Hilaire du Berrier: Spy From North Dakota

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 4, 1999 | by James P. Lucier

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the French spirited away du Berrier's radio and incriminating papers, but his position became more tenuous every day. Finally, the sound of heavy boots came on the stairway in the night and he was hauled away as a spy. Japanese interrogators took him to their torture chamber to make him identify the members of his spy ring. He never broke, but the torture left his face partially paralyzed, and ended his flying days.

After five years in a Japanese prison camp near the River Kwai, he was liberated by advance forces of the American O.S.S. The Chinese Nationalists gave him a special citation. The French decorated him with the Croix de Combattant Voluntaire and the Croix de Combattant de la Resistance and, years later, awarded him a military pension. Leftists in the US. State Department, however, spent years dunning him for $600 for food the U.S. government supplied through the Swiss Embassy while he was starving in the Japanese camp and denied him a passport until the bill was paid.

Eventually returning to Paris, du Berrier fell in again with his pals in French intelligence circles. It was a critical moment. Salan and Jacques Soustelle, then the top intel chief first maneuvered Gen. Charles de Gaulle into power to save Algeria as a part of France and then tried to overthrow him when he moved to turn the country over to Ahmed Ben Bella and the Algerian terrorists. Salan and Soustelle went into hiding, and du Berrier performed critical services for them in raising funds and serving as a courier to their hideouts. When the coup plotters were arrested, du Berrier scurried back to the United States but finally settled in Monaco, where he has lived and written ever since -- publishing a monthly intelligence newsletter with subscribers all over the world (HduB Reports, 20 Blvd. Princesse Charlotte, Monte Carlo, Monaco; $75 the year).

Du Barrier was an adviser and friend to the Emperor Bao Dai, the exiled Vietnamese leader then living in a small house in nearby Cannes. France had gone through the agony of Algeria only to enter the agony of Vietnam. In 1963, du Berrier published the most important alternative history of the Vietnam war, Background to Betrayal, a book that received worldwide attention. Writing from his detailed experience, he denounced leftists in the U.S. government for supporting first Ho Chi Minh and later Ngo Dinh Diem, preparing the way for the Communist takeover of Vietnam.

Insight found du Berrier recently in his spacious modern apartment in Monaco sitting before a large bay window overlooking the famed casino, the palm trees and the sparkling blue Mediterranean. His desk is covered with files not just about the past but about the new Amsterdam Treaty, Ken Starr and the latest economic reports. Here, too, he is writing his memoirs on a computer that the boy from Flasher never could have imagined.

Insight: You proudly call yourself a nationalist, a monarchist and an American. Yet few men could claim to have a broader experience in international events than you. How did you become a monarchist?