FRANCE: Fight with the Octopus

On a soft June evening this summer, the police of industrial Lille came upon a man named Bachir Boussaid lying in a back alley with his head split open. The police knew him as a minor Algerian nationalist who had once belonged to the more moderate M.N.A. and then switched his allegiance to the terrorist F.L.N. Boussaid was taken to a hospital where, the police say, his dying delirium was composed almost entirely of names and addresses.

A transcript of Boussaid’s last words was forwarded to the Paris headquarters of the Direction de Surveillance du Territoire, the secret-service arm of the French police. The D.S.T. has long warred on the F.L.N.’s clandestine organization in France, which levies taxes to finance the rebels in Algeria, operates an espionage network and an underground escape route. The F.L.N.’s biggest coup occurred this spring, when it smuggled out of the country an entire soccer team made up of star Algerian players (TIME, April 28). In combatting the F.L.N., French secret police have made thousands of arrests, but they mostly pick up small fry. In the first six months of this year, Algerian war violence in Metropolitan France accounted for 374 dead and 617 wounded. Grumbled a D.S.T. agent: “It’s like chopping at the tips of the tentacles of an octopus. We haven’t been able to get at the beast himself.”

But there was finally a trail, starting at Boussaid’s bedside. It led to addresses in Paris, Lille, Belfort and Metz. In Paris the address was a five-story apartment house at 17 Rue Lucien-Sampaix, in the working-class 10th arrondissement. A new building was going up across from the apartment house, and D.S.T. agents disguised in painters’ white overalls drove up each morning in a truck that contained a battery of cameras with telephoto lenses. For days, everyone who entered or left the house was filmed. Separating the legitimate tenants from a recurring stream of Algerians, the police narrowed their search to a two-room flat on the fifth floor, rented by a 28-year-old French girl named Cécile Decugis, a cinema technician who had once worked in Tunisia.

Last week, after almost two months of photography and tailing suspects, the police struck, in Paris and in half a dozen other northern cities. The bag was impressive: some 30 people, ranging from Mohammed ben Aissi, who, police claim, was the head of F.L.N.’s Region No. 3 (northeastern France), to a 24-year-old Moslem girl who was a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, to a civil servant who worked in the French social security office in Lille, had access to employment rolls and was thus able to supply the names of Moslem workers who could be forced to contribute to F.L.N. Also gathered in: half a ton of documents, including false identity cards and residence certificates. The F.L.N. octopus in France was still alive, but it was now missing a few tentacles.