’s relationship with Iraq had already blossomed, and his successor, Giscard d’Estaing, would continue with the Gaullist rapprochement with the Arab world.
Iraq’s lobbyists had been very active in France since the 1970s. According to Alain Chenal, who was at the time a member of the Socialist Party’s international relations committee, the Iraqis knew “how to present a particular approach to each of the political families”.
Giscard’s first prime minister (and political rival), Jacques Chirac, developed close ties with Saddam Hussein, then Iraq’s vice-president and government strongman before replacing Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr as president in 1979. Saddam and Chirac met on several occasions between 1974 and 1976 (Chirac resigned from his post in an open split with Giscard in July 1976), when several major contracts were signed between Paris and Baghdad, notably for the construction of a nuclear power plant and the sale of Mirage fighter aircraft at a time of unprecedented economic and industrial growth in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the Ba’athist regime in power since a 1968 coup, characterised by its nationalist and secular policies, and its autonomous positioning with regard to the Soviet Union, was largely viewed with benevolence by Western governments. The elimination of Saddam’s rivals and its violent policies towards certain communities, notably the Kurds, prompted little official disquiet in France.
The economic interests of both France and Iraq were interlinked in a series of contracts including weapons sales, nuclear energy, the construction industry and also the favourable price of Iraqi oil. One former senior French foreign ministry civil servant who was against strong ties with Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the benefits at the time for France as being “a very, very good deal”.
But the close relations appeared potentially threatened with the election of Mitterrand in 1981. He had criticised France’s ties with the Baghdad regime during his election campaign, and was keen to distance France from involvement in the war between Iraq and Iran that had begun in September 1980. In the end, any such Iraqi fears were unfounded.
The former French foreign ministry official recalled an inter-ministerial meeting called at the French prime minister’s office shortly after Mitterrand’s election. “The conversation concluded with the fact that we were so involved with Iraq, that the country owed us so much money, that we should continue,” he said. “We couldn’t go into reversal.”
So it was that during his presidency, Mitterrand would change nothing in the relations with Baghdad of his predecessor, even becoming the most indulgent of any Western leader towards Saddam Hussein. Jean-Pierre Chevènement and others in government and the Socialist Party promoted the strategy, including Charles Hernu, defence minister before Chevènement, and markedly pro-Arab world foreign affairs minister, Claude Cheysson. The continuity with the policies of Mitterrand’s predecessors was also reinforced by Michel Jobert, a former foreign minister under Georges Pompidou who became foreign trade minister in the socialist government. Beyond economic considerations, Iraq was also considered to be a bulwark against the Islamic republic in Iran which was in place since the Shah was overthrown in 1979.
Under Mitterrand, France even found itself involved in helping Baghdad during the nine-year long Iraq-Iran war. In 1983, it loaned to Iraq five Super-Étendard fighter aircraft manned by French crews, making France a co-belligerent in the conflict. The move caused outcry among some in the French Socialist Party, including Lionel Jospin, who had taken over leadership of the party from Mitterrand after the latter became president.
French policy towards the Saddam Hussein regime would eventually change following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, when Mitterrand ordered French forces to join a UN-approved and US-led international military coalition to force an Iraqi retreat – a move which prompted the resignation of his then-defence minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, days after the combat began.
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- The French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse