Paris Letter: The Ben Barka Affair: Act One
Block-Michel, Jean
Only muffled echoes of the great scandal in recent French politics have reached the United States. Below, our Paris correspondent reports on the Ben Barka affair, but first it may help to...
...Ben Barka was neither a criminal nor a terrorist...
...The police could simply not lay their hands on Figon—the only man who knew everything about the Ben Barka affair— even though everyone knew where he was...
...For Dlimi came to Paris to save Oufkir...
...He knows everything and—this is more serious—everyone knows that he knows everything...
...If he does, the whole look of the Ben Barka affair will change...
...For it was impossible to question him until various authorities had pronounced themselves on the procedural questions he had raised...
...What did the trial show us...
...served as bait, probably unwittingly, to lure Ben Barka into coming to Paris...
...There is no doubt that discussions are taking place right now about what is to be done...
...Some lied for reasons of state...
...But will Dlimi talk...
...And this must be avoided at all cost...
...It was Figon's mother, an honest woman who had loved her dead, wayward son...
...But the Israelis and the French received no aid from the Argentine or German police...
...Who will accept the statement that Oufkir, a former French secret agent, had come to Paris to kidnap and kill Ben Barka, without first obtaining a "cover"—to use the language of espionage—from the French secret service...
...90 Were it not for the murder and torture, the Ben Barka affair could only be treated as a joke...
...The opponent is the enemy, and it is always more simple to kill him than to defeat him politically...
...for two hours and with the aid of very precise paraphernalia, an expert "proved" that a black gun barrel could look blue...
...He was, apparently, murdered, and the evidence points to complicity on the part of high officials in both the Gaullist and Moroccan regimes...
...No one knows whether this French complicity will be fully unravelled...
...These accomplices have been, in a way, appointed...
...General Jacquier—head of French Sitrete (secret police) at time of the killing but since removed by de Gaulle...
...If that is so, why did General de Gaulle start a general reform of the French police in the wake of the Ben Barka affair...
...But no longer can everything be hushed up...
...actually, he came to keep quiet...
...This was the purpose of the trial: to try some accessories to the crime, put up to shield the real criminals, and thus deprive the Ben Barka affair of its true character...
...He was accused of having offered money to another witness to silence him...
...He knows more about it than Lopez, the liar who builds card-castles...
...Press photographers and journalists were interviewing him at the time...
...And why was General Jacquier, head of the French secret service, dismissed from his post two weeks later...
...police agents used to trap Ben Barka and lure him to death...
...Then came a fantastic and dramatic event...
...One person had some very clear ideas on this question and wanted to pass them on to the court...
...When this expert was asked whether blue-barrelled guns existed, he answered that they were quite common...
...He was killed because he had tangled with the Moroccan Minister of the Interior and everything leads one to believe that he was murdered with an inexcusable French complicity...
...Lies became so gross that they ceased being lies and turned into innocent jokes, which everyone took for what they were worth...
...Not at all," he says, "it was he who offered me money...
...But the arrival of Dlimi changed everything...
...The judge who was so indulgent to liars and policemen was harsh to other witnesses...
...No matter...
...Dlimi—head of Moroccan secret police...
...Is there any other country that would express its gratitude to a deserving citizen by making him a secret service agent even though he was afflicted with loss of memory...
...If Dlimi talks, it will be to show that all the accused had good reasons to believe they were acting with the tacit or explicit approval of their superiors...
...Everybody at the trial has a tape ready at the opportune moment, and every lawyer has a tape up his sleeve, just as every magician has rabbits in his top hat...
...And yet these are the things we are supposed to swallow...
...For his first action was very clever: he initiated a complex judicial proceeding which challenged the validity of all that had been done so far...
...At that time, the taboo subject was the Dreyfus affair...
...Similarly, it never occurred to anyone to ask whether perjury proceedings could be started against a witness-lawyer-deputy whose testimony was found in flagrant contradiction with the testimony of not one or two but five other witnesses...
...Recordings are taken right and left...
...Who has lied in the Ben Barka affair...
...But behind these sacrificial lambs the main body of suspects remains untouched...
...You have never ceased lying...
...Officially, Figon committed suicide as he was facing 92 arrest...
...Below, our Paris correspondent reports on the Ben Barka affair, but first it may help to provide some preliminary information...
...Tapes vanish, others turn up with superimposed conversations...
...But not all journalists are police informers—although some are, as the proceedings showed—and Figon walked the streets of Paris peacefully, although he was supposedly wanted by the law...
...Except for a few persons who found themselves in court by a stroke of bad luck—Bernier, the movie director Franju, and the young woman who was a friend of Figon—one gets the impression that all of them never stopped lying: accused, witnesses, policemen, more or less secret agents, ministers, prefects and ambassadors...
...And he said this at the Court of Assizes, before magistrates in scarlet robes and a jury of nine, chaired by that excellent actress Marcelle Ranson, who must have thought that she had never seen such theater...
...When the police finally came to arrest him, he suddenly died...
...We heard the testimony of a general, head of our secret service, who wanted to prove that his department had good reason to keep clear of the Ben Barka affair...
...This is a likely explanation...
...The purpose of the trial seems to have been not to investigate the circumstances of Ben Barka's death but to defend French institutions threatened by scandal...
...Each government service released the most compromised of its men to save the others...
...Souchon—wife of M. Souchon...
...We thus learn— and it has never been denied—that the salons of Orly, the rooms reserved for the V.I.P.'s, were stuffed with gadgets to record their conversations...
...What is new about the Ben Barka affair is that the French themselves have helped to commit a violation of their own rights...
...But whereas Maitre Hayot was prosecuted for bribing a witness upon the simple accusation of a policeman's wife—the one who put microphones under the dishes—the only reaction to this revelation was general laughter...
...The Ben Barka affair is again, as everyone knew it was, an affair of state...
...It will be remembered that General de Gaulle stated in one of his press conferences that Dlimi and Oufkir had found in France only "ordinary and subaltern accomplices...
...His proceedings give time to negotiators...
...Without the permission of his king—who nonetheless promoted him from major to lieutenant-colonel the very night he committed his act of disobedience—he came to Paris to surrender to justice, eager to tell the truth and to tell it fast...
...There were other kinds of lying, too...
...And, of course, the victim was a quite different type of man...
...Next came one of the heads of this secret service, a most respectable person who had been severely wounded in the war and deported to Germany...
...Who will believe these explanations...
...Five liars or one...
...Even then, the recent trial would still be a sinister comedy, apart from the events which provoked it...
...Incidentally, magnetic tape plays a very important part in the whole Ben Barka affair...
...But one thing is certain: If the trial is resumed, and Dlimi finds himself in the dock together with the two bewildered policemen Souchon and Voitot, the clownish double agent Lopez, the secret agent LeroyFinville who was picked as a scapegoat, and poor Bernier who will always have bad luck, the comedy will be over and no one will laugh anymore...
...The Israeli secret service kidnapped Eichmann from Argen94 tina just as the French secret service kidnapped Argoud from Germany and the Moroccan secret service kidnapped and killed Ben Barka in France...
...the sentence was made famous by presiding Judge Deleguorgue at the trial of Emile Zola...
...Later, a lawyer was barred from the trial...
...Souchon reveals that, when she invited a friend to dinner from whom she wanted advice, she put a recording device under the soup bowl...
...We are told these things happened because the Ben Barka affair simply proved that the administrative machine needed modernizing...
...The great criminal affairs of the last few years have some points in common...
...now under arrest and investigation by French police...
...Dlimi claimed he had come to Paris to talk...
...But, Monsieur le Preident, the reason I went to Orly so early to welcome General Jacquier was that I wanted to find a room that wasn't bugged...
...after all, one does not arrange the suicide of a high foreign official as easily as that of a Frenchman of doubtful antecedents...
...Then she was forgotten...
...Franju—well-known French film director...
...Ben Barka, leader of a vaguely leftist opposition in Moroccan politics, had been living in exile...
...Morocco had found it more expedient to murder Ben Barka than to debate with him...
...Who can really believe that the shady characters who aided Oufkir—all of them old Gestapo agents, owners and bouncers of brothels acting in their spare time as police informers and strongmen—left France after Ben Barka's disappearance without the aid of accomplices who were anything but "ordinary and subaltern...
...She was summoned...
...Not too fast, however...
...Souchon and Voitot—the Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern of the case...
...had planned to make film on "Third World" using Ben Barka as advisor...
...But, for the first time, things cannot be arranged so easily...
...he had been accused of advising the wife of a policeman, Mme...
...Now that Figon "committed suicide," Dlimi is the only man in Paris who knows everything about the Ben Barka affair...
...The problem now is—and it is a difficult one—to find an acceptable version of the crime that would permit the condemnation of the accessories and save Oufkir...
...But recordings are just as easily lost...
...Who would blame her...
...But are the men responsible for the functioning of this machine really above suspicion...
...his astonishing arrival in Paris caused suspension of trial...
...An accused, Lopez, who does not say everything he knows but sometimes says too much...
...A man, "suspected of being the lover of an actress, had testified that Figon's gun had a blue barrel, while the gun he was shown in court and which he was supposed to have opportunely hidden, had a black barrel...
...Everyone means not only all the accused but also all the witnesses—policemen, secret agents of all stripes, prefects, commissioners, and ministers...
...The police, 93 the S iirete, the Renseignements generaux, all of them have not yielded an inch...
...Mme...
...We thought the war was over, but for some people it is not...
...A question that the presiding judge found not worth asking...
...The scandal would just be too great...
...But will he really...
...He knows everything and can say it...
...Meanwhile here is a list of the leading characters in Act I: Figon—key figure in the story, small-time Paris criminal with long jail record, pimp, deeply involved in the incident, supposedly committed "suicide" when the police came to arrest him...
...Oufkir—Moroccan Minister of Interior, alleged to have personally killed Ben Barka after torturing him...
...The question shall not be asked...
...said the Solicitor General to the most talkative of the accused, 91 that strange man Lopez, who was brazen enough to assert that he had bought himself an estate in the country with savings he accumulated when he stopped smoking...
...If he fails, he will tell all...
...But there are better things to come...
...Lopez—main representative of Air France at Orly Airport, a leading suspect, believed to be government agent, perhaps double agent, some say even triple agent (including work for Moroccan gvernment...
...It also permitted him to remain silent...
...Thus, Act I. If and when Act II occurs, the guilt that seems to be shared by both French and Moroccan officials may be exposed...
...They think that Figon's suicide was too beautiful—for the police, for the secret service—to be true...
...This seems a question all too easy to answer...
...Souchon, to say that one of her husband's chiefs was the guilty party...
...And that would spoil everything, so it is most unlikely to happen...
...Next came a hardened criminal, client of the lawyer-deputy-witness who was his regular customer...
...Dlimi, chief of the Moroccan Secrete., the man accused together with Oufkir, the Moroccan Minister of the Interior, of having killed Ben Barka with his own hands, heeded the call of conscience and patriotism...
...And then Mme...
...He will certainly threaten to do so...
...Bernier—political adventurer, occasional journalist of the "Third World," frequented Castroite circles...
...The trial which followed in France came to an abrupt end when Dlimi, an important Moroccan official, dramatically arrived at Orly Airport in Paris and was placed in a prison cell...
...Ordinary and subaltern accomplices...
...the secret service offered Leroy-Finville...
...It had, indeed, a few special moments—the testimony of a woman friend of Figon, the outbursts and sobs of Bernier...
...But Dlimi remains silent...
...The accused will still have to be judged...
...But some malicious people say he died too conveniently...
...General de Gaulle—General de Gaulle...
...They refuse to believe in his suicide...
...This time it would seem to be, in some way, the Figon affair, although its dossier was part of the Ben Barka proceedings...
...One thing will certainly not be done: uncover the whole and simple truth of the Ben Barka affair...
...she spent eight hours in the witness room and was sent away unheard...
...A conception of the defense of the state, current in wartime, has been preserved in peacetime...
...others for what might be called reasons of the police, which is like a state within a state...
...He told the court that he could only offer fragmentary testimony since he suffered, alas, from amnesia...
...The police contributed Souchon and Voitot, two policemen undoubtedly of the "ordinary and subaltern" variety...
Vol. 14 • January 1967 • No. 1
