The French Connection

The story line was the stuff of thrillers: $12 million worth of pure heroin, a former French spy turned smuggler, a conspiracy that reached from Paris to Le Havre to New York--all masterminded, American officials charged, by a top administrator in France's espionage organization, a man so mysterious that few knew his real name. The case was clearly reminiscent of the current film hit, The French Connection. But the federal indictments handed down last week in Newark concerned an affair as real as the one that inspired the film. It was an international smuggling scandal that, U.S. authorities allege, reaches into the staff of the French consulate in New York and to a high official of the SDECE (Service de Documentation et de Contre-Espionnage), the French equivalent of the CIA.

The scandal began in April when Lynn Pelletier, a U.S. Customs official acting on a hunch, searched a Volkswagen camper-bus shipped to Port Elizabeth, N.J., from Le Havre. She found 96 pounds of pure heroin secreted behind the fire wall of the bus. The bus's owner, Roger de Louette, had acted slightly nervous when filling out customs forms; he was arrested as he waited on the pier. De Louette claimed that he had been a spy with the SDECE. After being fired, he needed money badly, and accepted an offer to earn $60,000 for shipping the heroin. The man who set up the shipment, De Louette said, was one Colonel Paul Fournier, until recently the official in charge of French espionage activities in North America.

In sworn statements buttressed with lie-detector tests, De Louette said that Fournier (the name is an alias) recruited him to smuggle the heroin last December. Using money given to him by Fournier, De Louette bought the camper, then drove to Pontchartrain, outside Paris. There another man delivered the heroin and helped hide it inside the car. De Louette arranged for shipment of the car and flew to New York. After his arrest, he asked for help from a staff member of the French consulate. De Louette did so, he said, because Fournier had given him the name for use as a contact in the event he was caught by American police.

De Louette was indicted last spring for his role in the smuggling, but federal authorities said nothing publicly about Fournier and the consular official while they sought an agreement from the French government on the prosecution of Fournier. At one point, Herbert Stern, U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, flew to Paris to discuss the case. Relations between the U.S. and France have been strained over drug traffic; American narcotics experts estimate that 80% of the heroin brought to the U.S. is purified from raw opium in clandestine laboratories around Marseille. John Cusack, the chief American narcotics agent in Europe, had criticized the French for protecting hoodlums running the drug traffic in France. The French stiffly replied that the U.S. is looking for a scapegoat on which to blame its narcotics problems; they take credit for the fact that Cusack was recalled last week. Despite a Franco-American treaty on narcotics law enforcement, French officials have so far refused to extradite Fournier. They also appeared unwilling to prosecute him in France on the basis of De Louette's confession, so Stern sought indictments from a U.S. Federal grand jury.

Roger the Chef. In France, an official silence settled over the affair --breached by a denial from Fournier and a flurry of unofficial leaks downplaying the case. Fournier was questioned by an investigating magistrate in Paris for five hours, but blandly told reporters that the discussion centered around routine SDECE duties, not smuggling. French sources insist that De Louette was lying to get revenge on Fournier for dismissing him from SDECE.

But one significant dissent came from the director of an agency believed to serve as a front for French espionage. In a Radio Luxembourg interview, Colonel Roger Barberot of the Bureau for Agricultural Production Development speculated that the SDECE had used the heroin-smuggling incident to railroad De Louette. Said Barberot: "My conviction is--and some will tell you so officially --that the operation was mounted by a certain number of SDECE ageats in Paris. De Louette had to be got rid of in the United States. It is the sequel of that operation that is coming out now." If he was the target of a plot to land him in an American jail, De Louette is certainly making the best of his confinement. He has pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges, and passes his time introducing the keepers of the Somerset County, N.J., jail to the delights of cordon bleu cuisine. His French soups and meats periodically turn up at the guards' tables, with Friday's specialite--clam chowder--a much-anticipated luxury for his jailers. To them, he is a special inmate. Says one deputy: "Any other prisoner we call a crook, but Roger we call the chef."

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