The parapolitical activities of Jean Violet go back to the 1930s, when Violet was supposedly involved with a violent quasi-Masonic movement going under the title of the Comite Secret pour l’Action Revolutionnaire, or CSAR. CSAR was part of a larger far-right phenomenon in pre-WW2 France, the conspiratorial members of which were referred to as Cagoulards, or ‘Hooded Ones’. During WW2, the top leaders of CSAR – Eugene Deloncle and a certain Filliol – were such enthusiastic collaborators that they were in contact with General Max Thomas, who headed the Gestapo and S.S. Security Service (S. D.) forces in France in 1941. In October of that year, those same leaders arranged for the bombing of synagogues in Paris on behalf of General Thomas.(1)
Even if Violet was part of CSAR, he emerged from WW2 untainted by its actions, and proceeded to make a name for himself as a lawyer. He also fell in with Opus Dei, which may explain some of what followed. In 1951 he was approached by Antoine Pinay, who was a cabinet minister at that point. On behalf of some Swiss lawyer Pinay sought to clear up the matter of a Geneva-based firm that had seen its factory in Germany seized by the Nazis during the war. Violet resolved the problem and Pinay was so satisfied he recommended him to the new French intelligence organization, SDECE. Violet duly became an SDECE operative, utilizing a global network of contacts to assist that agency in its work.(2)
Violet’s early post-war deeds also featured a Roman Catholic priest, Father Yves Dubois. Both men figured in the creation of an Institute d’Etudes Diplomatiques, whose student body featured a young Yugoslavian refugee by the name of Jovanovitch. This individual would later acquire U.S. citizenship, call himself Daniel Boyer, and specialize in advising US and French businessmen interested in operating overseas. He would also cross Violet’s path at regular intervals. (3)
The Violet-Dubois combination proved durable and effective. As the Cold War raged, the pair acted as a conduit for SDECE funds used to maintain clandestine Vatican networks in Eastern Europe. During the Algerian war of independence (1954-62) Violet turned up at the United Nations, as part of the French delegation, and worked to shore up the support for France in the course of its traumatic struggle with Algerian nationalists. Not surprisingly, Father Dubois was also present, as part of the Vatican delegation, and he coordinated initiatives with Violet. Finally the man now known as Boyer was in the background; he has admitted to being in contact with Violet during this period.(4)
The Violet saga took a new turn in 1965 when a Belgian count, Alain de Villegas, teamed up with an Italian inventor, Aldo Bonassoli, for the first of several crack-pot schemes that would climax with the notorious ‘sniffer-plane’ fraud in France. The actual extent of the criminality of this pair is difficult to determine, because they did exhibit a genuine eccentricity, professing interest in everything from alchemy to flying saucers. On a somewhat more sober level, de Villegas was known to mutter darkly about communism. At some point he joined the Pan-European Union, a Brussels-based organisation with a history going back to 1923, and a tendency towards the right, if not the far-right. On account of this membership, de Villegas reportedly could count on the support of Antoine Pinay. In any event, the first escapade of de Villegas and Bonassoli centred on a desalination project in Switzerland. It was a fiasco. They then turned to the first of their two ‘sniffer’ capers, this involving an airborne device to detect underground, fresh-water reservoirs.(5)
By the early 1970s de Villegas and Bonassoli had encountered Violet and the duo became a trio. It is worth noting that this occurred at about the time Violet suffered a setback in his own machinations. One way or another his work for SDECE had always consumed considerable amounts of that agency’s money and SDECE at last severed the expensive relationship in 1970. Whether or not this was what inspired Violet to champion de Villegas and Bonassoli, he introduced the latter to another of his powerful contacts, Italian financier Carlo Pesenti. Pesenti was intrigued by the water-detection idea, but the early 1970s was a bad time for him, as his business empire was under attack by the endlessly carnivorous Michele Sindona. With the help of Philippe de Weck, chairman of a Swiss bank, the Union de Banque Suisse (UBS), Pesenti beat back Sindona’s take-over attempts, but was left too weakened for highly speculative ventures.
Violet’s relationship with Pesenti must have survived this disappointment because he helped the Italian not long afterwards when the latter was seeking to expand his US operations. In fact, he recommended Daniel Boyer. Boyer himself was becoming noticeably more spooky in this period and, on his own admission, was in touch with the UNITA rebels of Angola in 1976.(6)
In the wake of the oil price shock of 1973, Violet and his partners hit upon their final ‘sniffer’ scheme: instead of fresh water, they were now after petroleum. They first approached South Africa but Pretoria was unimpressed. Success actually lay much closer to home, in the form of the French state oil firm, the Societe Nationale ELF Aquitaine, or SNEA (often just referred to as ELF). Even taking into account the newly elevated price for oil at the time, ELF proved remarkably gullible when Violet, de Villegas and Bonassoli claimed they could outfit planes with oil-detection gear. The first contract between the two parties was signed in 1976 and ELF plunged about US$120 million into the sorry business before finally admitting in 1979 that it had been conned. Only half the money was ever recovered. (7)
The flow of money in the ‘sniffer-plane’ affair is the most revealing aspect of the scandal. A Panamanian firm set up by der Villegas, called Fislama, was used by the count to receive ELF payments. It was administered by none other than Philippe de Weck, the UBS chairman who had saved Carlo Pesenti. The conduit for the initial payments was a second firm, based in Zurich, Ultrafin AG. Ultrafin was subordinate to Banco Ambrosiano Holdings, itself a tentacle of Banco Ambrosiano, the Italian financial institution then being looted by its own chairman, Roberto Calvi, and P-2. Indeed, P-2 Grandmaster Licio Gelli kept an enormous account at de Weck’s UBS, and other UBS accounts popped up throughout the Banco Ambrosiano affair. Nor should one forget that Violet’s Vatican ties were mirrored by the role in the Ambrosiano looting played by the Vatican’s bank, the Instituto per le Opere Religione (IOR).(8)
Presiding over the final stages of the ‘sniffer-plane’ fraud was the ubiquitous Daniel Boyer. Violet first drew him into the morass by introducing him to a son of de Villegas, Fernand, in June of 1978. That, at least, is how Boyer has ‘related it. Even without that entanglement, Boyer was becoming more and more fascinating every year. In 1978 he took on the leadership of those members of the US Democratic Party resident in France, and held that position until 1982. His Vatican ties were such that, by the early 1980s, he was running a firm printing French-language editions of art books based on Vatican collections.
None of this, however, prevented the final debacle over at ELF. In Boyer’s version of events, a period of great anxiety and tension among the ‘sniffer-plane’ gang climaxed in December 1978, when de Villegas dismissed Violet as his representative, and asked Boyer to replace him. Boyer did so, supposedly without comprehending that the airborne oil-detection business contained not the slightest amount of serious technology. Violet was agreeable to the new arrangements, but kept in touch with Boyer regarding further developments. When ELF cried fraud in 1979, Boyer did what he says was his best to recover as much of the ELF funds as possible. (9)
The aftermath of the ‘sniffer-plane’ farce was eventful. ELF opted for a cover-up, and the facts of the case remained unknown until 1983, by which time President Giscard d’Estaing had been replaced by Francois Mitterand. Authorities did pursue the matter behind the scenes, but did not get very far. For instance, Swiss banker de Weck refused to answer any questions, invoking the confidentiality of his client, de Villegas. In 1982 Banco Ambrosiano collapsed in the wake of the mysterious death of Roberto Calvi. The Vatican appointed a commission to explore IOR complicity in the collapse which was notable mostly for its refusal to acknowledge that IOR was responsible for what happened. One of the commissioners was de Weck.(10)
Notes
- Naylor p. 258; Anderson pp. 224-229; Delarue pp. 238-9, 242
- Naylor p. 258; Faligot and Krop pp.194-5
- Guetta
- Faligot and Krop pp.195-8; Guetta
- Naylor p. 258; Singer; Yearbook of International Organizations 1981
- Faligot and Krop p.195; Naylor p. 259; Guetta
- Naylor pp. 260,267; Perry; Guetta; Yallop p. 321
- Yallop pp.320-21; Naylor p. 260; Gurwin p. 17; Cornwell p. 58
- Guetta
- Naylor p. 260, 400 (note 3); Yallop p. 320
Sources
- Anderson, Malcolm – Conservative Politics in France, Allen and Unwin, London 1974
- Comwell, Rupert – God’s Banker, Gollancz, London, 1983
- Delarue, Jacques –The Gestapo, Dell, New York, 1964
- Faligot, Roger and Krop, Pascal – La Piscine, Seuil, Paris, 1995
- Guetta, Bernard – ‘Les Explications de M. Boyer, hommes d’affaires de l’ ‘inventeur’ Belge’, in Le Monde 21 January 1984
- Gurwin, Larry – The Calvi Affair, revised edition, Pan, London 1984
- Naylor, R.T. – Hot Money and the Politics of Debt, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto 1987
- Perry, Nicholas – ‘Unliberation theology’, in New Statesman 1 March 1985
- Singer, Daniel – ‘Auto Workers and “sniffing planes”‘ in The Nation February 25 1984
- Yallop, David – In God’s Name, Jonathan Cape, London 1984
- Yearbook of International Organizations, 1981