Feature
The French connection
by Gordon Campbell
Helen Clark has kept the Americans at arm’s length over Iraq. So why is she now embracing the French over Ahmed Zaoui? How reliable is that evidence? Gordon Campbell talks to a former top Algerian counter-intelligence officer who reveals that he was personally involved in the campaign to discredit Zaoui.
If the French Security Service has furnished the SIS with its classified evidence against Ahmed Zaoui, then SIS director Richard Woods was our man in Paris at just the right time. Woods was New Zealand Ambassador to Paris between 1995 and 1999 – at the height of the conflict between France’s client military regime in Algiers, and the Islamic opposition forces. The mid to late 1990s is also the key period in the SIS case against the Algerian refugee Ahmed Zaoui, over his alleged activities in Europe.
These coincidences raise unsettling questions. During his four-year stint in Paris, did Woods make contacts with the French secret service? Has the SIS perspective on Zaoui been skewed by the contacts made by Woods during his
diplomatic posting? Once Zaoui arrived here, it is hard to believe that Woods would not have drawn on his formal and informal contacts in Paris for information. All in a day’s work perhaps – but in the process, has the government been captured by perceptions fed to them by the French secret service? In the name of an independent foreign policy, the Clark government has kept the Americans at arm’s length over Iraq – yet it seems more than willing to embrace the French over Algeria.
Relevant considerations, as we inch towards the review of the Zaoui case by SIS Inspector-General Laurie Greig. As Woods arrived in Paris in 1995, the most militant of the Islamic terrorist groups – the GIA – was rarely out of the headlines. Under its then-leader Djamel Zitouni, the GIA was responsible for several bloody massacres of Algerian citizens.
In addition, the GIA “kidnapped” a trio of French public servants in Algeria in 1993 – but this so-called “Thevenot affair” has since been revealed to be a fake kidnapping and rescue staged by the security services, designed to make the military regime look good and to inflame public opinion in France against the Islamists.
For similar reasons, the GIA hijacked an Air France plane in 1994, carried out a deadly series of bomb attacks within the Metro in Paris in 1995, and abducted and killed a group of seven French Trappist monks working in Algeria in 1996. All these incidents have since been found to have had either security services involvement or some degree of prior knowledge. Unfortunately for Zaoui, ever since he arrived in New Zealand he has been erroneously depicted by the police as a member of the GIA, and designated by the SIS as a threat to national security – and thus been kept in prison, for most of that time in solitary confinement.
Has the SIS the ability – or the sophistication – to adequately interpret the information it has been receiving from France? As the Refugee Status Appeals Authority patiently explained in its exhaustive decision last August, there was no evidence Zaoui had ever belonged to, or supported the GIA. In fact (see RSAA decision, p45), the GIA had effectively sentenced Zaoui to death in its “Burning Thunderbolts” communiqué of January 1996.
The details of French/Algerian collusion with the GIA are even more disturbing. It is not simply that Algerian death squads would impersonate the GIA and carry out massacres or create local militias – the so-called Patriotes – to do likewise. In recent years, firm evidence has begun to emerge from Algerian military sources and leading academics that the dreaded GIA has been – perhaps from the outset and certainly under Zitouni’s bloody leadership – a dummy, or “screen” organisation managed by French/Algerian counter-intelligence.
Where was the terrorist threat in fact coming from, Le Monde asked rhetorically in November 2002, during its preview of a 90-minute Canal+ television documentary on the Metro bombings, and then cited the right-wing MP and former French counter-intelligence chief Alain Marsaud in reply. “State terrorism uses screen organisations,” Marsaud said. “In this case [the GIA] a screen organisation in the hands of the Algerian security services … it was a screen to hold France hostage.”
Two recent books by former Algerian military officers have given chapter and verse about the “turning” of the GIA. Last year, the feared Algerian general Khaled Nezzar sued one of the authors (Habib Souaida) in a Paris court for libel – and lost, largely due to compelling testimony by the star witness, the former Algerian colonel Mohammed Samraoui.
The point being, Zaoui has been accused by New Zealand authorities of being a member and supporter of the GIA – when, in fact, it seems the relevant classified information has been fed to the SIS by the same security organisations that enabled the GIA to commit its most bloody exploits. In the High Court in December, Woods revealed that two out of three countries providing the SIS with classified information against Zaoui – Belgium and Switzerland – had agreed to publicly release this material, but a third (unnamed) country had refused. In context, this can only have been France.
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