The Listener

One after another, French governments came and went, but the shadowy figure of Roger Wybot stayed on, one of the few permanent fixtures of the Fourth Republic. A former leader of the French underground, Wybot had been made head of France's crack counterintelligence service in 1945 when he was only 33. Under him, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire spread so far, wide and mysteriously that it was once described as "a gigantic spider web, in the middle of which waits Wybot, his pipe in his mouth, in his soundproof office on the Rue des Saussaies." Some said that Wybot had compiled so many compromising dossiers that no French politician would ever dare to oust him.

An aloof and solitary bachelor, who liked to paint, cultivate roses and ponder mathematics, he lived in a strange Paris apartment that consisted of three rooms on three floors. The legends about him spread: that he hypnotized those he was questioning by spinning a small silver spoon as he talked, that the 110-lb. German police dog at his side named Nero had once guarded Germany's Hermann Goering. One morning last December, France awoke to surprising news: without a word of explanation, Premier Charles de Gaulle had fired Wybot as chief of the D.S.T. and banished him to a dusty office as inspector of police schools.

Last week, enterprising French Journalist Merry Bromberger, a man with good sources, turned up the story behind Wybot's fall. Last May 30, as De Gaulle was conferring in his quarters at the Hotel La Perouse, where he had held court out of office almost every Wednesday for 13 years, his son-in-law rose, suspiciously examined a cornice, lifted a piece of carpet, and discovered microphones.

Six months later, reported Bromberger, thinking to impress his chief with the thoroughness of his operation, Wybot marched into the office of the Minister of the Interior with the tapes of the May conversation. The next day he was ousted from his job. De Gaulle's son-in-law declared that Wybot had been "bugging" all of De Gaulle's private conversations for the past 13 years. But what really enraged De Gaulle himself was the fact that Wybot's duties involved only foreign espionage and not internal security; did Wybot therefore consider De Gaulle's patriotism suspect? As for the ever-reticent Wybot, he denied having anything to do with the tapes, insisted that the microphones were not his. "Maybe," said Roger Wybot helpfully, "they belonged to one of the other services."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.