New Team

The rebel Algerian F.L.N. last week abruptly turned left. After three years under the relatively benign leadership of Premier Ferhat Abbas, 61, an ex-druggist who speaks better French than Arabic and has a middle-class habit of falling asleep after a good dinner, control shifted to a clutch of hard-eyed terrorists who had survived street battles and mountain skir mishes in the seven-year war against the French.

Mustached Man. Abbas' bland parliamentary manner had brought the French to negotiations but not to terms. Since a 1957 auto accident in Morocco, he has increasingly suffered from headaches, dizzy spells, and an inability to concentrate for long periods at a time. Clearly, Ferhat Abbas and the other moderates of his Cabinet had outlived their usefulness to the F.L.N.'s tough revolutionaries.

In a three-week secret conference in the Libyan capital of Tripoli. 80 members of the F.L.N.'s National Council tossed out Abbas and installed a new team headed by Premier Youssef Ben Khedda. 41. who is convinced that the West is so committed to "colonialism and imperialism'' that the F.L.N. "must look elsewhere for salvation."

Thin. pale, with long black hair and burning eyes screened by spectacles, Ben Khedda performed his first revolutionary act at the age of 14 by scrawling "Long live Algerian independence!'' on the wall of his Algerian school. His extreme nationalism carried him to leadership among the Moslem students at the University of Algiers, and he was twice jailed by the French, winning his release the second time through the intervention of French liberals who had worked with him in the Algiers Boy Scout movement.

Ben Khedda promptly disappeared into the underground, surfaced a few months later in the Kabylia Mountains as the political commissar of an F.L.N. guerrilla band headed by famed Belkacem Krim. Moving on to Algiers, Ben Khedda helped plan and carry out the ruthless terrorist campaign in which killings of Europeans ran as high as a hundred a month. He lived under four aliases, grew a large mustache, boldly frequented the Cafe Otomatic, a favorite hangout of European rightists. The F.L.N. grip on Algiers was not broken until the summer of 1957. when General Jacques Massu and his French paratroops began to match terror with terror. Ben Khedda escaped a Massu dragnet by ducking down a manhole and dodging his way through the city's sewers. Shared Risks. Ben Khedda believed that the F.L.N. government should stay inside Algeria, sharing the same risks as the F.L.N. fighting men. But his terrorist campaign had failed, and he and his policies were temporarily discredited. Instead, a government in exile was set up in neighboring Tunisia under respectable Ferhat Abbas, who hoped to win foreign support through nonviolent diplomacy and to convince the French through Gallic logic. Ben Khedda was shunted to a minor Cabinet post, and became the first F.L.N. dignitary to lead an official mission to Red China. After touring other Communist countries as an ambassador at large, he turned up as a persuasive F.L.N. propagandist in Latin America, and received a VIP welcome from Cuba's Fidel Castro.

A devout Moslem who neither drinks nor smokes, Youssef Ben Khedda is not regarded as a Communist fin 1956 he actually liquidated a splinter group of Red terrorists in the F.L.N.). though he approves such Communist techniques as the nationalization of industry and political instruction of the Algerian masses. The most potent members of his new Cabinet are such like-minded ex-terrorists as his old comrade in arms. Belkacem Krim, who stays on as Vice Premier and Interior Minister, and tough, able Saad Dahlab. 38, who takes over Krim's old job as Foreign Minister.

Still Time. The change is evidence of the increasing self-confidence of the F.L.N. younger generation, who feel that they no longer need the respectable, moderate "front'' of Ferhat Abbas. They resented the fact that when Algeria's Moslems spontaneously demonstrated for independence last December, their rallying cry was "Vive Ferhat Abbas!'' This totally unexpected triumph of the F.L.N.'s "grand old man" alarmed the younger militants, who had installed him as Premier only to gain his fagade of respectability. If Abbas returned to Algiers as head of state, they argued, his personal popularity might prevent fulfillment of their ''revolutionary aims." Among them is the liquidation of rich Moslem landowners, and there seems to be no place in Khedda's Algeria for the European minority of one million, except as tame technicians of the Algerian "revolution."

Belatedlv. French officials took a regretful backward look at Ferhat Abbas. Sighed one: "He was a man with whom we could have come to an understanding." France's stiff-necked President Charles de Gaulle may find that he blundered badly in not having dealt with Abbas--while there was still time.

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