FRANCE has too many security services, military, internal, external and political. When you add to the potage, as in the 1950s, profound political instability and unwillingness to confront harsh post war facts, you have literally a recipe for disaster.
There was a belief in the glory of France. There was a fiction that Algeria, on the other side of the Mediterranean, was somehow part of metropolitan France.
There was rivalry between DST (charged with internal security and therefore, with Queen of Hearts logic, responsible for Algerian affairs), the external security service, DGSE, and military security. So many orchestras, and nobody heard the music from the minaret
Now it could he argued that the Algerian rebellion, which ended in 1962 after one million had died and two and a half million were made refugees, was a failure of French intelligence, not French intelligence agencies.
On November 1st 1954, Algiers and other cities were rocked by plastic explosives, and the French interior minister, Francois Mitterrand, sent for the head of DST and wanted to know why such things were being allowed to happen, in France.
Algeria would be funny, if it were not so tragic, and the tragedy is continuing, as fundamentalists struggle to complete the revolution in which independence was only, as they see it, a staging post.
The DST provided faulty intelligence which led to rounding up moderate Muslims while violent revolutionaries went free. Meanwhile French policy in Algeria became the property of pieds noirs, one million Algerians of French extraction who ran the North African country for their own benefit.
The French prime minister, Pierre Mende's France, decided not to negotiate with a moderate Muslim leader, Ferhat Abbas, because he had been categorised by DST as an archetypal extremist.
Using the get your retaliation in first ploy, two Paris thugs were hired to assassinate an Arab leader in the Spanish zone of Morocco. En route they got drunk and dropped a bag of grenades which rolled around the floor of the aircraft on which they were travelling.
The Spanish police arrested them, and the whole sorry tale emerged from then on Spain was not convinced that unrest in Algeria was an internal French matter.
DST's part in this fiasco became known, and military intelligence came to the fore in Algeria, but there were six more years of bloodshed and atrocities by both sides to come. And a mutiny in the army, led by Gen Salan, exposed a fault line running right through French society.
If the French secret services did not distinguish themselves in Algeria, they disgraced themselves in July 1985 when they blew up and sank the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, killing one man.
The ship was tied up in Auckland harbour, and ultimately the head of DGSE and minister for defence took the blame and resigned. Then as now, France seemed to think it had droit de seigneur in the south Pacific.
Unacceptable in principle, this act of international piracy was bungled in practice. The wretched Greenpeace photographer who died was a KGB agent, DGSE lied to friendly journalists.
Meanwhile DST gave New Zealand police invaluable assistance in tying DGSE into the debacle. Two DGSE agents pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter. They were sentenced to 10 years, but were released early following a deal in which justice took second place to access for New Zealand butter to the EU market.
In theory intelligence services provide information on what the enemy is doing. In practice they supply information skewed to suit the recipient, and carry out covert actions designed to serve a undisclosed agenda.
French secret services are no exception, as Douglas Porch's catalogue of errors from Dreyfus to the present reveals. Some readers will be depressed by the absence of a worthwhile value system it reveals others will be reassured by the bungling which frustrated many shameful enterprises.
