The affair has undermined the General Directorate of External Security (DGSE) for more than a year. According to a press release from the Moroccan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, published Thursday, December 19 at dawn, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, head of the junta in power in Burkina Faso, “responded favorably” to the request for the release of the four French intelligence agents detained in Ouagadougou, since December 2023, thanks to the mediation of King Mohammed VI. The President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, spoke on Wednesday with the Cherifian sovereign for the “warmly thank you for the success of the mediation”confirmed the Elysée to Agence France-Presse.
The four men were arrested on 1is December 2023, upon their arrival in Ouagadougou. Although they came on an official mission to the Burkina Faso National Intelligence Agency, with which the DGSE continued its cooperation, despite the high tensions between France and Burkina Faso, they were accused of espionage and destabilizing intentions. The Burkina Faso authorities criticized them for not having obtained their visas by respecting the official diplomatic channel. They had also found in the phones of French agents – they had not been “cleaned” before their mission, as the procedure normally provides – photos of sites considered sensitive in the capital and telephone numbers of contacts in critical areas of the country.
In Paris, certain officials readily recognized a “series of errors” detrimental, but everyone was convinced: the arrest of these agents was above all a pretext used by Captain Traoré’s junta to definitively break with France. Arriving in power through a coup in September 2022, the 36-year-old putschist officer turned his back on the former colonial power to seal a strong alliance with Russia. A few weeks before the arrest of the four DGSE agents, around twenty members of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, had arrived in Ouagadougou to work alongside the National Intelligence Agency. “The Russians probably whispered to the Burkinabés: “it’s them or us””estimated a French security source a year ago.
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