In search of the lost or.., p.16
In Search of the Lost Orient, page 16
It was a fascinating crowd and I was a part of it. As often happens, many had not found their place within French society or were dealing with some feeling of lack. This was also the case among the young humanitarian doctors. I remember one of them saying to me, “Here, I amputate.” In France he never would have been able to do it, because a general practitioner in France doesn’t amputate. Only a proper surgeon can do that. But on a humanitarian mission, there are allowances made and professional responsibilities given that would be unthinkable back in France. For example, take nurses—absolutely extraordinary women who would have been held back in France and kept in subaltern roles by the omnipotent chief in this or that hospital wing. Over there, they would operate during bomb attacks, built hospitals from scratch, trained local nurses, and, being the only women around a lot of men, were recognized by all, including the bearded contingent, as leaders. A certain nurse had her hospital and fought tooth and nail for it to run properly. Taking on ventures or adventures was open to everyone—men and women. Of course, some might at a given point stop everything to pursue a relationship and have children. Years later, one might run into them somewhere in France or in America, now slotted in, literally, but with no regrets, as though the quiet, tranquil life they were leading rendered only more exceptional the earlier years of their Cinderella story when they had had it all. Among the men, things were more complicated because it was harder to revert to a quiet life. There were, as I’ve said, many suicides, whereas I didn’t hear of a single such case among the women. I have in mind one of the most famous cases, my videographer friend Christophe de Ponfilly. After completing his film on Afghanistan and becoming a father to a young child, he put a bullet through his head.2 There were ten others like him. But tragic stories have their own beauty.
For example?
For example, the young British woman, Juliet, whom I met in London when I was doing a sort of benefit tour for Afghanistan. She was the daughter of a pastor and had grown up in the countryside. She was doing an internship for a humanitarian association focused on Afghanistan. She was in charge of logistics, that is, ordering plane tickets and making coffee. The association had an office in Peshawar that distributed humanitarian aid intended for Afghanistan. They were looking for road warriors, former soldiers, and the like who wanted to go to the country, and Juliet’s job was to go through the reply letters and rank the applicants. Only one day they discover they’ve been taken in by a con artist who in six months in Peshawar embezzles all their money and screws up relations with all their contacts inside Afghanistan. Someone needed to be sent there immediately to put out the fire, so to speak, and Juliet volunteers. She leaves for Peshawar and stays, building a reputation as a solid, indispensable piece of the organization. Then she meets a certain Dominique Vergos, a French freelance photographer fifteen years her senior—a real adventurer, always armed, boastful, smiling, and restless. They got married and had a child. However, a few months later, on Christmas night in 1988 in Peshawar, he comes back home a bit tipsy, starts a fight with her, and goes down to the courtyard. A shot rings out and she finds him with a bullet in his head. Alone with a baby in a city where a new round of violence was heating up due to conflicts arising in the wake of the Russian pullout—what could or should she do? Everyone expected her to go back to England.
But no! She steps into the shoes of her dead husband, takes his gun, buys a horse to ride about in jodhpurs in the streets of Peshawar, becoming the boss in the pure British tradition, with her safari hat and riding crop in hand. She became very respected among the Afghans because that’s indeed where she went, and she eventually meets a British war photographer whom she marries and has a second child by him. Later they move to Moscow when he’s posted there, and she creates her own agency. But during the failed coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 one Western journalist gets killed, by a bullet—her new husband.
So you were yourself part of this wild bunch in Peshawar, you say …
Me? Well, the first time I came back from Afghanistan after the caravan experience with Bernard-Henri Lévy, there was practically a line in front of my hotel door following my meeting with my neighbor, even though I was a nobody at the time, just a secondary school teacher at a high school in Dreux who traveled during the summer, totally unremarkable and on leave with no salary. Thinking I had something to say, I went to the French embassy and didn’t even get through the door. I was asked emphatically, “Who are you? Why are you here? Who do you want to see?” When they understood that I wanted to talk about Afghanistan, the first secretary said very openly that it didn’t interest him. The embassy was entirely tranquil at the time and appeared to want to stay that way. It was content to organize the routine sorts of diplomatic parties and activities. One day, though, when our embassy in Kabul was forced to shut down, the order came from Paris that they were to wake up about Afghanistan, but that all the personnel would have to be swapped out to become operational—and it was.
So you failed to get through to Paris at that point?
Not completely. While I was waiting in vain in front of the embassy door, and it’s 108 degrees in the shade, a tall fellow with a shaved head happens to pass by. After learning that I just returned from Afghanistan, he invites me to his office for a Coke! Compared with the Englishman who offered me whiskey (with ice cubes!), this was not a very classy invitation or not very professional. (An empirical observation confirmed at Sandhurst and Saint-Cyr: British officers are heavy drinkers. French officers are very sober, but I can’t speak for the those at lower ranks.) The man serving me my Coke was the head of the DGSE outpost in Peshawar. He offered to hire me as the local correspondent for that organization, but I refused. He then turned to another subject.
The Russians had just deployed a new type of grenade launcher, and every Western secret service obviously wanted to be the first to get their hands on one. So he told me that if I could bring him one of these grenade launchers, the AGS-17, he’d pay me $5,000. The Englishman had made me a similar offer. But a bit later the Englishman invited me to stop by again and quipped, “By the way, if my French colleague wants a grenade launcher, tell him that I have two! If you want one, I’ll give it to you.” It was the young adventure seeker Hadi, whom I spoke of earlier (wearing combat boots, of course), who had sold them to the Englishman after buying them himself. The Afghans probably bought them from Russian soldiers who were short on vodka or hashish. That was the Afghan circus!
Your tale paints a rather curious portrait of secret services.
One cannot speak of Afghanistan without encountering a whole series of dogmatic and often paranoid theories about the role of secret services, especially about the CIA, and they culminate, of course, with the conspiracy theories surrounding September 11. In particular it was said (and still is) that al-Qaeda was created or at least financed by the CIA, which is false. Viewed from the ground, what is striking, at least at the time, because things have changed, is the amateurism of the secret services (often accompanied by a cast-iron bureaucracy), their prudence combined with trepidation over a possible scandal, and even the incoherence of their actions. One reason, among others, was the gap in each service between, on the one hand, the people on the ground and, on the other, the analysts and deciders back at headquarters who distrust the people familiar with the terrain and who conceptualize things out of prejudices and formal constraints of their house rules rather than from the complexity of the situation in an actual location. Massoud, for example, will suffer from being classified by the operations service of the DGSE as a “fundamentalist close to Iran.” Yes, he was a member of a party that emerged out of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, and, yes, he was Persian-speaking (like the Iranians), but there is a profound antagonism between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranians.
The problem wasn’t so much the intelligence gathering itself but the analysis of it. All the services I was familiar with forbid the analyst to go out into the field. Therefore, he works from secondhand reports and submits his own report to his superior who, in turn, has to fit it within the house doxa and be watchful not about the proper comprehension of what’s happening in the field but about the coherence of the agency’s doctrine, and make sure that the information reported supports the house’s presuppositions. The caricature comes, for example, with delusional interpretations such as that of the judge Jean-Louis Brugière, who was always looking to confirm his (highly ideological) public discourse instead of trying to understand what was happening. And yet these services had excellent professionals out in the field. One must also say that some had amazingly difficult personalities, like my friend Robert Baer, the CIA department head in Dushanbe when I was there. One only has to read his books. He was the only American diplomat to live outside of the secure zone of the embassy. One morning, he wakes up feeling really cold; he reaches for his blanket but with no success; then he notices that there’s open sky right over his head! A bomb had blown the roof off but he was so drunk he hadn’t felt a thing. Two years later, when he was put in charge of the Kurdish area within Iraq, he was arrested by the FBI for having participated in an assassination attempt against a foreign head of state, Saddam Hussein, who would end up being killed by Baer’s employers ten years later. A government servant must never be right too early.
There are excellent writings on secret services, but they happen to all be novels—from Graham Greene to John le Carré … and one mustn’t forget the wonderful works of Percy Kemp. These books should be read before one starts speaking of grand secret strategies!
Do you plan one day to make your own contribution to this literature?
It’s still a little too early to say. But I can tell another story, since I like telling stories. Two months after the capture of Alain Guillo in August 1987, the DGSE noticed that the address listed in his passport was my address in Dreux. It so happens that, when Alain wanted to renew his passport, an overzealous minor Parisian functionary argued on the basis of some recently passed circular from Interior Minister Charles Pasqua that Alain, who was born in Haiphong, would have to show proof of his French nationality. That his father was a colonel in the French army, his mother killed in battle by the Japanese army, and himself a ward of the state as a boy was all beside the point—his vaguely Asian-looking eyes raised a suspicion that needed clearing up, supposedly. Alain left and slammed the door behind him. In Dreux, on the other hand, the woman in charge of these matters was more civil, and with a simple certificate from me affirming that Alain was living in my apartment, she agreed to make him a new passport.
I was summoned to offices on the Boulevard Mortier and told that the KGB would be tapping my phone if they hadn’t done so already. I wondered why the Russians would take such a risk, and what they could possibly hope to learn from listening to my calls. But the service telling me this was adamant: a Russian does an awful lot of spying, you know! It was decided that a special team would be sent to my place, the kind of team that usually “cleans” French embassies abroad, and this team would make sure that my telephone and home were bug-free. Naturally, I promised to say nothing about the whole matter, especially since I wanted them not to say anything about it either. They were to come on a Monday morning. It was early October. But on Sunday night, my cousin (a sort of avatar of the Tintin character Séraphin Lampion—no footnote please) shows up and turns down all proposals I try to make that would get him out of the house on Monday morning.
As soon as he awakes, I set out coffee for him at the end of the yard behind the house. It was sunny and pleasant out. I tell him that some workers from France Télécom would be coming by to check my line, which had been acting up. At 9 A.M. sharp, the doorbell rings, and in walk four individuals with metal briefcases who all look like the comic book detective Jack Palmer at different ages. They immediately start getting out their equipment and begin working. While I’m preparing more coffee, I detect a familiar odor that’s wafting in through the kitchen window. Looking out, I see my cousin taking hits off a huge joint and staring at the open windows. I hurried to bring him his coffee so that he wouldn’t budge, but he was already intent on coming in to help out. “Listen, Olivier, these guys here, they don’t look like people from France Télécom—I know, I worked at France Télécom.” I go back in the house and see that the telephones have been taken apart and one of the four guys is on a ladder tapping the walls with a sort of metal plate, as though he were diagnosing signs of bronchitis. I glanced back at the yard and saw my cousin had lit up a second joint that he was sucking on with all his might. Wafted by the autumn breeze, the suave and delicate exhalations of my cousin had now spread throughout the entire ground floor of my house, and the cloud was softly making its way up the stairs. I was worried about how these four detectives might react. Were they going to be shocked and appalled, or would their behavior undergo some modifications unforeseen by official regulations? I was inclined to go with the second hypothesis when the functionary on the ladder told me he’d found traces of a suspicious metal in the wall of the house. “What do you intend to do?” I asked somewhat nervously. “Well, knock the wall down, of course, but don’t worry, we’ll fix it before we leave.”
I returned to the yard to see if I could put out the fire. My cousin was making all kinds of agitated gestures inviting me to come closer, and he then whispered in my ear, “Olivier, you know, these guys, they don’t work for the phone company. I swear it, I’m not paranoid, I promise you. Listen, they’re wiretapping your house.”
Your Afghan experience threw you into another world, the world of deciders and opinion makers. How does one deal with that if one wants to remain an intellectual and a researcher, which I presume you wanted to do?
There is a mirror myth of the decider on one side and the expert on the other. Whether one sees them as opposites or as associates, one is ducking the fact that, at bottom, the decider does not know what he’s deciding, while the expert does not know what deciding means.
Intuitively, I have always been skeptical of the capacity of researchers, or of experts, to influence the making of a decision. My collaboration in that other world, as you call it, allowed me, first and foremost, to finance my trips, to lobby in favor of my Afghan friends, but also, and increasingly, to observe and work on phenomena in relation to the formulation of a political policy at the top level and to decision making. In truth there is a deep interaction among perception, action, and reality on the ground. It’s not a matter of observing a phenomenon and then responding to it—a classic way of thinking that gives the starring role to the expert—because the reaction of politicians contributes to a modification of the reality on the ground. For example, the overestimation by the West of Soviet power during the years 1981–1986 rested on an error of analysis, but it contributed to an internal collapse (paradoxically also a pacific one) of the USSR. The American analysis, which concludes with the necessity of invading Iraq in 2003, is totally fantastical, but by working as it does in Iran’s favor, it allowed for that nation’s return as an international player, as well as the decoupling between the geostrategy in the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was an objective of the Bush administration. Another major debate concerned moderate Islamism, that is, the refusal to see Islamic radicalism as the sole logical expression of the conception of political Islam, which is unfortunately the dominant view. Here too, because of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and later with al-Qaeda, the concept [of moderate Islamism] didn’t get traction, and therefore the West has never been able to conceive of an alternative politics, besides corrupt dictatorships, of the Muslim world or of a way to reintegrate the religious dimension within a democratic framework.
Here you’re discussing theoretical questions. But practically speaking, what does one do, how do you deal with those who approach you?
In fact, independently of any results, being solicited to serve as a consultant, lecturer, or expert has allowed me to make trips within the trip, if that makes sense. I really liked that period from 1981 to 1989 a lot because as soon as I would get back from Afghanistan I would go off to more peaceful destinations—support meetings somewhere outside Paris or abroad, conferences, international meetings, high-level summits like my first invitation to Bilderberg in the Austrian Tyrol in 1988. A bit like in Tintin’s Objectif Lune, I found myself in a little propeller plane landing in the fog in Innsbruck and then was immediately ushered toward a cavalcade of limousines as black as the suits of the mysterious guests who emerged out of another fog. We slipped into pine forests guarded by special mountain troops who stood like Christmas figurines behind trees covered in snow. I discovered all of Europe and then the United States this way. My Italian translator led me to Genoa, and I was also in Lausanne, London, and Athens, but also smaller places like Udine, Mons, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Orléans, and Blois. Sometimes I spoke to important people, sometimes in the country, in villages, in little community halls, or to support associations. I went from conversing with Kissinger to exchanges with a farmer in the Haute-Saône Department, and I told them all the same thing. I gave a talk to the Sixth Mountain Infantry Regiment of Valais, the last military group in a Western country to use mules, because they wanted to know how the Afghans used their mules to transport ammunition in the mountains. Answer: they actually preferred horses, which goes to show that the rational actor theory is an invention of lazy economists. And the answer within the answer: I also prefer horses, even if at fifteen thousand feet one is no longer sure who is transporting whom. I spent almost a week with the Twenty-Second Royal Regiment of Quebec speaking to them about how the Russians fought in snowy conditions. Answer: they never fought in winter—they weren’t crazy! I also gave many talks in provincial cities around France to help support and finance humanitarian interventions.
