This is a delicate matter, closely followed by the Elysée, which is causing a stir in the secret world of the Directorate General for External Security (DGSE). For more than nine months, four of its agents have been detained in Burkina Faso by the military junta hostile to France of Captain Ibrahim Traoré. “hostage taking”, according to several official French sources, from which no sign of a resolution has yet appeared.
By the end of 2023. On the 1stAhem In December, the four men were arrested in Ouagadougou, forty-eight hours after their arrival. They were sent there as part of a cooperation with the National Intelligence Agency of Burkina Faso (ANR), which continues despite the high tensions between France and Burkina Faso since Captain Traoré took power at the end of a coup d’état, in September 2022. Suspected of espionage and destabilising attempts against his regime, they were arrested by members of the State Security Directorate (DSE).
Although their superiors assured them that they were up to date and that their Burkinabe partners were aware of their arrival, the four men had not followed the procedure to the letter: equipped with diplomatic passports, they presented themselves upon arrival with electronic visas and not diplomatic visas in due form with a verbal note, which some of their colleagues and foreign diplomats had already done to come to Ouagadougou without this having caused any problems until then.
For about ten days, the four French agents remained incommunicado and interrogated by the DSE. Another error aggravates their case: the service telephones that were given to them on arrival were not “cleaned”, as they are supposed to be between two rotations. On some of these devices there are photographs of sensitive sites in the capital and contacts in sensitive areas of the country. If in Paris some recognise a “series of errors” damaging, everyone is convinced: this affair is above all a pretext used by the junta to ruin relations with France and break them off once and for all.
The file irritates the Elysée
The trick works. On December 17, 2023, the DGSE closed its post in Ouagadougou and repatriated its dozen agents working there. Behind the scenes, the role played by the Russians is questionable. And rightly so: thanks to the rapprochement between Captain Traoré and Moscow, around twenty agents of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence, arrived in Burkina Faso in November 2023 to collaborate with the ANR, effectively establishing an improbable and impossible coexistence between the French and Russian services. “The Russians probably whispered to the Burkinabe: ‘It’s them or us.’”traces a French security source.
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