Authors: James R. Arnold
Jungle of Snakes (13 page)
Having regrouped from their earlier mistakes, FLN leaders again showed their strategic impatience by seeking decisive results
in the country’s capital city, Algiers.
The Battle for Algiers
The FLN judged the capital city as the decisive battle zone. If they could routinely conduct terror operations inside Algiers,
then they could discredit or perhaps even paralyze French rule. Ever since March 1956, Algiers had experienced occasional
terrorist incidents. In August 1956 the FLN leadership decided to change the war’s focus and inflict on the capital an orchestra
of terror, featuring a steady drumbeat of detonating high explosives. It ordered its commander in Algiers, Yacef Saadi, to
begin a relentless campaign of urban terrorism to undermine France’s capacity to provide public order and security.
Yacef coordinated welders who made bomb casings, explosive experts who had learned their trade in the French army, and drivers
to convey the bombs to secret depots. Then Yacef dispatched the bomb planters to targets he had personally selected. The planters
typically were young, educated, stylish Algerian women who easily passed as Europeans as they deposited their bombs at Popular
nightspots frequented by young
pieds-noirs
. On September 30, bombs detonated inside the Milk-Bar, just across from French army headquarters, and at La Cafétéria. On
November 13, terrorists hurled a bomb into a bus, inflicting thirty-six casualties, and planted another in a department store
and a third at the rail station. A well-coordinated attack on November 28 detonated three large bombs simultaneously in downtown
Algiers. Just before Christmas a school bus bombing killed or maimed several children. The terrorists followed this up by
assassinating two prominent political leaders.
Europe ans who ventured onto the streets carried concealed firearms and saw a possible assassin in the face of every Muslim.
Terrorist violence produced brutal reprisals, the infamous
ratonnades
(Arab-bashings). Intimidated by the possibility of random
pied-noir
reprisal, cowed by Yacef’s long arm of terror, the city’s Muslim population also lived in fear. Exposed to frequent and seemingly
unstoppable terror bombings and assassinations, Algiers quickly descended into chaos.
French authorities concluded that it was impossible to prevent urban terrorism through normal police and judicial procedures.
On January 7, 1957, Governor-General Robert Lacoste summoned General Jacques Massu to his office. He told Massu that since
the city’s 1,500 police could neither prevent terrorist outrages nor control retaliation by
pied-noir
mobs, he was giving Massu carte blanche to use the his 4,600-strong Tenth Paratroop Division to restore order in the capital.
General Massu was like the Napoleonic marshal Michel Ney: a man of action who responded to resistance by conducting a head-down
charge. Events in Algiers immediately tested his command style.
Massu’s paratroopers entered the city just in time to confront a nationwide strike the FLN had called to begin on January
28, 1957, the opening day of the United Nations debates on Algeria. The FLN goal was to discredit the French assertion that
the rebellion enjoyed little popular support. As the sun rose, it appeared that the FLN was correct. Algiers was dead. Muslim
schoolchildren stayed at home. Shops did not open for business. Muslim employees who worked in essential services at power
plants and water pumping stations failed to report. Massu responded by ordering his paratroopers to open shops by force and
compel workers to report. Soldiers attached cables to the steel shutters securing the closed shops and armored vehicles dragged
them from their hinges. Paratroopers rounded up public workers and conducted them to the power plants and telegraph offices.
Within forty-eight hours Massu’s men had broken the strike.
But terror bombings continued. Massu remembered Paul Aussaresses’ performance as an intelligence officer in Philippeville
and summoned him to serve in Algiers. Massu told Aussaresses that the job was going to be hard and “we’ll have to be implacable.”
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Aussaresses understood this meant using torture and summary executions. Massu shared his understanding. Massu sought legal
latitude from the French government in hopes of overturning the laws that banned torture. When the government failed to oblige,
Massu simply denied the supremacy of civil law in Algeria. He asserted that because Algiers was under military authority,
civil law did not apply.
Aussaresses cared little about such fine distinctions. Police files provided him with a list of suspects. Mass arrests followed
by interrogations, which usually meant torture, often began with the small fry and the question “Who is the district tax collector?”
Disclosure led the French security forces to new names, new arrests, and new interrogations: “To whom do you turn in your
money?” So the French traced the bomb-making network, climbing up command levels to find the terror chiefs.
Meanwhile, Massu divided the city into four quadrants, each under the control of one paratroop regiment. The paratroop officers
were almost all veterans of the Indochina War. Massu’s chief of staff, Yves Godard, had commanded the Eleventh Shock, the
so-called dirty-tricks battalion answerable directly to the prime minister. Formed by the paratroop establishment and the
French secret service, the Eleventh Shock in Indochina had been part of the column attempting to relieve Dien Bien Phu. In
Algiers the Eleventh Shock performed many of the “delicate” missions that no French official wanted to acknowledge. Among
the other hard men were regimental commander Lieutenant Colonel Roger Trinquier, who had commanded an airborne combat brigade
with the mission of collecting intelligence behind Viet Minh lines. Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Jeanpierre, who had survived
both a German concentration camp and a devastating Viet Minh ambush, commanded another regiment. Then there was the brave,
ruthless Lieutenant Colonel Marcel Bigeard, celebrated for his conduct at Dien Bien Phu. Collectively these men were determined
to avoid the “mistake” of lack of firmness exhibited in that war. They set out to prove that they were willing to be more
extreme than the terrorists.
Henceforth, the Muslim population of Algeria lived in a city subdivided by barbed-wire barriers illuminated by searchlight
beams. The focal point of the urban insurgency was the Casbah, a thickly packed slum home to some 80,000 Algerians. The Casbah
was a confusing matrix of extremely narrow streets and alleys overlooked by old stone buildings. Europeans had long ago abandoned
this sector and the absence of French authority allowed the FLN free rein. The Casbah was the command center for Yacef ’s
bomb-making network, now using much more powerful plastic explosive packages only slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes.
Operating from secure safe houses, Yacef plotted his terror campaign. Yacef sent his cadre of young girls to place a bomb
in the female lavatory at a student hangout called the Otomatic and for a second time at the popular bistro La Cafétéria;
when diners at the nearby brasserie rushed to the window to see what had happened, a third bomb, placed beneath a table, detonated,
sending fragments slicing through the crowd.
Massu assigned the sector containing the Casbah to Colonel Bigeard’s Third Regiment. He and his men worked closely with Aussaresses.
Aussaresses had the paratroopers perform a detailed census by asking the oldest inhabitant of a house to name all the people
living in the house. Police cross-checked this information with statements made by the neighbors. If someone was missing,
he or she became a suspect. If the suspect returned home, police hauled in him or her for interrogation. In Aussaresses’ words,
“The results of the interrogations and comparisons of various sources allowed the patrols to set up reliable lists of persons
we should be looking for.”
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Conventional detective and forensic work contributed to closing in on Yacef’s bomb-making network. A waiter gave a detailed
description of a woman who had sat at the table shortly before the detonation. Careful examination of a clothing fragment
found at one bombing site led to the arrests. Henceforth Bigeard’s paratroopers carefully searched all women leaving the Casbah.
Throughout the city the paratroopers established a curfew and began shooting on sight anything that moved. Thus began an intense
and brutal nine-month military campaign.
Much of the action took place at night when the paratroopers donned their jungle camouflage uniforms and took to the streets
to make their arrests. The goal was to be done by midnight in order to leave plenty of time for interrogations. Aussaresses
boasted, “I was responsible for the decisions regarding all the suspects arrested inside the city of Algiers.” The vast majority
had weak links to the FLN, having joined out of fear. These people were sent to prison camps. Eventually more than 20,000
people, or 3 percent of the entire population of Algiers, passed through these camps. Aussaresses focused on the prime suspects,
flitting among the four paratroop headquarters inside Algiers to make godlike snap decisions literally involving life and
death, with the pendulum of justice heavily weighed toward the latter: “We would hold on to the others who were either positively
dangerous or thought to be so and make them talk quickly before executing them.”
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An estimated 3,000 Muslims “disappeared” during the Battle of Algiers.
The policy of counterterror sharply reduced the number of terrorist incidents as the months passed. But Massu’s chief of staff,
Godard, wanted more. He understood that most of the lower-level operatives—bomb transporters, lookouts, and even bomb planters—were
easily replaceable. Killing them would not completely end the terrorists’ ability to sow terror. Indeed, on February 10, 1957,
the terrorists showed they still had teeth when nearly simultaneously they detonated two large bombs at two soccer stadiums
while matches were being played. The bombs destroyed the stadiums’ grandstands, killing 11 and seriously wounding 146 more.
Godard compiled all information to replicate the bombers’ organizational hierarchy. For a long time the name of the head of
the organization remained unknown.
Indeed, Yacef took exceptional care to conceal himself. Purportedly he changed hideouts fifteen times on the day the general
strike began. He disguised himself as a woman in order to personally scout public places to detonate bombs. But as the paratroopers
systematically rolled up the FLN terror network, Yacef’s personal security and that of his remaining chiefs became doubtful.
The remaining senior leadership in Algiers dispersed, leaving Yacef to continue the campaign as best he could. Following a
long lull during which time he partially reconstructed his bomb network, Yacef ordered a new campaign to begin. Four terrorists
disguised in the uniform of public works personnel placed time bombs inside several streetlights next to a crowded bus stop.
A fifteen-year-old Muslim employee of a popular casino set a bomb underneath the orchestra platform, killing nine and wounding
eighty-five.
The French responded by clamping down even harder on the Casbah and intensifying the search for Yacef, who they now knew was
the head of the bomb network. Acting on pinpoint intelligence, at 5:00 a.m. on September 24, 1957, paratroopers sealed off
rue Caton in the heart of the Casbah. They went to Yacef’s safe house, broke into his hidey-hole built into a small space
between staircase and bathroom, dodged the hand grenade thrown by Yacef, and captured the terror chieftain. To the frustration
of many in the security service, most notably Paul Aussaresses, the French prime minister demanded that Yacef not be mistreated.
In their zeal to capture Yacef, the paratroopers had overlooked his alternative safe house on the rue Caton. From here three
of Yacef’s subordinates fled to another safe house. After realizing their mistake, French security forces relentlessly tracked
the subordinates until they cornered and killed them in the Casbah on the night of October 8. With this final blow, the Battle
of Algiers came to a close. The military result of the Battle for Algiers was the clear defeat of the FLN. Bombings and other
acts of terror virtually ceased inside the capital. For the remainder of the war the FLN abandoned large-scale urban terrorism
inside Algeria.
But the French victory had unforeseen consequences. Before the Battle of Algiers there had been occasional reports of torture
and other abuses. As early as January 15, 1955, an article in
L’Express
entitled “The Question” raised doubts about French conduct. On December 20, 1955,
L’Express
displayed photographs depicting the execution of an Algerian “rebel” by an auxiliary gendarme. The photographs did not quite
have the impact of the famous image capturing the moment of impact when the South Viet namese police chief executed a Viet
Cong suspect in the streets of Saigon during the Tet Offensive in 1968, but it did provide a powerful image that prompted
some Frenchmen to question their nation’s behavior in Algeria. The Battle of Algiers changed questions to moral certainties
and henceforth, as one historian observed, the “rivulet of allegations . . . swelled to a flood” and became imprinted upon
the French consciousness.
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Two groups held in high moral esteem by the French people, clergymen and veterans of the French resistance against the Nazis,
began to question openly French conduct. When the French press published disturbing accounts reported by conscripts and reservists,
the ethical issue of how the army conducted the fight in Algeria became crucial to the war’s outcome. Writers asked if the
French army had descended to the level of the Gestapo.
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Politicians began to criticize the army’s conduct. These criticisms, in turn, cemented the army’s loathing for the politicians
of the Fourth Republic. Right-wing extremists began plotting to overthrow the Fourth Republic and to replace it with a tougher
regime.
