What is said in French intelligence about the turmoil with Australia
The point of Giuseppe Gagliano
Bernard Emié, Director General of the French External Intelligence Service DGSE, will answer questions from the Senate Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on 6 October about Naval Group's canceled order of 12 submarines in Australia.
On October 12, naval group chief Pierre-Eric Pommellet and Defense Minister Florence Parly will also speak to the committee, which is investigating how France lost the strategic contract . "Why and how did our diplomatic network and our intelligence services not know about the operation?" This is what Christian Cambon, the chairman of the committee, asked a few days ago.
However, the DGSE will not be able to say much. Indeed, if Emié were to say that the service was actively gathering information on its strategic allies in Australia, that admission would only suggest that the Australian government was right to back out of a deal with a partner who was spying on it.
However, DGSE worked hard to support the French sale, as it usually does on large contracts negotiated in a complex environment, for example the 2017 talks with Qatar competing with Italy and the 2007 talks for the sale. del Rafale to Morocco, which also looked to the US F-16.
In August, the DGSE sent an extra officer to Canberra, in addition to the measures already put in place by the service, when some people of the Naval group and the French government began to doubt Australia's intentions.
Emié himself was closely watching the developments of the contract during his talks with Mathias Cormann, now OECD Secretary General, just after the G7 summit in June, when the agreement with AUKUS between Canberra, London and Washington was negotiated. secretly. Cormann, who was involved in negotiations with Naval Group when he was Australia's finance minister, also saw Pommellet around the same time
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/francia-sottomarini-australia-audizione-emie/ on Mon, 04 Oct 2021 08:35:37 +0000.