Panthers on Ice

The two burly men in the first-class cabin of the Air Algerie 727 appeared distinctly relieved as the plane settled down at Paris' Orly Airport and a large Citroen drove up on the tarmac, followed by another car full of police. Each of the men carried off the plane a brand new and obviously heavy black suitcase with a discreet plastic tag bearing the name and symbol of Delta Airlines. Inside the suitcases was a cool $1,000,000 in $50 and $100 bills paid out by Delta on July 31 to three men and two women who skyjacked the airline's Flight 841 and flew to Algiers to join Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver's "Afro-American Liberation Army."

The return of the money last week, witnessed by TIME'S Rome Bureau Chief James Bell,* marked the latest setback for Cleaver in his rapidly worsening relations with his Algerian hosts. Cleaver had been welcomed as a revolutionary hero in 1969, after jumping bail and evading arrest on charges arising from a 1968 Panther shootout in Oakland, Calif. The government of President Houari Boumedienne set him up in a white stucco villa in the diplomatic suburb of El Biar and granted him an allowance of $500 a month. Cleaver adorned the villa with two brass plaques, each engraved with a leaping black panther. The inscription announced that the building was the headquarters of the international section of the Black Panther Party.

Cleaver proved a somewhat difficult guest. Neighbors complained about all-night parties and loudspeakers blasting out hard rock; the puritanical regime disapproved of the hashish smoking by some members of Cleaver's 15-member entourage, and were especially dismayed when Cleaver took up with a teen-age Arab girl called Malika while his wife Kathleen was away.

The regime kept its complaints more or less to itself, but Cleaver did not. When the Algerian government showed no intention of letting the Panthers get their hands on the Delta ransom, Cleaver dashed off an open letter to President Boumedienne. "We must have the money," he told his host, "no ifs and buts about the point." The "expropriation" of the aircraft was an "internal problem between the American people themselves, to be settled by them and not others who are incidentally involved."

The letter was politically as well as personally offensive to Boumedienne. Algeria contemplates selling an annual $120 million worth of gas to the U.S. and is seeking an investment loan from the Export-Import Bank. At the same time, Algeria is anxious to maintain its revolutionary image, especially among the black countries to the south, and has welcomed not only the Black Panthers but a score of other revolutionary groups, including the Committee for the Liberation of the Canary Islands. Boumedienne thus could not simply boot Cleaver out of the country without some diplomatic embarrassment.

Instead, Cleaver was called in for a coup de semonce (literally, "warning shot"), or scolding, by a ranking member of the government party, the National Liberation Front. Two weeks ago, when the Panthers invited political exiles, Communist diplomats and journalists to an "international day of solidarity" at their villa, Algerian cops showed up instead. They confiscated photographers' film and chased the would-be guests away. Last week the villa was empty, and Cleaver gone. Speculation was that he had holed up elsewhere in Algiers. But in New York City, Party Spokeswoman Bernice Jones charged that Algeria had been making "reactionary, moves," and hinted that Cleaver and his group might move on. Where to? Perhaps to one of the more revolution-minded African states, such as Guinea or Libya, which, like Algeria, have no extradition treaty with the U.S.

*Bell was aboard the Air Algerie flight and reports that security was so lax that "anyone who wanted that money could get on the plane armed with anything short of a 155-mm. artillery piece."

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