The French all but invented the modern police force, under the guiding genius of Joseph Fouché, 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 Extérieure 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 émigré 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.