And if the Lafarge cement factory had continued its activity in the middle of the civil war, in the north-west of Syria, not so much to make a profit and preserve its production capacity as to inform Western intelligence services about this was happening in a country in chaos?

This is the thesis of the very detailed documentary by Guillaume Dasquié and Nicolas Jaillard, Lafarge: the multinational, Daesh and the spies. Problem: the former leaders of the Syrian subsidiary of Lafarge are now all indicted for “financing of terrorism”, “complicity in crimes against humanity” and “endangering the lives of others”. The price of the cement company’s continued activity until September 2014 consisted in paying taxes and passes to various armed groups present all around the plant, including the jihadists of the Islamic State organization ( IS, the Daesh of the title).

As General Christophe Gomart, former director of military intelligence (DRM) recognizes from the outset, it was very useful to have eyes and ears in such a volatile and troubled context. However, two senior Lafarge executives, Jean-Claude Veillard and Christian Herrault, had a military background, facilitating their contacts with the DGSE (Directorate General for External Security) and the DRM. Mr. Veillard, who was interviewed at length in the documentary, assures him: “I informed the DRM, the DGSI [General Directorate of Internal Security] and the DGSE from mid-2011. »

Informants in the field

The Lafarge group’s security manager can count on two men, who succeed each other in the field as plant security managers: the Norwegian Jacob Waerness, a former elite policeman, then in 2013 the Jordanian Ahmad Jaloudi, a former fighter pilot trained in counter-terrorist intelligence and the production of aerial maps. The maps of Mr. Jaloudi, drawing up a precise inventory of the various checkpoints and bases of the EI, were directly found in the files of the DGSE, as also told Le Monde.

Dasquié and Jaillard bring to light a second spy network, the one led by the Syrian businessman Firas Tlass. Former cacique of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, he defected shortly after the start of the revolution in 2011. Also a financial partner of Lafarge in Syria, Tlass takes refuge in Dubai, where he has a dense network informants in the field. His role ? Facilitate Lafarge’s work by talking to armed groups and paying them, knowingly at Lafarge.

But, quickly, Mr. Tlass has a second employer: the DGSE, which signs a contract with him for the sum of 70,000 to 100,000 euros per month so that he provides information, from 2015 to 2017. He details at the screen the list of ISIS cadres he provided with names, pseudonyms, phone numbers, email addresses and Skype IDs. His contact? A certain Jacques, officially working for the French consulate in Dubai, but in fact an honorable correspondent for the DGSE. We are in the middle of a spy novel.

And, as in John le Carré’s books, in the end, it ends in betrayal. When French justice became interested in the dangerous links between Lafarge and IS, those who took advantage of the information transmitted by the cement manufacturer and its men, the DGSE, the DGSI, the Quai d’Orsay, vanished. They have no comment to make and do not confirm this intelligence work.