Crackdown on "Disinformation"

France prosecutes two journalists for "bad acquaintances"

"The Plan we devised three years ago was to develop our capacity to influence public opinion in the West, through disinformation fed to governments and opinion formers and, above all, through media operations."

The half-crazed Soviet spy master who spells out his Plan is pure fiction, the creation of Journalists Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss in their new novel The Spike. The plan itself, according to U.S. intelligence experts, is all too factual. "Disinformation" refers mostly to covert falsification tactics used by the Soviet Union to further its propaganda aims. Examples of disinformation--a forged U.S. Army field manual, bogus vice-presidential statements critical of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat--occasionally surface in the Western press.

Soviet experts in the West have known of the KGB'S disinformation activities for years; dealing with them is quite another matter. For the first time, French authorities have begun to crack down on the practice. In the past 15 months, two writers have been arrested and charged with using secret foreign contacts to jeopardize national security. Other French journalists are wondering whether the campaign against disinformation is beginning to restrict the free flow of information.

The first case involves Pierre Charles Pathe, 70, the son of pioneer French Film Producer Charles Pathe. An avowed admirer of the U.S.S.R., Pathe was arrested in 1979 after leaving a long trail of liaisons with Soviet diplomats and intelligence agents. He was accused of accepting money for disseminating Soviet disinformation through numerous writings dating back to 1959.

After his arrest, Pathe helped police fill in the missing KGB names and dates in the 15 years' worth of notebooks taken from his Paris apartment. He assisted in pinpointing some 50,000 francs in his bank account as Soviet payments. The money, he said, represented author's fees for Soviet rights to his book and many articles. His regular intelligence contacts, he claimed, were simply journalistic sources for gathering information--not spreading disinformation.

Pathe was tried last May, but for the most part his writing was not examined in court. Compared with the normal stream of invective and accusations running through France's hyperactive partisan press, Pathe's personal editorializing seemed tame indeed. As one French intelligence officer acknowledges, "If the court had only ruled on what Pathe wrote, he would not have been condemned."

Why, then, was his case pursued? One reason may be that for a pro-Soviet leftist, Pathe had unusually close links with business and government. His brother-in-law, Bernard Vermier-Palliez, is president of the state-owned Renault autos, which has just agreed to become the principal owner of a U.S. automaker, American Motors. Pathe himself belongs to a group called Movement for the Independence of Europe, whose members have included a number of government ministers. Thus, as the court suggested, Pathe's danger lay not only in his role as a biased small-press journalist, but as a man of important private influence. Moreover, the government may have been looking to set a harsh precedent. French Counterespionage Commissioner Raymond Nart acknowledges that Pathe was punished simply for having contributed to "an operation of orientation of the French public." The Pathe case, one bitter witness told TIME's Sandra Burton, was the state's "warning to the press that it is dangerous to accept information from foreign sources."

The French press recognized the warning--and roundly denounced it. The conservative Le Figaro called Pathe a "scapegoat," and Versailles's Toutes les Nouvelles feared that espionage would henceforth include "confidences and personal analyses of men and political events." Meanwhile, a petition signed by 100 journalists complains that the court's decision poses "a serious threat for freedom of expression and information."

Coincidentally, only days before Pathe was tried, French authorities were beginning to press another case of disinformation. Roger Delpey, a right-wing author, was arrested on the steps of the Libyan People's Bureau in Paris. He was charged with resorting to "technical disinformation" that would "compromise the external policy of France."

Delpey's troubles began shortly after Central African Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa was ousted with French help last September. The Paris-based satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine (The Chained Duck) printed a 1973 document signed by Bokassa authorizing a large cache of diamond gifts to his old friend, French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who was Finance Minister at that time. The tale was almost forgotten when Delpey was quietly jailed. Last week Le Canard Enchaine ran excerpts of a telephone interview with Bokassa, now living in exile in the Ivory Coast. He not only confirmed the diamond document, but said that he had employed Delpey to write his memoirs and to send letters pleading his case to French and African leaders. Bokassa added that he had given 187 documents to Delpey, some of which are thought to contain further embarrassments for Giscard.

Some French journalists were convinced that Delpey had been imprisoned for acting as Bokassa's personal secretary and accomplice in humiliating Giscard. His biggest crime, noted the left-wing Le Monde, was his "bad acquaintances." Undeterred, the French prosecutor said he would press the case against Delpey, alluding to "technical disinformation which the court has already come to know in other affairs"--namely, those of Pierre-Charles Pathe, who is now in Fresnes prison serving a five-year sentence.

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