“I’ll just take her this valise for the moment and don’t be surprised if you see my nephew tomorrow. I’ll send him to do a little housework. When everything’s cleaned up he’ll give you the new keys.”
Jeannette had asked me to hand the archives over to Livio, at midday, in the Terminus Nord brasserie opposite the station. Because I’ve had to make a selection of the documents, I’m an hour and a half late. Livio’s waiting for me, nervous, his face white with anxiety.
I sit down and slip the suitcase under the table. “There’s the stuff.”
“I can’t take it,” he replies, pushing it back to me with his foot.
“Why?”
“I’m an official of the Association of Algerian students. They’ve got a file on me.”
“Well that wasn’t in the plan… OK, I’ll deal with the suitcase. But there’s still lots of stuff left in the apartment. Documents, a rifle, radios.”
“I can send a man.”
“Here’re the keys.”
As I leave with the suitcase, I’m doubly vigilant. A glance at my watch. My train for Belgium has just left.
1. Institut des hautes études cinématographiques—Institute of Advanced Film Studies.
12
AFTER SEVEN YEARS of the struggle for independence, and at a time when the OAS bombs were exploding every day, when there was no end to the massacres and torture in the remote hills of Algeria, when the peaceful demonstration of October 17, 1961 turned into a bloody tragedy1 and the hunger strikes in Fresnes started again,2 with more and more prisoners taking part, responsibility for supplying the network with forged papers at the Rue de la Loi laboratory in Brussels now fell, under my supervision, to Gloria de Herrera, known as ‘Katia’ for, as well as the photoengraving and printing of papers, I now had a quite different mission to carry out. To inundate France with forged banknotes and thus destabilize the economy if the government persisted in its refusal to open negotiations—the idea was far from new. In short: economic blackmail. More radical action to speed up the end of hostilities. But if it was to be taken seriously, it had to be credible. Put into action.
There had already been one attempt. Pablo, the leader of the 4th International, had gathered several experienced printers together in the Netherlands, but what he couldn’t know was that one of them had been tailed by an agent of the Netherlands secret services. They had just started printing forged banknotes when the police arrested them.
This time there was no question of playing the apprentice sorcerer by working with just anyone. True, my laboratory couldn’t print as quickly as a national mint, but all the same, in one week I’d managed to fill a single cardboard box with notes of 100 francs in the laboratory storeroom. Only Daniel, Omar and Katia were in on it. We hadn’t settled on a final amount. I would keep on printing as long as there was no end to the war—that was the plan.
The start of my new life in Belgium had been a very emotional business. Because of having to clear out Madame François’ apartment, I’d arrived in Brussels twenty-four hours late. I’d ended up hiding the suitcase with the archives and other compromising material in the attic closet above the photographic studio and asking Marie-Aline to arrange for them to be sent on to me. So I’d got on the train at the agreed time but a day later, heartbroken at the fact that I hadn’t been able to find the time to give my children a goodbye kiss.
When I got to the furnished apartment where we were to meet in Brussels, I was no longer expected. There I found Omar Boudaoud, the chairman of the federal committee of the French Federation of the FLN, who’d been leading the organization since 1957 and whom I now met for the first time. Then there was Jeannette, sobbing inconsolably at the thought that I might have been arrested because of her, and Katia, who was soon to become my right-hand woman, and my partner as well. My appearance, as if by a miracle, was greeted with an immense sigh of relief, as if I’d suddenly come back to life and, with me, the hundreds of FLN militants whose names were on the documents in the archives.
The pleasure Omar and I both felt at our meeting wasn’t feigned. I’d often heard Omar’s leadership qualities praised, and I was pleased to discover that he matched up to his reputation. He had the stature of a great leader, radiating serenity, intelligence and swift judgment. My past in the Resistance, my experience of clandestine work and my commitment, as a Jew, to the Algerians particularly commanded his respect.
For several weeks I’d been working on the idea of trying the forged banknotes plan again. Once we were alone together I put forward the project to him. Omar wasn’t very enthusiastic, especially after the Dutch fiasco. Though it was true that the operation had failed, I felt that the idea itself was a good one and certainly worth considering. I told Omar what I felt about this interminable war. If it were to go on for years to come, given the way the hatred was growing on either side of the Mediterranean we’d soon have to finally abandon any hope of Franco-Algerian friendship. I had the feeling that everything we could do had already been tried: armed struggle, diplomatic negotiations, intellectual propaganda, political argument, the insubordination of the young soldiers, and I was afraid that the OAS assassinations would provoke similarly violent responses. It was due to the intervention of our network, in particular the arguments put forward by Francis Jeanson, that it had been possible to avoid the war spreading to French soil. At one time, in 1958, the French federation of the FLN had been preparing a series of attacks on the French mainland as a response to four years of war. Francis had managed to persuade Omar to restrict the attacks to military, police and industrial targets. As a pacifist, I saw the ‘forged notes’ project as an excellent way of applying pressure without getting caught up in a spiral of violence. I knew that seven long years of conflict had not been without effect on the state coffers. Would the government take the risk of seeing the economy, which was already shaky, weaken even more? Eventually Omar had no objection and we decided to launch the operation, while still making forged documents our priority, of course.
Belgium was a hub for border crossings. Belgian laws only required foreigners to register after three months’ residence, so every three months we had to move to different premises and change our identities, which meant we never needed to register with the police. Lots of decisions were made there, at the top level. The five members of the federation management committee—Omar Boudaoud, the boss; Kaddour Ladlani, in charge of administration; Ali Haroun, press and information; Saïd Bouaziz, head of the armed section known as the Special Organization (OS); Abdelkrim Souici, treasurer—used to travel through Belgium at least once a month, but frequently much more often.
Thus it wasn’t sheer chance that many former members of the Jeanson network had been hiding there for several years. The struggle could still be pursued from Belgium. Daniel, Francis’ assistant, had never given up his responsibility for the escape routes. Replaced in France by Curiel’s right-hand man, he now looked after all the crossings of international borders. The Belgian network was perfectly organized with women and men whose courage was incontestable, guides mostly who would cross the Belgian, French, German, Swiss and Italian borders, and never complained when I had to wake them up at four in the morning to give them the necessary documents for an urgent mission. At the police level, Belgium gave the impression of absolute calm compared with Papon’s police in France. I never had the feeling I was being followed. But the calm was deceptive: when you opened the door of your car, when a package was delivered, you had to beware of bombs. The bloody attacks of the OAS went well beyond the French borders.
Once I was there I had to set up everything from scratch, without wasting any time at all. From the start it had been agreed that Katia would assist me, for she was a surrealist painter and had been trained as a restorer of works of art. An American and a committed communist who had been very much involved in the Jeanson network from the very beginning, she had fled McCarthyism on the same ship as her friends Man Ray and André Breton. She was the one who looked for premis
es for me before I arrived, and found them with a couple belonging to the Belgian network who lived with their children in a large apartment, of which they allowed us to use one room. We would arrive in the morning, after they’d gone out, and leave in the evening before they returned. I managed to set up a fully equipped, functioning laboratory in the room within two days. I bought a little enlarger, then turned it into a copier to make the templates. I had the network buy me a hand press, a tiny thing compared with my huge ‘litho’ in Rue des Jeûneurs on which I printed the documents, though one by one. I made photosensitive plates for printing flat and in relief. My centrifuge was no longer made out of a bicycle wheel, as it had been during the Resistance, but out of an electric 78-rpm record player after I’d tinkered with the internal drive-belt so that I could vary the speed.
Very soon we had to move again. A comrade in the network rented a large place for us in Rue de la Loi—the address, as I discovered much later, of the Belgian outpost of the Red Orchestra3—and we could start printing forged banknotes.
The ones I chose were those of a hundred new francs; that was a sufficiently substantial amount. I had to study the structure of the paper, its weight, its rigidity, the noise it made when you shook it to make it crackle, its texture to the touch. By chance, going through the stock of a wholesaler I found some paper that seemed very close. All I had to do was to color it very slightly, with a dying process using alcohol so that the paper wouldn’t swell too much while it was being soaked, to make it identical to the paper banknotes were printed on.
Then, with a special rolling press of my own invention, set very tight, I smoothed and finished off the paper. Napoleon was on it in his bottle-green jacket with yellow stripes and crimson collar, his gaze fixed on the Arc de Triomphe. The black ink of the numbering was slightly raised. The outlines were full of ornamentation and complicated flourishes, rosettes and sprays of flowers interwoven and with important variations in the color. The choice of inks and dyes needed gave me a real headache. Finally I analyzed the watermarks of higher and lower density. There were also some in color. After several weeks of analysis and tests I finally made some trials that were conclusive. And, gradually, the banknotes started to pile up in the laboratory storeroom. First a small cardboard box full. Then two, then three…
It was the end of the afternoon on a very ordinary day. Katia was yawning and rubbing her eyes. There was one photo left to attach to a driver’s license before going home. We hadn’t had much sleep the previous night because of a last-minute urgent request. Daniel had knocked on our door late in the evening asking for two ID cards and two driver’s licenses that Cécile Marion, alias ‘Maria’, was to take to the French border in the middle of the night, using the route through the forest. So I’d gone back to the lab at that late hour; Katia came with me because she didn’t want to stay by herself. Once we’d made the documents, we delivered them to Maria. She’d fallen asleep while waiting and greeted us with her eyes gummed up with sleep, though still smiling as always. For five years now Maria had spared no effort to help us. Since she was blonde, with angelic looks and could go anywhere, the organization relied on her for lots of liaison work. She still had to wait more than an hour, until three in the morning, before setting off, and we suggested we should stay there to help her stay awake.
Katia lit herself a cigarette and sighed as I closed the last eyelet of the photo on the identity card.
“I’ll wait outside, I need some fresh air,” she said, putting on her coat.
Before turning off all the lights, I opened the door of the storeroom as I did every evening, to have a quick look at my output, which was growing. More than a square meter of boxes full of tightly packed banknotes of a hundred new francs. How much could it amount to? Frankly I had no idea; I never bothered to count. I locked the door before going out. Every evening we used to walk home to enjoy what was left of the daylight. Only a few days previously we’d changed our identities and moved house for the fourth time, as demanded by our clandestine existence in Belgium. Our new home, a furnished apartment of no particular attraction, had a nice view over the Sablons district. No sooner had we gotten back than Katia automatically switched on the radio, then hung her jacket and bag on the coat-rack and was about to slump onto the sofa and light a cigarette, when she suddenly froze and held her breath. The radio was blaring full blast. “A historic day,” the journalist kept repeating. The Évian Accords and just been signed. It was March 18, 1962—the cease-fire had just been announced. Algeria was independent. The fruit of so many years of effort. Katia fixed her eyes on me in a look full of peace and relief. Around us the city was calm, almost completely still. No outbursts of joy, not even whoops of jubilation from the North African women. Brussels was not celebrating Algeria’s independence.
There was no celebration in our new home either, but we were happy.
My immediate reaction was to rush over to the telephone and call Jeannine, my ex-wife, so I could talk to my children. How long had I been waiting for this moment! It had been almost two years since I’d seen them. I was trembling as I dialed the number. Jeannine picked up the receiver; I could hear the voices and laughter of Marthe and Serge, who were playing close by, right next to my ear. After I’d gone through a long explanation and asked her if she’d be kind enough to send the children to me by train, Jeannine said something I’ll always remember: “We thought you were dead, Adolphe, but I always knew that if you weren’t, you were sure to be doing something good.”
“And the money, what did you do with that?”
What d’you think? We burnt it. The idea of doing anything else with it never crossed our minds. And then, as you can well imagine, I wasn’t stupid enough to number the notes. We were determined to put them in circulation—if the war continued—and in that case I’d have numbered them. But, despite everything, I was hoping it would never come to that and that the conflict would find a diplomatic solution we could be more proud of.
Questions of money inevitably cause big problems. It’s always with money that the troubles begin. I trusted Katia absolutely, of course, and she was the only one who knew where the forged banknotes were kept. But information could have slipped out, someone could have heard us talking, have figured out what we were doing. Money arouses cupidity, and by its very nature has the power to affect commitment and corrupt the minds of those you thought most honest. Numbering them too soon could have been like signing my own death warrant. When we started the forged money project, several things happened that put me on my guard. The behavior of some people around me changed from one day to the next. For example, I remember a woman in the network suddenly starting to make advances toward me when we’d known each other for four years already and there’d never been anything of that kind between us before. It’s wearying to be suspicious of everyone and everything. I wasn’t unhappy to see the money go. I’d be able to relax again.
Don’t imagine burning banknotes is a simple matter. It’s true that they catch fire easily, but they can also blow away. It took us almost a month to get it done. There was so much of it. With Katia’s help, I dug a hole in the garden of a Belgian friend in the network, so that I could destroy it in small batches day by day. A bonfire that seemed interminable to us. I was watching almost a year’s work go up in smoke. I enjoyed that, watching the banknotes burn. I was exultant, drunk at finding peace again.
1. In a crackdown ordered by police chief Maurice Papon, Paris police turned their guns on 30,000 pro-FLN protesters gathered by the Seine. The exact number of casualties remains in dispute as Papon directed records to be destroyed. In 1998, Papon was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for crimes against humanity because of his collaboration to deport at least 1500 French Jews to Nazi death camps. [MM]
2. Some four thousand Algerian nationals held in French prisons went on a nineteen-day hunger strike in November 1961 to protest being locked up as common criminals when the government had clearly arrested them for political reasons. The strike was ha
lted after assurances by The Red Cross that they would be given a different regimen, but then continued when demands were not met. The New York Times reported on November 20, 1961: “Mohammed Ben Bella and four other Algerian rebel ministers held by the French since 1956 have sworn to continue their hunger strike until liberated and permitted to participate in the Algerian peace talks.” [MM]
3. The Russian anti-Nazi spy network organized by Léopold Trepper during the Second World War.
13
I CAME BACK TO FRANCE in the course of the summer of 1963, exactly one year after the cease-fire in Algeria. The war was over, but that didn’t mean my work was finished. We still had to ensure the security of the leaders and the members of the network who had remained underground, allow them to cross the borders in the other direction, organize their return and then liquidate everything—premises, apartments, vehicles—burn compromising material, obliterate every last trace of our illegal activities. It had taken a whole year to get that done.
I knew that a lot of the former members of the network had gone to Algeria to take part in the reconstruction of the country, but for the moment there was no reason for me to join them. I’d done what I had to do, Algeria was independent and I considered that the politics of the country were no business of mine, especially since I’d been totally taken aback by the fratricidal conflict between the former leaders of the revolution in the race for power. Once the anti-colonial struggle had been won, they made war among themselves. Worse still, I’d been profoundly shocked by the fate of the harkis. I was furious at the attitude of the Algerian government, which allowed the massacres to take place, but even more at the absolutely immoral stance of the French government that had been cowardly enough to simply abandon them there and then, when they knew full well what fate awaited them.
Adolfo Kaminsky Page 15