Scandals

While the Iran-contra scandal has virtually monopolized the attention of the American media since last November, Europeans tend to wonder what the fuss is all about. To a great many of them, the scandal seems like yet another perplexing case of American moralism run wild, a national exercise in self- flagellation. Many Europeans, who also never fully understood why Americans became so upset by the Watergate affair in the mid-1970s, feel that such a crisis could never happen in their own countries. TIME's Paris bureau chief Jordan Bonfante examines the European bewilderment concerning Iranscam:

On the evening of Sept. 27, 1985, at the climax of the Greenpeace scandal, General Rene Imbot, a square-jawed French army officer who had just been appointed chief of the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, France's overseas intelligence agency, went on television with a startling pronouncement. "To my profound stupefaction," he said, "I have discovered a malignant attempt to destabilize our secret services, I would say even, to destroy our secret services!" Asked to clarify this, Imbot replied, "I won't say any more about it. I am chief of the secret services."

More remarkable than the outburst was the fact that after a few days of bewilderment, politicians and the press simply dropped the matter. To this day, the French parliament and public remain blithely in the dark about it. Imagine William Casey going on television to proclaim that the CIA was being dangerously subverted in the Iran arms deal -- and having the U.S. press and public let it go at that.

Imbot's unheeded alarm showed how the European political conscience can be very different, and far less exacting, when it comes to conspiracy in high places. That is one reason why Iranscam has had limited impact in much of Europe. Government officials and the general public are not shocked by the facts of Iranscam so much as by its mismanagement and the extent to which the scandal is traumatizing the Reagan Administration.

West Europeans believe that an Iranscam-style scandal is unlikely in their countries for institutional and psychological reasons. In Britain, for example, there is no government equivalent of the National Security Council, only a benign advisory appendage to 10 Downing Street known as the Cabinet Office. Insists Field Marshal Lord Bramall, a former Chief of the General Staff: "The idea of a bunch of military cowboys running their own foreign policy out of the Cabinet Office is too absurd to contemplate." On the Continent, a widespread feeling exists that if anything like Iranscam were uncovered, it would not have the same paralyzing repercussions. Throughout much of Europe, especially across the Latin, Catholic southern tier, there is greater cynicism about political conduct.

This comes from centuries of Kings, Popes and Presidents acting out the gap between principles and applied statecraft. Says Guy Sorman of Paris University's Political Studies Institute: "Most Frenchmen believe that political power and foreign policy should be Machiavellian. Today when President Mitterrand is called a Florentine -- meaning a Machiavellian -- it is meant largely as a compliment. What Frenchmen dislike is naivete."

Not that Europeans lack for scandals. Last week, for example, allegations resurfaced that a French company, with possible government knowledge, had spirited artillery shells to Iran from 1983 to 1986. But it is rare for a government to be clapped in political irons because of foreign policy subterfuge. Rather, scandals have their own uniquely national styles:

-- In Britain sex is lethal, while it seems that spying, though regrettable, can be lived with. A series of sensational double agents at high levels of British intelligence, including Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, never seriously rocked the British ship of state. But sex scandals have regularly felled British political figures, from War Secretary John Profumo in 1963 to Conservative Party Deputy Chairman Jeffrey Archer last year.

-- In West Germany politicians are most vulnerable to financial scandals and East bloc spies in their midst. Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt never really recovered from the uproar after his close aide Gunter Guillaume was discovered spying for East Germany. The long-running Flick affair, swirling with allegations about illegal campaign chests and influence peddling, tormented the Christian Democratic government of Helmut Kohl for years. Quips one political observer in Bonn: "If Iranscam were ever replayed here, the odds are that the Germans would be more scandalized by the missing millions and the sloppy accounting than the arms transactions."

-- In Italy many a financial imbroglio has begun to emerge, only to vanish in the political sands. But governments must beware of dark conspiracies involving secret societies. The scandal surrounding the mysterious "P-2" Masonic lodge in 1981 entangled Cabinet ministers and military officers in a web of tax evasion and political intrigue. The uproar eventually toppled the Christian Democrat-led coalition government of Arnaldo Forlani, but no official was ever convicted, and Forlani is now back in government service.

-- In France the scandal specialty for years has been covert mayhem committed by barbouzes, shadowy secret government agents with false beards or other disguises. The gem of these was surely the Greenpeace affair of 1985, in which two teams of French secret service frogmen blew up a trawler belonging to the environmental organization Greenpeace in Auckland harbor. The resulting international uproar shook Francois Mitterrand's Socialist government and forced the sacking of its intelligence chief and the resignation of its Defense Minister. Unlike Iranscam, however, that was the extent of it. Parliament never pursued it further. Indeed, the two French agents jailed by New Zealand until last July are now regarded as heroes.