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Abstract
Stay-behind networks in France were set up starting in 1948 and were aimed at responding to the possibility of a Soviet armed attack into Western Europe. Participants were identified, and arms and explosives cached, to be activated in case of hostilities. This activity became folded into a multilateral effort under the Allied Coordination Committee (ACC) of NATO. In France, the network was run as a highly compartmented activity under the French external intelligence service (DGSE). As the Soviet threat receded, the stay-behind activity became more and more dormant, and in 1990 it was quietly disbanded, immediately after the P-2 scandal broke in Italy.
Notes
1Roselyne Chenu, Paul Delouvrier ou la passion d’agir (Paris: Seuil 1994), 137.
2Letter to the author from Paul Gaujac, 1 Feb. 2005.
3‘Que faire avec l’hyperpuissance?’, interview with Hubert Védrine, Le Débat, no. 125 (May–Aug. 2003), 6.
4‘Intelligence in Waging the Cold War: NATO, the Warsaw Pact and the Neutrals, 1949–1990’, Oslo, Norway, 28 April–1 May 2005.
5The information from this source, as cited farther along in this paper, came from an email to the author dated 18 April 2005.
6Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass 2004), 46–7.
7Jonathan Kwitny, ‘The CIA's Secret Armies in Europe’, The Nation, 6 April 1992, 445.
8Ernest May (ed.), American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press 1993), 72.
9Ibid., 79.
10Ibid., 74.
11Michael Warner (ed.), CIA Cold War Records: The CIA under Harry Truman (Washington DC: CIA History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, CIA 1993) doc. 30, 134.
12This author prefers to use the term ‘covert action’ operations. This is because some intelligence officials and writers, particularly in the early post-World War II period, tended to conflate ‘covert operations’ with ‘covert action operations’. It seems better to use the latter term, because pure intelligence collection operations are, after all, ‘covert operations’ too, in that they are conducted covertly.
13Warner, CIA Cold War Records, doc. 43, 214.
14Ibid., 215.
15Ibid., doc. 47, 241–42.
16David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1997), 104. Reference is to Warner, CIA Cold War Records, doc. 47.
17Ibid., p. 123. Reference is to Warner, CIA Cold War Records, doc. 73.
18See p.937.
19Jean Guisnel, ‘Chevènement balance la glaive’, Libération, 13 Nov. 1990, 15.
20Author interview with Franklin Lindsay, 18 Feb. 2005. Note: Lindsay was recruited into the OPC by Wisner at the outset. He left in 1952. Thus the activity he described would have taken place in the period 1949–1952.
21Guisnel, ‘Chevènement balance la glaive’, 15.
22Philippe Bernert, SDECE Service 7 (Paris: Presses de la Cité 1980), 64–6.
24The observations of this expert are borne out by the following account by former DGSE chief Admiral Pierre Lacoste, in an email to the author on 10 April 2005:
As regards the special position of France, I would recall the background of French leaders of that period and their past as members of the Resistance. And also, I would draw attention to the political situation – the distrust of the Communists and the fear of a new occupation. All these elements readily explain the acceptance by government officials and military authorities of precautionary measures to take in the event of a new military occupation. The idea of a ‘Breton redoubt’ or an ‘Alpine redoubt’ had been evoked since 1940. And finally, the presence of an ‘enemy within’, controlled by the Soviets, made it indispensable to treat such matters with the utmost discretion. Hence the recourse to the SDECE and the very secret nature of the structure of the ACC of NATO, in which we were completely integrated.
23Email to the author, 23 Feb. 2005.
25See p.940.
26Email to the author, 18 April 2005. N.B. It is true that stay-behind was carried out within the framework of NATO, and in particular through the NATO element known as the Allied Coordination Committee (ACC). At the same time the representatives of the member countries on the ACC came from their respective intelligence services. (The knowledgeable French military source agrees with this postulate).
28French name: ‘Comité Clandestin de l’Union Occidentale’ (CCUO).
29French name: ‘Comité de Planning et de Coordination’ (CPC).
30Hofer worked until Dec. 1976 as secretary at section 4 at the BND; this section was responsible for the German stay-behind.
31French name for the ACC: ‘Comité de Coordination Alliée’ (CCA).
27Email to the author.
33According to Le Monde defense journalist Jacques Isnard, the stay-behind personnel were trained at the 11th Choc's bases at Cercottes, near Orleans, and at Calvi, in Corsica. However, the personnel were not on active duty but were reservists who had previously served in the French military:
The essential part of the [stay-behind] apparatus, in France, is constituted of reservists from the Service 29 of the SDECE, of certain émigrés from the East working for [the SDECE] who were sometimes parachuted into their country of origin under precarious, not to say dramatic conditions, and of the corps of its traditional, more or less unpaid, ‘informers’ … a group of ‘moles’ who were [in the category of] sleepers and who were ready to emerge at the slightest alert from the [head] of the SDECE. (‘En France, ces étranges réservistes de l’ombre’, Le Monde, 14 Nov. 1990). N.B. There is no further identification of ‘Service 29’ of the SDECE).
34According to Cees Wiebes, there were Europe-wide exercises of the stay-behind network that were conducted every three years, and in the later stages more frequently. (Email to the author from Cees Wiebes, 1 March 2005).
32See p.940.
35Kwitny (note 7), 445.
36Ibid., 446.
37Guisnel (note 19), 15.
38Jean Guisnel, ‘M. Chevènement: le réseau ‘Glaive’ a été démantelé en France’, Le Monde, 14 Nov. 1990.
39See p.940.
40Guisnel, ‘Chevènement balance la glaive’ (note 19), 15.
41Kwitny, ‘The CIA's Secret Armies in Europe’, 448.
42See p.940.