Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [202]
France’s tortuous relationship with the United States was not improved in 1954, when the unwinnable war in Indo-China ended in ignominious defeat at Dien Bien Phu. French dominion over North Africa was also doomed. A fatal combination of bigotry, weakness, wilful shortsightedness, political inconsistency and bad faith was leading to a series of humiliations which together were tantamount to the defeat of 1940. Once again, de Gaulle appeared as the only candidate able to rescue France from the consequences of national pride and then proceed to rebuild it.
The bitter turmoil in Algiers allowed him to return to power in the virtually unopposed coup d’état of May 1958. Colonel Passy immediately flew to his old wartime haunt of London as the General’s envoy to the intelligence community. Passy arranged a discreet lunch with the former SIS chief of station in Paris, who was now in charge of the European department. He chose the Savoy, where, to remind himself of the gastronomic curiosities of London, he ordered kippers and a bottle of Bass beer. The purpose of his visit, however, was to ask his old colleagues to spread the message that de Gaulle had come to power only to solve the Algerian crisis. He had absolutely no intention of staying on.
The General, however, had every intention of staying on. His return allowed him to end the Fourth Republic, which he had despised from its conception. This time he was able to insist on the Constitution he wanted, with almost all the power concentrated in the hands of the President. The Fifth Republic, with politicians reduced to rude mechanicals, was patently his creation.
His distrust of the British and the Americans had continued to burn strongly over the years. In 1961, President Kennedy sent a highly secret message for de Gaulle’s eyes only to Paris by special courier. The missive informed the French President that the CIA had just started to debrief a Russian defector, and he had produced the names of Soviet moles high in the French administration. If President de Gaulle would like to select a senior English-speaking officer with intelligence experience, his nominee could come to the United States and sit in on the relevant debriefing sessions. De Gaulle promptly summoned General Jean-Louis de Rougemont, who was then head of the army’s intelligence staff, to the Élysée Palace. He emphasized to Rougement the great secrecy of the whole affair and explained in detail what he should do. ‘In any case,’ said de Gaulle, ‘you must see whether this isn’t a trap.’
‘The Russians?’ asked Rougemont.
‘No, the Americans!’ replied de Gaulle in exasperation.
Because de Gaulle’s attitude to the Americans had not changed, neither had the Kremlin’s strategy towards France. As mentioned earlier, the Soviet politburo allotted the task of persuading France to leave NATO to Boris Ponomarev.
Ponomarev worked in close liaison with Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs. In 1965 and 1966, Gromyko launched a diplomatic campaign to encourage France to sign as many treaties and agreements as possible on a range of issues. These included a deal by which Russia would take the French colour television system and a Soviet offer to launch French satellites on Soviet rockets. Couve de Murville visited the Soviet Union at the end of October 1965; the subjects to be discussed included the improvement of relations between the two countries, European questions and the German problem. In June 1966, de Gaulle accepted an invitation to visit Moscow not long after an agreement on sharing nuclear research was reached. At the end of September, a Franco-Soviet