On the 11th January 2015, 56 heads of state and government met in Paris, in a street close the the Voltaire Métro station, to demonstrate their opposition to terrorism. Among them were the godfathers of Al-Qaïda and Daesh, such as Ahmet Davutoğlu.

According to the official version, the attacks of January and November 2015 in Paris were sponsored by Al-Qaïda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) —for the execution of the editors of Charlie-Hebdo— and by Daesh for all the others. The authorities have admitted that the Charlie-Hebdo attack was coordinated with the attack against the supermarket at the Porte de Vincennes, although, according to them, AQAP and Daesh are enemies. They also admitted that doubt persists concerning the claim that Amedy Coulibaly was a member of Daesh.

Reuters revealed that the weapons used in the attacks came from the factory of Crvena Zastava, situated in Kragujevac (Serbia) [1]. Both Associated Press and the Palm Beach Post believed that one of the Serbian pistols had been transported by Century International Arms, a Florida firm linked to the CIA [2], although the Press Agency – but not the Post – has since retracted the claim [3].

According to the Croatian daily Slobodna Dalmacija, the weapons used in the January attack against the supermarket, and others used during the attack in November, came from the Serbian manufacturer Crvena Zastava, and were moved to France by the same dealer, Claude Hermant [4].

Our readers will remember that in 1998, the Réseau Voltaire uncovered the surprising activities of the security contingent of the Front National, the Département Protection Sécurité (DPS). This unit had been compiling a list of personalities and had scouted their homes – apparently a small group of individuals within the DPS were preparing certain illicit activities. After a long period of complicated negotiations, we managed to obtain the creation of a Parliamentary Commission of Enquiry to investigate these facts [5]. The elements that we provided for the Assemblée Nationale, specifically concerning the double mission of members of the DPS - for the Front National in France and for the organisation of coups d’état in Africa - were quickly blocked by the Secret-Défense [6]. However, this information provoked a crisis and division within the Front National, so that finally, no-one was available to answer the allegations. Two years later, in 2001, one of the ex-members of the DPS, Claude Hermant, (mentioned above), admitted to the French daily Libération the existence of the « Action » structure within the DPS [7].

Here’s a reminder of our work between 1998 and 1999. We had established that in 1972, the « Front National pour l’Unité Française » had been created in secret by Jacques Foccart, then responsible for Affaires Africaines et Malgaches at the Élysée, by request of President Georges Pompidou. The FN was led from the beginning by Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had played an important rôle in Charles de Gaulle’s ascension to power in 1958, before turning against him [8], and by François Duprat, who had engaged with Bob Denard in the support of Moïse Tchombé in Katanga. Also, we had shown that in 1984, François Mitterrand and Guy Penne, Jacques Foccart’s successor at the Élysée, had used secret Republican funds to finance the electoral campaign of the Front National in the European elections. We thus arrived at the conclusion that the FN was, and had always been, not so much a political party with the desire to exercise power, but a structure necessary to the Élysée, which it used first of all to control personalities of the extreme right wing, then to introduce them into the national political landscape.

Concerning the DPS, we have shown that it was directed at the time by Bernard Courcelles, also the bodyguard for Anne Pingeot, François Mitterrand’s mistress, and by Gérard Le Vert. The DPS included a secret group of about 60 men, all of whom were linked to the secret services, and were mobilised whenever necessary to carry out secret missions, mainly in Africa. This is the group to which Claude Hermant belonged. The true directorate of the DPS was not the Front National, but the Ministry for Defence, with the DPSD, a secret service with almost the same name, whose mission was the protection of the armed forces.

Now the revelations of the Slobodna Dalmacija make sense. In January 2015, when he was jailed for « arms trafficking », Claude Hermant described himself to the committing magistrate as an « informer » for the Customs and the Gendarmerie. When asked by the magistrate for details of the weapons he had sold, he played the Secret-Défense card. The Advisory Committee for Secret-Défense, and then the Minister for the Interior, Bernard Cazeneuve, opted in his favour [9].

In summary, Mr. Hermant belonged to a structure which, under cover of the security unit for the Front National, was unofficially charged by the Élysée with secret missions overseas. Today he is paid for freelance work by the Customs and the Gendarmerie, still without any official status. According to Slobodna Dalmacija, he bought decommissioned weapons in Serbia and recommissioned them himself, and that these were the weapons used in the attacks of January and November. The Croatian daily also spoke of the results of a microscope analysis of a firearm which no-one has so far mentioned. Mr. Hermant also allegedly sold weapons to Islamists in Brussels. His trafic, despite being illegal, is covered by the Secret-Défense.

Let us mention that according to the US Press agency McClatchy, the Kouachi brothers, the killers of Charlie-Hebdo, were linked to the French secret services [10]. Finally, let us also note that Claude Hermant was imprisoned on the decision of judges from Lille, Stanislas Sandraps and Richard Foltzer, who were investigating his arms trafficking, and not by the Parisian judges who were investigating the attacks, Christophe Tessier, Nathalie Poux et Laurence Le Vert. Madame Le Vert is incidentally the cousin of Gérard Le Vert, mentioned above, Claude Hermant’s ex-boss in the DPS.

In conclusion, either Mr. Hermant was working on infiltrating the terrorist cells who perpetrated the attacks, without their action having been prevented, or else – and this is less probable – his current superiors, probably in the Élysée, themselves participated in the organisation of the attacks. But it still has to be determined why, and in whose name, Claude Hernant’s superiors acted as they did.