On the gray afternoon of Oct. 29, 1965, Mehdi Ben Barka—a self-exiled left-wing Moroccan politician and a well-known critic of King Hassan II —was stopped outside the Brasserie Lipp on Paris's Boulevard St. Germain by two French agents. "You have a rendezvous with some politicians," said one of them. Ben Barka, 45, who was accustomed to being tailed by the police, climbed into the back of an unmarked Peugeot 403. The car drove off. Ben Barka has not been seen in public since.
The disappearance of Ben Barka grew into a scandal that rocked France. Because of widespread rumors that French intelligence agencies were involved, President Charles de Gaulle ordered a full-dress inquiry. Frenchmen were appalled to discover that a Moroccan political refugee had been kidnaped and presumably murdered in France with the apparent help of the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE) which was and is France's equivalent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Open Case. Ben Barka's corpse was never found, nor were his suspected murderers. Even though the scandal has died down, the case remains open. Last October, one day before the tenth anniversary of his father's disappearance, Ben Barka's son Bachir, 25, brought judicial proceedings under French law "against unknown persons" for murder and complicity to murder, a maneuver to prevent the statute of limitations from running out.
TIME has learned that Ben Barka was indeed killed by three high Moroccan officials in an act of loyalty to King Hassan; one of them was former Interior Minister Mohammed Oufkir, who died in 1972; the other two were Moroccan agents, one of whom still holds an important position in the Rabat government; the other is reportedly still a Moroccan intelligence official. According to one of TIME'S sources, Ben Barka's body was interred in the garden of a villa at Fontenay-le-Vicomte, a Paris suburb; 16 days later, for fear that inquisitive French police might discover it, the corpse was hastily exhumed and reburied on the southeast bank of the Ile de la Grande Jatte opposite the Boulevard General Leclerc, in another Paris suburb, Neuilly-sur-Seine.
Although Ben Barka was kidnaped by French intelligence agents, TIME has also learned that he was in the pay of the French. He received monthly stipends from a French scientific research center—in fact, a cover for intelligence activities in North Africa.
Also involved in the case was Israel's CIA equivalent, known as Mossad. Although Morocco later supported Arab confrontation states in the Middle East wars, it had excellent relations with Israel after it became independent in 1956. For example, Morocco arranged, through the French, to have Mossad train its own fledgling secret service. Mossad's chief Moroccan contact was Oufkir. At one point after the Moroccans had decided to get rid of Ben Barka, Oufkir asked Mossad to obtain some poison for him. The agency declined, but later agreed to help tail Ben Barka, who was then living in Geneva.
Prince's Tutor. According to TIME'S sources, this is the sequence of events that led to the murder of Ben Barka on that October day in Paris ten years ago: