L'Affaire Ben Barka

The French all but invented the modern police force, under the guiding genius of Joseph Fouche, who served the nation's regimes from the Revolution to the Restoration. He finally retired in 1816, and no French leader since then has been able to disentangle the mysterious, proliferating networks-within-net-works of French security agencies. Today France has no fewer than a dozen, ranging from the trench-coated men from S.D.E.C.E. (Service de Documentation Exterieure et Contre-Espionnage) to the blue-frocked flics. So, when friendly intelligence agents from another country ask French help in getting their man, there is always someone in Paris to oblige.

Thus it was that France last week found itself reeling under a scandal bridging two continents and of proportions not felt since the Dreyfus Affair at the turn of the century. It has strained ties between Paris and its onetime protectorate, Morocco, exposed France's security forces to charges of either dark collusion or woeful ineptitude, and forced an angry Charles de Gaulle to admit to the world that the much-vaunted probity of his Fifth Republic is badly tarnished.

The Police Peugeot. The scandal turns about Mehdi ben Barka, a shadowy, diminutive Moroccan emigre who had fled his native land for nomadic exile around the Mediterranean six years ago. The founder of Morocco's leftist National Union of Popular Forces Party, he was twice sentenced to death in absentia for plotting to overthrow King Hassan II. Someone wanted that sentence carried out, at home or abroad --and, to many, the most likely someone was Hassan's rightist Interior Minister, Mohamed Oufkir. Apart from Oufkir's fierce hatred of Ben Barka, there had been rumors of an impending reconciliation between the King and the exiled leftist leader, which Oufkir and other right-wing Moroccans were determined to prevent.

Last Oct. 29, Ben Barka arrived in Paris for a lunch at the famed Brasserie Lipp. He had no sooner alighted from his taxi on the Boulevard St. Germain than he was met by an S.D.E.C.E. agent and two French policemen acting for the Moroccans. They bundled him into a police Peugeot, and took him to a villa in suburban Fontenay-le-Vicomte. It has since been established that Oufkir, accompanied by the head of the Moroccan secret police, flew from Rabat to Paris next day. Whether by coincidence or not, Ben Barka was never seen again.

French Complicity. This month Parisians were being titillated by press interviews with a French ex-convict and freelance barbouze (undercover agent) named Georges Figon, who claimed to have seen Oufkir torture Ben Barka with a curved Moroccan knife at the suburban villa, then leave him to suffocate in his bonds. When Figon's accounts first began to appear in two weekly magazines, Minute and L'Express, the government tried to ignore the affair--just as the Gaullists had done during the December presidential election. Then, last week, the police moved in to arrest Figon, but, they reported, he had committed suicide before he could be taken alive. With that, the scandal could no longer be suppressed. As the satiric Canard Enchaine, right or wrong, put it last week: "Figon committed suicide with a shot fired against him from point-blank range." De Gaulle's campaign opponents, Franc,ois Mitterrand and Jean Lecanuet, demanded that the truth be told, flayed the Gaullists for trying to cover up the affair.

De Gaulle, purple with rage, summoned his Cabinet to a table-thumping session and aired the whole matter. When the Cabinet proposed a bland communique, De Gaulle seized the draft and wrote out the harsh facts himself for the world to hear: that though it was "organized abroad," the kidnaping "had been brought off with the complicity of agents of French special services or police." Insisting that "justice be done," De Gaulle sacked Counterespionage Chief Paul Jacquier. S.D.E.C.E. itself was transferred from the authority of the Premier's office to the Defense Ministry, and a complete reorganization of all French police and security agencies was ordered.

Arrest That Minister! Next day, De Gaulle ordered that an "international warrant" be issued for the arrest of Oufkir and two of his aides. He hardly expected King Hassan to yield up his own Interior Minister to the French courts, but privately he conveyed to Hassan that the Elysee would not be satisfied until the King at least fired Oufkir. But King Hassan was angry too: he already had canceled a state visit to France because of the Ben Barka affair. At week's end he was still refusing to sack Oufkir, even though Paris threatened to cut off the $100 million in annual aid that Morocco, still closely tied to France after ten years of independence, needs for survival.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.