"A junior minister in the current French government was recruited by the CIA during the 1990s before being "turned" by the French secret service and becoming a double agent, according to a book to be published next week.
Carnets intimes de la DST, a history of the French counter espionage service, reveals how Hervé Plagnol, now a junior minister in charge of civil service reforms, passed classified information to a US contact in Paris. It included France's baseline positions in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) talks.
In 1992, while working as a lecturer at the elite Sciences-Po academy in Paris and as an adviser to the new prime minister, Edouard Balladur, Mr Pagnol began lunching with Mary Ann Baumgartner.
She was a CIA agent, but presented herself as the head of the Dallas Market Centre, a foundation that sought to "clarify misunderstandings between Europe and the United States". Mr Plagnol told the book's authors, Frédéric Ploquin and Eric Merlen, that he had "no idea the information could have interested the CIA". "
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