LAffaire Voodoo

Captain Joseph P. Smith of the U.S. 38th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron gunned his RF-101 Voodoo jet down the base runway at Ramstein, West Germany. His destination, according to a flight plan filed half an hour earlier with French air control, was France's Rhone Valley. His announced purpose: training for NATO defense. At 4:54 p.m., as he was making his second pass at 2,000 ft. over the Rhone town of Pierrelatte, Captain Smith was greeted wingtip to wingtip by an old French Vautour interceptor. He made two more passes over Pierrelatte and then headed back to Ramstein, where he touched down at 6:05. Waiting for him was an agitated reception committee, including a representative of the French armed forces, who stalked away with the plane's baggage--175 undeveloped photographs, 28 of them containing detailed closeups of France's main hydrogen-bomb fuel plant at Pierrelatte.

Questions Without Answers. At this point, the facts end and the mystery begins. Was the Voodoo on a spying mission or were the Pierrelatte pictures simply the result of a monumental Air Force snafu? The French, in a polite oral protest to the American embassy, seemed to think the former; the U.S., in an ambiguous, embarrassed apology for its "inadvertent violation of French flight regulations," indicated the latter.

If the U.S. had wanted pictures of Pierrelatte, would it have gone about it in such a heavy-handed manner? The town lies only five miles from the busy Lyon-Marseille commercial airway, and lateral pictures could easily have been taken from high altitude at that distance. If an overhead flight was to be made, why would it be made at the absurdly low altitude of 2,000 ft.? And would the U.S. so readily hand over the film if some dark job of espionage had been involved?

To such questions, no answers were forthcoming, for U.S. public relations officers fell silent after some initial muttering about the plane going astray "in bad weather." Later, it was suggested that the Telex line that was to relay the flight plan was out of order, and the French might have gotten a garbled version. This did not alter the fact that there is a blanket prohibition against foreign air photos of French soil without permission of the government; even when the U.S. wanted photos of the American cemetery at Ste.-Mere-Eglise last year, it had to get approval.

The Disapproving Parent. After its first stiff little protest, the French government treated the flight with understanding restraint last week, somewhat like a disapproving parent who has caught a child in a naughty act but doesn't want to hurt his feelings with a spanking. The press was amused: L'Aurore seemed flattered that anyone would consider France's puny atomic arsenal worth spying on, and Combat put tongue in cheek to ask WILL THE FRANCO-AMERICAN WAR TAKE PLACE?

Officially, I'Affaire Voodoo was over. Or was it? If De Gaulle's most skillful intelligence operatives had arranged the whole thing as an elaborate trap to embarrass an unsuspecting U.S. Air Force, his agents could not have given le grand Charles a better case to justify his long-felt need to get the Americans out of Europe--or at least out of France.

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