Tuesday, August 30, 2011

THE SPYMASTER OF MONTE CARLO 50: PERILOUS LIAISON





Prince Albert
must have known that he possessed the power to make things happen--fast--by simply picking up the phone and demanding it be done. Instead, he permitted petty people to play trivial politics over anything and everything, and impede his stated directives.

When
Nicholas SARKOZY was elected president of France, he immediately took control and demonstrated leadership, yet as an elected president of a republic he actually possessed less power than an absolute monarch.

For example, when
Sarko decided that France’s two internal security services, the DST and the RG, should consolidate into one agency, both institutions resisted with multiple reasons why such a merger would be impossible.

Did SARKOZY waffle and allow his plans to be stalled by civil servants?

He said,
I don’t care, that’s what I want, so do it, NOW.

And it was done. And everyone knew not to mess with SARKOZY thereafter.

Yet in October (2006), SIGER, Monaco’s police intelligence unit, had still not been revamped, as ordered by the Prince nine months earlier.

And though Albert promised to take action against
Philippe NARMINO after the Prince’s recent M-Base meeting with me, the Prince continued to procrastinate.

And now, having learned that he had been targeted for investigation, NARMINO was trying to start
his own intelligence service with the deputy interior minister, Didier GAMDERDINGER, at the helm, plus a favored police officer, and a man named Jean-Yves GAMBARINI, who had been retired from Monaco’s police force partly for refusing to allow private security guards to unlock the bathroom door behind which banker Edmund SAFRA and his nurse were dying from smoke inhalation. (NARMINO had just hired GAMBARINI to run the judiciary police.)

NARMINO was also said to be trying to posture GAMDERDINGER as an eventual minister of state, though poor Didier was known to fall far short of ministerial potential.

Someone very close to the Prince conveyed their opinion on why he had taken no action against the chief of judicial services:

“When people leave Albert’s presence, they think he is a fool. Narmino and other Monegasques know how to play him.”

And the French were no slouches, either.

Minister of State
Jean-Paul PROUST had been back in the Prince’s office to take another bash at me, bolstered by his new finance minister, Gilles TONELLI. According to Jean-Luc ALLAVENA (JLA), who heard about it from Paul MASSERON. Proust had “cast negativity” my mission and questioned the Prince's wisdom of my contact with “international organizations" (meaning, foreign intelligence services).

PROUST was clearly unhappy with me running a covert foreign policy, and doing so in a way that circumvented his own control.

The Prince apparently replied, “I hear you.”

I tried to reach the Prince but could find only his long-serving (and suffering) secretary, Madame
Mirielle VIALE. “How’s everything going?” I asked.

“I’m trying,” she said.

Discerning exasperation in her voice, I knew precisely what she meant.

On October 13th, I met with LIDDY. Following up on our last meeting, during which he reluctantly named
Thierry LACOSTE as the individual trying to dig dirt on JLA, I asked LIDDY for more information.

Again, LIDDY was hesitant, but he finally came clean: “A constituted power is attacking JLA to destabilize him.”

“What power? I asked.

“Very strong, very high up,” said LIDDY. “A real power.”

Under further questioning, LIDDY insinuated that it was coming from Freemasons in Paris. He alluded to a “senior Monegasque close to the Prince who travels regularly between Monaco and Paris” and “a position will be taken next week” and “they are awaiting his arrival from Paris to issue instructions.”

LIDDY was vague and fragmented, but his information was extremely important, and actually foretold what would soon transpire.

LIDDY was also terribly uncomfortable. He believed I was playing with fire because he was not sure whose side the Prince was on—mindful that I operated in the Prince’s service, not JLA’s.

“Is the Prince supporting JLA a hundred percent?” LIDDY posed rhetorically. He had his doubts.

The morning of October 20th began with a seven o’clock rendezvous in
M-Base with JLA. I brought him up to date on the NARMINO investigation. As before, JLA favored confronting the chief of judicial services and resolving the matter conclusively. That was JLA’s management style: Make a decision, execute it, move on—not belabor it for almost a year.

Bad news does not improve with age.

Claude PALMERO, meantime, suffered a coronary over an increased invoice from me that the Prince had approved. JLA’s assurance of its necessity did not ease PALMERO’s pain, especially as LACOSTE—with whom PALMERO was close—continued to splutter dark noises about me.

JLA departed for his office, replaced in
M-Base five minutes later by interior minister MASSERON and the new chief of police, Andre MUHLBERGER.

I astounded the police chief with my liaison cultivation schedule: I had opened doors with Montenegro and Switzerland the previous week and would presently attempt the same with Romania and Poland.

MUHLBERGER provided a fascinating tidbit on Andorra that helped explain their duplicitous behavior following my visit in July. (Not only had they caused a furor among SICCFIN and PROUST, but J
ordi Pons LLUELLES ignored Luxembourg’s invitation to the kick-off meeting without so much as a
no thanks.): Andorra was not interested in cleaning up their money-laundering problem, said MUHLBERGER, because, for them, it was not a problem.

According to MUHLBERGER, the sister of Andorra’s interior minister was connected to a man named
DURAND, reputed to be a big-time, wide-scale Andorra-based money launderer.

Andorra was simply not interested in an association that might cramp its money-spinning style from which higher circles had been profiting for decades.

MASSERON and MUHLBERGER departed, replaced in
M-Base fifteen minutes later with the operations chief of Romania’s foreign intelligence service and two associates. A new liaison partnership was born. An hour later the Prince phoned and said, “I’ll be down in six minutes.”

I descended to the lobby to greet him, leaving the Romanians with
Jean-Leonard DE MASSY, who had become my assistant.

The Prince arrived disoriented and bothered, as if the pressure, the decisions (
non-decisions, mounting up) were gnawing him. In the elevator going up, my necktie--seriously frayed, by design--distracted him.

“It gets better,” I said, unbuttoning his navy blazer to reveal a skull and bones at its lower end. “It’s my old school tie. As in,
self-taught (and proud of it). It also reflected Monaco’s pirate history. “By the way,” I added as we reached the door, “it’s Romanians, not Bulgarians, you’ll be meeting.”

“What?” said the Prince.

“I left a message on your cell. Did you not get it?”`

No, Albert said. He had not gotten beyond “Don’t forget our meeting…” before hitting the
end button.

The Romanians, like everyone else, were charmed by the Prince’s presence, even though Albert was distracted and fell asleep in his chair.

As I descended to the lobby with the Prince after the meeting, Albert cited problems with JLA: “family pressures” and “he cuts off cabinet members in mid-sentence.” Odd thing about it, Albert sounded like a programmed robot, as if others had planted those very phrases in his brain.

I thanked the Prince for appearing, which demonstrated to foreign intelligence officers that he fully backed the unofficial but very active Monaco Intelligence Service.

My experience with the Romanians was a good example of how I, a U.S. citizen without official status, was able to open liaison partnerships with foreign intelligence services: I would explain that I wanted to create a liaison relationship; they would be intrigued, willing to meet, and listen—and at first they would not know what to do with it.

The bureaucratic system cannot easily handle such a concept. So they would stew. But they really wanted to visit Monaco (at government expense) and meet a real prince, so inevitably they would come upon a solution: This should be an “informal contact,” handled by just a very few persons at the top, themselves (no mid-level bureaucrats, no local field officers).

And this arrangement suited our purpose better than normal official liaison, because it quickly evolved into a very special relationship, often hidden from government oversight, and dealt with at the very top.

Of all the jobs in intelligence, foreign liaison is certainly the most dangerous.
For your heart and liver. You’re not likely to get kidnapped or shot, but the rich food and fine wine from entertaining (and being entertained) will leave you with clotted arteries, a swollen liver and gout.

The Prince invited me to join him for lunch the following day at the Palace.

“Not the white-gloved guys,” I protested, as much put off by their formality as the probability that they would eavesdrop and report their conversation to others for cash.

“No,” the Prince replied, “the nightclub bar.”

“I’ll be there.”

Meantime, the two Jean-Pauls--CARTERON and PROUST--had been exchanging barbs, the minister of state vowing the current summit would be CARTERON’s last, and CARTERON referring to PROUST as a “toxic waste dump.”

Watching these ugly specimens whack away at each other made the pressures of my job more bearable.

DE MASSY toured the Romanians around Monaco all afternoon. At one point, the Romanian operations chief told DE MASSY that when he’d made a courtesy call to the DST director before embarking on this visit, the director supposedly said, “I don’t know—he’s American.”

Maybe I
was driving the French nuts. They couldn’t help but notice an escalation of liaison partnerships and a constant flux of representatives from foreign intelligence services trekking through Immigration at Nice Airport for onward travel to Monaco.

During the past three months, I had hosted the Luxembourgers, Bulgarians, Slovenians, Montenegrans, Liechtensteiners, and Swiss—not to mention CIA and SIS. My rapid expansion of such relationships might have unnerved the French.

And perhaps a burgeoning association of micro-Europe intelligence services further rattled them.