From the onset of the Fifth Republic and until 1962, it was subordinate to Prime Minister Michel Debré and its resources largely dedicated to the Algerian War.
The SDECE was founded in 1946 as a successor to the wartime Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action which was seen as too closely associated with the Gaullists to properly serve the republic.
[2] The SDECE was officially responsible to the Minister of Defense, but in fact reported to the president acting through a special adviser on intelligence matters.
[10] The cryptographic division of the SDECE was well regarded, having broken several Soviet diplomatic codes, but its attempts at playing the role of a para-military organization was less successful.
[11] In 1951 SDECE created the Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés para-military organization in Vietnam, part of the "Action Service" (together with 11th shock parachute regiment), to counter the Vietminh who were fighting for independence from France, but the general hostility of the Vietnamese to the French limited the appeal of fighting for France among the Vietnamese people.
[18] The fact that the various Länder police forces of West Germany were ineffective in investigating the "Red Hand" assassinations committed by SDECE was the result of a secret agreement with General Reinhard Gehlen, the chief of the Bundesnachrichtendienst under which the French and German intelligence were to share information in exchange for allowing the SDECE to commit murders on German soil.
[19] One SDECE agent, Philippe L. Thyraud de Vosjoli, wrote in his 1970 memoir Lamia: "Dozens of assassinations were carried out.
Carbon dioxide guns ejecting small syringes had been purchased in the United States-but the SDECE people substituted the tranquilizing drug with a lethal poison.
[45] From 1963 onward, a major concern for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) was monitoring the SDECE agents who were supporting Quebec separatism by handing over bags of cash to separatists, and the RCMP viewed the French embassy in Ottawa much like the Soviet embassy; namely as a den of spies working for a hostile foreign power.
[51] In 1970, President Georges Pompidou appointed the Comte Alexandre de Marenches SDECE chief with orders to clean up the agency.
[52] Marenches described SDECE in 1970 as being more alike to an organized crime racket than an intelligence agency, writing: "Some agents were running drugs and guns; others were engaged in kidnapping, murder and the settling of the most bloody scores".
[53] Marenches severed the links with the SAC (which was finally dissolved in 1982 after the SAC murdered a police officer and his family in 1981), fired half of SDECE's 1,000 employees, made the SDECE more professional and less politicised, changed the focus from assassinating enemies of the republic to intelligence gathering, and modernized the procedures for intelligence collecting and analysis.
[57] On the night of 13 May 1978, Denard and 42 other mercenaries landed on Grande Comore, almost effortlessly annihilated the Comorian forces and by the morning the Comoros was theirs.
[59] In 1981, when the Socialist François Mitterrand became president, he fired Marenches whom he viewed as too conservative and appointed Pierre Marion, the former CEO of Air France as the new intelligence chief of what was renamed the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (General Directorate of External Security) in 1982.