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In France, meanwhile, top officials had called off their Christmas holidays to deal with the crisis. At noon on Dec. 24, Foreign Minister Alain Juppe convened a crisis team, while Interior Minister Charles Pasqua met with aides long into the night. The first objective of the French was to persuade the Algerians to allow the elite National Gendarmes Intervention Group (G.I.G.N.) to provide "technical" assistance for a raid on the plane. The antiterrorist unit had been put on alert shortly after the plane's seizure. At 8 p.m. on Dec. 24, some nine hours after the Airbus was taken, about 40 G.I.G.N. troopers took off from a military base near Paris aboard an Air France Airbus A300, identical to the one that had been hijacked. Created in 1974, the G.I.G.N. comprises some 60 "supergendarmes" deployed in four units of 15 men each. Highly trained and motivated, they specialize in such crisis situations as hostage takings and hijackings. Their commander was Major Denis Favier, 35, a brilliant graduate of France's top military school but a man who some of the commando veterans felt had been prematurely promoted and was thus unprepared to lead a dangerous mission. The gendarmes' plane put down in Spain, at the airport of Palma de Mallorca, 200 miles north of Algiers, to await developments. The squad learned that the Algerians would not allow it on their soil.
In the Alpine resort of Chamonix, where he had gone to spend Christmas at his chalet, Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, a man dogged by a reputation for avoiding difficult calls, faced an agonizing decision. Expected soon to announce his presidential candidacy, he stood to see his front-runner status compromised should any operation ordered by him turn into a debacle. Yet he had to take action. On Christmas morning Balladur flew to Paris and took personal responsibility for managing the crisis.
By then the hijackers had dropped their demand for the liberation of the F.I.S. leaders; now they insisted on being flown to Paris. That triggered a tug-of-war between the Algerians, who were adamant that the plane stay in Algiers, and the French, who wanted it on their territory so they could deal with the situation directly. Things came to a head late on Dec. 25, when the terrorists laid down an ultimatum: if the boarding ramp was not pulled back and the plane was not allowed to take off before 9:30 p.m., they would kill a hostage every half hour. Their first victim, they said, would be Yannick Beugnet, a cook at the French ambassador's residence in Algiers. He was brought to the cockpit and pleaded into the microphone: "If you don't allow the plane to depart, they will kill me." The French wanted the ramp pulled back. "The Algerians said, 'No, no, we are sure they are bluffing,' " a French diplomat recalled. "Five minutes later, the hijackers killed the cook and threw his body on the tarmac."