Interview with Patrick Le Berre: A "Cult" Rumour at the CEA

Patrick Le Berre worked within the CEA’s directorate of military applications, with a high level of defence-secrecy clearance. Alongside the nuclear physics he pursued transpersonal development work and Freemasonry and, by his own account, the simple fact of speaking about it drew escalating pressure from his hierarchy between 1994 and 2000: a rumour of “cult” membership, moral harassment, an internal interrogation, and finally anonymous threats. In this CICNS interview he recounts that period from the inside, as first-person testimony of workplace discrimination linked to new spiritual paths in France. Everything he describes, including his identification of who was behind the pressure, is his own account.

CICNS interview. (English translation of the interview published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 5 November 2012. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

[Interviewer]: Patrick Le Berre, a research scientist for 14 years at the CEA, the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique (French Atomic Energy Commission), extended the field of his research beyond nuclear physics into a path of spiritual inquiry. The simple testimony of his experience was badly received by his management, who subjected him to a series of escalating pressures that degraded his professional life. He testifies here to his passage through that period, which illustrates the discrimination directed against new spiritual paths.

[Le Berre]: In 1994 I belonged to the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique, in the directorate of military applications — the manufacture of nuclear weapons — and so, professionally, I held a level of defence-secrecy clearance that is not even given to the military regarding nuclear weapons applications. With which, of course, come responsibilities to uphold.

In parallel, at exactly the same time, I went through an experimental process of transpersonal development work. For me this process unfolded first over one year of individual sessions, as many people in France do these days, and then over three years of transpersonal development in a group setting, at seminars. The humanist path I took at that time because I was contacted simultaneously by three Masonic obediences, at the very same moment, who invited me to come and follow a path in Freemasonry. I followed the path in Freemasonry with one of these obediences and became a Master Freemason in the space of about three years.

So during that period, from which I was setting out on my double path, experimental and theoretical, I experienced a first degree, I would say, of pressure, exerted in my professional environment by my hierarchical superiors, and this in two different CEA centres, from the moment when, in the end, I spoke readily about what I was experiencing. That aroused fears in the people, the interlocutors I met. And those fears led me to justify myself on a mental level, and that generated even more fear on the other side. And so at that time I had to experience, without knowing it of course, a process entirely bound up with the mechanism of fear. And so the pressures began to grow stronger and stronger. That went on for a period that lasted three years, from 1994 to 1997.

Then there was a second grade, I would say, of pressure, which I call, myself, that of the rumour. At one point, in October 1997, I became the target of a rumour. At first I did not know exactly where it came from, and how in the end this rumour, by whom it had been launched, before realizing that it came from my hierarchical superior, and that this rumour was a rumour accusing me of being in a cult — in Scientology, as it happened. So for one year, from 21 October 1997 to 21 October 1998 — those are dates I am in no danger of forgetting — I was the object of very, very strong pressure, which was moral harassment. I was forbidden to publish my results. Others even dressed themselves up in some of my research results. I was forbidden to present them, and I would say that a number of my measurements were even treated as open to doubt, to the point that I had to redo them in front of witnesses. What was obviously particular at that time, as you may well imagine, is that everything to do with advancement, bonuses and so on — all of that largely falls through the trapdoor. You are then singled out as someone open to doubt on a scientific and technical level, when that is the very heart of your profession. So it is not necessarily easy in terms of personal recognition. So there was a whole stage in which this scientific and technical harassment was thus doubled by psychological harassment.

Now, psychological harassment is a second phase, one which this time aims to make you ill, and then to get rid of the sick man. So I was under the fire of this double pressure. On the psychological level, I experienced at that time something like collapses of energy. At that point, all of a sudden, I could no longer stand up. I would faint. There was truly a phase there where everything that was the recognition I received from the outside world — and for an executive, for a research scientist, that was something strong — at that moment all my energy would drain out of me and I would faint. At the time I did not know exactly, myself, what was playing out underneath.

There was a strong moment of awareness, since I was continuing my path of transpersonal development at the time. It was to say: that’s it, something has clicked in me. I became aware that I finally had to take that recognition into myself, to go and seek it within myself and no longer seek it outside myself. That was a great detonator, which made me take a stand vis-à-vis my hierarchy. I went to see my hierarchy at that point and told them: “From today onward, I stop working for you.” At that time I was still continuing my research. And I continued it not along the axis of the CEA hierarchy, but along the axis of the scientific father [inaudible ?] and of the whole scientific community, which, for its part, was in the end with me and behind me.

And this grade 2 of pressure due to a rumour intensified. Because from the moment I had made that choice of saying I no longer worked for them, I found myself put through, for a year — a full year — a phase I have called the cupboard. Even when I went to the staff restaurant and a few colleagues ventured to come and have lunch with me in the canteen, they were taken aside afterwards by their hierarchical superior, systematically, to be told: don’t go and have lunch with me, have lunch with that man there, he is in a cult.

So that was a phase which was important too, for going to seek within myself even more what was, I would say, that foundation, that recognition within oneself — the one I had finally set in motion by telling myself: the way out is surely there. And it was at that moment that I certainly became even more destabilizing for them. So there, one more grade had been crossed.

So I call it, myself, grade 4. This grade 4 was 20 September 99. I was invited, without warning, to an interrogation, which took place inside the CEA. I had within me the awareness of what had triggered it, since the director had somewhat put me to the test on a subject. He wanted to see for himself whether or not I belonged to something. Whether the rumour was founded or not. So he had launched — that is normal — an inquiry.

This interrogation — there were, in this interrogation, two distinct phases. A period of 15 minutes, which started from a suspicious, intimidating, police-style attitude. First, they arrived with a file 7 cm thick, a red file, you see, with the intimidation. With, inside it — they really showed it — there were telephone taps, there was personal intelligence, mail that had been opened, there were statements from people — you know, well-intentioned friends, who are there and tell little stories. Well, everything brought up at that moment was for me like burlesque. There was something that, for me, was becoming almost comical. And of course they sensed that touch of irony showing through in me, and of course they escalated the form, that police-style form, in the first quarter of an hour. At the end of that first quarter of an hour, of course, as they were escalating it into a more police-style form, saying to me: “Monsieur Le Berre, if you carry on like this, we are going to interrogate you standing on a chair with a lamp in your face.” Well, at that point, of course, I burst out laughing and then I said to them: “But you are using cult methods now!”

Behind those 15 minutes there unfolded 3 hours of interrogation, which this time took on another tone. The tone became much friendlier, if I may put it that way. Insofar as they felt themselves hunted by the way I was able to answer, in the end, and to get into their weak points where cult mechanisms are concerned. They were, in fact, coming to pick nits over what I might have experienced in the course of a path of transpersonal development — a path in which you give birth to yourself. That allowed me to realize, of course, their theoretical background, the fact that, in their profession, part of their code of ethics forbids going to look beyond theory. Which makes them very vulnerable, obviously, to a powerful anti-cult lobby in France. Can you imagine? If those people do not have the right to go and look beyond theory, how do you expect them to be able to form their own idea? So, at the end of this interrogation, what happened is that I was officially cleared, and that I had to sign a document showing that my extra-professional activities — because it was about theory, it was only about that, it was only about my extra-professional activities — did not interfere with my professional activities.

There was still another year after that, a year which for me was again a year of going to search for why, in the end, I drew down so much lightning. Somewhere there was an attitude in me that I had to find. So that allowed me to go a little further. But at the same time I realized, during that year in which I was taking up a new job, that everything was not rosy, nor had it become rosy again as before. In fact, I called that phase the false rehabilitation. Insofar as my hierarchical superior made me feel very clearly that if I got back into line, if I gave up a certain number of my extra-professional activities, I might perhaps once again have a career at the CEA.

In December 1999 and in March 2000, I received two letters, two death threats. Now, two letters, two death threats — but it was almost child’s play to guess where they came from, insofar as one would have had to have listened to telephone conversations without my knowledge, and at work in particular, to have sent me that type of message; and the messages were written in such a way that one would almost have had to be a Freemason or gazard [inaudible ?] to have written that kind of message. For me, it was the unknown. It was crystal-clear, in fact. It came very directly from those intelligence services, who were putting intimidation pressure on me. I understood it well at that moment once again. Now, obviously, if at that time you have not done real work on yourself, when you receive that kind of document you come out of it completely shattered, or embittered forever.

What saved me is that, in fact. It is the courage I had, and continue to have, to go onto my own ground, to do things I do not know how to do. Now, I did after all have the luck, it is true, I acknowledge it, of having been able to rub shoulders closely with these intelligence-service people in general, enough to realize how truly burlesque the caricature was. When, for example, we had at our place a commander of the DST who came to give us lectures within the CEA, it was easy to see the paranoid state of the individual: his gestures, his tics, his facial expressions — you see, the whole form of the character shows how much they find themselves in their own prison. So it requires having, toward the tormentors, a real compassion. Obviously, they will take their time to get out of it. That is their story. But at least it is easy to see, when you have this type of DST commander telling you that he, with his somewhat fascistic outlook, still has a bit of a hard time because he is bothered by what there is at the CNIL and the judiciary — you understand that it does not necessarily look very serious.

In the same way, the circles in which I lived here extra-professionally, in Freemasonry: I met many people from the local Renseignements Généraux. And when you have, for example, in the course of an evening in Freemasonry — an entirely ordinary evening — someone who takes offence at you, and who is from the Renseignements Généraux, and who pulls out his revolver in the middle of a Masonic session — truly, it is clownish. In the same way, when you have these Renseignements Généraux people who spend their time — and that had been the case when we had helped, for example, one of our friends — who spend their time calling the municipal officials of the neighbouring towns to discredit this or that person, to say that so-and-so is in a cult and so on, and that this is their game — they fool no one. They fool no one, truly. In the same way as that “Mr Cult” who, at our place, was tasked with checking up a little on all the flaws of individuals.

You see, all the flaws — because we have flaws. Well, that bothers him. We have flaws. Today, I must acknowledge that one of man’s greatest strokes of luck is to have flaws. The research subject that was mine, in the physics of insulators, shows me this. Energy is stored in the vacancies. That is how we say it in solid-state physics. In the vacancies. So it is in that place that the energy is stored inside. And it is there that you can go and fetch that energy to bring it, finally, outside yourself, to make it come out and gain access to your inner truth. But conversely, when you have someone from the Renseignements Généraux or from the central security services — which was my case — who comes and tells you that he spends his time hunting down the flaws in individuals, while he collates them all in himself alone… It is burlesque.

It is for each person to meet what I call, myself, their wall of necessity. For some, it will be a family shock. For others, it will be an emotional problem in the couple. For others, it will be a problem with their children, a relational one. For others, it will be a professional problem. For others, a health problem they will encounter. But at one moment or another, it is perhaps good for each person to ask themselves the question in front of a mirror and say: what do I have to change in myself?

So there you have what is, for me, a strong outcome, and the testimony I wanted to bring today in this subtle game between the tormentor and the victim — asking above all the victim to realize and to become aware, for it will not be the tormentor who can do so at first.