It's the latest twist in relations between France and Burkina Faso. Four French agents from the General Directorate of External Security (DGSE) were arrested in Ouagadougou on December 1. Charged with espionage, they were indicted and transferred to the Burkinabe capital's prison for detention and correction two weeks later. The rare arrests have further deteriorated relations between the two countries, which have been steadily soured since the putsch of Captain Ibrahim Traoré in September 2022.

The arrests, revealed on December 19 by Jeune Afrique and confirmed to Le Monde by diplomatic sources, have embarrassed French authorities, who repeatedly tried to dissuade magazine from publishing the news. While French intelligence services have made discretion a doctrine, the Foreign Ministry has since been at pains to play down the incident.

Officially, France considers that these "civil servants," in possession of diplomatic passports and visas, were "technicians" present in Burkina Faso to "carry out an IT maintenance operation on behalf of the French embassy." Paris has rejected the accusations of espionage and requested the return of its staff "without delay."

"We're not worried," a French diplomat told Le Monde, adding the intelligence services are "used to dealing with such difficulties." An informed observer of the intelligence community, on the other hand, believes that "if the information is confirmed, it's unprecedented. It's extremely embarrassing and comes at a time when technical intelligence in the region has been lacking for years."

The DGSE has already had to endure criticism from the French president for failing to see the coups in Mali and Niger coming over the past three years. The replacement of Bernard Emié, head of "the pool" since 2018, by Nicolas Lerner, who was head of the General Directorate of Internal Security, was ratified on Wednesday, December 20.

According to several sources, the ruling junta in Burkina Faso was informed of the presence of DGSE agents on its territory. "They were to be deployed as part of cooperation and training, as France does with other countries," said General Bruno Clément-Bollée, who was director of security and defense cooperation at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. "Logically, they inform their hierarchy of what they see, but most likely, Ouagadougou was aware of their presence."

Is it the recent rapprochement with Moscow that led to the hardening of the ruling military in Ouagadougou? After summoning soldiers from Operation Sabre to leave Burkina Faso in January, and expelling the military attaché from the French embassy in September, Traoré has continued to multiply areas of cooperation with Russia, starting with the military.

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