ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, Feb. 19— When Jacques Foccart, one of France's most secretive statesmen, broke his legendary silence with a newly published memoir, one of his main goals, it seems, was to shed the image that he had long headed a potent network of informants, henchmen and spies in former French territories in Africa.

Instead, for all his denials, what emerges from the book about the man who was among Charles de Gaulle's top aides is a picture of a master puppeteer. The account indicates that his seemingly unchecked powers in shaping the former French empire in Africa in the postcolonial era surpass even those imagined by ardent critics of French behavior in the third world.

Mr. Foccart's book also depicts France's preoccupation with American influence, which it considered scarcely more desirable than influence from Moscow.

In the book, Mr. Foccart, 81, says that African leaders who were seen as insufficiently friendly to French interests were simply frozen out, as in the case of Guinea's President, Sekou Toure, who sought and gained independence in 1958, before Paris was ready to relinquish control. Others were eliminated, as with Felix Moumie, a Cameroonian opposition figure who was assassinated in Geneva in 1960. It is the first time a French official has acknowledged a French role in the killing.

With an air of nonchalance, Mr. Foccart tells the interviewer who wrote the book how in 1968 he literally auditioned Omar Bongo, a young politician in the Central African nation of Gabon, before Mr. Bongo could become the country's President. Other African leaders who were made and often broken by France, he said, had telephone hotlines to the bedrooms of the French ambassadors in their countries, or signed blank authorizations of French intervention in case of political trouble.

This system failed in at least two cases, Mr. Foccart said, because he was out hunting or fishing in the French countryside when an African coup began and could not be reached in time to mobilize a response.

Mr. Foccart was de Gaulle's counselor for African affairs for most of the period covered in the book, and at one time was secretary general of the presidency, a high-level staff position.

For most of the period from the dawn of African independence in the late 1950's to the end of the cold war, the United States gave assurances that it was content to see France govern over the affairs of its former colonies as part of a sort of division of labor between Western allies that was aimed at minimizing Soviet advances in the third world.

"The U.S. policy was very explicit, giving major responsibility for Africa in global terms to the major metropolitan powers," said Herman Cohen, a former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under the Bush Administration, referring to the colonial states. "The problem with the French," he said in an interview, "is that they never believed it, because they extended the Gaullist vision of the U.S. as an imperialist power in Europe into Africa."

Mr. Cohen said that French suspicions became so strong that "they were even running intelligence operations against us out of their Embassy in Zaire."

For many Africans reading Mr. Foccart's book, the fascination of seeing confirmation of many long-rumored behind-the-scenes coups and other twists of history has been tempered by a sadness over the ease with which their leaders were manipulated, more often to satisfy French interests than to address the needs of their own countries.

Nowhere was this more true than in the Central African Republic, where, according to Mr. Foccart's account, the French-installed Central African dictator Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who would later proclaim himself "Emperor," insisted on calling de Gaulle "Papa." The French President considered the pliant Mr. Bokassa, who would later be pushed from power and accused of cannibalism, to be a "noble idiot," Mr. Foccart said.

Francis Kpatinde wrote in a column about the book in the French-based weekly Jeune Afrique, "If it didn't involve the fate of a continent, the destiny of millions of Africans, one could have laughed at the dozens of anecdotes."

"The worst is that change is not in the cards for tomorrow," he added. "Between the discreet successors of Foccart and the new generation of African leaders, relations have only lost their warmth and theatricality."