Leaks

"The affair surpasses anything that even the most fertile imagination could conceive," cried Paris' L'Intransigeant. "The truth is somewhere . . . but one begins to wonder if it will ever see the light of day."

All France seethed with indignant fascination last week as the arrest of one Communist-hunting policeman mush roomed into a major scandal involving high government servants, top state secrets and espionage. While Premier Pierre Mendes-France labored across the channel at the London Conference, a dizzying succession of arrests, disclosures and confessions revealed that vital secrets of France's National Defense Committee had methodically leaked to the Communists. There were suggestions that the secrets had been going to other foreign powers as well. The permanent secretary-general of the Defense Committee was indicted for negligence. Two of his highest-ranking aides were arrested as spies, along with a Red or ex-Red who apparently worked as a double or even triple agent. France's chief Communist hunter was accused of being a Communist himself. Supporters of Mendes-France even implied darkly that the affair was an anti-Mendes plot supported by the U.S.

Raised Asking Price. One central fact that arose above the confusion was that high state secrets from the private councils of the Defense Committee--composed of the Premier, the President and a handful of France's top Cabinet ministers and generals--had fallen into Communist hands. The first of three disclosed incidents was last May, when Joseph Laniel was Premier. The second involved minutes of the Defense Committee meeting of June 28 (two weeks after Mendes-France had become Premier), at which the committee discussed the details of France's near-hopeless military plight in Indo-China. The Geneva Conference was then in progress, and the Communists' familiarity with the stark facts about France's position presumably allowed them to raise their asking price for a settlement. Mendes-France was at Geneva when he first heard of the leaks, by way of Police Inspector Jean Dides, a member of the anti-Red squad who had been demoted after Mendes' regime took over. Dides kept at his ferreting among the Reds any he way told an (TIME, old Oct. 4), friend, and who one day had in joined June Mendes-France's Cabinet, that the defense minutes had been transmitted out side the committee. Dides refused to tell the minister where or how he learned of the leaks.

Alerted to the danger, Mendes-France ordered his young, ambitious Interior Minister, Franc,ois Mitterrand, to "turn the house upside down" and find the leak. But only three days after the Sept. 10 meeting, Dides told his Cabinet friend, Minister for Moroccan and Tunisian Affairs Christian Fouchet, that he had a complete verbatim transcript of the meeting. A few days later, Dides was arrested, and the transcribed minutes were found in his briefcase.

Blunt Hint. Before a military court of inquiry, Dides at first stuck to his refusal to reveal his source. But after a second grilling, he revealed that he got the papers from a shady little Tunisian named Andre Baranes, a fellow-traveling journalist. As Dides described him, Baranes played the doubly devious game of passing government secrets to the Reds and Red secrets to Dides. Where did Baranes get the documents , he handed over to Dides? "A policeman." said Dides "doesn't ask his agents where they get things." Baranes,however, could not be found.

"Forgive Me." As more than a week passed without an arrest, press and politicians of the right wing cried for action and implied that Mendes-France and his ministers were powerless or afraid to act. If the Dides affaire was not to blossom into a full-scale threat to the regime's existence, Mitterrand and his police needed more--facts and arrests. One morning last week, the police rocked the country with two arrests. Jailed as the men who leaked from the Defense Committee were Rene Turpin, 42, and Roger Labrusse, 40, both ardent leftists and both high-ranking officers on the staff of Jean Mons, the permanent secretary-general of the Defense Committee. At the Interior Ministry, the two confessed to turning over the secret minutes to Baranes.

Secretary-General Jean Mons, not able to believe in the guilt of two such trusted employees, was brought to the ministry to hear their confessions. "Forgive me!" cried fat, thin-mouthed Rene Turpin, who had made a career by attaching himself to Mons and traveling upward with him. "This is an affair of crypto- Communism," said the police. "They knew perfectly well where their information was going. They wanted to give the opposition information for their campaign to stop the war in Indo-China and ban the atom bomb."

The arrests took some of the heat off the government, and the government in turn turned more heat on the case. It promptly suspended Jean Mons from his secretary-general's post, then indicted him for "laxity" in imperiling the the handling of nation's state security secrets. and Then police caught the scent of Andre Baranes: Jean Dides, after withholding the information for two days, reported that he was hiding out in a country house south of Paris. The hiding place, oddly enough, was provided not by the Communists but by a right-wing deputy of the National Assembly. The police caught up with Baranes as he was pedaling for the Swiss border on a bright red bicycle. They bundled him into a car and hurried him back to Paris. After 15 hours of uninterrupted grilling by four secret service men, Baranes admitted receiving the committee documents from Labrusse and turning them over to the Communists. He also admitted turning the documents as well as certain Communist information back to Dides in order to convince the policeman that he was an honest double-dealer--but, Baranes explained, everything he gave to Dides was first doctored by the Reds to conceal or mislead.

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