Adolfo Kaminsky

by Sarah Kaminsky

  Do I have to tell you that Lia had finally decided to break up with me? The separation took a long time and was full of sadness and misunderstandings, as our whole affair had been.

  Once more permanently on the alert, I started to suffer from nervous fatigue. I made an assessment of the situation. I was one of the older generation, active in the area since the middle of the Second World War. And I was alone. There were numerous people fighting for freedom, but none, or almost none, in my field. Whenever necessary, I made forged papers for every life that was in danger, and the same question kept coming back to me: if it came to the point where I had to stop, if something should happen to me, who would take over?

  I started to work on the project of who would replace me. Until this point I had taken the trouble, whenever possible, to train an apprentice in forging, rather than doing it myself. Often it wasn’t necessary to make the whole document, it was enough for accomplices to steal or borrow passports on which only the photo had to be changed, or details such as the date, name, age. My training of people helped both to reinforce the autonomy of the networks and to lighten my load.

  I was a very good teacher and had some excellent pupils. José Hipolito dos Santos, who was one of the leaders of the ULRA (United League of Revolutionary Action), was a very assiduous pupil. He became an expert for military discharge certificates that allowed many young anti-colonialists to desert from the Portuguese army. Nicolas, Aurélie’s boyfriend, had great manual aptitude and a resourcefulness that reminded me of myself. I know today that his talents as a forger saved many members of the Greek resistance. Either of them would have made a first-rate replacement, only they were both devoted to their movement, to their cause and not to causes in general. I suppose they had neither the time nor the desire to become ‘professional’ forgers.

  We never went into the methods of making documents.

  The African liberation movements that had their offices in Algiers often sent me new people to help out and to train. With caution I would either accept them or not, for I had to make a selection. It has to be said that at that time anyone demanding the liberation of this or that people, holding forth in any old way, with any old revolutionary terms, could hope for financial aid from Boumediene’s government.1 I arranged meetings in cafés well away from where I lived. I made inquiries, spent a long time assessing them, rejecting those who were talkative, inexperienced, proud, arrogant, hooligans…

  I spent a long time observing and searching for the person who would be capable of taking over, both technically and morally.

  “Did you find one?”

  One of them could have been the right man. Fabrizio was in his thirties and had a good knowledge of printing. He really wanted to know everything and was interested in the struggles all over the world. I gave him some very intensive training. For six months he spent two half days a week with me, and each time he left he took some practical work to do at home. He was smart, had a great memory and we progressed very quickly. I estimated that at that speed he would have completed his training in two years.

  But little by little I detected attitudes, ways of talking that aroused my suspicions. Fabrizio had been sent by Solidarité, Henri Curiel’s network, but as soon as we started to discuss it, he would criticize it in a singularly furious manner. It’s true that not everyone was happy with Curiel’s line. Better and better organized, the structure he’d put in place since the Algerian war was becoming much more effective and was expanding. As always in politics, the increasing power of a man or a group triggers off jealousy and rancor, disagreement and dissidence, hurt pride and the desire for a putsch.

  But that wasn’t what most concerned me about Fabrizio. In the course of the long discussions in which we got to know each other better, it was expressions such as ‘more radical’, ‘to the very end’, or ‘if there’s damage, so be it’ that got me thinking. We were starting to hear about little groups of the extreme left, such as the Red Army Faction, the Baader-Meinhof gang or even the Red Brigades, whose bloody methods of urban guerrilla warfare I roundly condemned. For some time, many of the young people who joined the solidarity networks seemed motivated by the dubious desire to handle guns and money, idolizing the hooligans and forgetting the cause, slowly but inexorably sliding into organized crime.

  Fabrizio wasn’t a criminal, far from it. He wasn’t interested in money for example. But because the line between ‘resistance’ and ‘terrorism’ is sometimes very fine, difficult to feel, I canceled his training overnight and resigned myself to continuing on my own for as long as necessary. The handover wasn’t going to happen in the immediate future.

  1. Boumediene ruled Algeria through a revolutionary council after 1965 until his death in 1978. [MM]

  15

  “WHY did you stop?”

  A series of disturbing incidents led to my decision to step aside.

  It all started one July day in 1971. Mattéi had come into the area for color and technical photography in the Rue des Jeûneurs then sat patiently in the waiting room, stroking his mustache as usual. Mattéi was a regular client; by then we’d been working together for eight years. The ritual was that whenever he came to Paris he’d pop in at the laboratory as soon as he arrived, then just before he left. The rest of his time was spent going around the Third World. Disguised as a tourist in a floral shirt and with a camera hanging around his neck, he looked for contacts, arranged secret meetings between the leaders of liberation movements, organized escapes, set up support networks, always with one foot on the ground, the other on the next plane, in all the places where races and nations were fighting for emancipation.

  We both had our little habits. His ‘package’ was always ready, waiting for him in one of the hundreds of boxes of photographic paper stacked against the walls of the darkroom. The ‘Mattéi’ box, identical to all the others, was the eighth from the bottom in the third stack on the left.

  I went to fetch him and took him into the darkroom, taking care to lock the door behind us.

  Aways concerned that walls can have ears, inquisitive ears, I’d set up a little radio so we could talk without fear of being overheard and, although M. Petit had already left, we only made small talk until our voices were masked by the music. It was doubtless that my decades working in the underground had made this a reflex action.

  Mattéi had come to collect some South African ‘internal’ passports for the ANC, the African National Congress, the South African anti-apartheid political party. These documents, indispensable for the Black community in South Africa, consisted of an identity card and a police pass. Looked on as foreigners in their own country by the application of the apartheid laws, the Blacks had been expelled from the cities and territories of the Whites to be herded together in reservations—the townships. These documents were essential to allow them to move freely.

  Since the ANC’s peaceful demonstration in 1960, the organization, judged to be subversive and dangerous, had been outlawed, and its leaders had gone underground. When arrested, the members of the ANC were invariably given life imprisonment; for example, Nelson Mandela, whose imprisonment starting in 1963 moved public opinion worldwide.

  It was in that year of 1963 that Mattéi first asked for internal passports; after that the stream of requests was never-ending.

  We went over his current needs. Mattéi gave me lists of names and photos, and requested that new Venezuelan and Dominican passports be ready for his next visit.

  Then he informed me of a new request. He wanted to know how long it would take to start producing South African ‘external’ passports. This time it was to allow a large number of anti-apartheid militants to join the ANC leaders in exile and continue the struggle from outside.

  I’d never had to make external passports. Mattéi gave me one to serve as a model, doubtless borrowed or stolen, and I set to work a soon as he left.

  I examined the original with a magnifying glass. It belonged to a black South African of around thirty who was staring, un
smiling, straight at me from the photo. There was a stamp overlapping the corner of the photo, and the ink had dribbled across the man’s shoulder. The passport must have been kept in a trouser pocket. It had a slight coating of grease and was more dog-eared on the right than on the left. The cover was very simply made from solid boards, light brown, with a watermark impressed on it in a slightly darker tint with an emblem above it, die-stamped. It was glued to the pages, of which there were ten or so. I established the format and the weight of the paper, studied its grammage and texture as well as the color, which came in different shades of sepia. The internal pages had impressed watermarks and ruled lines incorporated into the paper. I analyzed the ink used in printing, in the handwriting and in the stamps, and measured the size of the perforations punched in the numbers in order to choose the right needles.

  There was no relief stamp and, at first sight, no traps nor any particular difficulties.

  I photographed the model page by page, took shots of each stamp and the revenue stamp so that I could photoengrave them, chose my sheets and colored them, incorporated the watermarks, printed them out, made the cover of boards and glued it together.

  It took me a week to get the blank prototype passport exactly identical.

  I met Mattéi in the Closerie des lilas, gave him back the passport I’d used as a model and told him I was just waiting for him to give me the green light.

  “We’ll see about that when I get back from the Dominican Republic, I’ll have the names and photos,” he said as he left.

  A week later Mattéi still wasn’t back from his trip, and I had a phone call from Roland Dumas, who wanted to see me as soon as possible. I went to his place, where I was introduced to Michel Raptis, known as ‘Pablo’. Introductions over, Roland left us alone together in a parlor in his office suite.

  Although our paths had never crossed, I’d heard a lot about Pablo. In his sixties and of Greek origin, he’d set up a section of the 4th International in Greece before becoming the leader of the Trotskyist party in France. Like me during the war in Algeria, he’d given support to the FLN, notably by being in charge of a gun factory in Morocco. He was also the one who had devised the forged money fiasco in the Netherlands. That operation had failed and led to his arrest as well as that of his accomplices. He’d been sent to prison for fifteen months.

  Pablo was reputed to be taking part in most of the struggles for emancipation. Indeed, such was his reputation that when Roland Dumas and Stéphanie had come to ask me to help the Greeks in their fight against the colonels, I’d assumed that their network depended on the Pablists, without, however, being sure.

  The only thing was that, however interesting and committed he was, Pablo was the type of person I made it a rule to avoid at all cost. ‘Leaky as a sieve’ as the underground jargon had it. Too well known to the police forces. Too much of a blabbermouth as well. For me he didn’t respect the first law of illegality: when you’re working underground you have to observe a certain restraint and thus keep out of the public eye and official political platforms. A question of security and good sense.

  Pablo asked me what I’d been doing since I’d supported the FLN.

  “Photography. I’ve specialized in the reproduction of works of art. I have a small firm.”

  “No forged papers?”

  “No.”

  We exchanged our political opinions, which were markedly similar. We shared the same human values, but I preferred to keep my distance and to remain as evasive as possible about my activities.

  After we’d chatted for half an hour, Pablo asked me if I’d be capable of making forged passports. He had one to show me as a model, a South African passport that he held out to me.

  Without saying anything I took it to examine it, opened it and was horrified to see that it was the passport I’d given back to Mattéi a week ago. Same photo, same name, same number, same dog-eared corners. I knew this passport by heart—I’d examined it in detail, photographed it, weighed it, gone over it millimeter by millimeter.

  “How long would it take you to make some, a hundred, say? Two hundred? Three hundred?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Name me your price. I assure you it’ll be mine as well.”

  I was shocked that he should mention money to me. Was someone taking me for a mercenary again? Anyone who knew me, even if only a little, knew that I categorically refused to accept payment. I’d made working for nothing an absolute principle, for it alone guaranteed my total independence of the networks and kept my commitment incorruptible.

  I hid these reflections from Pablo and took the passport with me, telling him I’d let him know later.

  Back in my apartment and after a face-to-face with the passport in my kitchen, I had a desperate need to get some sleep. The South African in the photo was looking me up and down, impassive. I’d always made it clear that I insisted on having a sole contact. I’d chosen Mattéi because he was the only one whom I trusted absolutely. He showed strict respect for my system of watertight compartments and had proved a thousand times over that there was no doubt about his intentions. He didn’t mention his underground activities to anyone, never took an unnecessary risk. And it wasn’t mere chance that as a pair we’d kept going for so many years without obstruction. His complete independence made him different from the others, selecting very carefully the people for whom and with whom he worked.

  That Pablo should feel it was his mission to help the ANC, that he should have a need to be someone and, above all, to regain his prestige as a militant internationalist that had been seriously compromised by the unfortunate outcome in the Netherlands, didn’t surprise me at all.

  What I couldn’t understand was how the passport had gotten from Mattéi to him and why it should end up with me again. Mattéi wouldn’t have given it to Pablo himself because he would have foreseen the risks we would run into working with a person on whom the police had files. And then we’d already sorted out together all the technical elements in producing the passport. Was it Curiel? And in that case, why should he look for another forger, since Mattéi worked for Curiel?

  If something serious had happened to Mattéi, I thought, I would have been informed by someone in the network or through the press. Curiel would have found a way of contacting me directly, without going through Pablo. And above all, I was sure Curiel would never have offered me money.

  It was impossible to clear my mind of all the questions jostling each other inside my head, making it more and more difficult to get to sleep. What was there behind this business? Two possibilities: either the Curiel network was the source of this shambles, and in that case it unfortunately meant that I was dealing with amateurs totally unaware of the dangers; or we had been infiltrated and somewhere in the group there was a police agent pulling the strings with the aim of breaking up the organization.

  The next day I took the passport back to Roland Dumas’ place, in an envelope addressed to Pablo, informing him that I didn’t intend to follow up his request.

  August was approaching and still Mattéi hadn’t come to see me. I was getting a little worried and went through the paper from end to end every morning, hoping I wouldn’t find his name or his description under news in brief or, worse still, obituaries.

  The same as every summer, I shut my firm down for a few weeks. Omar Boudaoud had invited me to go and see him in Algeria. Évelyne had been a partner for me after Lia left. We’d now separated but were still good friends. She wanted to go to Africa, and one day I suggested she accompany me on a vacation in Algeria if, that is, she thought North Africa was sufficiently African. She agreed, so we went on what we called our “breakup trip.”

  The last time I’d been in Algeria was before the war there, in 1953. I’d never set foot on the soil of independent Algeria.

  Some former members of the Jeanson network had settled there, helping to reconstruct the country. They were called ‘redfeet’. One of them was Jean-Marie Boeglin.

  A journalist at
first, then the general secretary of the Théâtre de la Cité in Lyons, he’d joined the FLN support network in the same year as me, 1957. Two years later he’d become the organizer of the network in the Lyons area before he was informed on by a traitor based in Marseilles who, as we later learned, was responsible for the breaking up of the Jeanson network. The day the police came to question him at the theater, he just had time to escape via an emergency exit behind the stage and get to Switzerland. Then to Algeria. Sentenced in his absence to ten years in prison during the Jeanson trial in 1961, he’d never returned to France. In Algiers he became director of the Department of Communications and Environment of the Société nationale de sidérurgie (SNS).1 We’d never met, but all the good things I’d heard about him and our long telephone conversations had been enough to create an unequivocal sense of brotherhood between us. We couldn’t wait to meet.

  As soon as I arrived, Boeglin invited me to dinner, and it was as if we’d known each other forever. A simple, warm-hearted get-together. Boeglin was intelligent, welcoming, sincere and above all humane, in every aspect similar to the idea I had of him. The next day I was again invited to dine with him, and the day after and so on for the whole of my stay.

  During a never-ending meal, in the course of which we got into high spirits solving the problems of the world, he asked me how I felt about giving a two-week course on photographic technique as a guest lecturer at the Algiers College of Art. As a person who’d always enjoyed training young people, I accepted with pleasure. It was agreed that the course would take place some time after September.