A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (53 page)

Monsieur le ministre
,

With the
Affaire
K you thought you were introducing a Trojan horse into the heart of the Algerian resistance. You were deceived. Those whom you took for traitors to the Algerian nation were pure patriots…. We thank you for having procured us arms that will help us to liberate our country.

Hentic now received orders to “liquidate” operation
Oiseau Bleu
, as “Force K” had now evidently gone over to the F.L.N. With the aid of a strong para force it was ruthlessly hunted down, just as it was about to be equipped with mortars. 130 of its men were killed and an equal number of weapons recovered, but a total of nearly 400 other firearms plus a similar number of sporting rifles, which the French had so lavishly distributed, were reckoned to have been lost to the F.L.N.; while some 600 “Force K” operatives survived to rejoin Krim. In the aftermath, it transpired that Krim had penetrated the leadership of “Force K” at an early stage, turned them, and even obligingly supplied them with “F.L.N. corpses” that were in fact those of slaughtered members of the dissident M.N.A. Whether all the “Force K” operatives wiped out by the French were in fact, like Tennyson’s Lancelot, “falsely true”, or truly false, will perhaps never be known. Nevertheless,
Oiseau Bleu
was undoubtedly a net gain in the “disinformation war” for the F.L.N. As Captain Hentic admits: “The moral prejudice was immense. The
Affaire
K had smothered and destroyed any desire of
ralliement
on the part of the local populace….”

Another embarrassment for the French in the underground war of private armies was Belhadj Djillali, alias “Kobus”, a corruption of the Arabic word for pistol. The son of an officer who had fought in 1914–18 and was a small property-owner, Kobus was arrested as a member of the O.S. in 1950 but released as a police informer. An expert in changing sides and treachery, he is described by Yves Courrière as an arrant liar; nevertheless, he too was encouraged (also under the aegis of the D.S.T.) to set up a counter-guerrilla in the Orléansville area, on the western fringes of the F.L.N.’s Wilaya 4. Although Kobus appears not to have betrayed the French, the Wilaya 4 leaders—the astute Si M’hamed and Omar Oussedik—cunningly created a series of incidents against the French which were made to look as if Kobus were the author. His French “controllers” reckoned that, on his past track-record, it was probable that Kobus was once more playing a double game, and began to withdraw support in April 1958. Wilaya 4 now applied extreme pressure on Kobus’s immediate supporters, telling them that if they came over, bringing Kobus with them dead or alive, their lives would be spared. His second-in-command accepted the offer, had Kobus assassinated on his return from Algiers, cut off his head to take as his “pass” to the F.L.N., and left the corpse with the shaft of a tricolour thrust macabrely into its decapitated neck. The deal was not honoured, however, and all twenty-two of Kobus’s defecting officers were promptly dispatched by the Wilaya 4 commanders. After
Oiseau Bleu
and Kobus, the French would be rather more cautious about doling out weapons; mistrust would linger, and even the most loyal of the
harkis
would never be quite free of it.

The end of Bellounis

Then there was, once more, Bellounis—or “Operation Ollivier”. The leader of the private army of M.N.A. dissidents had, it will be remembered, twice escaped when his followers had been trapped and slaughtered by the F.L.N. Since the Mélouza massacre of May 1957, Bellounis had gone over completely to the French, had been extensively and expensively equipped by them, and at one moment his force numbered some two thousand armed men. It called itself grandly the Armée Nationale Populaire Algérienne (A.N.P.A.), and marched behind a flag of red crescent and star on a green and white field similar to the colours of independent Algeria. According himself the rank of general, Bellounis became prey to megalomania. At first he registered some notable successes against the F.L.N. in an area fringing on the north of the Sahara, coming under the newly created Wilaya 6. But then his harsh treatment of the local population, as well as of his own men, began to make the A.N.P.A. as resented as the F.L.N. Bellounis refused to hand over his prisoners to the French (it was presumed they had all been eliminated), his supporters were beginning to melt away, and it is suggested that after the events of May 1958 he was becoming disillusioned with the French cause. On 22 May he addressed a series of slightly mad letters to President Coty and General de Gaulle; three days later he refused to attend a meeting with his “controller”.

Some weeks later, Simone de Beauvoir noted in her journal: “The French have killed Bellounis, who was accused of having shot four hundred of his men; the Italian newspapers say the French have killed Bellounis
and
the four hundred men.” The official account is that Colonel Trinquier, who was commanding the 3rd R.P.C. after Bigeard had been repatriated and, having been despatched to wind-up “Operation Ollivier”, came across the recently executed corpses of Bellounis’s victims and decided to grant him no quarter. On 14 July the bullet-riddled body of Bellounis was picked up near Bou-Saada and displayed widely as a “traitor to France”. With the death of Bellounis there ended disastrously yet another private army enterprise; at the same time, it also removed for the F.L.N. the last major threat of a rival military bid by the Messalists.

Léger’s “bleus” turn the table

What the French lost in such debacles as
Oiseau Bleu
, Kobus and Bellounis, was probably just about balanced by the success of the reliable
harkis
, so that by the end of 1957 the score was roughly equal. It was as a by-product of the Battle of Algiers, however, and indirectly one of the rare episodes where torture did produce a net tactical gain for the victors, that the French were enabled to turn one of their most valuable tricks in the “secret” war. One of the more interesting of the shadowy, all-powerful intelligence captains thrown up by the Algerian war was a Zouave called Christian Léger. Born in Morocco in 1922, Léger had the kind of dark, lean features with which he could pass almost equally well as a
pied noir
, an Arab or a Kabyle, and there were few subterranean episodes where he did not play a role. During the Second World War Captain Léger’s father had been condemned to death by the Nazis, and he himself had volunteered to jump into occupied France in 1944. As a parachutist with de Bollardière in Indo-China, he had undertaken a number of highly risky missions in Viet-Minh territory disguised as one of General Giap’s guerrillas. Returning to Algeria to perfect his Arabic and Kabyle, he then joined the S.D.E.C.E. in 1955, with whom he “disappeared” on top secret work for the next two years. During the Battle of Algiers he had been picked up by that expert on subversive warfare, Colonel Trinquier, who had known him in Indo-China and placed him in charge of a highly secret organisation called the Groupement de Renseignement et d’Exploitation (G.R.E.).

Linked to Trinquier’s controversial D.P.U. with its system of block-warden informers unpleasantly reminiscent of the Third Reich, and answerable only to Colonel Godard, Léger’s G.R.E. assembled a network of top-level Muslim agents, informers who, quite unbeknown to the F.L.N., had turned coat under lesser or greater degrees of coercion at the para interrogating centres. The cornering of Yacef, then of Ali la Pointe, in the final stages of the Battle of Algiers had been ultimately achieved by his
bleu
double agents. At the nucleus of the group was his right-hand man, a killer with the cover-name of “Surcouf”, an Algerian who had served in Indo-China, and a young Muslim woman called “Ourhia-la-Brune” who had joined Léger out of the most basic of human motives: she had discovered that her husband, an F.L.N. militant arrested by the French, had betrayed her so as to protect his mistress. Ourhia filled a key role as a courier carrying messages for the F.L.N. in Algiers, but under Léger’s control. Then there was a young man of twenty-one called Hani Mohamed, who had commanded the western zone of Algiers for Yacef until his capture in August 1957; finally, and most important, an Algiers Muslim with a string of aliases including his own cynical choice, “Safy-le-Pur”. It was Safy-le-Pur, the former F.L.N. chief of east Algiers, who, by continuing to communicate with Yacef and Ali la Pointe after he had been turned, had led the paras to the hiding places of both.

No one but Yacef and his fellows, however, was aware (until after their capture) of the identity of their betrayer, and one of Yacef’s last acts in freedom had been to nominate Safy-le-Pur military commander of the whole Algiers area. This appointment he communicated to the ferocious Kabyle chief of Wilaya 3, Amirouche. On learning this, with the Battle of Algiers over, Captain Léger and his superior, Godard, suddenly saw opportunities of unparalleled allure standing before them. Soon Amirouche was opening up contacts with Safy-le-Pur. With Yacef and Ali la Pointe out of the way, there appeared to remain only Safy-le-Pur among the Algiers leaders; so the C.C.E. in distant Tunis instructed Amirouche to begin reconstructing the debris there—through the medium of Safy-le-Pur. Thus Léger found himself, in effect, virtually controlling the F.L.N. apparatus that was attempting to re-establish itself in Algiers. Like any intelligence operator placed in this position, he was confronted with the difficult choice of whether to swoop and mop up the incipient network of fund-collectors and agents before the complex double-game should be “blown”, or to play it to the limit, in the hopes of penetrating the whole F.L.N. structure still further back. On Godard’s advice he chose the latter course, and a highly dangerous game now ensued in the last months of 1957.

To enhance credibility, Léger and Surcouf “helped” the new F.L.N. set-up to explode a few harmless bombs in Algiers, and even arranged the bombing of their own headquarters. Meanwhile, in the course of liaising with Amirouche, Hani Mohamed had succeeded in gaining access to the command of Wilaya 3’s western zone, but when he was arrested by mishap by the army it was clear that the game could not last for ever, and that a big gamble must be tried without delay. At the end of January 1958 Hani Mohamed and Safy-le-Pur made a rendezvous at the zone’s headquarters outside Bordj-Menaiel, on the western approaches of Kabylia. With them came Léger, disguised in a
cachabia
, Surcouf and several other members of the G.R.E. The F.L.N. leaders were completely deceived; by the following dawn the zone’s entire general staff was aboard helicopters bound for French prisons; a large bomb factory and arms depot had been captured, as well as quantities of incriminating documents that would lead to the mounting of further deadly
bleu
operations.

Léger’s coup was a success that more than atoned for such past debacles as
Oiseau Bleu
, Kobus and even Bellounis. The destruction of the post-Yacef network in Algiers was so complete that, in effect, the Z.A.A. was never to be usefully re-created until the last months of the war. But even more far-reaching were the consequences of the mistrust it had sown in Wilaya 3. By what was more or less a random shot, Léger had struck at the Achilles’ heel of the whole F.L.N.: the mutual distrusts, hatreds and fears of betrayal that, as one now knows, seethed constantly just beneath the surface. Immediately Amirouche, like a Stalin in microcosm, launched the most savage and self-perpetuating series of purges. First of all the new leadership-designate for Algiers that had been “played” by the G.R.E. were shot or had their throats slit. Then came the wholesale liquidation of the so-called “city intellectuals”, for the most part dedicated F.L.N. students who had fled Algiers during the Battle. When Léger realised what was going on, he added fuel to the flames by leaving forged documents on the bodies of killed rebels, incriminating other, loyal leaders of being traitorous
bleus
. “We must take measures to amputate all the gangrened limbs,” one of his subordinates declared to Amirouche, so during 1958 and into 1959 the F.L.N. lost some of its best “limbs” through this murderous procedure. The purges were infectious and were soon spreading to the hitherto model and democratic neighbouring Wilaya 4, with consequences that were to be possibly even more far-reaching.

“Secret war” against the arms dealers

Not only inside Algeria was the “secret war” fought ruthlessly and often skilfully by the French intelligence services, or by organisations and individuals operating beneath their ample wingspan. One of the more intriguing sideshows was the campaign waged against the international arms dealers. At the beginning of 1958 an informed French army appreciation could reasonably reckon that the F.L.N. had no hope of winning a military victory—as things were. But what could upset the balance would be any new, massive infusion of weapons into Algeria. Thus the prevention of this had become a top French priority. There was the Morice Line barring movements by land; the French navy was extremely active checking shipments by sea, while any “friendly” nation endeavouring to sell arms to an Arab country that might possibly find their way to the F.L.N. met with the full force of French diplomatic wrath—as the Anglo-Americans discovered at the time of the Tunisian arms sales.

On the other hand, the funds available for arms purchases had become seductively great and were growing all the time. In addition to the money collected in Algeria, or from Algerian workers in France and funnelled out through the Jeanson network, the Arab League nations were now at last coming up with the cash, and no longer just empty promises. At the Cairo conference of December 1957 a target of ten milliard francs a year was set, but already by the last months of that year some seven milliards had flowed in. Moreover, as the watchful eye of French Intelligence noted, at that same conference an event of some historical importance had occurred when the Eastern bloc countries had, for the first time, expressed willingness to support the Algerian revolution with arms supplies. This was endorsed the following month when the French navy boarded off Oran a Yugoslav ship, the
Slovenija
, carrying 148 tons of illegal weapons, including 12,000 arms of Czech origin.