Television: Focus on Algeria

In a rebel camp somewhere in the hilly wilds of Algeria, CBS Correspondent Frank Kearns faced a camera and began: “Here on the spot it sounds rather ridiculous to hear Washington—” He was interrupted by a cry of warning. He squinted at the sky, his shoulders hunched instinctively and he dived for shelter, suddenly heedless of any TV audience as he muttered in disgust: “Here comes a damn plane!” The interruption made a vivid TV fragment this week in Algeria Aflame, an hour-long CBS report that brought home, with the immediacy of an air raid, the war between the French and the Moslem nationalists.

“Moral Grounds.” In TV’s most ambitious effort to get the rebels’ side of the story at first hand, Kearns and Cameraman Yousef Masraff entered Algeria through the nationalist supply line from Tunisia, hiked for 22 days and nights 175 miles into the mountains with a rebel unit that slipped through the French forces, shared the hazards and discomforts of guerrilla warfare—and the risk that the French, who recognize no war, would recognize no war correspondents.

During the six-week assignment, the rebels let them film anything, even offered to stage for them a real ambush with real French victims. “We refused, of course, on moral grounds,” Kearns told the TV audience. CBS made up for that gap by opening Algeria Aflame like a bombshell with a memorable year-old sequence of an actual ambush. What emerged from the new footage was a sympathetic closeup of intense, fiery-eyed Algerians who endure their wounded, their bombed-out meshtas, the homelessness of their families, to fight for their cause as tough, well-trained soldiers. Among them: a sloe-eyed, pretty, 21-year-old girl, and such veterans as a captain who won a dozen decorations in 14 years of service with the French army.

Planes & Camels. For the French side of the story, a CBS crew headed by Paris Correspondent David Schoenbrun got pictures of the French forces—in planes, weapons carriers, on camels and afoot—swooping down on a gunrunning caravan in the desert, raiding a burned-out farm settlement for hiding rebels (they found one suspect), seizing a cache of bombs in a raid within Algiers’ famed casbah. Schoenbrun underscored the heavy threat of terrorism in daily civilian life, the heavy commitment of France’s money and prestige, the huge stake of the 1,000,000 French and other European residents who built up Algeria, and their determination to defend their homes even by installing pillboxes. From Manhattan, Commentator Eric Sevareid rounded up the issues, viewed them in light of the cold war and their implications for the U.S. Neither taking sides nor offering easy solutions where none exist, Algeria Aflame brought a tragic stalemate into sharp focus.