Did France pay to free hostages?

As two French journalists arrive back in Paris after 124 days in the hands of Iraqi captors, questions are asked about why they were released. John Lichfield reports

It does not often fall to two journalists to be welcomed home by their head of state like conquering heroes. No one begrudged Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot their joyous reception at Villacoublay air force base, west of Paris, last night after 124 days in captivity in Iraq. The French journalists have mobilised an impressive unity of support and concern, crossing all religious ethnic and political divides in a much divided country, since they were captured on a dusty road outside Baghdad on 20 August.

They arrived at a sleet and wind-driven airport to the rapturous welcome of their parents and loved ones. Both men looked thin and drawn but in good humour. Among the crowd on the Tarmac, which also included the Prime Minister and the Defence Minister, was Mohamed al-Joundi, the Syrian driver kidnapped with them, who escaped in November. He received a lengthy hug from M. Malbrunot. A beaming President Chirac - who had been supposed to give the initial welcome to the hostages alone - had to jostle among the relatives to shake their hands.

In brief comments to the press, the two men said that they had survived by "playing the French journalist card" - in other words by stressing France's opposition to the Iraqi war and its insistence on maintaining an independent, pro-Arab policy in the Middle East.

M. Malbrunot had scathing words for a freelance "rescue" operation by a maverick government MP, Didier Julia, which scuppered previous release hopes in October. The released Figaro journalist said that M. Julia deserved "nothing but contempt" for putting the lives of his countrymen at risk.

M. Mabrunot said: "We never lost hope, even if we had a difficult time, often a very difficult time. We managed to persuade our kidnappers that we were not pro-American. We played the card marked 'French journalists'."

The pair were not allowed to return to their families immediately but taken for health checks and a debriefing by the French external security service, the DGSE, the French equivalent of MI6. It emerged yesterday that the DGSE had played a large part in their release.

France was transfixed throughout yesterday by the return - just before Christmas - of two men whose abduction had seemed to be an affront to the nation.

Had France not stood against the US-led invasion of Iraq? Had France not supported the Palestinian cause? Had France not supported the case of the "Iraqi people" against UN sanctions? Had the coverage of the two journalists - freelances who work for Radio France and Le Figaro and Ouest France - not been critical of the US-led invasion of Iraq? That two well-known French journalists should be kidnapped - and that the kidnappers should attempt, at first, to interfere in French internal politics on Islamic headscarves - was taken as an insult by almost everyone in France, including the most radical Islamic movements.

At France's request, demands for their freedom were made by almost all Arab governments - Syria excepted -and some of the most extreme organisations in the Middle East.

However, the release unharmed of the two French correspondents, when so many other foreign hostages have been murdered, and another 20 remain in captivity, also provoked the French press and French opposition politicians to pose a series of questions.

Why did M. Chesnot and M. Malbrunot survive, when so many other equally innocent captives, such as the pro-Arab Italian journalist, Enzo Baldoni, the British engineer Ken Bigley and the British-Irish-Iraqi aid worker, Margaret Hassan, have been killed? Was this purely because the journalists were French, or had some kind of ransom been paid?

Why were the journalists released now, when all indications had been that negotiations were going nowhere? The fact that President Chirac had to be called back from his Moroccan holiday implied - perhaps deliberately - that the release was as much a surprise to the Elysée Palace as everyone else.

The Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, told senior politicians of all parties yesterday that no ransom had been demanded by the kidnappers and none had been paid by France. He told the national assembly that the journalists had been released "without pre-conditions" and that France had remained faithful to its "convictions" that governments should not bargain with terrorists.

The Islamic Army of Iraq, the enigmatic organisation that kidnapped the journalists and their Syrian driver-fixer, Mr Joundi, said that the release was a tribute to France's "support for the Iraqi people and the Palestinian cause".

If so, why did it take almost four months for the kidnappers to let them go? The newspaper Le Monde said yesterday that a "senior political figure" had indicated money exchanged hands for the release of the journalists. Several opposition politicians also hinted they believed there had been a deal with the kidnappers which was partly financial.

That may have taken the form of a "deniable" payment - money handed over by an Arab government or money handed to an intermediary for fixing access to the kidnappers. Further details may, or may not, emerge in the next few days.

Le Monde said yesterday that negotiations to identify the kidnappers, among the scores of opposition groups in Iraq, had been conducted exclusively by the DGSE. The paper reported that a DGSE team, or several teams, had been working within Iraq - initially to the annoyance of the Iraqi interim government, finally with their blessing - since September. It had finally established - or re-established - contacts with the correct group in November and had been "on standby" for a hostage release every day since then, the newspaper said.

Arrangements for their release had almost been concluded in late September, the DGSE source said, but were scrambled by a bizarre, freelance release effort led by the maverick deputy from the government party, M. Julia. M. Julia's antics - bitterly criticised by some French officials, quietly supported by others - put release efforts back by two months, according to Le Monde.

The DGSE source suggested that the Julia mission - which had claimed at one point, falsely, to have released the hostages - had been a spoiling operation sponsored by the Syrian government, which is hostile to France. That absurd episode remains only partly explained, like much else in the French hostage affair.

Although the DGSE source refused to discuss the question of ransoms for "reasons of state", Le Monde yesterday quoted "a senior political figure" who, the newspaper said, believed that money did change hands. France is known to have paid ransoms to release hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s and, according to a senior DGSE official quoted in Le Monde, was quite willing to do so on this occasion.

"If we had been asked for money, we would have paid up straight away, without any problems with our conscience," the official said. The problem for much of the past four months, the official told Le Monde, was that the kidnappers were not asking for money.

Did they change their mind? Were large sums paid through intermediary groups?

François Hollande, leader of the Socialists, the main opposition party, suggested yesterday that the truth would have to be told eventually. (Others were not so optimistic.) "When the time is right, the time for explanations will come," M. Hollande said. "We must ask for explanations about all stages of their detention.

"Now their freedom has been secured, informing parliament about all the conditions of how the discussions have unfolded since August is the least thing that can be done." The DGSE's shadowy role in the journalists' release was made public later in the evening when President Chirac rang the boss of the organisation, Pierre Brochant, to thank him and his staff for the "quality of their work".

A defence spokesman said M. Malbrunot and M. Chesnot had initially been flown from Baghdad to Cyprus yesterday morning in a French air force Hercules, which had been "placed at the disposal of the DGSE several days ago".

In Cyprus, the journalists were transferred to an air force Falcon jet, which had flown out from Paris yesterday morning carrying the Foreign Minister, Michel Barnier, and members of the hostages' families.

French officials say part of the answer to the question "why did the French hostages survive" lies in the muddled, nationalist and relatively moderate nature of the group that captured them. If they had been handed on to one of the more absolutist, anti-Western, Islamist opposition movements, close to al-Qa'ida, nothing - not money, not their French nationality - could have saved them, the officials say.

M. Malbrunot and M. Chesnot were seized as they tried to drive from Baghdad to the besieged city of Najaf. They are acknowledged experts on the Middle East, who collaborated on three books on the region.

In late August, the "Islamic Army in Iraq", threatened to execute them within 48 hours unless France scrapped a law banning overt religious symbols, including Islamic headscarves, from state schools.

Paris refused to bow to the demands and - paradoxically - the revulsion at the threat among the French Muslim community helped the headscarf ban to pass relatively smoothly when schools reopened in early September.

The journalists' driver, Mr Joundi, who was separated from the Frenchmen and then escaped in November, gave French intelligence services hours of interviews, and detailed information, on their kidnappers. That is believed by Mr Joundi and others to have been another factor which helped the final negotiations that led to the journalists' release. In a lengthy interview with the newspaper Libération last month, Mr Joundi said the kidnappers - a mixture of secular Saddam loyalists and devout, rural Muslims - seemed to have seized the Frenchmen by mistake and had little idea what to do next.

"The Islamic Army is not a monolithic group with a mainly religious membership. It's more like a collection of scattered cells, made up of former soldiers, with family or other connections, who have decided to work together," he said.

"For some of the [ex-army] officers, the references to Islam are a way of justifying their actions in the eyes of the people. For the peasants guarding us, Islam is the only true ideology. It was a strange kind of mixture.

"I think that within the Islamic Army in Iraq, objectives and strategies switch around according to who happens to be involved. Each of them is under different kinds of external pressures, which explains why they change their mind so often ... [By kidnapping us] they found they had gained in prestige but didn't know what to do to get out of the mess they were in."

However, Mr Joundi also pointed out that the "Islamic Army" mostly funded itself with ransoms from kidnappings.

There were indications yesterday that the French government - having previously bypassed the Iraqi interim government and American occupation forces in its attempts to win the hostages' release - had established improved relations with the powers-that-be in Iraq in recent weeks. The Iraqi government, hugely critical in the past of French solo efforts, said yesterday that the release of the hostages was made possible by "co-operation" between Paris and Baghdad.

French officials, who had previously said privately that American military activities had hampered attempts to free the Frenchmen, said yesterday that the coalition assault on Fallujah last month may have helped. The two journalists are believed to have been held in Fallujah until the city fell.The fact their captors were flushed out of the city may have contributed to their willingness to make a deal.

A financial deal? Many questions remain unanswered. Some light may be shed when, or if, M. Chesnot and M. Malbrunot give a longer account of what they saw, and what they know, in the next few days. For now, the country is just happy to have them home, safe and well.