Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...evening of Sept. 27, 1985, at the climax of the Greenpeace scandal, General Rene Imbot, a square-jawed French army officer who had just been appointed chief of the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, France's overseas intelligence agency, went on television with a startling pronouncement. "To my profound stupefaction," he said, "I have discovered a malignant attempt to destabilize our secret services, I would say even, to destroy our secret services!" Asked to clarify this, Imbot replied, "I won't say any more about it. I am chief of the secret services...
More remarkable than the outburst was the fact that after a few days of bewilderment, politicians and the press simply dropped the matter. To this day, the French parliament and public remain blithely in the dark about it. Imagine William Casey going on television to proclaim that the CIA was being dangerously subverted in the Iran arms deal -- and having the U.S. press and public let it go at that...
...that Europeans lack for scandals. Last week, for example, allegations resurfaced that a French company, with possible government knowledge, had spirited artillery shells to Iran from 1983 to 1986. But it is rare for a government to be clapped in political irons because of foreign policy subterfuge. Rather, scandals have their own uniquely national styles...
...France the scandal specialty for years has been covert mayhem committed by barbouzes, shadowy secret government agents with false beards or other disguises. The gem of these was surely the Greenpeace affair of 1985, in which two teams of French secret service frogmen blew up a trawler belonging to the environmental organization Greenpeace in Auckland harbor. The resulting international uproar shook Francois Mitterrand's Socialist government and forced the sacking of its intelligence chief and the resignation of its Defense Minister. Unlike Iranscam, however, that was the extent of it. Parliament never pursued it further. Indeed, the two French agents...
...action was the latest setback for Khashoggi, a key middleman in U.S. arms sales to Iran. French police confiscated his DC-9 aircraft earlier this month. The arms dealer's growing financial woes, which stem in part from the failure of grandiose real estate and development schemes, seem certain to cause further cutbacks in a sybaritic life-style that once earned Khashoggi a reputation as the world's richest...