FRANCE: DIMINISHED FIFTH

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00149R000600120007-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 19, 1999
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: January 31, 1966
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

n FOIAb3b
FOIAb3b
'tt
=~RDP75-00
nuary
0
0
0
FRANCE:
CPYRGHT
CPYRGHT
Diminished Fifth
we ve weeks ago when Moroccan
leftist leader Mehdi Ben Barka was kid-
naped-and presumably murdered-in
Paris, the cynical . among the French
wrote it off as a cloak-and-dagger epi-
sode that would go forever unsolved
simply because it would not be in the
official interest to have the case cleared
up. But last week, although still far from
solved, l'affaire Ben Barka erupted into
a scandal that sent shivers through the
entire French Government.
The lid finally blew off the Ben Barka
case early in the week when one of the
leading characters in the drama-a
strange and intellectually inclined tun-,
derworld figure named Georges Figon-
died of a bullet through the head just as
police burst into the Right Bank apart-
ment where he was holed up. According
to the police, his death was a suicide.
But somehow, most Frenchmen found the
story a bit hard to swallow.
More than two months earlier, Figon,
39, had admitted having helped set the
trap that was sprung last Oct. 29 when
the unsuspecting Ben Barka was picked,
up in broad daylight on a Left Bank
sidewalk by two detectives, then whisked
off to a suburban hide-out and, appar-
ently, to a hideous death. A warrant for
Figon's arrest was promptly issued, but
in the weeks that followed it appeared
that the only people who could not find
him were the police. Acquaintances ran
into him in his old haunts, the made him-
self accessible to journalists and flooded
Paris newspapers with letters, phone
calls and "eyewitness" accounts of Ben
Barka's fate. (In one such account,
Figon said he had seen Ben Barka
beaten to a bloody pulp by four "re-
tired" French gangsters, after which the
diminutive Moroccan had been stabbed,
tortured and left to die by the man
Figon contended was really behind the
plot: Morocco's flinty-eyed Minister of
the Interior, Gen. Mohammed Oufkir.)
The climax of Figon's hide-and-seek
game with the police, however, occurred
early last week when the magazine
Paris-Match published a double-page
photograph of the "fugitive" strolling
nonchalantly past police headquarters
under the eyes of three bored cops. It
was this which apparently stung the po-
lice into action, but when they did act,
they won no plaudits. After Figon's
death, a chorus of indignant newspaper
editorials echoed the question that was
uppermost in Parisian minds: why, when
he could so easily have been captured
alive anytime before, had swarms of.
heavily armed cops apparently fright-
cued him into suicide?
What shocked the French public even
more than Smalti ed. I1fik1D o e
Oufkir, Ben Barka and Figon: A story hard to swallow
he revelation that officials of the Paris
olice force and of tlae .SDECE-France's
quivalent of the CIA-4had been aware
f the i3lof o h nap 13eii Ilafku well' be-
ore it occurred and that even after the
bduction both organizations had been
emarkably slow to act. The most dam-
ging of a flood of charges and counter-
barges came from two men who had
layed vital roles in the kidnaping: an
it France airport official named Antoine
opez and a Paris plain-clothes man
arced Louis Souchon. Lopez, who, on
he side, worked for the French secret
ervicc, testified that he had informed
is immediate superior in the service of
he kidnap scheme before it was ex-
cuted. Lopez's boss, one Maj. Marcel
e Roy, admitted that this was so. He
]so admitted that he had waited for
wo days before reporting the kidnaping
o his superiors, explaining straight-
acedly that he had felt obliged not to
isturb them during the long, All Saints'
ay weekend.
Souchon, who with a fellow plain-
lothes man had actually seized Ben +
Barka on the Left Bank sidewalk, un-
urdened himself of equally startling de-
ails. At least two top officials at the
aris police prefecture were aware of
he plot in advance, he said. What's
more, Souchon claimed that according
to Lopez, a green light for the kidnap-
ng had come from a senior aide to In-
erior Minister Roger Frey as well as
from Jacques Foccart-a trusted Elysee
glace aide of General de Gaulle's and
he real boss of France's secret agents.
Warrant: All this enraged Charles do
aulle, one of whose proudest boasts it
had been that the scandals which
lagued the Third and Fourth Republics
had disappeared under his regime. The
eneral's first reaction was to retire the
head of SDECE, Air Force Gen. Paul
Jacquier, and to launch a sweeping re-
rganization of France's intelligence ap-
aratus. Then, following a Cabinet
meeting, a communique reportedly
drafted by de Gaulle himself bluntly
randed the Ben Barka kidnaping a
ices or police." The French Government,
in fact, appeared inclined to accept the
widely held theory that General Oufkir
-who has admitted to being in Paris
just after Ben Barka's disappearance-
planned the murder in order to prevent
a reconciliation between Ben Barka and
Morocco's King Hassan II. And on the
strength of this suspicion, the prosecutor
in the Ben Barka case last week issued
an international warrant for Oufkir and
two of his top aides.
This move put King Hassan in a diffi-
cult position. If he refused to hand
Oufkir over to the French courts, he
would be running the risk of a diplo-
matic break with France-and possibly
even the loss of French economic aid to
Morocco. But if he did surrender Oufkir,
he could jeopardize his throne, since
Oufkir who controls the Moroccan police
is one of the country's most powerful
men. Difficult as the choice was, how-
ever, Hassan would have to make up
his mind soon, for the one thing upob
which everyone agreed was.that Charle.k
de Gaulle was determined to remove
the tarnish of the Ben Barka affair fris regime, no matter what the cos,_)
1,-9D0149R000600120007-9
#e~ ` 1",'A It Ad M