DRUGS CHARGE Plot by French agents alleged

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32895, 19 April 1972, Page 18

DRUGS CHARGE Plot by French agents alleged

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) NEW YORK, April 18. A Frenchman convicted of smuggling 961 b of heroin worth about SNZIOm into the United States in a Volkswagen minibus has laid the smuggling plot to the French intelligence service, which he said might have been financing political campaigns in France.

In the testimony before the French Magistrate, Delouette said that Colonel Paul Fournier, the number two man in the S.D.E.C.E., was his boss in the operation. Fournier also has been indicted in the case, but not extradited from France. Delouette said that Fournier asked him in December, 1970, when Delouette was down and out, “If I would accept an assignment which included certain risks . . . Fournier had told me at one time ‘we have the support of the boss’, of the S.D.E.C.E. department for which they worked. “I realised immediately that It was not a regular business,” Delouette said. “I knew two things: that for cer-

tain operations it happened that when the necessary budget could not be obtained, certain means are employed to obtain the funds necessary to implement this operation. “Second, this took place at the time when the municipal elections were going to take place. I knew that members of the S.D.E.C.E. have political acquaintances with certain parties and that some irregular means are used in order to obtain funds.” At another point in his testimony Delouette said: “I have never said that this case was an S.D.E.C.E. case. I always said that I thought that it was people of the S.D.E.C.E. who did this in order to finance, as I have told you before, either a special assL jnent of the S.D.E.C.E. or what I really thought, the financing of political operations.” Delouette said, however, he doubted if Fournier organised the “special operation” himself and suggested that Fournier’s superiors in S.D.E.C.E. were responsible.