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Slowly tempers cooled. In Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba relaxed his blockade of French bases enough to permit the entry of civilian trucks carrying food. In Paris, too, there were second thoughts. From the start Foreign Minister Pineau had been privately dismayed by the attack on Sakiet. (When U.S. Columnist Joseph Alsop quoted him as calling the bombing "a sad error," Pineau at first flatly denied the quote, then admitted, "I may have said a few imprudent words" which Alsop had "distorted.")
Under sharp questioning from the National Assembly's Foreign Affairs Committee, Pineau finally admitted that neither the Cabinet nor Robert Lacoste, France's Minister Resident in Algeria, had known in advance of the decision to attack Sakiet-Sidi-Youssef. Neither, apparently, had General Raoul Salan, the luckless Indo-China veteran who commands French forces in Algeria. The murderous blow that earned France worldwide obloquy had been ordered by a local air force officer, reportedly a colonel, on the strength of an imprecise government directive authorizing retaliatory attack on Algerian rebel concentrations in the immediate frontier areas bordering on Tunisia.
Away from the Ring. At week's end Félix Gaillard's government made a first gesture toward conciliation. Though it refused to match Bourguiba's offer to accept U.S. mediation—this, the French fear, would open the way to international "interference" in the Algerian rebellion—the Gaillard government announced that it was now willing to accept "the good offices" of the U.S. in settling the dispute. Even more important psychologically, Gaillard and his Cabinet tacitly admitted France's guilt at Sakiet-Sidi-Youssef by offering to pay damages to civilian victims of the bombing.