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 Mendès-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 Mendès-France even implied darkly that the affair was an anti-Mendès 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 Mendès-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. Mendès-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 Mendès' 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 Mendès-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, Mendès-France ordered his young, ambitious Interior Minister, François 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.