A junior minister in the French government was recruited by the CIA during the 1990s before being "turned" by the French secret service and becoming a double agent, according to a book to be published next week.
Carnets intimes de la DST [Directorate of Territorial Security], a history of the French counter-espionage service, reveals how Herve Plagnol, now a junior minister in charge of civil service reforms, passed classified information to a US contact in Paris. It included France's baseline positions in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) talks.
In 1992, while working as a lecturer at the elite Sciences-Po academy in Paris and as an adviser to the new prime minister, Edouard Balladur, Pagnol began lunching with Mary Ann Baumgartner.
She was a CIA agent, but presented herself as the head of the Dallas Market Center, a foundation that sought to "clarify misunderstandings between Europe and the US". Plagnol told the book's authors, Frederic Ploquin and Eric Merlen, that he had "no idea the information could have interested the CIA."
Soon after he was appointed to Balladur's office he was told by the counterespionage boss, Raymond Nart, that Baumgartner was a spy. He was forced to resign his highly paid adviser's job.
A month later, however, Nart asked him to feed his contact false information -- he would be allowed to keep the ?500 the Americans had been paying him for each meeting. "I found myself in an extraordinary game of liar's poker, trying to persuade the Americans that I was a valuable source. I succeeded."
The game continued until December 1993, when France got what it wanted from the world trade talks and the DST told the CIA that it had been caught red-handed trying to infiltrate the highest ranks of the French bureaucracy. Plagnol was never charged, "his integrity never having been in doubt," the authors write.
However, in 1995, the then interior minister, Charles Pasqua, used the affair, with others, as justification for expelling five US undercover agents.
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