At this time the Deltas were quartered in a sumptuous villa loaned them by pieds noirs in the garden suburb of Bouzaréah. Right opposite them lived a senior official of Morin’s Délégation-Générale staff, with known liberal sympathies, Maurice Perrin. After the Gavoury killing Perrin reported to the police his suspicions about the neigbouring villa; but — lending substance to their boast, “The O.A.S. knows everything” — the Deltas received an immediate tip-off. Evacuating the villa, they returned a few days later to riddle Perrin with bullets in front of his horror-stricken wife. Then, between 9 and 10 June, the F.L.N. terrorist squads responded by killing four and wounding thirty-seven in Algiers. A similar picture prevailed in Oran, where the police proved both inadequate and unreliable; the prefect, freshly arrived from France, soon discovered that he could trust perhaps no more than half-a-dozen of his officers. In July the dwellings of no less than thirty-three Oran pieds noirs received a strounga after their owners had ignored the O.A.S. warning not to leave the country, even on holiday. With the onset of the summer heat tempers were rising violently, and a deadly pattern established itself, with the F.L.N. generally killing between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m., so as to catch victims on their way to work, the O.A.S. Deltas carrying out their opérations ponctuelles in the evening when their victims were returning from work.
On 5 August, the O.A.S. scored its first major propaganda success. Minister Joxe was in Algiers to discuss the current situation with Morin; in Tripoli, the Fourth C.N.R.A. was convening. It was a Saturday, and at 1 p.m. most pieds noirs were clustered around their television sets for the lunch-time news bulletin. Suddenly the screens flickered, and went blank. Then out of the pictureless sets came the voice of General Gardy, speaking for the O.A.S. as Salan’s delegate. There followed an unhurried speech by Gardy, inciting the army to revolt and calling on both Europeans and Muslims to rise up and join the O.A.S. against the “Gaullist dictatorship”. The coup had been achieved by Degueldre’s Deltas blowing up the television cables and then using O.A.S.-recruited technicians to play a tape of Gardy’s speech over the transmitter. The broadcast had a powerful effect on the pieds noirs of Algiers, who persuaded themselves that it meant that the O.A.S. might be about to seize power. Crowds thronged the streets, and cars beat out on their horns the old familiar refrain of “Al-gé-rie fran-çaise”. On 21 September a second pirate transmission by Salan himself summoned the people of Algiers to join in a three-day demonstration to attest to their unity of thought and action behind the O.A.S. Two days later, for five solid hours thousands of pieds noirs, seemingly from every window and balcony in the city, hammered out the Algérie française rhythm on pots and pans. The din was deafening. Black-and-white O.A.S. banners fluttered from public buildings, or hung from cranes in the harbour — or were paraded quite openly throughout the city.
At about the same time the Deltas grabbed eighty million francs in a first daring raid in the port; Jean Morin and his staff moved out of Algiers to the new government complex at Rocher Noir, and General Ailleret (the new army commander replacing General Gambiez, humiliated during the putsch) to Reghaia. Although both moves had been scheduled many months previously, the timing now made it look as if Algiers had been abandoned to the O.A.S. It was a situation of which the O.A.S. was not tardy in taking advantage, proclaiming itself boss of whole areas of the city. Coupled with the apparent inability of the authorities to check the O.A.S., this new self-confidence in turn caused a pronounced rise in the morale of the pieds noirs, shaken as it had been by so many shocks and reverses since “Barricades Week” of January 1960.
How much support, then, could the O.A.S. count upon from the pied noir population at large? Harassed constantly by the French security forces, scattered and often out of communication with each other, continually wrangling among themselves, the O.A.S. would have been unlikely to have got off the ground — let alone have survived as long as it did — without the utmost civil co-operation. By and large the pieds noirs were led to believe and trust in the O.A.S. as an organisation protecting their interests, just as the F.L.N. had fought so successfully for Muslim interests over the past seven years. In their growing despair, and with principles distorted by the isolation in which they had so long existed, perfectly decent citizens turned to the O.A.S. to reverse the trend of history. Much as the German working classes had flocked to the Nazi party in the 1930s out of fear of the Bolshevik bogey, so the poor whites — the petits blancs — in particular now rallied strongly to the O.A.S.
Degueldre’s killers
By the autumn of 1961, it could be said that the O.A.S. had well and truly established itself, at least in the cities of Algiers and Oran. In September Degueldre’s Deltas killed fifteen and wounded 144, and the volume of their operations continued to increase — with apparent impunity. A car would slow down alongside a group of Muslims and promiscuously mow them down with machine-pistol fire; a Jewish and Socialist police inspector would be shot dead at the wheel of his car on his way home through the Tunnel des Facultés. Often there was a certain carelessness about the identity of the victims; for instance, two Deltas on a motor scooter shot down the Socialist Party’s secretary-general for Algiers, William Lévy,[3] then found that the opération ponctuelle had been scrubbed by O.A.S. headquarters a week earlier. Likewise, a man taken to be de Gaulle’s hated “listening post”, Colonel François Coulet, was “executed” — then it was revealed that the victim was just a small baker from the suburbs of Algiers. Grisly rumours (probably manufactured by the O.A.S.) circulated about young pieds noirs being bled to death in Muslim clinics to provide blood transfusions for wounded fellaghas; groups of whites would then take their own reprisals, cornering a passing Muslim motor-cyclist at random and setting him alight with petrol. Sometimes the pieds noirs’ patronal instincts would lead them into grotesquely contradictory acts; A.-P. Lentin, a pied noir journalist, tells of one Bab-el-Oued bistrotier who, at the beginning of a ratonnade, helped his own Muslim “boy” to escape to safety, and then “went to despatch a little street vendor fifty yards away”. Almost inevitably, it seemed, when the killings took place the gendarmerie would not arrive until it was all safely over, giving the populace a further assurance that they too were on the side of the O.A.S.
By the end of November Jouhaud in Oran was expressing disgust at the promiscuous killings, while Salan was increasingly aggravated by his lack of control over what was going on, or of any prior consultation on the acts of the Deltas. On 31 August he was surprised to read of the assassination of the Socialist mayor of Fort de l’Eau (another “third force” moderate, but condemned by Susini as “one of the most disquieting and the most contemptible personalities of Algeria, one of those old corrupters who had hoped to found their political fortune on the success of the rebellion”). The following week Salan was even more taken aback by the attempt in France to blow up de Gaulle at Pont-sur-Seine.[4] On 3 November the Muslim garage opposite Salan’s current hiding-place was blasted by an O.A.S. strounga, shattering the general’s window and covering him with fragments of glass. The “Mandarin” “remained passive about it”, says Ferrandi, but “asked me to inform him on the exact targets pursued by the plastiqueurs”. A few days later, as Degueldre stepped up his opérations ponctuelles another notch, Ferrandi noted: “It is difficult to know the feelings of Salan on this subject. He contents himself by showing astonishment not to have known until after the incident of each enterprise.” Then, on 10 November, the Muslim garage opposite was blown up a second time, once again smashing the general’s windows. This was too much for him and (according to Ferrandi), losing his temper, he declared: “The order must be given to stop at once this kind of stupidity.” After the killing of Lévy, Salan in anger wrote a personal letter to Guy Mollet disowning it, and blaming “extremist splinter groups”. Nevertheless, the bombing and killing went on, gathering momentum all the time.
Counter-measures: effectual and ineffectual
For many months the Algiers authorities displayed a disturbing imp
otence to cope with the O.A.S., despite the more than 25,000 gendarmes and C.R.S. available to them. The problems facing them were, admittedly, immense. In the larger part of Algiers and Oran the O.A.S. enjoyed the same advantages of being the “fish in water” among a sympathetic population that helped make the F.L.N. so elusive over the country as a whole. As with Yacef’s network in the Casbah before the Battle of Algiers, the adjacent poor white district of Bab-el-Oued now became a virtually impenetrable citadel for the O.A.S. There was also a worrisome question of loyalties. Following the collapse of the April putsch, General Ailleret estimated that — while ten per cent of his officers were prepared to fight against the O.A.S. — ten per cent were actively favourable to it, and the remaining eighty per cent neutral and unlikely to obey orders to fire upon the army deserters with the O.A.S. (Despite this, in September Ailleret issued an uncompromising “Order of the Day No. 5” which was tantamount to an army declaration of war on the O.A.S.; several days later his Paris apartment was blown apart, his wife narrowly escaping with her life. From then on the Commander-in-Chief took to carrying two revolvers and travelling in a bullet-proof Citroën — passed down from Salan — filled like a mobile armoury with grenades and sub-machine-guns.)
The situation was even worse with the force most closely concerned with combating the O.A.S.; of the gendarmerie mobile of the city of Algiers, it was reckoned that between sixty and eighty per cent were O.A.S. sympathisers. When Morin appealed to the Minister of the Interior, Roger Frey, for reinforcements of “reliable” police from France, he was met with cool lack of interest; Algeria was lost anyway, and Paris wasn’t going to bust itself to maintain order there. Morin warned of the danger that the establishment of Salan in real power in Algiers could have for metropolitan France, but this too fell on deaf ears. Morin then addressed himself directly to de Gaulle, who — having recently survived the Pont-sur-Seine attempt on his life — promised to send him a high-grade counter-terrorist team. But a further three months were to elapse before this was to become effective.
Meanwhile, Morin’s chief card was Commissaire Louis Grassien, sent from the Rheims police, who had formed a tiny anti-O.A.S. squad of ten trustworthy men. After weeks of patient work Grassien managed to sketch out an organnigramme of the O.A.S. — similar to that which Godard had composed of Yacef’s networks during the Battle of Algiers. He had managed to identify most of the O.A.S. leaders, but had proved incapable of tracking down a single one. Then, in September, a break came. An Italian ex-Legionnaire, “Pino”, turned informer and led Grassien to Godard’s hideout. That expert on underground techniques proved (as he always would) too elusive, but notes found in the raid revealed the name of one Maurice Gingembre, an important O.A.S. courier plying between Madrid, Paris and Algiers. Aged forty, Gingembre was a wealthy, flamboyant and indiscreet pied noir with a childish passion for “007” work — for which, according to Susini, he could scarcely have been less suited. On 7 September Gingembre — his briefcase stuffed with incriminating documents — flew from Paris to Algiers. With him on the plane was Colonel Debrosse himself, the head of the Algiers gendarmerie, whose men had suffered so appallingly at the hands of “ultra” sharpshooters on that “bloody Sunday” of 24 January 1960. Debrosse settled an old score by arresting Gingembre, who, says Susini, “immediately began to talk at the top of his voice”. On the resultant information, police in France swooped to arrest a number of senior French army officers. These included Colonel de Blignières, one of those involved in setting up the April putsch, and General Paul Vanuxem, former deputy commander-in-chief in Germany, on the charge of being “Verdun”, Salan’s designate to be O.A.S. military commander in France — a charge of which he was acquitted two years later. The O.A.S. network in metropolitan France probably never recovered from Gingembre’s revelations, while in Algeria networks throughout the western region were smashed; Godard’s secretary was captured, but he himself once again escaped. As Susini later admitted: “The O.A.S. general staff as a whole was almost arrested. Liaison was broken off; some of our agents abruptly disappeared; for two weeks the wheels of the Resistance stopped turning. We barely escaped total disaster.”
It was the closest of shaves. Next, a renegade police inspector working with Degueldre was picked up in a bar by former colleagues; tortured, he revealed the address of the Deltas’ lair. On 12 October a net thrown around the house caught Bobby Dovecar, Degueldre’s deputy who had led the Delta commando that killed Commissaire Gavoury, and five other Deltas. The net missed Degueldre by a matter of minutes; Dovecar died in front of the firing squad the following June.
Little time elapsed before the Deltas were hitting back. Early in November word reached Degueldre that Grassien, recalled to France, was holding a farewell party for some of his inspectors at the l’Universel bar. A car drew up outside, the occupants got out and calmly raked the bar with sub-machine-gun fire; Grassien survived, but his assistant, Commissaire Joubert, was killed. Godard and his fellow colonels expressed strong objection to the murdering of men “who wear French uniforms”; nevertheless, a few days later a “Z-Commando” — less disciplined O.A.S. rivals of the Deltas — ambushed a gendarmerie half-track on the Rue Michelet. Attacked by “Molotov cocktails”, four French gendarmes were burnt to death in the very heart of Algiers. The episodes marked the beginning of what was in effect a kind of civil war, and another of those “secret wars” fought behind the scenes of the main battle-front — savage, mean and without quarter — of which the first round had been won by the O.A.S. For the time being they appeared once again masters of Algiers.
“Civil war” against the “barbouzes”
After the killing of Commissaire Joubert, over a period of forty-eight hours in mid-November six well-known Algiers cafés frequented by “ultras” were blown up. They included the “Otomatic”, scene of one of the first F.L.N. bombing outrages during the Battle of Algiers. It was clear that some new counter-terrorist body was at work in the tormented city. A clue to its identity might have been gained from a rash of anti-O.A.S. posters that had appeared overnight throughout Algiers, to the surprise of its inhabitants, and bearing the initials M.P.C. The Mouvement pour la Communauté had been launched earlier in the year to boost de Gaulle’s Algerian policy, receiving substantial funds from Morin’s Délégation-Générale for its activities. Though its function was essentially political, with the growing ascendance of the O.A.S. its secretary-general in Algiers, a former radio producer called Lucien Bitterlin, decided that something more than words was now called for. He began gathering around him a group of strong-arm men. Bitterlin claims he did not demur when a colonel in Military Security branch supplied him with weapons, explosives and permits to move about during the curfew, and asked him to “plastiquer several activist cafés in Algiers” — in itself an extraordinary revelation of the state of anarchy and lawlessness already prevailing in the cities of Algeria. Short on security, the M.P.C. and its new activities were not long in reaching the ears of the French Press. Before the end of the month France-Soir was publishing a sensational scoop, under the banner headline: “Carte blanche for ‘Barbouzes’[5] to liquidate the O.A.S.” The new “anti-O.A.S. shock force”, it proclaimed, was to be composed entirely of “new men”:
all the aces of espionage, counter-espionage and subversive warfare available in France are being sent to Algeria. They are trustworthy men, from the most diverse origins…. The new anti-O.A.S. formations will not belong to any classical hierarchy. They will be autonomous organisms, not subject to normal authority…. They will act largely outside the army and the police.
Above all, this new force will be secret. An absolute secrecy will cover the activities and above all the identity of the members of the anti-O.A.S. formations.
Both in respect to secrecy and its members being “aces”, the M.P.C. was excessively flattered by France-Soir. By comparison with Degueldre’s highly trained and ruthless army deserters and the veteran pied noir counter-terrorists of Pérez, Bitterlin’s barbouz
es were a motley and amateurish crew. Their nucleus consisted of Jim Alcheik, a Jewish-Tunisian karate champion, and eight judo black belts he had brought with him; four Vietnamese expert in torture (which they not infrequently used), but who stood out like sore thumbs in the Algiers scene; and a mixture of pieds noirs of Jewish origin, Gaullist party “bouncers” and untrained muscle-men. None of them was a match for Degueldre’s Deltas, by whom they were almost immediately identified before even going into action. On the other hand, the France-Soir report had muddled Bitterlin’s amateurs with a much more professional body arriving in Algiers at the same time — that which de Gaulle had promised Morin three months previously. Called “Force C” and under the command of Michel Hacq, Director of the French Criminal Police and hero of the Resistance, it consisted of no less than 200 hand-picked police inspectors. These would be posted in quick rotation (to avoid corruption by the O.A.S.) so that none would spend more than two months in Algeria. “Force C” would work hand-in-hand with Bitterlin’s team, getting it out of scrapes, deploring its fiascos, but also benefiting from the intelligence provided. Both bodies would become bracketed in the public eye as barbouzes; the name that would stick henceforth where any “irregular” action against the O.A.S. was concerned.
Degueldre slaughters the “barbouzes”
For Hacq, installed in an office inside the Algiers Police School under the name of “Professor Ermelin”, there now began a five-months’ methodical and relentless hunt, ending only when the O.A.S. had been tracked down. For Bitterlin and his barbouzes it almost immediately opened with disaster. Within three days of his having established Jim Alcheik’s team in a rented villa in the Chemin Raynaud, Bitterlin was ambushed by four Deltas. His driver was badly wounded in the abdomen, while Bitterlin received superficial shoulder wounds; but for the heavy steel of the old Mercedes in which they were driving they would both probably have been riddled with bullets. The wounded driver was removed to the Maillot Hospital in Bab-el-Oued, and when visiting him a few days later Bitterlin nearly fell into another well-informed ambush. While he was inside the hospital with Jim Alcheik, a Delta Peugeot swept up and sprayed his two cars with automatic weapons. The Deltas obviously intended to get the barbouzes in the hospital. This time, however, Bitterlin had two of his Vietnamese on guard outside, who returned the fire and drove off the Deltas. No one was hit on either side, but the shooting drew a crowd from Bab-el-Oued which, recognising the Vietnamese as belonging to the hated barbouzes, took on an ugly aspect. With his tyres shot to shreds, Bitterlin was trapped and forced to telephone “Force C” for help; the rescuing inspector sent by “Professor Ermelin” advised him coldly to try to keep out of trouble in future. Meanwhile, in France the barbouzes were soon under cross-fire from the Press, with the Right criticising them as “parallel police” and the Left deriding de Gaulle’s regime as “The barbouze Republic”.
A Savage War of Peace Page 72