So which nation was “probably the best” ally the U.S. had right after Sept. 11 in the shadow war against al Qaeda?

C’est la France, naturellement!

At least, according to Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin L. Powell’s longtime top aide. Wilkerson’s nod to the French was a largely overlooked aspect of the Oct. 19 speech he gave at the New America Foundation, which was notable for its harsh criticism of the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq.

Halfway through his fire-breathing denunciation of a pro-war “cabal” of Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other administration officials, the colonel took a moment to single out French intelligence for praise — which might come as a surprise, considering the scorn the White House heaped upon Paris for its opposition to the war.

“[C]ontrary to what you were hearing in the papers and other places, one of the best relationships we had in fighting terrorists and in intelligence in general was with guess who? The French,” said Wilkerson, Powell’s close aide at the Pentagon and State Department. “In fact, it was probably the best. And they were right there with us.”

And still are, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official who works with foreign counterintelligence agencies. “The French have continued to provide exceptional assistance to us,” said the official, who responded to questions via e-mail but requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “Unfortunately, they do not want that fact publicized and we don’t want to lose their help by creating a political problem for them at home.”

Apparently, to be seen working with the United States would be as bad a career move for any French official as it would for any U.S. politician who appeared too sweet on the French.

So the liaison dangereuse continues, with discretion, Wilkerson and other experts say.

They and other European intelligence agencies work together at a site in Paris called “Alliance Base,” according to a July 3 article in The Washington Post. And last January, then-Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced he was dispatching a full-time Department of Homeland Security attaché to the European Union, headquartered in Brussels.

France’s dedication to the cause is part of an overall hardened stance toward terrorism across Europe since Sept. 11, amid fears that large Arab Muslim populations are breeding al Qaeda recruits, the senior U.S. official said. “The murder of [Dutch] movie producer [Theo] Van Gogh last year by a Netherlands-born Muslim, the London bombers and other incidents have provided ample motivation for them to intensify the level of cooperation with each other and us.”

Even before Sept. 11, according to Nicolas de Boisgrollier, a French analyst of transatlantic relations, Paris and Washington were closely cooperating on counterterrorism. The so-called millennium bomber, Ahmed Ressam, “was prosecuted partly thanks to information provided by the French, who had before his arrest flagged him to U.S. authorities,” de Boisgrollier said. Ressam was intercepted by a U.S. Customs agent on Dec. 14, 1999, at Port Angeles, Wash., with bomb-making materials in his car, headed to Los Angeles International airport.

“French law enforcement officials . . . have a very good working relationship with their U.S. counterparts,” said Boisgrollier, a visiting fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, “though U.S. officials sometimes find it difficult to reciprocate to the same extent because they have more legal constraints.”

One big asset for U.S. intelligence is that “French agencies . . . know the Middle East well,” de Boisgrollier added, particularly in Lebanon and Syria, where they had a long colonial presence.

The French are also better at the spy business, or as it’s more dryly known, human intelligence (HUMINT), which complements a U.S. superiority in spy satellites and other “technical means,” he said.

But the relationship has not been hiccup free. Even as the French were sending special forces troops to Afghanistan and permitting American Predator surveillance drones to fly out of the French naval base at Djibouti, Rumsfeld continued to bash Paris. U.S. generals were forbidden to call their French counterparts, and the French were dropped from a major U.S. war game that they had participated in for decades, according to press reports.

Then, with a row building over the question of whether Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Niger, anonymous sources quoted in conservative newspapers here and in Europe charged that French intelligence had withheld proof of the nuclear transfer from the CIA. Conversely, stories made the rounds that a French intelligence agent was the source of papers — later dismissed as forgeries by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, among others — that supposedly document an Iraq-Niger deal.

Throughout, U.S.-French intelligence collaboration continued, with Paris officials suffering in silence as french fries became Freedom Fries on Air Force One and in congressional cafeterias.

“The nature of intelligence is obviously not to publicize its actions, but rather to be effective on a day-to-day basis,” Boisgrollier said. “This is what the French try to do with the Americans.”

French intelligence officials were stung as badly as their U.S. counterparts in pre-war assessments of Iraq’s nuclear arms, Wilkerson said in his Oct. 19 speech. But their cooperation never faltered, he added.

“We have a strong cooperation with the U.S. on a range of issues, from daily intelligence sharing to judicial cooperation on warrants, arrests and prosecutions,” said Nathalie Loiseau, spokeswoman for the French Embassy in Washington. “It works very well.”

“Thank God,” she added, “that it works well despite all the politics.”

President Nixon “came to the job already despising the CIA,” Stansfield Turner, Jimmy Carter’s CIA director, writes in a new book, “Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence.” Turner says his own rocky tenure (1977-80) led to intelligence screw-ups that failed to prevent Sept. 11 . . . Yassir, that’s our baby: A new Swedish documentary, “Dining With the Devil,” probes the top-secret, three-decades-long collaboration between the CIA and Yassir Arafat’s PLO, a murky arrangement not widely known beyond the experts — and fans of David Ignatius’ 1987 true-to-life thriller, “Agents of Innocence.” The CIA gave the PLO “millions of dollars” to go after Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists instead of American interests in the Middle East, the film says. No word on bookings here . . . The United States cut off security aid to Indonesia in 1992 for its murderous generals’ behavior in East Timor, but in the name of GWOT (global war on terror) it has quietly resumed security ties. A $3.8 million program includes training Indonesian officers at U.S. military war colleges. For more particulars, see “Indonesia’s War on Terror” by retired Air Force Col. William Wise, a professor at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

First posted Oct. 28, 2005 8:02 p.m.