A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (54 page)

Supplying arms to the F.L.N. was now big enough business to make it irresistible to the international brotherhood of freelance arms dealers. But whereas France could do nothing to stop at source arms originating officially from the Soviet bloc, she could—and did—much to deter the private operators. The ramifications of the arms dealing world are complex, surrounded by more legend than fact, so the truth is difficult to penetrate, but some of the details that are known of the trade with the F.L.N. and the French counter-measures read like passages from Ian Fleming or Frederick
Forsyth
. Respectable names from the United States and from London were involved, but the biggest traffic came through West Germany, particularly the port of Hamburg. The reason was simple to explain: since the demise of the Allied Occupation controls, the Bonn government had done nothing to replace the previous strict limitations on the arms trade. While this gap remained unplugged, the Federal Republic was a happy hunting-ground for the dealers. One shipment of German flame-throwers, for instance, came to the F.L.N. in a cargo labelled “crop-sprayers”. In on the ground floor were a group of ex-Nazis who had found refuge in Cairo and had made themselves useful to Nasser; among them a former S.S. man called Ernst-Wilhelm Springer, who had helped form the pro-German Muslim Legion in the Second World War. Springer’s efforts, though not always successful, illustrate the complexities involved. One of his first shipments of rifles, via Yugoslavia and Syria, was confiscated on Tito’s orders, the bolts removed and the barrels bent. Enraged, the F.L.N. refused to pay Springer. He then tried to purchase 120 tons of dynamite from the Nobel plant in Troisdorf, near Bonn. When this failed, he negotiated for the same amount from Budapest, via a Finnish intermediary. After a mysterious attempt on his life, Springer faded from the scene.

At the other end of the game, in Paris, was “Bureau 24” of the French S.D.E.C.E., closely affiliated with the 11th Shock units and run by a “Colonel Lamy”, which resorted freely to almost every weapon in the “007” inventory to thwart the arms dealers, though usually operating through “cut-outs” or paid killers. A consignment of plastic explosive from Sweden would turn out to have been mysteriously transformed into casein somewhere along the way. Two arms factories in Switzerland and Spain actually became “controlled” by Bureau 24 in much the same way that Léger had played the recrudescent F.L.N. network in Algiers, and busied themselves fabricating faulty firearms and instantaneous fused grenades for the arms salesmen. Finally, there were personal threats, following the dealers wherever they might go, that were by no means idle.

Dr Wilhelm Beisner, a former leader of the German Sicherheitsdienst in wartime Yugoslavia, had a miraculous escape when a shrapnel-laden bomb blew him through the roof of his car. Four separate bomb attempts, spread out over a period of two years from September 1956, were made against Otto Schlüter, an honourable third-generation Hamburg arms manufacturer. After a fourth attempt, when a remote-control automobile bomb killed his mother and injured him, Schlüter prudently abandoned his business with the F.L.N. Also in West Germany, the head of the F.L.N. organisation there, Ait Ahcène, was mysteriously shot down in Bonn in November 1957 on what were believed to be French orders. Responsible personally for many of these liquidations was a figure whose true identity still remains unknown, and who was sometimes dubbed just “The Killer”. He had once worked with General Gehlen’s intelligence organisation in West Germany, as well as with the French S.D.E.C.E., and the fact that he travelled with two French passports suggested that he had remained on good terms with the French government. “The Killer” and his network received considerable publicity when, in March 1957, the Swiss Federal Attorney-General committed suicide after being implicated in passing to them secret information on the gun-runners, together with telephone tappings of the Egyptian Embassy. It was the worst scandal to hit Switzerland since the war.

“The Killer” appears also to have been a specialist in style; perhaps the more to frighten off the arms dealers—
épater les bourgeois
! The most active of them all, and the top target of Bureau 24, was another German called Georges Puchert, who operated out of Tangiers, was impervious to threats and for two years led a charmed life. Dealing with Boussouf in Morocco, Puchert learned that one of the F.L.N.’s most favoured weapons was the German Mauser 7.92 mm. carbine from the Second World War. The principal stocks of these were to be found in Czechoslovakia, accumulated from the 1945 defeat, but as they were soon insufficient to meet demand the Communist Czech regime had obligingly set up plants to construct Mausers, perfect down to the last detail, including the swastika engraved in the metal, as a guarantee of top quality. Unable to tamper with this source of arms, “The Killer” was unleashed on Puchert’s closest collaborators. In September 1958 one of them, a Swiss explosives expert called Marcel Léopold, was picked up dead in the corridor of one of Geneva’s smartest hotels. An autopsy revealed that he had been shot in the neck by a tiny blowpipe dart, tipped with curare and fired from a contraption like a bicycle pump, which “The Killer” had thoughtfully left behind for the benefit of the world Press. Six months later, when Puchert was visiting Frankfurt, a limpet bomb was attached under the driver’s seat of his Mercedes and detonated by inertia. Filled with ball-bearings, it did relatively little damage to the car, but riddled the ample arms trafficker like truffles in a Perigord pâté. With the death of Puchert, freelance gun-running more or less faded away.

France’s new Maginot Line

For both sides, however, what was more important than the liquidation of gun-runners, or the “secret war” inside Algeria, or pitched battles like Agounennda, was the struggle constantly being waged on the Morice Line during this period. Completed in September 1957, this barrier was a remarkable and sinister triumph of military technology which ran along the Tunisian frontier for two hundred miles and more from the sea to the empty Sahara, where no one could hope to cross it undetected. The nucleus of the Line was an eight-foot electric fence charged with five thousand volts; on either side of this was a fifty-yard belt liberally sprinkled with anti-personnel mines and backed up with continuous barbed-wire entanglements of the style of the First World War. “An immense serpent in the style of Bernard Buffet” was how one French conscript described it. The wire was festooned with electrocuted animals—dogs, sheep, goats and even occasionally a pathetic little donkey. The German Foreign Legionnaires were particularly distressed at the sight of handsome Alsatian tracker dogs electrocuted by the Line. Immediately to the rear ran a track along which passed frequent armed patrols, equipped with powerful searchlights at night. Not only was the electric fence designed to kill but there were also electronic devices that could determine precisely where it had been cut by a raiding party. Fire from automatically sighted 105 mm. howitzers could be brought to bear on the point immediately, and mobile troops rushed to it. Defending the line was a force some 80,000 strong, the most powerful concentration of French combat troops in Algeria. There were mechanised and armoured units, four para regiments—including the crack 1st R.E.P. of Colonel Jeanpierre who had been wounded during the capture of Yacef—and plentiful helicopters to spot any crossing-points and track the crossers. In the event of a successful crossing in force, presumably made by night, it was of prime importance for the French defenders to pin down and destroy the A.L.N. unit before the end of the following day, after which time it would be able to break up into small groups and disperse into the interior.

With such an outlay in expenditure and effectives, the integrity of the Morice Line became the top military priority for the French during the winter of 1957–8. Its breaching had equally become the supreme objective for the F.L.N.; there were now some ten thousand A.L.N. troops, armed or in training, concentrated in the frontier zone, and the weapons beginning to flow into Tunisia from all over the world had totalled, over the three winter months, 17,000 rifles, 380 machine-guns, 296 automatic rifles, 190 bazookas, thirty mortars and over 100 million rounds of ammunition. Meanwhile, the Wilayas were asphyxiating for want of reinforcements.

All through the winter the two sides fenced for an advantage on the Morice Line. The F.L.N. probed, or threw itself at the barrier, constantly trying out new techniques. High-tension wire-cutters were ordered from Germany, employed with special hooks to lift up the wire; but the French electronic detectors proved capable of locating the breach all too swiftly. Groups tried burrowing under the wire, or throwing insulated ramps over it; teams specially trained with “Bangalore torpedoes” in Egypt blasted holes through it. Then they would bury delayed action mines under the lines along which ran, bristling with machine-guns, the French armoured trains; these mines were timed to explode beneath the third coach, the one usually carrying troops. But always the French mines, electrocution, or the sheer firepower of the defending patrols took a terrible toll. Diversionary tactics were tried, with a small detachment setting off the alarm system while the main body in fact attempted a breakthrough perhaps fifty kilometres further down the line. In Tunisia the breakthrough units were trained in the execution of forced marches at astonishing speeds, so as to avoid being corralled by the French once through the line. They attempted to go round the end of both the Moroccan and Tunisian lines, through the Great Erg sand deserts of the Sahara, disguised as Meharist columns. But the wretched camels would be slaughtered wholesale by strafing them from the air (and sometimes those of genuine Meharists, in error), and in one of the last operations by Bigeard before his repatriation a parachute-drop trapped and wiped out fifty of one such group of frontier runners.

In their assaults on the main line the A.L.N. at first threw in small commandos; then bigger groups; finally whole
katibas
, and even
faileks
over 300 men strong, in desperate efforts to overwhelm the defenders. But this escalation only resulted in higher and higher losses; for all the time the French were perfecting their interception techniques, speeding up mobility and increasing the firepower brought to bear on a given point. The statistics speak for themselves. One regiment in a busy part of the Line, the 9th R.C.P., recorded scores as follows for early 1958:

According to French estimates, the percentage of F.L.N. infiltrators “neutralised” rose as follows:

Souk-Ahras and Sakiet

The steep increase in this last figure was caused by the F.L.N.’s decision to launch an all-out offensive against the Line. The sector chosen was the so-called
bec de canard
, east of Souk-Ahras and not far from the scene of the Sakiet bombing in February. Its wooded hills provided ideal cover for
katibas
attempting to disperse once through the Line, and much of the previous barrier-crossing action had taken place in this area. Thus, also, the French forces were particularly well-prepared. But, apart from just military considerations, the F.L.N. were probably encouraged by the international uproar raised over Sakiet, as well as the accompanying political disarray in France—the Gaillard government having fallen two weeks previously, leaving the country in a vacuum. Over three nights, from 27 to 30 April, seven
katibas
totalling over 800 men, and destined to reinforce both Wilayas 2 and 3, were thrown against the Line north and south of Souk-Ahras. A large number got through the wire, but were almost immediately pinned down and encircled by a crushing superiority of airborne troops ferried in by big transport helicopters. For the best part of a week an intense and merciless battle raged. A twenty-year-old French conscript who took part, Alain Manévy, records how the entire
pied noir
population of Souk-Ahras turned out to watch, infuriating the military by blocking the highways with their cars, and accompanied by Arab street vendors plying the spectators with sticky cakes. French losses were heavy, one company of the 9th R.C.P. losing its captain and most of its effectives. But those of the A.L.N. were crippling, by far the worst that it had suffered in the war to date; out of a total of 820 men crossing the Line, no less than 620 were killed or captured, including a
failek
commander. With them were taken 416 rifles or sub-machine-guns, and forty-six machineguns. (The disproportionate number of arms to rebels captured, however, is once again a testimony to the efficiency of the F.L.N. system of weapon recovery, which aimed at never leaving behind the previous firearm of a fallen
djoundi
.) The pile of weapons was displayed in the market-place of Souk-Ahras, though Manévy noted indifference on the part of the Muslim inhabitants: “The French have simply got out their old weapons from stores to make us believe….”