Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...days. At his weekly Cabinet meeting, Mitterrand asked questions about the Greenpeace affair and furiously turned to Hernu, whose responsibilities included overseeing the secret services. "I want to know," said Mitterrand. "I want to know." Next day the President sent a letter to Premier Laurent Fabius noting that French newspapers and magazines were uncovering "new elements that we cannot evaluate because of the absence of information from the appropriate services." It was a strange plea. Mitterrand was, in effect, asking his own government to supply information the press had already published. He ended the letter with a demand for action...
...weeks the French press has steadily stripped away the credibility of the government, which had firmly denied any responsibility for the attack on the Rainbow Warrior, in which a Greenpeace photographer lost his life. In its first hasty search for culprits, the government had appointed as special investigator Bernard Tricot, a respected former chief of staff for President Charles de Gaulle. Tricot's report, completed in 17 days, revealed only a murky picture of French spies trying to learn about Greenpeace's plans for a floating protest against France's nuclear tests on the Pacific atoll of Mururoa this autumn...
...possibility of a cover-up at the highest levels of government spurred the press into action. French newspapers and weeklies vied with one another to dig up detailed and colorful accounts of the operation against the Rainbow Warrior. It was inconceivable, Le Monde claimed, that Vice Admiral Lacoste, the foreign espionage chief, would have acted without orders. Among those who might have authorized the attack or allowed it to happen, the paper said, were Lacoste's superiors: General Jean-Michel Saulnier, Mitterrand's personal chief of staff when the surveillance scheme was conceived; General Jeannou Lacaze, then overall armed forces...
...moment the scandal exploded last week, Mitterrand's government clung to the findings of the Tricot report. But doubts were already growing within the Cabinet and the Socialist Party. Le Monde, among others, charged that the true saboteurs of the Rainbow Warrior were neither the jailed pair of French agents nor the three-man crew of the spy yacht Ouvea, which allegedly had been sent from the French territory of New Caledonia to back up the operation. The real hitmen, claimed Le Monde, were two unidentified frogmen, probably from France's underwater demolition training base in Corsica, who were supplied...
Within the government, Hernu alone denied the revelations, expressing "indignation" at what he called "a campaign of calumny against the French military." He insinuated that the campaign was part of a foreign plot against France's nuclear ambitions. Said Hernu: "I know well that in the shadow zones of this affair there is malice." Hernu pledged that if he had been "disobeyed or lied to," then the government would be asked to draw the proper conclusions...