(2 of 2)
French Complicity. This month Parisians were being titillated by press interviews with a French ex-convict and freelance barbouze (undercover agent) named Georges Figon, who claimed to have seen Oufkir torture Ben Barka with a curved Moroccan knife at the suburban villa, then leave him to suffocate in his bonds. When Figon's accounts first began to appear in two weekly magazines, Minute and L'Express, the government tried to ignore the affair—just as the Gaullists had done during the December presidential election. Then, last week, the police moved in to arrest Figon, but, they reported, he had committed suicide before he could be taken alive. With that, the scandal could no longer be suppressed. As the satiric Canard Enchainé, right or wrong, put it last week: "Figon committed suicide with a shot fired against him from point-blank range." De Gaulle's campaign opponents, François Mitterrand and Jean Lecanuet, demanded that the truth be told, flayed the Gaullists for trying to cover up the affair.
De Gaulle, purple with rage, summoned his Cabinet to a table-thumping session and aired the whole matter. When the Cabinet proposed a bland communiqué, De Gaulle seized the draft and wrote out the harsh facts himself for the world to hear: that though it was "organized abroad," the kidnaping "had been brought off with the complicity of agents of French special services or police." Insisting that "justice be done," De Gaulle sacked Counterespionage Chief Paul Jacquier. S.D.E.C.E. itself was transferred from the authority of the Premier's office to the Defense Ministry, and a complete reorganization of all French police and security agencies was ordered.
Arrest That Minister! Next day, De Gaulle ordered that an "international warrant" be issued for the arrest of Oufkir and two of his aides. He hardly expected King Hassan to yield up his own Interior Minister to the French courts, but privately he conveyed to Hassan that the Elysée would not be satisfied until the King at least fired Oufkir. But King Hassan was angry too: he already had canceled a state visit to France because of the Ben Barka affair. At week's end he was still refusing to sack Oufkir, even though Paris threatened to cut off the $100 million in annual aid that Morocco, still closely tied to France after ten years of independence, needs for survival.