Louis Caprioli and Michel Guérin embody a very particular type of statesman: those you meet in the frozen food section of the supermarket without ever suspecting that they hold a ton of secrets. With his beard-sweater-over-suit jacket combination and his laughing eye, the first could easily pass for a lecturer in history. The second, clean shaven, opted for an elegant caviar blue ensemble; only the red rosette on the left side, synonymous with the Legion of Honor, reveals that he does not exercise management control. As expected, these two jovial septuagenarians go completely unnoticed in the editorial staff of L’Express, which is not to surprise or even displease them, after a life spent cultivating absolute discretion. “Most of the time, people will never know that we saved their lives,” smiles Michel Guérin.
Listening to them, it is obvious: the secret binds its holders like siblings. Sometimes, the two former colleagues seem to forget you, all about their complicit memories of a life spent in state affairs: “Rondot, what year did he arrive again?” A simple impression, probably, as we are dealing with two professionals in human manipulation, whose self-control is second nature. For more than thirty years, they were secret agents within the Directorate of Territorial Surveillance (DST), the internal intelligence service, predecessor of the current DGSI, until occupying the highest positions there.
In Salinger’s eponymous novel, the hero, Holden Caulfield, imagines the job of “catcher in the heart”. This is to prevent children from falling off a cliff they are playing near. Michel Guérin and Louis Caprioli were, precisely, the “catchers in the heart” of French society. Except that they were chasing the perpetrators of the attacks. “We covered Palestinian terrorism, then state terrorism, Islamist terrorism, to arrive at what we call today jihadism,” summarizes Louis Caprioli, former deputy director in charge of anti-terrorism at the DST.
Imbroglio Abdallah
In April 1985, the policeman found himself at the center of a serious imbroglio between France and Algeria. The director of the secret service, Yves Bonnet, went to Algiers to negotiate the release of Sydney Peyrolles, a Frenchman kidnapped in Lebanon, against that of the revolutionary activist George Ibrahim Abdallah. Except that at the same time, Caprioli’s team discovered a cache of the Abdallah group in Paris with, inside, the weapon of two murders, that of an Israeli diplomat and that of the American military attaché in Paris . The market is canceled. “Politically, it was a problem! The minister never believed us, the director of the DST was fired. It was said that we had known about the cache for months. I see it as proof that we were working in the respect for the law and justice above all.”
Revelations like this, The DST on the front line of the war against terrorism (Mareuil Editions), the work that the two police officers co-signed with Jean-François Clair, who was deputy director of the DST for ten years, is teeming. Who knew that before Euro 2000, the networks of jihadist Adel Mechat were planning an attack against the French football team? “Terrorists seek maximum impact. Major sporting events are a natural objective for them,” explains Michel Guérin, former deputy director of antiterrorism at the DST, also the only one of the trio to have also worked within of the DGSI. One month before the Olympic Games, the reasoning remains relevant. From May 26 to June 8, 1998, that is to say two days before the start of the Football World Cup in France, intelligence agents arrested 64 members of a terrorist cell linked to the Algerian GIA, wishing to knock out the competition.
Dakar 2000
From January 2 to 16, 2000, the Paris-Dakar rally was suspended due to a threat of attack. The DST deciphered a conversation from Mokhtar Belmokhtar’s network: the Islamists mentioned unknown names. “The DST translator realizes that these names correspond to the players of the Algerian football team at the 1982 World Cup. Each name is linked to a number, the list actually corresponds to a telephone number. It is that’s how we discovered the threat”, reveals Michel Guérin.
If the three ex-leaders of the DST are putting their memories on paper today, it is as much to leave a trace as to correct the errors peddled for a long time in the press, not always informed of the exact facts, they say. . The book, for example, challenges the theory, disseminated at the time by Charles Pasqua, then Minister of the Interior, according to which the Algerian secret services were complicit in the GIA attacks in 1995. “I don’t believe it at all. “That Algerian intelligence had sources in the GIA is one thing, that it was complicit has nothing to do with it,” argues Louis Caprioli. “There are false things that were written by the media, now taken up by researchers. We wanted to correct them. And then, we wanted to leave a testimony,” continues Michel Guérin.
Rivalry with the RG
The work was reread by the DGSI, which saw no problem with it. The authors relied on their memories, and on those of members of the association of veterans of internal intelligence (Adari), which encourages its members to pass on their experience, so that the memory of counter-terrorism is perpetuated. This participation notably fuels interesting passages on the attacks linked to the Algerian war and the FLN networks in France. On the other hand, we will read relatively little about the activity of the OAS, and more generally about all Franco-French terrorist groups, such as the Corsican cells or Direct Action: the DST has always been kept away from such matters, for the benefit of the judicial police or general intelligence (RG). “Politicians thought that it was necessarily beneficial to have two specialized services rather than one. We all think that this was a mistake, which is why we welcomed the creation of the DGSI,” says Louis Caprioli.
Several times, politicians have given in to the temptation to create their own intelligence body. For the worse, say Caprioli, Clair, and Guérin, sarcastic about the amateurism of the “Elysée cell” desired by François Mitterrand during his first seven-year term, as well as that of Charles Pasqua’s entourage, which was known less: in 1986, the minister created a small cell around him which recruited a source in Palestinian terrorist groups… in fact an intelligence crook well known to the DST, never informed of the operation.
The DST on the front line of the war against terrorism develops the vision of the institution, which is why we will find little self-criticism there, particularly not on the two scandals to which its name is linked, it is true far removed from the fight against terrorism: the failed installation of microphones At Chained duck, in 1973, and the real-false passport entrusted to Yves Chalier, ex-ministerial advisor soon on the run, in 1986. “These two cases weighed on us, but I can tell you that on a daily basis, the DST was an extremely republican service “, pleads Michel Guérin.
The authors are more forthcoming about the attacks that the security services were unable to prevent, often carried out by an offshoot of Arab revolutionary organizations, in the 1970s and 1980s. For twenty years, the bête noire of French intelligence was called Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as Carlos, elusive leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, murderer of two DST inspectors in an apartment in the Latin Quarter, in 1975. “During this entire period, we were the only ones to be interested to Carlos, without the DST, he would never have been arrested,” argues Michel Guérin.
In August 1994, thanks to a tip from a “major foreign service”, the authors write, French intelligence officers arrested the terrorist in Khartoum, Sudan, without an extradition warrant. According to the historian Etienne Augris, author of Philippe Rondot, master spy (New World), it was General Rondot, advisor to the director of the DST, who himself supervised the operation in the Sudanese capital. A big name in French secret diplomacy to whom the three former French leaders address a “moved thought” in the acknowledgments of their book. “Among many things, General Rondot allowed us to get closer to the world of the Quai d’Orsay which was somewhat closed to us,” remembers Louis Caprioli.
Terrorist sources
The action of the senior military officer, in constant contact with Arab countries that are sometimes complacent, if not more, with regard to armed groups, tells the story of yesterday’s terrorism, supported by States in a word of a revolutionary order. A universe swept away by the irruption of jihadism. “But the mechanisms remain the same. We must have sources of intelligence, starting with human sources. There is no successful business without a human source,” explains Michel Guérin. In their recruitment of terrorist sources, the two specialists used to use the levers of money and “ego”, taking advantage of the rivalries within these groups. “But be careful, a source can turn against you. Some have paid for it with their lives. It’s very complicated to manage,” continues the former deputy director of the DST. Proof, according to the authors, of France’s expertise on jihadism, the CIA tasked the DST with founding an anti-Islamist intelligence alliance after September 11.
An action today continued by the DGSI, which continues to provide assistance in old cases. In April 2023, the Lebanese-Canadian Hassan Diab, related to the PFLP, was sentenced in his absence to life imprisonment for his participation in the attack on Rue Copernic, in 1980. In February 2024, the Paris Court of Appeal she confirmed the indictment of Abou Zayed, a Norwegian accused of having participated in the attack on rue des Rosiers, in 1982, as a member of the group known as Abou Nidal. In 2019, Yves Bonnet said he then signed an agreement with Abou Nidal, ensuring his networks free movement in France on the condition of not committing attacks there. Louis Caprioli assures that he will speak on the subject during the trial, if it takes place. There are memories which are first transmitted to justice.
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