But terror bombings continued. Massu remembered Paul Aussaresses’ performance as an intelligence officer in Philippeville and summoned him to serve in Algiers. Massu told Aussaresses that the job was going to be hard and “we’ll have to be implacable.”6 Aussaresses understood this meant using torture and summary executions. Massu shared his understanding. Massu sought legal latitude from the French government in hopes of overturning the laws that banned torture. When the government failed to oblige, Massu simply denied the supremacy of civil law in Algeria. He asserted that because Algiers was under military authority, civil law did not apply.
Aussaresses cared little about such fine distinctions. Police files provided him with a list of suspects. Mass arrests followed by interrogations, which usually meant torture, often began with the small fry and the question “Who is the district tax collector?” Disclosure led the French security forces to new names, new arrests, and new interrogations: “To whom do you turn in your money?” So the French traced the bomb-making network, climbing up command levels to find the terror chiefs.
Meanwhile, Massu divided the city into four quadrants, each under the control of one paratroop regiment. The paratroop officers were almost all veterans of the Indochina War. Massu’s chief of staff, Yves Godard, had commanded the Eleventh Shock, the so-called dirty-tricks battalion answerable directly to the prime minister. Formed by the paratroop establishment and the French secret service, the Eleventh Shock in Indochina had been part of the column attempting to relieve Dien Bien Phu. In Algiers the Eleventh Shock performed many of the “delicate” missions that no French official wanted to acknowledge. Among the other hard men were regimental commander Lieutenant Colonel Roger Trinquier, who had commanded an airborne combat brigade with the mission of collecting intelligence behind Viet Minh lines. Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Jeanpierre, who had survived both a German concentration camp and a devastating Viet Minh ambush, commanded another regiment. Then there was the brave, ruthless Lieutenant Colonel Marcel Bigeard, celebrated for his conduct at Dien Bien Phu. Collectively these men were determined to avoid the “mistake” of lack of firmness exhibited in that war. They set out to prove that they were willing to be more extreme than the terrorists.
Henceforth, the Muslim population of Algeria lived in a city subdivided by barbed-wire barriers illuminated by searchlight beams. The focal point of the urban insurgency was the Casbah, a thickly packed slum home to some 80,000 Algerians. The Casbah was a confusing matrix of extremely narrow streets and alleys overlooked by old stone buildings. Europeans had long ago abandoned this sector and the absence of French authority allowed the FLN free rein. The Casbah was the command center for Yacef ’s bomb-making network, now using much more powerful plastic explosive packages only slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes. Operating from secure safe houses, Yacef plotted his terror campaign. Yacef sent his cadre of young girls to place a bomb in the female lavatory at a student hangout called the Otomatic and for a second time at the popular bistro La Cafétéria; when diners at the nearby brasserie rushed to the window to see what had happened, a third bomb, placed beneath a table, detonated, sending fragments slicing through the crowd.
Massu assigned the sector containing the Casbah to Colonel Bigeard’s Third Regiment. He and his men worked closely with Aussaresses. Aussaresses had the paratroopers perform a detailed census by asking the oldest inhabitant of a house to name all the people living in the house. Police cross-checked this information with statements made by the neighbors. If someone was missing, he or she became a suspect. If the suspect returned home, police hauled in him or her for interrogation. In Aussaresses’ words, “The results of the interrogations and comparisons of various sources allowed the patrols to set up reliable lists of persons we should be looking for.”7
Conventional detective and forensic work contributed to closing in on Yacef’s bomb-making network. A waiter gave a detailed description of a woman who had sat at the table shortly before the detonation. Careful examination of a clothing fragment found at one bombing site led to the arrests. Henceforth Bigeard’s paratroopers carefully searched all women leaving the Casbah. Throughout the city the paratroopers established a curfew and began shooting on sight anything that moved. Thus began an intense and brutal nine-month military campaign.
Much of the action took place at night when the paratroopers donned their jungle camouflage uniforms and took to the streets to make their arrests. The goal was to be done by midnight in order to leave plenty of time for interrogations. Aussaresses boasted, “I was responsible for the decisions regarding all the suspects arrested inside the city of Algiers.” The vast majority had weak links to the FLN, having joined out of fear. These people were sent to prison camps. Eventually more than 20,000 people, or 3 percent of the entire population of Algiers, passed through these camps. Aussaresses focused on the prime suspects, flitting among the four paratroop headquarters inside Algiers to make godlike snap decisions literally involving life and death, with the pendulum of justice heavily weighed toward the latter: “We would hold on to the others who were either positively dangerous or thought to be so and make them talk quickly before executing them.”8 An estimated 3,000 Muslims “disappeared” during the Battle of Algiers.
The policy of counterterror sharply reduced the number of terrorist incidents as the months passed. But Massu’s chief of staff, Godard, wanted more. He understood that most of the lower-level operatives—bomb transporters, lookouts, and even bomb planters—were easily replaceable. Killing them would not completely end the terrorists’ ability to sow terror. Indeed, on February 10, 1957, the terrorists showed they still had teeth when nearly simultaneously they detonated two large bombs at two soccer stadiums while matches were being played. The bombs destroyed the stadiums’ grandstands, killing 11 and seriously wounding 146 more. Godard compiled all information to replicate the bombers’ organizational hierarchy. For a long time the name of the head of the organization remained unknown.
Indeed, Yacef took exceptional care to conceal himself. Purportedly he changed hideouts fifteen times on the day the general strike began. He disguised himself as a woman in order to personally scout public places to detonate bombs. But as the paratroopers systematically rolled up the FLN terror network, Yacef’s personal security and that of his remaining chiefs became doubtful. The remaining senior leadership in Algiers dispersed, leaving Yacef to continue the campaign as best he could. Following a long lull during which time he partially reconstructed his bomb network, Yacef ordered a new campaign to begin. Four terrorists disguised in the uniform of public works personnel placed time bombs inside several streetlights next to a crowded bus stop. A fifteen-year-old Muslim employee of a popular casino set a bomb underneath the orchestra platform, killing nine and wounding eighty-five.
The French responded by clamping down even harder on the Casbah and intensifying the search for Yacef, who they now knew was the head of the bomb network. Acting on pinpoint intelligence, at 5:00 a.m. on September 24, 1957, paratroopers sealed off rue Caton in the heart of the Casbah. They went to Yacef’s safe house, broke into his hidey-hole built into a small space between staircase and bathroom, dodged the hand grenade thrown by Yacef, and captured the terror chieftain. To the frustration of many in the security service, most notably Paul Aussaresses, the French prime minister demanded that Yacef not be mistreated.
In their zeal to capture Yacef, the paratroopers had overlooked his alternative safe house on the rue Caton. From here three of Yacef’s subordinates fled to another safe house. After realizing their mistake, French security forces relentlessly tracked the subordinates until they cornered and killed them in the Casbah on the night of October 8. With this final blow, the Battle of Algiers came to a close. The military result of the Battle for Algiers was the clear defeat of the FLN. Bombings and other acts of terror virtually ceased inside the capital. For the remainder of the war the FLN abandoned large-scale urban terrorism inside Algeria.
But the French victory had unfores
een consequences. Before the Battle of Algiers there had been occasional reports of torture and other abuses. As early as January 15, 1955, an article in L’Express entitled “The Question” raised doubts about French conduct. On December 20, 1955, L’Express displayed photographs depicting the execution of an Algerian “rebel” by an auxiliary gendarme. The photographs did not quite have the impact of the famous image capturing the moment of impact when the South Viet namese police chief executed a Viet Cong suspect in the streets of Saigon during the Tet Offensive in 1968, but it did provide a powerful image that prompted some Frenchmen to question their nation’s behavior in Algeria. The Battle of Algiers changed questions to moral certainties and henceforth, as one historian observed, the “rivulet of allegations . . . swelled to a flood” and became imprinted upon the French consciousness.9
Two groups held in high moral esteem by the French people, clergymen and veterans of the French resistance against the Nazis, began to question openly French conduct. When the French press published disturbing accounts reported by conscripts and reservists, the ethical issue of how the army conducted the fight in Algeria became crucial to the war’s outcome. Writers asked if the French army had descended to the level of the Gestapo.10 Politicians began to criticize the army’s conduct. These criticisms, in turn, cemented the army’s loathing for the politicians of the Fourth Republic. Right-wing extremists began plotting to overthrow the Fourth Republic and to replace it with a tougher regime.
Meanwhile, the paratroopers in Algiers enjoyed their newfound adulation among the city’s young female pieds-noirs. Their officers found satisfaction in a dirty job well done and looked forward to some cleaner, real soldiering out in the hinterland against main-force insurgent units. In the words of Colonel Bigeard, counterinsurgency operations in Algiers had been a battle of “blood and shit.”11
NINE
The Enclosed Hunting Preserve
The Battle on the Frontiers
FRENCH DECREES ISSUED IN THE spring of 1956 divided Algeria into three zones: a zone of operation, a pacification zone, and a forbidden zone. The allocation of counterinsurgency forces logically followed this division. The zone of operations was the killing ground where elite mobile French forces relentlessly pursued guerrilla bands with the objective of eliminating them. In the pacification zones, which embraced the most populous and fertile areas, French conscript and reserve formations tried to protect the civilian population, European and Muslim alike, from terrorist attacks. Here security was accompanied by major economic reforms, education, and propaganda indoctrination. French strategists designated sparsely populated areas that were adjacent to the pacification zones as forbidden zones (zones interdites). The strategic intent was to separate the rebels from their sources of supplies and recruits while providing security for the pacification zones. They were beyond the pale, a region from where the population was evacuated and relocated in settlement camps controlled by the army. Thereafter, the army was permitted to fire on anyone seen moving in the forbidden zones.
Having established the parameters by which it would operate, the French military went to work. It employed overwhelming force to drive the FLN’s military organization, the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN), out of Algeria. Most ALN fighters took refuge in the neighboring countries of Morocco and Tunisia. Those who continued the fight inside Algeria became dependent on external supply sources. The French recognized this vulnerability and concentrated on isolating Algeria. Nourished by good intelligence, the French navy intercepted ships carrying arms to Algeria. They also blocked aerial resupply of the guerrillas. Outside of Algeria, French secret agents waged a successful intimidation campaign, including targeted assassinations, against international arms dealers. Because of these measures, the insurgents remained starved for effective firearms and munitions.
Inside Algeria, the French organized harki units of “loyal” Algerians. A farsighted settler, Jean Servier, had overcome official resistance to organize light companies from FLN defectors. Servier insisted that these harki units serve near their homes so they could protect their own families from FLN retaliation. Armed with shotguns, intimately familiar with the local environment, Servier’s harkis soon demonstrated their worth by eliminating local insurgents. News about the opportunity for regular employment spread rapidly and French-loyal village elders began organizing their own harki units. They were essentially miniature tribal armies. Over a two-year period beginning in 1957, the number of these lightly armed native forces serving as village militia rose to involve some 60,000 Algerians. When associated with skilled French SAS leaders the harkis proved to be very effective in denying the insurgents access to rural people.
However, the Algerian borders were open to infiltration from guerrilla sanctuaries in Morocco and Tunisia. The recent memory of Indochina, where Communist guerrillas enjoyed free passage across international borders, persuaded the French to tackle this challenge decisively. The French utilized a classic counterinsurgency approach that the Romans who constructed Hadrian’s Wall would have admired. The French built extensive fortified barriers along 500 miles of the Moroccan border in the west. But it was in the east along the Tunisian border where they erected a state-of-the-art defensive barrier. This was the famous Morice Line, named after the French defense minister, a 200-mile-long line extending from the sea to the Sahara desert. An eight-foot-high electrified wire barrier carrying 5,000 volts ran through the middle of a wide minefield overlooked by regularly spaced watchtowers. When the guerrillas tried to break through the fence, detection devices triggered an alarm system. Of critical importance, the Morice Line, like Hadrian’s Wall, was not simply a passive defense system. Rather, both worked in association with mobile combat formations who met insurgent breakthroughs wherever they occurred. Precalibrated artillery fire rained down wherever automatic devices detected a breach, while mobile combat patrols rushed along a purpose built highway that ran along most of the Algerian side of the barrier to deal with the penetration. If a breach occurred in the roadless, remote southern sector, heli copters flew the reaction force to the scene of the incident. The entire system involved 80,000 soldiers, watching and waiting for any FLN attempt to reinforce their beleaguered fighters in Algeria.
The challenge came soon. Raiders probed the Morice Line looking for weaknesses. They employed high-tension wire cutters purchased in Germany, insulated ramps, tunnels, and blasting charges. After opening a breach the raiders tried to hold the nearby terrain to permit the passage of reinforcements and supplies before the French resealed the border. Nothing worked. Infiltration parties attempting to outflank the line at its southern end found themselves exposed to French air power in the open Sahara and were slaughtered. So the armed wing of the FLN, the ALN regulars, tried a series of escalating conventional attacks against the Morice Line.
A large ALN force fought through the Morice Line in May 1958 only to encounter the reconnaissance group of the First Foreign Legion Parachute Regiment. Colonel Pierre Jeanpierre, one of Massu’s paratroop leaders during the Battle of Algiers, died while leading his Legionnaires in a decisive counterattack that resealed the line. In another climactic action, waves of ALN fighters managed to breach the Morice Line only to be pinned down by the French mechanized and helicopter-delivered reaction forces. A total of 620 of the 820 men who penetrated the line were killed or captured. The series of efforts to breach the French fortified barriers cost the ALN upward of 6,000 men, a devastating setback that compelled the FLN to cease trying to breach the French fortifications.
While the French navy prevented the guerrillas from smuggling arms and men into Algeria, the Morice Line and the Moroccan barrier effectively blocked infiltration by land and thereby “established a kind of closed hunting preserve” where the French security forces could relentlessly conduct a battle of attrition.1 Only some 8,000 ALN fighters remained inside Algeria. With the veterans gone, most of the remnants were young, inexperienced recruits who predictably suffered heavily whenever drawn into comb
at with the French.
Because the ALN dispersed and went into hiding, increasing numbers of Algerian civilians withdrew support for the rebels. In June 1960 an FLN political leader reported to his government in exile, “It becomes increasingly impossible to penetrate the barriers in order to nurture the revolution in the interior . . . unless directed, supplied with fresh troops, effective weaponry, and money in great amounts, the underground forces will not be able to live for a long time let alone achieve victory . . . The organic infrastructure has been dismantled in the urban centers, and it is increasingly nonexistent in the countryside.”2
The Return of Charles de Gaulle
Just when it appeared that the FLN was on the verge of defeat the entire political climate in France changed. In Algeria, the pieds-noirs had greeted various proposals for reform as betrayal. On April 26, 1958, some 8,000 Europeans marched through Algiers and made a public oath: “Against whatever odds, on our tombs and on our cradles, taking our dead on the field of honor as our witnesses, we swear to live and die as Frenchmen in the land of Algiers, forever French.”3 In France, press investigations of abuses in the resettlement program and new revelations about the practice of torture demoralized the public. The war’s unpopularity combined with numerous economic and social gripes to reduce domestic support for the French government. A cabinet crisis fractured the weakened government and presented an opportunity for right-wing activists to strike.
Jungle of Snakes Page 13