NORTH AFRICA: Aerial Kidnap

To hard-bitten French air force intelligence officers in North Africa it was the perfect chance to score a coup that might shorten Algeria’s long and bloody war. Sultan Mohammed V of Morocco, with the unofficial blessing of Socialist Guy Mollet’s government, had invited top Algerian rebel chieftains from their Cairo headquarters to Rabat to talk peace terms with him. Then they would fly to Tunis for discussions with moderate Tunisian Premier Habib Bourguiba. A daring plan occurred to the officers: Why not kidnap the Algerian rebels’ high command in midair?

Two difficulties occurred to them. It would not do to kidnap His Majesty the Sultan. And the whole thing should be cleared with somebody in Paris. The somebody in Paris turned out to be hawk-nosed Socialist Max Lejeune, Secretary of State for the armed forces and close friend of Algeria’s tough Minister Resident Lacoste, opponent of a liberal line in Algeria. Lejeune cautiously hinted of the operation to Premier Mollet, who had promised the Sultan and Bourguiba that the rebels would enjoy immunity. Mollet snapped: “Definitely not.”

The Trick. Notwithstanding, Lejeune gave the go-ahead to the intelligence officers. He apparently counted on the French Cabinet’s current impatience with the Sultan. After all, when the Sultan’s 28-year-old son had discussed with Mollet the possibility of talking to the Algerian rebels, Mollet had agreed as long as it was done unspectacularly. Instead the Sultan had welcomed the rebel leaders to his palace, had been photographed with them and had issued a joint communique.

The Sultan’s indiscretion played right into the plotters’ hands. The Sultan’s French advisers persuaded him that the French, already miffed, would be even more hurt if the rebels flew with him to Tunis in his private Super-Constellation. The Sultan saw the point. At the airport he explained his delicate problem to the rebel leaders, then took off without them.

A few minutes later the Algerians (accompanied by nine newsmen) took off in a chartered DC-3 of Air Atlas, Moroccan-operated but staffed with French crews. Unsuspecting, Mohammed ben Bella, the Algerian military chief (who won the Croix de guerre as a sergeant in World War II), settled down to study papers. Mohammed Khider, the underground’s political chief, scanned Paris-Match.

According to the original flight plan, French Pilot Gaston Grellier, 40, headed toward a non-French refueling stop, at Majorca in Spain’s Balearic Islands, to avoid putting down in Algeria. In the air the first directive crackled from Algeria: “Refuel at Palma and then proceed to Algiers.” Since French delicacy dictated that the Sultan should be among the first to hear that his hospitality was being violated, Pilot Grellier was also told to radio his new destination back to Rabat. Seeing the report, the Moroccan Minister of Works cried, “This is pure piracy,” and ordered instructions sent to Pilot Grellier to wait at Majorca until further notice. The plane was on the ground and the passengers drinking in the bar when the order should have arrived. But the French radio operator in Rabat simply neglected to send the message. The DC-3 took off again, bound for Algiers. Minister Lacoste had been let in on the plot and told there was still time to stop it. “No, go ahead,” he said, and gave orders for troops and tanks to be sent to the airport.

The Capture. Over the, Mediterranean Pilot Grellier radioed Algiers for a fighter escort, then called in Stewardess Claudine Lambert, 22, told her what was going on and suggested she go back to chat with the passengers to keep them from being suspicious. “Now be a big girl,” he said. “Tonight you are entering history.”

At 9:15 p.m. she chirped: “Please fasten your seat belts and extinguish your cigarettes. We are arriving in Tunis.” A moment later she called out the routine “Please do not move till the plane is completely stopped,” then disappeared into the pilot’s compartment. Tommy gun-toting gendarmes pried open the plane’s back door, poured into the cabin while the passengers were still tied down in their safety belts. Ben Bella said: “All right, we’re coming out.” One by one the passengers, hands high, got down to the tarmac and were taken away. Shouted Ben Bella: “This is how you can trust the French.”

In Tunis an ashen-faced Sultan heard the whispered news after parading with Bourguiba to the cheers of 370,000 Tunisians. In Paris Guy Mollet gasped: “It’s crazy. I don’t believe it.” At a midnight conference Mollet accepted the accomplished fact, and the immediate political advantage it gave him. Next morning all Parisian newspapers except the Communist L’H’umanite cheered the French kidnaping. Mollet, declining to surrender rebels “already condemned by French justice,”* won a massive 330-140 vote of confidence. Only ex-Premier Pierre Mendés-France asked whether “those who organized and ordered the action made any attempt to calculate the consequences in advance. I have never considered these men spokesmen for Algeria, but I am afraid they are going to be now.”

The Consequences. The consequences came swiftly. Morocco’s Sultan protested that France had doublecrossed him: “The worst blow my honor has ever been dealt,” cried he. “Morally it’s worse than my exile in 1953. If I had been in Paris I would have said imprison me and my son, but free these men who are prisoners only because they trusted me.” The Tunisian ambassador to Paris wept at the news. Alain Savary, Mollet’s Secretary of State for Morocco and Tunisia, resigned. Tunisia’s French-educated Bourguiba recalled his ambassador from Paris and went into an all-night Cabinet session. “This was going to be a peace conference, and it’s liable to become a council of war,” he said. “North Africa is moving toward a showdown of force.”

In Algeria French forces reported killing 30 more guerrillas. But this was more than offset by the stirring up of anti-French feeling in Morocco and Tunisia, which had been quiet for weeks. In Tunisia eight members of Bourguiba’s irregular forces died fighting French troops near the Algerian border. And in Morocco young Arabs marched through the streets chanting “Free Ben Bella” and “Liberate Algeria.” When the Meknes police chief tried to stem the mob, one of his own men shot him to death. Screaming crowds raged through the city, killing any European in sight, stopping cars and burning them with passengers inside. Mobs burned some 200 French-owned farmsteads in the countryside, killed 40 Europeans. Reluctantly Moroccan authorities had to let French forces restore order. General René Cogny, supreme commander in Morocco (and commander in North Viet Nam at the time of Dienbienphu), rushed to Meknes to direct the defense in person. The Moroccan government of Premier Si Bekkai, a moderate, fell. In its place the Sultan named a new government, dominated by the anti-French Istiqlal (Independence) Party.

In Paris, determined to make the best of their coup, the French announced that they had captured 25 Ibs. of secret and incriminating documents in the DC-3 and were sure that they could now prove the complicity of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser in the Algerian rebellion. But hitherto the proved method of minimizing Nasser’s influence in North Africa was to establish a climate of friendship among Arab leaders. The Sultan of Morocco and the premier of Tunisia, the two men who by their moderation have done most to restore order in North Africa, stood discredited before their people for trusting the French. In the end this melancholy fact was apt to outweigh 25 Ibs. of captured documents.

* But Mollet’s government has been perfectly willing to deal with these “criminals” before: Pierre Commin, acting secretary-general of Mollel’s Socialist Party, acted as Mollet’s go between in September at secret meetings in Rome with one of the arrested rebels, Mohammed Khider.