Scandal

For months Washington had suspected that Western military secrets were leaking to Russia from France, the North Atlantic nations' most potent Continental ally and the top recipient of U.S. arms aid. By last week it was clear that such worries were at least partly justified. At least one top officer in the French army had been guilty of gross carelessness, or worse, in the handling of top-secret military information. The officer was General Georges Marie Joseph Revers, chief of the French general staff, who a fortnight ago was summarily sacked by the French cabinet.

Erect, soldierly Georges Revers had had a brilliant military career. As chief of staff and the army's top officer, he had won the respect and trust of professional soldiers of Britain and the U.S. But he had a great weakness: he liked to dabble in political intrigue, often used professional informers to get inside stories on matters of interest to him.

A Fight in a Bus. Last spring General Revers was sent to investigate the French colonial war against the Communists in Indo-China. On his return he wrote a 60-page report to the government in which he made adverse comments on France's conduct in Indo-China. Somehow the report got into the hands of the Communists, as the worried French government learned last September, when a young Indo-Chinese named Do Dai Phuoc got into a fight with a French soldier in a Paris bus. After the fight Do Dai Phuoc, a doctor of law and president of the Vietnamese Students' Association in France, was arrested for disorderly conduct. Among various innocuous pamphlets in his briefcase, police found a copy of General Revers' top-secret report.

Do Dai Phuoc led French counter-espionage agents to an Indo-Chinese Socialist in whose home police found 80 copies of the Revers report. The Socialist said he had received the report from a known informer whom the cops suspected of playing a double or triple game--informing not only for the French in Indo-China, but also for Ho Chi-Minh's Communists, and possibly checking on Ho for Moscow. The informer in turn told police that he got the report from General Charles Emmanuel Mast, onetime Resident-General in Tunisia, since 1947 on the inactive list.

A Non-Political Successor. Questioned, General Revers made a damaging admission: he had given the text of the report to General Mast. In his turn, Mast admitted that he had passed it on to the informer. In Paris last week, fellow officers reasoned that, in handing out the report which was critical of French cabinet ministers, General Revers had probably been playing one of his political tricks; it was known that he had also given the report to several politicians and officials.

Determined to avoid scandal, Premier Georges Bidault's cabinet made no public charges when it removed Revers. Instead, it placed him "at the disposal of the Prime Minister," and there was even talk that General Revers would get a new job, probably with Western Union headquarters at Fontainebleau. To succeed Revers as chief of staff, Bidault picked General Clement Blanc, a logistics expert who had directed the re-equipment of Free French forces in Africa with U.S. materials, and had served as General de Lattre de Tassigny's No. 2 man at Western Union headquarters. The French press has called General Blanc the "worst-tempered man in the French army." Able Soldier Blanc also seemed to have another qualification that France needed: he was widely respected as a non-political officer who knew how to keep a secret.

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