PARIS — He works behind bullet-proof glass windows in a tiny office hidden on one of the obscure, upper floors of the old Palais de Justice. He has no permanent staff except for a secretary. Stacks of working files litter his standard government-issue desk.
Yet in terms of power and influence, French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the man who first made the Libyan connection in the terrorist sabotage of French and American airliners, including the December, 1988, bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, would be the envy of even the most highly placed American judge or prosecutor. How many American judges, for example, can single-handedly order searches and wiretaps, interrogate witnesses, issue indictments and then arrest, judge and condemn suspects? How many can affect their country's foreign policy? Cause presidents to postpone summits? Bruguiere does all this and more.
The most celebrated of France's 570 juges d'instruction --a uniquely French legal combination of judge and crusading district attorney--Bruguiere enjoys nearly unlimited use of police investigators, espionage agents and diplomats. If he wants to fly to Brazzaville, Congo, as he did several times this year, he simply phones up the Ministry of Justice and asks for a ticket and spending money.
"I don't have to tell them why I am going or certainly not what I did when I come back," Bruguiere explained recently during an interview in his office. "I simply ask for what I need for my investigation."
Over the last two years, the stocky, sixth-generation French jurist has made 15 international trips in pursuit of leads in the 1989 bombing of a French airliner over the African desert. He even ordered French police technicians to make a movie of his investigation, with himself, Judge Bruguiere, smoking his cherrywood pipe and looking contemplative, in the featured role.
In the same investigation, he had the wreckage of a bomb-shattered French jetliner removed from the Sahara desert, reassembled at a military base in France and blown up again to try to duplicate the effects of the original explosion.
As France's chief investigative magistrate probing Middle East terrorism, Bruguiere handles the country's most politically sensitive cases. The latest hot files-- dossiers chauds --are those of the assassination last summer of former Iranian Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar and the 1989 terrorist bombing of a French Union des Transports Aeriens (UTA) DC-10 airliner.
Bruguiere's development of a Libyan connection in the UTA bombing was done in cooperation with American investigators probing the Lockerbie Pan Am bombing. But Bruguiere struck first against the Libyans, issuing four international arrest warrants at the end of October. He also struck much higher in the Libyan government, naming two senior officials, including the brother-in-law of Libyan ruler Col. Moammar Kadafi, earlier this month.
After taking the initiative, the French jurist waited anxiously for the Americans and British investigators to join him on the front against Libya, as they did late last week by announcing indictments against two low-level Libyan agents.
Unlike the United States--where, as soon as the indictments were announced, President Bush made it clear that he would seek some sort of international revenge against Libya--the French government has essentially ignored the findings of Bruguiere. The French judge, feeling isolated, welcomed company on the international legal front. He hoped to relieve some of the political pressure he was feeling when it was "Judge Bruguiere vs. Libya."
"If there are some indictments against the Libyans in the Lockerbie case," said a source close to the French investigation before the American and British indictments were announced last Thursday, "there could be a boomerang effect in France, and the French government would be forced to act."
Just as the judge had hoped, on Friday, the day after the indictments dropped in Washington and Edinburgh, Scotland, French President Francois Mitterrand announced that France was discussing with the United States and Britain joint action that might be taken against Libya.
"We know enough to say there is a Libyan responsibility," Mitterrand said during a news conference in Bonn, where he was meeting with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. "We are starting to have the results of the reflections, investigations and conclusions of the investigative magistrate. They all seem to jointly confirm a Libyan responsibility."
The problem is that Judge Bruguiere's reflections, investigations and conclusions are not always convenient for the French government, where there are grumblings that the judge is a publicity-mad, loose cannon who interferes with French diplomacy.
