A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (36 page)

The Faure conspiracy, and the bazooka

Shortly after Salan’s arrival two events took place that were indicative both of the neurotic atmosphere in Algeria and the mounting tensions within the army itself. Just before Christmas Paul Teitgen, secretary-general at the Algiers Prefecture and in charge of the city police, received a strange visit from a General Jacques Faure, second-in-command of the Algiers sector. Faure was a popular figure in the army, a fine soldier, champion skier and former alpine troop commander; his son was later to be killed in action in Algeria. To Teitgen’s amazement, the general — whom he had never met before — promptly outlined a conspiracy to overthrow the civil government in Algeria and replace it by a military regime. After Christmas Lacoste was due to visit the oasis of Ouargla for a brief holiday; on the way his plane was to be made to land at Paul-Cazelles, where he would be arrested and conducted to a “secret destination”. The conspirators would then seize Algiers radio and announce that Salan was taking over. Faure admitted that Salan was not in the plot, but it was considered that — once it was a
fait accompli
— he would accede. At the same time, Faure hinted that a number of eminent politicians in France were favourable to the
coup
, mentioning specifically Michel Debré.

Teitgen, a hero of the Resistance who had survived Dachau, was little disposed towards an army takeover in Algeria in any shape, and he could hardly believe his ears. At first he thought the bronzed and rugged general had gone slightly out of his mind. On second thoughts, however, he decided he should delve a bit deeper, and called Faure in for a further discussion, this time recording it all on a tape. Fortified with it, he then went to warn Lacoste. Distressed by this news, especially as he regarded Faure as a “stout-hearted sort” (
un coeur généreux
), the governor-general despatched Teitgen to Paris to inform the Minister of Defence, Bourgès-Maunoury. Teitgen has told how the minister’s immediate reaction was to hope that the affair would not “make it impossible for one to go ski-ing”, and asked him whether he had said anything to “
ce con-là
”, Mitterrand, then Minister of Justice. Shocked by Bourgeès-Maunoury’s apparently frivolous lack of interest, as well as his disrespect for a fellow minister, Teitgen then went on to see Mollet himself. Mollet took the matter much more seriously, but in turn used the same expression in deprecating Bourgès-Maunoury — “
ce con-là
”! Teitgen returned to Algiers, disquieted at the apparent lack of solidarity within the government. Faure was recalled and sentenced to thirty days’ fortress arrest — the first senior officer to suffer such a penalty for dissidence in Algeria. Salan was enraged that Teitgen should have gone over his head and behind his back in reporting one of his subordinates; while Teitgen’s action may well itself have reflected the general lack of trust inspired by Salan. Meanwhile, the nine days’ wonder of the “Faure conspiracy” was submerged by news of the assassination (on the same day that Teitgen was in Paris) of Amédée Froger, mayor of Boufarik, and the prominent conservative President of the Mayors of Algeria, an act that was to unleash the “Battle of Algiers”.

Hardly had the shock of Faure and the Froger killing been assimilated when there came a much more serious assassination attempt against the person of the Commander-in-Chief, Salan. At 6.40 p.m. on 16 January 1957, Salan had just left his office in the 10th Military Region G.H.Q., a large white building[
6
] on a corner of the Place Bugeaud, right in the heart of Algiers, to attend a meeting with Lacoste. From the Gouvernement-Général, some twenty minutes later, he heard a powerful explosion, shortly followed by a white-faced secretary rushing in to announce: “It’s your office; Commandant Rodier is wounded!” Rushing back to the Place Bugeaud, Salan found his office blasted and in the next room his
chef-de-cabinet
, Rodier, lying dead, almost cut in two by the force of the blast. Had Salan been still at his desk he would almost certainly have shared the same fate; his ten-year-old daughter, injured by flying glass while doing her homework in the apartment above, had an even narrower escape. On investigation, Salan discovered that the explosion had been caused by two anti-tank “bazooka” projectiles, ingeniously fired from home-made tubes installed on the roof of the building opposite. One had been sighted on Salan’s office, the other on Rodier’s. Electric wires ran from them to the ground floor where the perpetrator had pressed the button, evidently on seeing the silhouette of Rodier, which he had mistaken for Salan’s. He had then disappeared into the street.

It was immediately reckoned that the attempt was far too sophisticated for the F.L.N., and a number of suspects were rounded up among the “ultra”
pieds noirs
who had already emerged from the time of the anti-Mollet demonstrations. They included Dr Kovacs, the ex-Hungarian doctor and hypnotist who had become passionately attached to Algeria; Philippe Castille, a former member of the 11th Shock, the para cloak-and-dagger unit that had blown up Ben Boulaid; Michel Fechoz, Dr Jean-Claude Pérez, Robert Martel, Jo Ortiz, the restaurateur, and Georges Wattin, alias “The Limp”. In the motives and complicities behind it, the
affaire du bazooka
remains one of the most mysterious and shadowy episodes of the whole war. Colonel Godard, chief-of-staff to Massu in Algiers, who intensively questioned motives of the principals, himself admits: “I never understood why.” According to Pierre Vidal-Naquet, supported by Maître Teitgen, many of the records were mysteriously destroyed “on orders” after May 1958; though Teitgen himself managed to keep copies and Salan himself prints Kovacs’s testimony in full.

Under interrogation Castille admitted to setting up the “bazookas” and firing them; while Kovacs revealed that the object behind the plot was to replace the mistrusted
bradeur de l’Indochine
, Salan, by his former junior there, General Cogny. Following upon this, it was hoped, a “government of national unity” would then be brought to power in Paris. In his deposition Kovacs implicated the involvement behind the conspiracy of a Comité des Six of French politicians — among whom the name of Senator Michel Debré, close associate of General de Gaulle, Minister of Justice in 1958 and later prime minister, figures. After inexplicable delays the “bazooka” trial started in July 1958. Kovacs attended on a stretcher, then “disappeared” to Spain in what the
Guardian
at the time described as “preposterous circumstances”. He was sentenced to death
in absentia
; Castille to ten years’ hard labour, Fechoz to six years. Both were liberated by
pieds noirs
demonstrators during “Barricades Week” of January. Nobody more important was ever brought to trial; though to this day Salan, both in his
Mémoires: Fin d’un Empire
and privately, still insists on the involvement behind the scenes of Michel Debré and others, but no real evidence has ever been adduced.[
7
]

Historically, however, what is important about both the “Faure affair” and
le bazooka
is the profound malady and disaffection that they revealed in the heart of the French army, extending to the higher reaches of the Fourth Republic itself, and which were shortly to burst to the surface with revolutionary force.

[
1
] Later, but for his disapproval of Gaullist policy which caused him to resign in 1961, he would have risen to the top post of Army Chief-of-Staff.

[
2
] This nearly ended in disaster when Bigeard, by now nearing sixty and a senior general, was dropped into a shark-infested sea by mistake during a visit to troops in Madagascar. He broke an arm but was saved by his faithful staff who had parachuted into the sea with him.

[
3
] The French government assiduously refused to recognise operations in Algeria as anything more than the “maintenance of order”; it was not even a “campaign”, thus the Croix de Guerre could not be awarded and a new decoration, the Médaille de la Valeur Militaire, had to be struck.

[
4
] Unités Territoriales, auxiliaries formed of
pieds noirs.

[
5
] The Nazi occupation following 1940 may have left other, unpleasanter, legacies to the Algerian war. John Gale, a young British war correspondent who suffered a nervous breakdown following his experiences in Algeria, records a threat made to an F.L.N. suspect by a young para: “I’ll shoot your whole family like mine was shot by the Germans,” and another remark passed, with perhaps a touch of grudging respect, by a para captain: “The Germans did things coldly, systematically.…”

[
6
] Now, ironically, party headquarters of the F.L.N.

[
7
] When asked by the author why he had not sued Salan for libel M. Debré replied, “I took legal advice, and was told that the charges made against me were far too vague.” Debré is supported, among others, by the well-informed Brombergers in their book,
Les 13 Complots du 13 Mai
(1959), who cast doubts both on Kovacs’s evidence and Salan’s own conviction “that he had been shot at by other people than a small team of over-excited Algerian ‘ultras”’. Yes, they assessed, there was a
political
plot involving senior politicians, but Dr Kovacs had — they suggest — hypnotised himself into the false belief that the Comité had really wanted him to assassinate Salan. Such was the fervid mentality of the
pied noir
extremists.

CHAPTER NINE
The Battle of Algiers:
January–March 1957

A strong dilemma in a desperate case

To act with infamy or quit the place.

Jonathan Swift

Preliminaries

IN Algeria the year of 1957 was occupied by one of the most dramatic and best-publicised episodes in the entire war. The actual date of the first salvo in the Battle of Algiers is as arguable as who actually fired it, although the assumption of civil power in the city by General Massu’s paras presents a convenient one. As with the outbreak of any major confrontation it was preceded by a long chain of events, starting on 19 June the previous year. That day two members of the F.L.N., Zabane and Ferradj, who had been under sentence for many months, were guillotined in Barberousse prison after Lacoste — under heavy pressure from
pied noir
public opinion, and wanting to placate it so as to push through his own intended “bill of rights”, or
loi-cadre
— had refused clemency. In the appallingly over-crowded prison where conditions were already atrocious (“It is hell,” wrote Bitat, who was already imprisoned there, “men are beaten with iron bars, the heat is horrible and they are given salted water to drink.”), the immediacy of the executions — the sinister preparations, the defiant shouts of the condemned, the very audible thud of the blade — provoked most violent reactions, and these were amplified outside. To the Algerian mind such judicial executions were particularly shocking, and in this instance exacerbated by the fact that Ferradj was a cripple.[
1
]

Announcing that for every guillotined member of the F.L.N. a hundred French would be killed indiscriminately, Ramdane Abane ordered immediate reprisals. Saadi Yacef (who, on the arrest of Bitat, had taken over the Algiers network) was told to “kill any European between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four. But no women, no children, no old people.…” Between 21 and 24 June Yacef’s squads roaming Algiers shot down forty-nine civilians. It was the first time that Algiers had been hit by this kind of random terrorism, and the ineluctable escalation now began here. On 10 August an immense explosion rocked the Casbah. A house in the Rue de Thèbes had been blown up; reputedly it had housed F.L.N. terrorists involved in the June reprisals, but also destroyed with it were three neighbouring houses, and the Muslim death-roll ran to seventy, including women and children. At first it was alleged that a secret bomb factory had gone off by mistake, but soon
pied noir
counter-terrorist groups associated with Kovacs and Achiary were making no secret of their responsibility.[
2
] The F.L.N. claim that, up to this point, no bomb directed against human life, as opposed to property, had yet been detonated in Algiers. A month later, however, under Abane’s influence indiscriminate terrorism was espoused at the Soummam Conference, and orders were passed to Ben M’hidi, who had become the political leader of the Algiers Zone (Z.A.A.), and Yacef, his operational executive, to prepare for a major offensive.

Yacef was the twenty-nine-year-old son of a Casbah baker, seventh out of a family of fourteen, who had begun work for his father at the age of fourteen, a highly self-possessed young man with big, mocking brown eyes, a sensual mouth under a thick black moustache and immense confidence in himself. A keen footballer, he was daring and inventive. Arrested in France, he had managed to talk his way out of Barberousse by persuading the French gaolers of his willingness to act as double agent — to such effect that for some time he was regarded with distrust by his former colleagues. Knowing every inch of the tortuous alleys of the Casbah, so narrow that one can often jump from one roof-top to another, and where one square kilometre housed a teeming populace of 100,000 Muslims, he had persuaded Abane of the advantage of “purging” it of all doubtful elements and turning it into a fortress from which a campaign could be launched. With the aid of skilful masons Yacef had created a whole series of secret passages leading from one house to another, bomb factories, caches and virtually undiscoverable hiding-places concealed behind false walls.