PORTRAIT OF AN ALGERIAN

Early in September 1954 nine young Algerian exiles met in a rented house outside Bern, Switzerland to plan the scattered hit-and-run raids which ultimately ballooned into the Algerian revolt. Of the nine original moujahids (freedom fighters), three are now dead and five are in French prisons. The only one still at large is Belkacem Krim, 35, now the senior military man in Algeria's Front de Liberation Nationale. Like most Algerian rebel leaders, moody Belkacem Krim, who has five death sentences hanging over his balding head, rarely discusses his personal activities. But from Paris last week TIME Correspondent Stanley Karnow reported:

CLIMBING aboard an Egyptian Misrair Viking at Tunis airport early this week, I found, by luck, a vacant seat next to Krim. He was returning to Cairo from the Conference of North African Arabs and, after an initial coolness ("I took you for a Frenchman"), he dropped his natural wariness of strangers and began to talk. Once started, he talked so steadily and passionately that he left his breakfast of omelet and chicken untouched. Time and again, as he tried to explain and justify the terrible momentum of the nationalist rebellion in which he was caught up, the same word came out: injustice.

Krim's first rebellion was against his father, a garde chameptre (rural warden) in the mountainous, impoverished Kabylia region of eastern Algeria. His father, an old-fashioned Berber patriarch whose first loyalty was to his clan, wanted Krim to stay at home and follow the traditional Berber way of life. But Krim, determined to share in the new European existence introduced by the French, ran off to Algiers, where he lived with a cousin who was a minor civil servant, learned to read and speak French. Like the great majority of top rebel leaders, he is practically illiterate in Arabic, feels more at home culturally in a French atmosphere than in an Islamic one.

In 1942, still yearning for the kind of life he saw Europeans leading in Algeria, Krim joined the Chantiers de Jeunesse, Marshal Henri Philippe Petain's equivalent of the old U.S. Civilian Conservation Corps; from there he went into an infantry regiment, where he became a chairborne corporal. It was in the melting pot of the French army that he began to acquire a basic sense of frustration. "Wherever I turned," he recalls bitterly, "there was injustice. There were always differences between us, the Moslem inferiors, and the superior Europeans. I was a clerk and I had to fill out forms for new recruits. For Moslems the forms were filled out in red ink, for the French in blue ink. That doesn't seem important, does it? It was important to me."

For Nothing, Nothing. Discharged from the army late in 1945, Krim went home to the Kabylia and plunged into the nationalist movement. The French claim he became a bandit after killing a man who won the garde champetre job that he coveted. Krim denies the story, says he was wanted by the police for nationalist agitation, and fled to the hills to escape a two-year jail sentence for "an attack on French sovereignty." From then on Krim and his colleagues started preparing military rebellion.

At first they tried to organize a full-scale army, but the whole organization fell apart in 1949 when one naive conspirator was arrested carrying a full membership list. Thereafter, Krim & Co. restricted themselves to a small "secret organization," theorizing that the rebellion could rally mass support once it got started. It was on this risky theory that they launched their revolt in 1954. "The French could have stopped us easily in the beginning," says Krim. "Now we can go on fighting for a hundred years."

Assigned to command of Willaya (Zone) Three, his home region of Kabylia, Krim set about establishing politico-military structures in some 2,000 villages. Each village organization was based on a three-man cell--tax collector, recruiter and judge--and when terror proved necessary to rally the Moslems, the F.L.N. did not hesitate.

"I tried to avoid it at first because it isn't efficient," said Krim coldly. "You cannot hold a population by terror, and we need the population on our side. But we have traitors among us. And we had to answer French repression, too--massacres, tortures, bombardments. This is a hard war, but perhaps that is a good thing. We are building a nation, and we want no gifts. For nothing you get nothing."

The Supreme Sacrifice. Krim takes obvious pleasure in recalling his own exploits--how he evaded French police who had him trapped aboard a train, how he eluded the phony appointments set up to trap him. With a certain masculine embarrassment, he reluctantly confirms French reports that he has on occasion disguised himself as a veiled Moslem woman, explains defensively: "I would do anything for the revolution." His proudest boast is of the manner in which he foiled a daring scheme originated by Jacques Soustelle, then Governor General of Algeria.

In November 1955, Krim claims, one of Soustelle's Moslem agents got in touch with an F.L.N. officer and proposed to establish a decoy unit within the F.L.N. itself. The French were prepared to provide guns and money for the unit, which would appear to be loyal to the F.L.N. by day, but would actually fight the F.L.N. by night. For nearly a year Krim and some of his subordinates strung the French along, fought ferocious mock battles amongst themselves at night, and to provide casualties, left the imaginary battlefields strewn with what Krim describes as executed "traitors" dressed in F.L.N. uniforms. Finally, in October 1956, Krim put an end to the comedy, turned 450 "pro-French" troops against the very French army posts that had supplied them with weapons.

The Purifying Life. Though he is slated to become Minister of War in the government in exile that the Algerians may soon be forming, Krim is obviously pained by the idea of playing a political role. Divorced, separated from his two children, and uncertain whether his father is alive or dead, he declares that "the only love I can have is for my country." A good part of that love seems really to be a longing for adventure, which the Moslem moujahid shares with the swaggering paratroopers of France. As we flew over the sandy wastes of Libya, Krim gestured at the comfortable interior of the plane, pointed deprecatingly to his grey European suit and shrugged: "I don't like this luxury. What I really like is being out in the mountains. You know, I can march all night, sleep in rain or snow, then fight and march and fight again. That's really my life. It's purifying."

Then, with a faint smile on his lips, he leaned toward me and asked: "Tell me, have you ever killed a man?"

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