Revelations on “Homo” operations – L’Express

The quadruple murder has never made the headlines, barely an interfilate in The world. L’Express can today reveal that Saad Rahal and his family have been murdered by France, as indicated by the archives of the external documentation and countelewing service (SDECE), the ancestor of the DGSE, which we were able to consult.

On April 19, 1957, this Algerian pharmacist from Meknes, Morocco, opened a package filled with marbles, which exploded to him in the face. The load is explosive. The 32 -year -old man, her two parents and her daughter Leila, 4 years old, are killed instantly. The survey quickly concluded that the bomb was made locally and that the thirty -something was no longer responsible for its “contribution” to the FLN. He would therefore have been the victim of a settlement of accounts. In reality, French secret services considered Saad Rahal as an important trafficker for the benefit of Algerian separatists.

Eliminate traffickers and activists

A table annexed to an unattained letter – written in the summer of 1958, according to the indications which appeared there – intended for Jacques Foccart, then adviser to General de Gaulle, president of the Council of the Fourth Agonizing Republic, summarizes all the assassinations perpetrated by French intelligence. Regarding Saad Rahal, it is noted coldly that the attack allowed the “destruction of the objective and his family”.

In another document dated July 28, 1958, it is a question of the decision circuit of these targeted murders. “Agreement given by Admiral Cabanier, except for French people”, he manually annotated. Georges Cabanier was then chief of staff of national defense. The “French” is probably the journalist Jacques Favrel, based in Algiers, appointed as an “objective” in a third document.

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This table in the summer of 1958, whose existence had been revealed by journalist Vincent Nouzille in 2020, in The Killers of the Republic (Fayard) is a decisive play. He documents the practice of assassinations targeted by France during the Algerian war. In addition to the abuse of the army, the State kills knowingly. This involves eliminating influential traffickers and anti -colonialist activists. In A thousand days in Matignon (Grasset), Constantin Melnik, soon adviser to Prime Minister Michel Debré, says that General de Gaulle had set three conditions for these murders: his prior approval, actions only carried out “outside the national territory” and never against “French nationals”.

Three rules that do not seem to have been fully respected. Before De Gaulle, first. In June 1957, the Sdece tried to kill the French doctor Louis Tonelot at his Algerian home in Oujda. The world had revealed it in 2022, L’Express can confirm it: a bomb, placed on its terrace, blows the windows, injuring his wife and daughter. The machine was prepared by the French secret services, obviously ulcerated from the notable anti -colonialist positions. “The family is reached,” reports French spies in their painting a posteriori.

Direct contacts with the Prime Minister

Even after the return to power of General de Gaulle, several differences can be suspected. In The Algerian War in France, 1954-1962 (Presses de la Cité), Raymond Muelle, ex-member of the SDECE action service, claims to have participated in a commando having shot the Algerian lawyer Amokrane Ould Aoudia, on May 21, 1959 in Paris. An operation carried out with the approval of political power, will affirm Muel, in a documentary by Patrick Rotman, in 1996: “The order came from the Prime Minister personally. It went from the Prime Minister to the General Commander of the Sdece, General Grossin at the time. But most of the time […]the contacts were direct between the head of the “Action Service”, Mr. Foccart, and the Prime Minister. “

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Jacques Foccart’s archives do not mention it. As if there were, in this already clandestine matter, actions so unspeakable that they would not appear in any report. In her book, Muelle relates another operation carried out on French soil by a secret agent, the “lieutenant Lambert”: the murder of Rachid Khilou, “Muslim police officer secretly passed to the FLN”, killed from a poisoned bite in October 1960. At the time, the press attributed it to the separatists. “The Rachid Khilou a supplement was executed by the FLN”, writes the daily newspaper Paris-Presse. In a letter addressed to Jacques Foccart, on May 5, 1961, an anonymous official reveals that “the Swiss think that the police officer Khilou (…) was deleted” by the French intelligence services.

The table produced by the SDECE in the summer of 1958 established an assessment of the targeted assassinations. On “38 tried operations” between January 1956 and March 1958, “17” were considered a success, including “12” a “total success”, which means the elimination of the target, while “four” ended with a failure. In three cases, a technical incident prevented the killing. In Tunis, in March 1957, a French secret service agent was arrested on the scene, while he was preparing to explode a premises in the FLN. “Having held his foreign coverage, notes the document, he was released.”

17 of these so -called “homo” operations have been canceled, including “eight” by a “higher order”, especially political power. We discover there that the president of the Council Guy Mollet (SFIO) will thus cancel “at the last moment” an operation aimed at killing Ahmed Ben Bella, future Algerian president, in Cairo, in July 1956. The separatist was to be killed “with a silent weapon, in the street”. As for the Egyptian President Nasser, support for decolonization, L’Express can reveal it could have been pulverized by a “remote-controlled explosion”, upon his arrival at his residence in Port-Said in December 1956, write French spies. Again, Guy Mollet has the assassination canceled.

“Pen-Pistolet” and other instruments

The “killers of the Republic” are primarily aimed at FLN leaders, international weapons traffickers and cargo cargo ships. Especially via bombs, at first, the specialty of Captain Jeannou Lacaze, nicknamed “Le Sorcier Aztec” in the Sdece action service. He will finish chief of staff of the armies under Mitterrand, then UDF MEP.

On March 22, 1956, Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, one of the founders of the FLN, tried to light a radio station trapped by the Sdece. The explosion kills him with three of his assistants; In September 1956, the premises of the German merchant Otto Schliter, an alleged arms trafficker, underwent a blast, one of his friends was killed; On June 3, 1957, Schluter turned the key to his Mercedes, in Eppendorf: the bomb placed under the car costs his mother’s life. The methods are perfected: on September 19, 1957, the Swiss Marcel Léopold, also a seller of arms at the FLN, was reached in the armpit by an poisoned Sarbacane. A gadget prepared by Henri Deruelle, a polytechnician from the Sdece, inventor of “pens-pistolets” and other death instruments. “Objective killed,” said the Sdece laconically.

At that time, the management of the SDECE had a retort idea: to hide these assassinations behind a fictitious organization, the red hand, composed, according to this legend, of the snipers opposed to the independence of Algeria.

In reality, a pure French intelligence creation … “Inventive secret services say: we can participate in the destruction of the FLN, and for that, possibly, we could invent an imaginary organization which would be called the red hand”, will testify Constantine Melnik. Concerned about detail, the SDECE has a homonymous book write under the alias of Pierre Geneva, an alleged interview with one of the officials of the pharmacy, at Nord-South, a Swiss publisher created for the occasion. “We were remotely remotely playing this role to play this role, will later assure General Grosin in Political history of secret services, Roger Faligot journalists, Jean Guisnel, Rémi Kauffer (La Découverte). And each time a newspaper asked for a red hand interview, it was previously written boulevard mortier, at the swimming pool [NDLR : le surnom du Sdece]”. A service commander, nicknamed” the penguin “because of his missing arm, gives interviews, claims that the red hand would be linked to Catena, a secret society of the far right. A false nose dedicated, among other advantages, to blur the tracks in the event of arrest abroad.

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Because the SDECE multiplies murders in Switzerland and Germany, where several arms sellers nestle. On May 5, 1961, in a white note addressed to Jacques Foccart, an unidentified official detailed the recent operations “of the red hand”, that is to say of the SDECE. There are around fifteen “homo” operations there, including half a dozen homicides in Switzerland and Germany, or the assassination of the Aitziane Ait Ahcène lawyer, a FLN leader, suffering from two balls in the head, in Bonn, in Western Germany, November 5, 1958.

In his book on red hand operations, Constantin Melnik offers an approximate counting: “During 1960 alone, 135 people were sent to the fathers During “Homo” operations of the SDECE action service “;” Did the initiative come from the only focal? Was the general informed or not ?, Asked Melnik in L’Express, in 1994. The question remains. “Even today, we do not know how many assassinations were committed by the French Republic.