Spy boss admits deal with terrorists

A former French intelligence chief has prompted outrage and calls for a parliamentary inquiry over his claims that he struck a secret non-aggression pact with a Palestinian terrorist group after it attacked a Jewish restaurant in Paris in 1982.

Yves Bonnet was reported last week to have told a judge that he had made a deal with the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal that allowed members of Abu Nidal’s group to visit France freely so long as they agreed not to carry out any more attacks on French soil.

‘‘We made a kind of verbal deal in which I said I don’t want any more attacks on French soil and in return I’ll let you come to France and I guarantee nothing will happen to you,’’ said Bonnet, who was head of the domestic DST intelligence service from 1982 to 1985.

Families of victims were shocked that the government could have negotiated with a group accused of the attack on Jo Goldenberg’s restaurant in the Rue des Rosiers, in the Parisian Jewish quarter. Masked gunmen threw grenades and shot dead six diners on August 9, 1982, before escaping.

Abu Nidal, who had broken away from Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation, led a reign of terror in the 1970s and 1980s with an estimated death toll of 300. His group shot and critically injured Israel’s ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov, outside the Dorchester Hotel two months before the Rue des Rosiers attack, and it killed 20 people in Rome and Vienna airports in 1985.

According to Le Parisien newspaper, Bonnet, a police commissioner who took over the DST after the Rue des Rosiers attack, told the investigating judge in January that his agents had held a rendezvous with Abu Nidal organisation members – not the killers, he insisted, but their ‘‘sidekicks’’.

‘‘I take full responsibility for the agreement,’’ he is reported to have said, describing how, in exchange for allowing its members to visit France ‘‘without risk’’, the group would abstain from further attacks there. ‘‘If they were to carry out attacks in Italy, for example, that wouldn’t concern me, so long as there was nothing on French soil.’’

It was also agreed that two of the group’s members could visit two fellow militants jailed in France for the murder of a PLO official.

‘‘And it worked,’’ said Bonnet, referring to the agreement as a ‘‘non-aggression’’ pact rather than ‘‘collaboration’’. ‘‘There were no more attacks between the end of 1983 and the end of 1985.’’

‘‘It’s shameful,’’ said Yohann Taieb, the president of a support committee for the families of victims.

He called on French president Emmanuel Macron to declassify documents relating to the Rue Des Rosiers attack and to ‘‘take decisions about eventual legal proceedings’’.

Avi Bitton, a lawyer for families of victims, said: ‘‘We must have a parliamentary inquiry, not only about the Rue des Rosiers. Were such agreements made with other organisations?’’

Bonnet, now 83, suggested that Francois Mitterrand, who was president at the time, was aware of the agreement because his chief of staff was briefed on it. Officially, however, the Elysee Palace ‘‘knew nothing’’.

Abu Nidal, whose real name was Sabri Khalil al-Banna, died in a shooting in his Baghdad flat in 2002. Iraqi officials insisted that he committed suicide during an interrogation. Others believed he was killed on the orders of Saddam Hussein. –