The French Secret Services: From the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War

by Douglas Porch

A scholarly but highly readable account of France's intelligence networks, from the "black chambers" of the ancien rTgime and Napoleon to the formation of the SDECE (CIA) and the DST (FBI). The events chronicled range from the Dreyfus Affair, to WWI and WWII, to Indochina and Algeria, to the Rainbow Warrior debacle. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Genres: History, France, European History, War, Nonfiction, Espionage

623 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Douglas Porch is an American historian, academic and a Professor and former Chair of the Department of National Security Affairs for the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, California. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee in 1967 and a Ph. D. from Cambridge University in 1972. He has been a professor of strategy at the Naval War College, a guest lecturer at the Marine Corps University, a post-doctoral research fellow at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and the Mark W. Clark Professor of History at The Citadel.

Reviews

[Barry Sierer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Douglas Porch does an intriguing job of explaining the journey of the French Secret Services from the 1880’s until the 1990’s. The first half the book seems tedious. Porch’s prose is dry but still insightful. The pace of the book picks up after World War II when he outlines the various factions that formed in the Secret Services and their role in French Indochina where Porch elaborates on the role of opium and currency speculation, and their resulting effects on French strategy. The book then ventures on to Algeria and various Secret Service generated scandals including the Ben Barka affair and the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior.

A parliamentary review in 1982 of previous operations lists “failures, scandals, and doubtful operations” as a hallmark of operations under the 4th republic.

The French government leaders feared (with justification) that the services were spending more energy embarrassing leaders with scandals than protecting the Republic. Much of this was rooted in factionalism within the services that stemmed from the end of World War II; when the intelligence agencies absorbed people from a variety of post war political blocs into their ranks.

Since government leaders did not trust the intelligence agencies; they would form “parallel networks” of their own supporters to conduct intelligence operations which only exacerbated the fragmentation of intelligence work.

These issues, combined with the French proclivity for reading each other’s mail, created a situation where amateur actions would be carried out by actors with interests that were not truly aligned with the state, while the analysis and coordination of intelligence was frequently treated as an afterthought at best.

While this book can come across as “dry” I would still recommend it.

[Barry H. Wiley · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary history presented by an acknowledged expert on the French military (see Douglas Porch's remarkable history of the French Foreign Legion which reads like an historical novel). Well worth studying for the lessons he teaches that would be relevant to today,

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not that well written or sourced, but illuminating.