FRANCE: A junior minister in the current 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, writes Jon Henley Paris
Carnets intimes de la DST, a history of the French counter-espionage service, reveals how Mr 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 Sciences-Po academy in Paris and as an adviser to the new prime minister, Mr Edouard Balladur, Mr Pagnol began lunching with Ms Mary Ann Baumgartner. She was a CIA agent, but presented herself as the head of the Dallas Market Centre, a foundation that sought to "clarify misunderstandings between Europe and the United States".
Mr 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 Mr Balladur's office he was told by the counter-espionage boss, Mr Raymond Nart, that Ms Baumgartner was a spy. He was forced to resign his highly-paid adviser's job.
A month later, however, Mr 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," he said, "and I succeeded." - (Guardian Service)