The scene is unimaginable today. On June 2, 1996, Chad was in turmoil. The country has just voted in its first pluralist election by universal suffrage. General Déby, who took power by force six years earlier, is a candidate to remain in office. A few hours after the counting, Jean-Pierre Augé, DGSE agent, was “the first foreigner informed of the unofficial results of the vote”. It occupies an essential place in the French intelligence system on the continent.
As a member of the SR/N, the Black Africa sector – as they said at the time – of “the Box”, he is special advisor to the Chadian president, to the point that his office adjoins that of the head of state. It is therefore he who telephones France to inform of his victory with 60% of the votes. These confidential results are received with circumspection by Paris, which asks him to convince Déby to organize a second round. “His victory will only be more credible, particularly in the eyes of the international community. Do you understand?” his leaders told him. With a lump in his stomach, Augé complies. Déby leaves a long silence, then accepts. “In Chad, today, France-Africa is very much alive, and my position as special advisor is fully justified!” says Jean-Pierre Augé in his book, Farewell Africa. Memoirs of an officer from the Black Africa sector of the DGSE (Mareuil ed.). A month later, Idriss Déby became the first Chadian president elected by universal suffrage.
Loss of influence
With his Memoirs, Colonel Augé not only recounts a personal journey. We follow with delight the dive of this officer, formerly of the Foreign Legion, behind the scenes of the DGSE in the 1980s and 1990s, with, as a bonus, some revelations. We learn, for example, that a pretty French and Russian-speaking spy was fired from La Boîte after the DST revealed her intimate relationship… with a KGB agent. We discover that the Iranian wife of a law professor close to the PS was spying for Tehran. We note, not completely surprised, that the emissaries of the French presidential candidates did not hesitate, then, to fill their suitcases with a few undeclared notes from African places of power.
Above all, the ex-secret agent gives his answer to the question that everyone is asking today: how did France lose its influence in Africa? By dismantling the Black Africa service of the DGSE at the beginning of the 2000s, responds hollowly the soldier, who was its head. By continuously plowing the continent, the secret service ensured an unrivaled level of information, Augé demonstrates throughout the 336 pages of his book. The parallel between the departure of the spies and the recent French setbacks in several countries on the continent, the Central African Republic, Burkina Faso, Mali or Niger, in particular, is never explained, always suggested. But how can we not think about it? The DGSE was unable to predict the putsches of recent years, organized by intermediate strata of the armies concerned. A sociology that the specialized agents of the intelligence agency knew perfectly…
The story of a twilight
For more than fifteen years, Jean-Pierre Augé was able to closely analyze the power games between Paris and African countries. At the end of the Cold War, the continent was an essential terrain for intelligence services. “When I was admitted in 1986, production in the Africa sector represented 20% of all that in the service,” the former soldier tells L’Express. The DGSE does everything that the diplomats at the Quai d’Orsay cannot do. This is to ensure a “permanent, secure and discreet link” between African capitals and the French executive. Secret agents plow the ground, know African societies perfectly, provide services, and ask for them. Spies mainly occupy “liaison and intelligence positions” (PLR) in the presidential palaces, France’s real secret weapon in Africa.
“The interest of these posts was, through a simple phone call, to pass messages that it would have been inappropriate to have transmitted by an ambassador, Jean-Pierre Augé explains to us. You see the French ambassador asking Idriss Déby to organize a second round? It’s impossible!” A personal request from an African leader, unspeakable in front of a diplomat? The DGSE takes care of this. A suggestion that Paris cannot accept in public? The secret service is mandated. Through this discreet channel, a special relationship is formed and continued. It’s difficult, when reading the work, not to see in it also a criticism of the action of the Quai d’Orsay, too far from the field, too worldly no doubt. Often presented, as in Chad, as “close to the opposition”, certain diplomats struggle to establish relationships of trust with heads of state. Augé also criticizes them for their general attitude towards the continent: “For a reason that escapes me, Africa has been seen for a very long time at the Quai d’Orsay as a secondary zone. It is less prestigious than Washington, that the ‘Europe.” A lack of interest long compensated by the DGSE. But not anymore.
Because Africa Farewell also tells of a twilight. Changing times. Increasingly divergent conceptions of the relations between France and its former colonies are affecting French power. The “liaison and intelligence posts” gradually appear more and more anachronistic. The socialists coming to power claim, first of all, to condition French economic and financial support on the promotion of democracy. New turnaround upon Chirac’s arrival at the Elysée. Linked to the old relays of the French right in Africa, the new president relies on the indescribable Jacques Foccart. The man resorts “readily to plots and coups”, having at his disposal, writes Augé, “almost unlimited hidden funds” and “barbouzes and mercenaries”. In the eyes of the former secret agent, these sulfurous networks contribute to the degradation of the French image. The spirit of predation is evident, including on the economic level.
The DGSE divided
Foccart’s death in 1997 marked the end of the France-Africa “historic channel”. A world disappears, relations between Paris and the continent deteriorate. When France intervenes, it is more “to ensure the security of its compatriots” than to “influence the future” of countries shaken by crises, says Augé. At the DGSE, posts in the presidential palaces are closing one after the other. The French presidency no longer wants to be accused of interference. Parallel networks of Françafrique, linked to business circles or Corsican networks close to Charles Pasqua, are eating into the space left by the service. “Business took precedence over politics,” sighs Augé. “If you knew the number of former officers or personalities interested in money who hung around the presidencies… It was quite astonishing.”
Françafrique is living its last years. France-Africa too. Before his arrival at the Elysée a year later, Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, indicated in 2006 in a speech in Cotonou in Benin that he wanted to “get rid of [la relation franco-africaine] networks from another time.” “The normal functioning of political and diplomatic institutions must prevail over the unofficial circuits which have done so much harm in the past,” he says. “Always the same refrain rehashed since 2007 by the French executive”, regrets Augé.
Strained relations, rising anti-French sentiment… The former secret agent harshly judges French action in Africa since the closure of the specialized sector of the DGSE. His observation is that of total abandonment. As if, rather than sorting the wheat from the chaff, we had preferred to destroy everything. “Who can believe that twenty years after its death, France-Africa is still responsible for the failures of France’s African policy, the contours of which no one has really understood since the end of Jacques Chirac’s presidential mandate?” he asks, convinced that a clearer partnership, without economic predation but in a spirit of mutual trust, would have been possible.
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