The Ben Barka Scandal
HERALD, GEORGE W.
POLICING DEGAULLE'S FRANCE The Ben Barka Scandal By George Herald Paris Some Frenchmen are calling the scenario "Thundergaulle," others have labeled it "To Rabat with Love." But despite...
...Sunday...
...The agents of Stalin and Mussolini similarly dispatched several others, and the French secret services themselves have not always been above such methods...
...On Sunday morning, immediately after Oufkir had left Paris, Lopez reported the strange happenings of the previous 36 hours to Commander Marcel Leroy, his superior in the Counterintelligence Service...
...Because of his key position at Orly airport, Lopez had often been used as an informer by the French counter-espionage and the narcotics squad...
...To date, no one knows for sure what happened to him after he entered the villa...
...Oufkir took a plane for Geneva from Orly the next morning at 5 a.m...
...Germain at 12:30 p.m...
...He considered Ben Barka, who had twice been sentenced to death for contumacy, to be his worst political enemy...
...It is also likely to affect the already strained friendship between France and the United States because many people around de Gaulle, including Nobel-prize winner Francois Mauriac, are insinuating, so far without any proof, that the American CIA had a hand in Ben Barka's disappearance...
...All the various testimonies raised more questions than they answered...
...He is expected to insist more than ever that he is the President of "all the people" and that he plans to stay in office even if the majority in the National Assembly should change in 1967...
...There is a consensus that he is sincerely trying to find an answer to the crucial question of the case: whether high-placed Frenchmen actually knew beforehand of Oufkir's kidnapping project, as Lopez affirms, and not only did nothing to thwart it but actually endorsed it...
...last October 29...
...He also is believed to have obtained the help of Lopez, who had long been eying a wellpaid directorial post with Royal Air Maroc...
...Except for the fact that Ben Barka was accompanied by a Moroccan student, Mohamed Azemouri, who witnessed the scene and immediately alerted Ben Barka's brother Abdelkader, the world probably would never have learned how the victim disappeared...
...He did so without suspicion, particularly since they took him to an official police car...
...Lopez and the two policemen returned to Paris, and did not again see or hear from their victim...
...According to these depositions, the Ben Barka kidnapping was instigated by General Oufkir...
...De Gaulle also feels that those involved in the Ben Barka scandal should be taught not to tangle with his policy of cooperation with underdeveloped countries which is based on a refusal to draw distinctions between domestic political regimes...
...Leroy passed on the information to General Jacquier, the head of the service, and to police commissary Leon Caille, the second in command at the Paris Prefecture...
...If it were proven that Pierre Lemarchand also had fore-knowledge of the plot, de Gaulle might come to more far-reaching conclusions, with drastic consequences for many associates...
...They claim that even after Souchon's arrest, the details of the story were kept hidden from the public and that certain high officials, as well as Deputy Lemarchand, made demonstrably false statements...
...The police car already had three occupants when Ben Barka approached it: the two "retired" gangsters, Julian Le Ny and Jean Palisse, and Air France flight manager Antoine Lopez, wearing dark glasses and a false beard...
...Perhaps most shocked and embarrassed was General de Gaulle himself, for the evident negligence and malfeasance of his subordinates tarnishes his image as an all-seeing father figure with everything under control He is said to feel let down and betrayed by his own chosen subordinates...
...They claimed that Lopez had told them the operation was "covered" by top French officials in the know, including Jacques Foecart, the grey eminence of the Elysee Palace...
...Germain corner drug store next to Lipp, he was approached by police inspectors Louis Souchon and Raymond Voitot...
...Here, however, are the essential and established facts: On October 29, Ben Barka had a date at the restaurant Lipp with movie director Georges Franjus, journalist Philippe Bernier and "repented" ex-convict George Figon to discuss a common film project...
...but for this there is no material evidence...
...The Ben Barka scandal is special, however, because it has revealed that behind the virtuous facade of the Gaullist regime there could occur a shocking connivance between the police, the secret service, various so-called "parallel" police organizations, and a mafia of thugs and ex-convicts...
...Many Frenchmen see in the Ben Barka drama a kind of new Dreyfus affair that is bound to be kept alive for many months, if not years...
...Saturday to 5 a.m...
...Lemarchand used to run one of those "parallel" police that distinguished themselves in the struggle against the OAS in the early '60s...
...But the police told him nothing, letting the judge fend for himself for 13 days...
...The General seems to suspect this, for he has already fired General Jacquier, the chief of Counterintelligence, and his aide Leroy...
...The kidnapping of Algerian rebel chief Ahmed Ben Bella in a commercial airplane in 1956 is still well remembered, and so is the abduction of French Secret Army Organization (OAS) leader Antoine Argoud from a Munich hotel in 1962...
...Oufkir was allegedly afraid of being forced out of office, and felt he had to act before Ben Barka returned...
...He knew that King Hassan, seeking a broader political base at home, had sent emissaries to the labor leader, promising him a royal pardon if he came back from exile and entered the government...
...Everything else is based on largely concording testimony of participants interrogated separately...
...A second sequence of proven events began the day after the kidnapping...
...Figon and the other truants could not be found...
...El Mahi had booked a room for General Oufkir at the Royal-Alma hotel, but it has been established that he did not stay there...
...Whatever the truth may be, Lopez really did act as if he considered himself covered...
...George W. Herald, a previous contributor here, is a veteran foreign correspondent based in Paris...
...No one accuses General de Gaulle himself of complicity in the attempt to suppress the Ben Barka scandal...
...Anti-Gaullists indignantly charge that the story was deliberately suppressed to avoid embarrassing President de Gaulle in his reelection campaign, which ran from November 4 to December 19...
...Through his connections with various French "parallel" police, Oufkir is believed to have secured the cooperation of Figon, Boucheseiche and other underworld characters, offering them a total award of $200,000...
...At the same time, its international implications are grave...
...While Oufkir might have been motivated by hatred and his accomplices by greed, it was more difficult to explain the participation of two highly respected veteran policemen like Souchon and Voitot in the plot...
...Ben Barka, to be sure, was not the first political exile ever abducted on a Paris street...
...But he has so far failed to explain his activities here during the 12 hours from 5 p.m...
...It will almost certainly become a significant campaign issue in the French general elections in spring 1967, and the opposition has already started exploiting it for all that it is worth...
...Figon, who has since committed a controversial "suicide," made an equally controversial confession a few days before his death, in which he affirmed having been present while Oufkir tortured Ben Barka with the edge of a sword until he fainted...
...By Figon's account, Ben Barka was then transported to Lopez' villa at Ormoy and tied to the boiler in the basement...
...As election time approaches, he may use the Ben Barka affair as a lever to dissociate himself even more strongly from certain Gaullist followers who fail to follow him scrupulously enough...
...But despite their respect for the inventive powers of the late Ian Fleming, they feel the creator of James Bond never came up with a tale as explosive as that of the kidnapping of Moroccan labor leader Mehid Ben Barka in front of a drug store on Boulevard St...
...These measures are considered a first warning to King Hassan that one does not tangle with the President of France...
...The meeting, a trap arranged by Figon, never took place...
...He claims that he did not meet anyone involved in the Ben Barka kidnapping while he was in Paris...
...All three were in Paris to prepare for the state visit of King Hassan II, scheduled for November 11 (and later cancelled...
...Figon, for his part, asserted that he too was "covered" by Gaullist Deputy Pierre Lemarchand, a close friend of Minister of Interior Roger Frey...
...Up to now, Paris political observers have wondered whether Gaullism is going to survive de Gaulle...
...Trying to sift indisputable facts from second-hand accounts based on unproven testimonies is not an easy matter in this case...
...Caille, through Lemarchand, called in Figon, who came clean on November 2. Souchon and Voitot admitted their participation in the kidnapping on November 3. No one was taken into custody at that time...
...These are the objective facts of the case...
...Ben Barka was left at the villa together with Le Ny and Palisse...
...to visit his family in the Swiss resort town of Gstaad...
...Meanwhile Ben Barka's brother had alerted the French Ministry of Justice, and Judge Louis Zollinger had started looking for the kidnappers...
...On Saturday, October 30, at 5 p.m., General Mohammad Oufkir, the Moroccan Minister of Interior, arrived at Orly airport where he was met by major Ahmed Dlimi, head of the Moroccan security police, Hamid Chtouki, chief of the secret service, and police inspector El Mahi...
...They showed him their tricolor credentials and asked him to follow them...
...Since the Ben Barka kidnapping, it rather looks as if de Gaulle will be trying to survive Gaullism...
...When Oufkir landed at Orly on October 30, Lopez, by his own admission, took him directly from the airport to Boucheseiche's villa, where Ben Barka was held...
...The General has always been careful not to identify himself too closely with the Gaullist UNR party...
...Only after Figon leaked his version of the story to the opposition weekly Express were Lopez, Souchon, Voitot, Bernier and El Mahi arrested...
...The affair has strained the relations between France and Morocco to the breaking point and may yet lead to the downfall of King Hassan II...
...Together with Souchon and Voitot, they took Ben Barka to a villa at Fontenay-leVicomte, near Orly, which belonged to ex-gangster Georges Boucheseiche, now the owner of a number of shady "hotels" in Paris and Casablanca...
...For the time being, France has withdrawn its ambassador from Rabat, and Judge Zollinger has issued a warrant of arrest against Oufkir...
...When Ben Barka stepped out of a taxi in front of the St...
...It is presumed that, during the night from Saturday to Sunday, he was either killed and buried on the spot or taken to Orly, dead or alive, and whisked away to Morocco aboard a private plane...
Vol. 49 • February 1966 • No. 4
