AS MINISTER of defence, Charles Hernu was known to be a bon vivant whose fondness for wine and women was equalled only by his affection for all things military. The Rainbow Warrior affair - when French saboteurs under Hernu's command blew up a Greenpeace ship in 1985 - brought his career to a halt, and Hernu died of a heart attack five years later.
Now a French magazine has revealed that Heru was a paid agent of east bloc intelligence services from 1953 until 1963 - and perhaps beyond. L'Express weekly based its cover story published yesterday on a file turned over to the DST, the French counter intelligence agency, by a Romanian official in 1992.
The two journalists who investigated the story travelled to eastern Europe to confirm details with Mr Hernu's former "handlers".
No high level "moles" had previously been identified in France.
L'Express compared Charles Hernu's recruitment to the KGB's enlisting Britons Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt at Cambridge in the 1930s. And Hernu's story may be only the beginning. According to today's Le Monde London three years ago provided Paris with a list of 300 French diplomats and civil servants who worked for the east bloc.
Despite the evidence in L'Express and widely cited confirmation by French intelligence sources that they believe the story to be true, Mr Hernu's son, Patrice, condemned it as a "gross fabrication" and said he would ask President Chirac to clear his father's name.
L'Express is also asking Mr Chirac to lift the gag order on the Hernu file. Mr Hernu's former friends have rushed to defend him, noting that he took a firm stand against the Soviet Union during the SS 20 missile crisis in the early 1980s.
As head of the DST in 1992, Mr Jacques Fournet had the unhappy task of informing the late President Francois Mitterrand that his close friend Charles Hernu had been a paid agent of foreign intelligence services.
Mr Fournet this week confirmed that he presented the report to Mitterrand, but added that he did not know if it was true. Mitterrand demanded that Hernu's past be regarded as a state secret, since he had died two years earlier and could not defend himself.
According to L'Express, Charles Hernu was first approached in 1953 by Raiko Nikolov, a secret agent serving at the Bulgarian embassy in Paris. For three years, Hernu - known by the code name "Andre wrote reports for Nikolov - including a profile of Mitterrand. For these he received between up to £1,807.
The payments increased when Hernu became the youngest member of the French legislature in 1956. The Bulgarians then turned him over to a Soviet "handler", Mr Vladimir Ivanovitch Erofeev, councillor at the Soviet embassy. In 1958, the Soviet Union invested £36,144 in Hernu's parliamentary election campaign.
The Soviets lost contact with Hernu when he was placed under police protection in 1961. The head of the Romanian Securitate in France renewed the relationship with Hernu - now code named "Dinu" - in 1963, immediately after Hernu cofounded an off shoot of the French Socialist Party.
The KGB resumed control over Hernu a month later. That is where all trace of his espionnage career peters out. Was Hernu still an agent nearly 20 years later, when as defence minister from, 1981-85 he gained access to all of France's nuclear weapons secrets? The answer may yet come from Moscow archives.
