"The Archangel"

To his friends, Gabriel Aranda, 33, a slight, bald onetime journalist and former government civil servant, is known as "the Archangel." But to France's ruling Gaullists, he is something else again. For a week Aranda flooded the press with photocopied letters and documents that made high-ranking Gaullist ministers. Deputies and party leaders look like influence peddlers for private interests. In the process, he became something of a public hero, and left the government of President Georges Pompidou in embarrassed disarray.

Aranda claims to have obtained 136 documents implicating 48 public officials. He leaked 15 of the papers which involved ten well-known Gaullist politicians, including Minister of Agriculture Jacques Chirac and the editor of the Gaullist party daily La Nation. One letter from former Gaullist Party Secretary-General Rene Tomasini asked "mon cher Albin" Chalandon, then Minister of Development and Housing, to give a private firm a fat contract for highway construction. Another disclosed that a Gaullist Deputy had forged a building permit for a supermarket by inserting it between the clipped-off letterhead and signature of Chalandon. Yet another letter, on party stationery from a former Gaullist Deputy, Dr. Guy Fric, urged that a contract be given to a private company.

Disease. Gaullist reaction to the disclosures verged on hysteria. Prime Minister Pierre Messmer denounced Aranda for "acting against morality and against the law." Pompidou, in one of his semiannual press conferences last week, lamented that photocopying had become "a disease of our times" --though he promised to check carefully on the integrity of Gaullist candidates in next March's parliamentary elections.

Aranda, Chalandon's former press attache, began preparing the latest revelation after Chalandon lost his job last July when Pompidou forced Chaban-Delmas to tender his resignation. Chalandon asked Aranda to go through his correspondence and sort it out. Aranda did, and made photocopies of documents he considered compromising to Gaullist bigwigs.

Curiously, Aranda linked his revelations to the recent sale of French Mirage fighters to Libya. If the Pompidou government did not stop "the delivery of these offensive weapons at once," Aranda threatened to publish many more documents. "No one has the right to sell out the people of Israel," he added. "Shalom!" The speech led many Frenchmen to believe that he was Jewish. As it turned out, Aranda is Catholic, conservative and, to the consternation of the government, a staunch Gaullist. The Mirage statement, he explained grandly, was just "a poetic touch, a flower on the dung heap."

Police were not amused. Justice Minister Rene Pleven instructed the Paris district attorney to arrest Aranda and charge him with "stealing, concealing and revealing." Frontier police and Orly airport officials were also ordered to catch Aranda--though, as the Paris daily Le Monde wryly pointed out, not to question him.

While the police searched vainly, Aranda holed up in a Paris hotel, giving interviews to any journalists who dropped by. Finally, last week Aranda gave himself up, though not before he held yet another press conference on the steps of Paris' Palais de Justice under the watchful eyes of hundreds of police. "Why did you release these documents on the eve of the election?" someone asked. "There is no season for honesty," Aranda replied, adding whimsically: "I deserve a chocolate medal."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.