France Back In The NATO Fold

[Jan Klimkowski]

You have to tip your hat to De Gaulle for having the balls to give the finger to America in the first place. I don't see that it has harmed them financially. Maybe the rest of us should follow the example now that France are stepping back into the fold?

Assassination attempts against De Gaulle were partly blamed on the OAS (the Organisation de l'armée secrète or Organisation armée secrète).

They figure in spookily interesting Freddie Forsyth's Day of the Jackal.

Officially, the OAS were a very far right French nationalist group formed during the horrifically brutal colonial wars in Algeria.

However, there are persistent rumours that the OAS was part of the CIA/Nazi/Gehlen stay-behind Operation Gladio, which would throw an entirely different light on OAS assassination attempts on De Gaulle for refusing to allow France to be part of NATO.

Wiki contains some intriguing snippets on Gladio in France:

France

In 1947, Interior Minister Edouard Depreux revealed the existence of a secret stay-behind army in France codenamed "Plan Bleu". The next year, the "Western Union Clandestine Committee" (WUCC) was created to coordinate secret unorthodox warfare. In 1949, the WUCC was integrated into NATO, whose headquarters were established in France, under the name "Clandestine Planning Committee" (CPC). In 1958, NATO founded the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) to coordinate secret warfare.

The network was supported with elements from SCEDE, and had military support from the 11th Choc regiment. The former director of DGSE, admiral Pierre Lacoste, alleged in a 1992 interview with The Nation, that certain elements from the network were involved with terrorist activities against de Gaulle and his Algerian policy. A section of the 11th Choc regiment split over the 1962 Evian peace accords, and became part of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), but it is unclear if this also involved members of the French stay-behind network.[43][44]

La Rose des Vents and Arc-en-ciel ("Rainbow") network were part of Gladio. François de Grossouvre was Gladio's leader for the region around Lyon in France until his alleged suicide on April 7 1994. Grossouvre would have asked Constantin Melnik, leader of the French secret services during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62), to return to activity. He was living in comfortable exile in the US, where he maintained links with the Rand Corporation. Constantin Melnik is alleged to have been involved in the creation in 1952 of the Ordre Souverain du Temple Solaire, an ancestor of the Order of the Solar Temple, created by former A.M.O.R.C. members, in which the SDECE (French former military intelligence agency) was interested.[45]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio