A Few Words From

By James Kelly

A major surprise of L'Affaire Greenpeace has been how aggressively the French press has pursued the story. As watchdogs of government, French newspapers and magazines historically have been rather toothless. Though a few publications, notably the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine, occasionally have sniffed out scandal in high office, serious French journalism, by and large, favors analysis and ideological commentary over investigative digging. This time, however, periodicals ranging from the left-of-center daily Le Monde to the conservative newsweekly L'Express joined Le Canard Enchaine in unraveling, bit by bit, what has been dubbed Underwatergate.

The first revelation appeared in early August in VSD, a weekly popular- interest magazine. It reported that "Sophie-Claire Turenge," the "Swiss honeymooner" arrested by New Zealand police after the bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, was in fact a captain in the French intelligence service.

Other publications unearthed fresh details of government complicity, but it was not until Le Monde printed a story in mid-August verifying the broad | outlines of the scandal that the political implications for the French government became grave. The country's most respected newspaper, Le Monde was also an early and fervent supporter of Socialist President Francois Mitterrand. Suddenly the Elysee Palace could no longer dismiss the charges as mere gossip or yellow journalism.

Despite the disclosures in Le Monde, however, direct proof of government involvement was missing. A major breakthrough came from Le Canard Enchaine. In its Sept. 11 issue the magazine speculated that another, heretofore unknown, team of French agents might have been sent to New Zealand to blow up the ship. A week later Le Monde Reporters Bernard le Gendre and Edwy Plenel revealed that two frogmen had placed mines on the Rainbow Warrior before escaping. Their orders, the paper said, had to have come from a high level within the government, since none of the military figures involved would credibly have acted on their own. The tone of the articles was so authoritative that the government did not even bother to deny them. At the weekly Cabinet meeting the following day, Mitterrand complained strenuously that the press was uncovering facts that he had not been given by his own officials. Two days later Defense Minister Charles Hernu resigned and Admiral Pierre Lacoste, the head of France's foreign intelligence agency, was fired.

In a television interview last week, a besieged Premier Laurent Fabius credited reporters with helping clear up "this unfortunate affair," noting that "it is they who have opened the floodgates to a vein of lies that existed."

There is speculation in Paris that Reporters Le Gendre and Plenel received much of their information from the office of Interior Minister Pierre Joxe. He is an old-line Socialist who, according to one scenario, leaked the damaging details in order to lance the Greenpeace boil before it further threatened the government. Another possible motive for Joxe: to savage Hernu, a political rival. The rumors about Joxe's role as an informer multiplied so swiftly that Le Monde took the extraordinary step last week of running a small item under the byline Gorge Profonde, or Deep Throat, that said Joxe was not the paper's main source. Nonetheless, Le Gendre and Plenel admit that they relied partly on Interior Ministry sources for their stories. "We are not naive," says Plenel. "We know that sources have motives. The point is not the motives but the facts. No one has challenged us on the facts."

With reporting by B.J. Phillips/Paris