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The slightly-built French NATO officer, a regular fixture at NATO's daily press conferences at Sarajevo's Holiday Inn in the months following the end of the Bosnian war, turned out to be the perfect spy -- until he got caught passing NATO's arrest plans to top Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, the man many hold responsible for the worst crimes of the Bosnian war. Gormillon had apparently been meeting secretly with Karadzic, in his stronghold of Pale, for months, passing secrets.

Gormillon's treachery forced NATO to scrap their arrest plans. Already fearing casualties, NATO commanders killed the plan once they realized Gormillon had destroyed their chief advantage against the heavily-guarded Karadzic: The element of surprise. NATO Commander General Wesley Clark said "he would never trust the French again" after the Gormillon incident, according to one former NATO official who asked not to be named.

To this day, Karadzic remains free, along with some two dozen other Serb war crime suspects. Most reportedly live in the French-controlled sector of southeastern Bosnia.

"The French have a blind spot when Serbs are involved," said Jim Hooper, director of the Balkan Action Council, a Washington advocacy group. "Karadzic moves around their sector openly. The guy has a guard force of 100 people. When you have that many guards, it makes it virtually impossible that the French troops don't know where he is, don't intercept their radio communications. It's very hard to hide 100 people, especially in an area that small. I mean, we're not talking about Alaska."

While British troops stationed in northern and western Bosnia have carried out arrests of 12 war crimes suspects, the latest on Monday of Bosnian Serb general Stanislav Galic in Banja Luka, French troops have attempted only one arrest. That ended in the killing of Dragan Gagavic, a suspect who had moved freely around the southeastern Bosnian Serb city of Foca in plain sight of French troops for months and who was reportedly close to giving himself up. French troops say they shot Gagavic because he looked ready to hit them with his car, which was full of girls he was bringing back from a judo tournament.

The Americans' arrest record has not been much better: U.S. troops have arrested only three war crimes suspects in their sector of eastern Bosnia. But while the Americans' reluctance to carry out arrests seems to be based almost entirely on fear of U.S. casualties, several incidents suggest that French failure to carry out arrests may be based on something else: a larger pattern of tacit French tolerance and sympathy for Serb actions in the Balkans. For one, although the French military recalled Gormillon to Paris after he was caught passing NATO secrets to Karadzic, Gormillon has never been dismissed nor seriously disciplined by the French military, despite the fact that his actions threatened the safety of his fellow NATO soldiers and delivered a severe blow to the cause of Bosnian justice.

A second incident of French spying for Belgrade occurred last year. In October 1998, during the escalation of hostilities in Kosovo, a senior French military officer posted to NATO, Cmdr. Bunel, was discovered to have passed NATO's bombing target list to Belgrade.

A French embassy spokesman said Monday that the French government was treating both spying incidents seriously. "Commander Bunel was indicted on charges of high treason in October 1998, and arraigned before a military court. Gormillon was hastily recalled to Paris, and I don't recall what happened to him after that."

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