BBC finds evidence that French helped Argentines sink our ships

French technicians helped prepare Exocet missiles - but was their 'treachery' any worse than America's?

Crispin Black

SACRE BLEU! According to a documentary broadcast on BBC Radio 4 last night, the French cheated on us during the Falklands War by helping the Argies while they were pretending to help us. No one is suggesting that President Mitterand was anything other than wholehearted in his support for the UK. He ordered an immediate and complete embargo on supplying or assisting the Argentines. Vital technical data on the French-made anti-ship Exocet missile was made available to the Ministry of Defence, the French having sold five to the Argentines before the war.

French intelligence supplied leads to MI6 as it tried to prevent Argentine emissaries from buying further Exocets on the black market and turned a blind eye as British spooks carried out covert sting operations on French soil. The Fleet Air Arm was even able to practice against the same French-made Mirage aircraft operated by the Argentine Air Force, while the French Navy made its repair and resupply facilities at Dakar in Senegal available to our Task Force. But at the same time, according to convincing evidence unearthed by the BBC, a group of French technicians in Argentina fine-tuned and repaired the five air-launched Exocet missiles the Argentinians had already purchased.

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is a former Welsh Guards lieutenant colonel and intelligence analyst for the British government's Joint Intelligence Committee. His book, 7-7: What Went Wrong, was one of the first to be published after the London bombings in July 2005.