In The Devil’s Chessboard – Allen
Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (Harper/Collins,
2015, p. 412) David Talbot writes:
It was Cuba that created the first
fracture between Kennedy and his national security chain of command. But while
the Bay of Pigs was still dominating the front pages, the CIA mucked its way
into another international crisis that required the president’s urgent
attention. The Cuba invasion has all but erased this second crisis from
history. But the strange events that occurred in Paris in April 1961 reinforced
the disturbing feeling that President Kennedy was not in control of his own government.
Paris was in turmoil. At dawn on
Saturday morning, April 22 (1961), a group of retired French generals had
seized power in Algiers to block President Charles de Gaulle from settling the
long, bloody war for Algerian Independence. Rumors quickly spread that the coup
plotters were coming next for de Gaulle himself, and that the skies over Paris
would soon be filled with battle-hardened paratroopers and French Foreign
Legionnaires from Algeria. Gripped by the dying convulsions of his colonial
reign, France braced for a calamitous showdown.
The threat to French democracy was
actually even more immediate than feared. On Saturday evening, two units of
paratroopers totaling over two thousand men huddled in the Forest of Orleans
and the Forest of Rambouillet, not much more than an hour outside Paris. The rebellious
paratroopers were poised for the final command to join up with tank units from
Rambouillet and converge on the capitol, with the aim of seizing the Elysee
Palace and other key government posts. By Sunday panic was sweeping through
Paris. All air traffic was halted over the area, the Metro was shut down, and
cinemas were dark. Only the cafes remained open, where Parisians crowded
anxiously to swap the latest gossip.
News that the coup was being led by
the widely admired Maurice Challe, a former air force chief and commander of
French forces in Algeria, stunned the government in Paris, from de Gaulle down.
DeGaulle quickly concluded that
Challe must be acting with the support of U.S. intelligence, and Elysee
officials began spreading this word to the press. Shortly before his resignation
from the French military Challe had served as NATO commander in chief, and he
had developed close relations with a number of high-ranking U.S. officers
stationed in the military alliance’s Fontainebleau headquarters….In
panic-gripped Paris, reports of U.S. involvement in the coup filled newspapers
across the political spectrum.
Dulles was forced to issue a strong
denial of CIA involvement in the putsch…C.I. Sulzberger, the CIA-friendly New
York Times columnist, took up the agency’s defense, echoing Dulles’ indignant
denial….The New York Times’s Scotty Reston was more aligned with the sentiments
of the Kennedy White House. Echoing the charges circulating in the French
press, Reston reported that the CIA was indeed ‘involved in an embarrassing
liaison with the anti-Gaullist officers.’ Reston communicated the rising fury
in JFK’s inner circle over the CIA’s rogue behavior, in the wake of the Bay of
Pigs fiasco and the French escapade: “All this has increased the feeling in the
White House that the CIA has gone beyond the bounds of an objective
intelligence-gathering agency and has become the advocate of men and policies
that have embarrassed the Administration.”
Allen Dulles was once again making
his own policy, this time in France.
In his war memoirs, de Gaulle accused
Dulles of being part of “a scheme’ that was determined to “silence or set aside”
the French general.
As he continued to wrestle with
fallout from the Bay of Pigs crisis, JFK was suddenly besieged with howls of
outrage from a major ally, accusing his own security services of seditious
activity. It was a stinging embarrassment for the new American president, who
was scheduled to fly to Paris for a state visit the following month. To add to
the insult, the coup had been triggered by de Gaulle’s efforts to bring French
colonial rule in Algeria to an end – a goal that JFK himself had ardently
championed.
JFK took pains to assure Paris that
he strongly supported de Gaulle’s presidency, phoning Herve Alphand, the French
ambassador in Washington, to directly communicate these assurances. But,
according to Alphand, Kennedy’s disavowal of official U.S. involvement in the
coup came with a disturbing addendum – the American president could not vouch
for his own intelligence agency. Kennedy told Alphand that “the CIA is such a
vast and poorly controlled machine that the most unlikely unlikely maneuvers
might be true.”
Kennedy’s strong show of support for
de Gaulle undoubtedly helped fortify French resolve against the rebellious
generals. In the midst of the crisis, the American president issued a public
message to de Gaulle, telling him, “In this grave hour for France, I want you
to know of my continuing friendship and support as well as that of the American
people.”
But it was de Gaulle himself, and
the French people, who turned the tide against the coup.
By Sunday, the second day of the
coup, a dark foreboding had settled over Paris.
But at eight o’clock that evening, a
defiant de Gaulle went on the air as nearly all of France gathered around the
TV, and rallied his nation with the most inspiring address of his long public
career…The nation had been betrayed “by men whose duty, honor and reason d’etre
it was to serve and obey.” Now it was the duty of every French citizen to
protect the nation from these military traitors. “In the name of France,” de
Gaulle shouted, thumping the table in front of him, “I order that all means – I
repeat all means – be employed to block the road everywhere to those men!”
De Gaulle’s final words were a
battle cry. “francaises, Francaises! Aidez-moi!” And all over France, millions
of people did rush to the aid of their nation. The following day, a general
strike was organized to protest the putsch….Even police officers associations
expressed “complete solidarity” with the protests….Hundreds of people rushed to
the nation’s airfields and prepared to block the runways with their vehicles if
Challe’s plotters tried to land. Others gathered outside government ministries
in Paris to guard them against attack.
“In many ways, France, and
particularly Paris, relieved its great revolutionary past Sunday night and
Monday- the past of the revolutionary barricades, of vigilance committees and
workers’ councils,” reported the New York Times.
Meanwhile, de Gaulle moved quickly
to arrest military officers in France who were involved in the coup.
By Tuesday night, Challe knew that
the coup had failed. The next day he surrendered and was flown to Paris.
Challe expected to face a firing
squad, but de Gaulle’s military tribunal proved surprisingly merciful,
sentencing the fifty-five year-old general to fifteen years in prison.
Following the Algiers putsch, de
Gaulle remained an assassination target – particularly during the explosive
months before and after he finally recognized Algerian independence in July
1962. The most dramatic attempt on his life was staged the next month by the
OAS – an ambush made famous in the Frederick Forsyth novel and movie The Day of
the Jackal. As de Gaulle’s black Citroen sped along the Avenue de la Liberation
in Paris, with the president and his wife in the rear seat, a dozen OAS snipers
opened fire on the vehicle. Two of the president’s motorcycle bodyguards were
killed – and the bullet-riddled Citroen skidded sharply. But de Gaulle was
fortunate to have a skilled and loyal security team, and his chauffeur was able
to pull the car out of its spin and speed to safety, despite all four tires’
being shot out. The president and his wife, who kept their heads down
throughout the fusillade, escaped unharmed.
Because of the security measures he
took, Charles de Gaulle survived his tumultuous presidency. He died of a heart
attack the year after he left office, just short of his eightieth birthday,
slumping over quietly in his armchair after watching the evening news.
President Kennedy only met once with
de Gaulle, on his state visit to Paris at the end of May 1961, a month after
the failed coup. The president and First Lady were feted at a banquet in Elysee
Palace, where the old general – dazzled by Jackie – leaned down closely to hear
every breathy word she spoke to him, in fluent French. During the three-day
visit, the two heads of state discussed many pressing issues, from Laos to
Berlin to Cuba. But Kennedy and de Gaulle never broached the touchy subject of
the coup, much less the CIA’s involvement in it. As French journalist Vincent
Jauvert later observed, “Why wake up old demons who had barely fallen asleep?”
Kennedy knew that he would have to
resume wrestling with those demons as soon as he returned home. He would have
to decide how deeply to purge his own security agencies, as de Gaulle had
already begun to do in France. Kennedy knew there would be steep political
costs involved in taking on the CIA and Pentagon….Shaken by the traumatic
events in Cuba and France, JFK was ready to remake his government….
Overseas, the speculation about Kennedy’s murder – and the suspicious shooting of his alleged assassin – was even more rampant.
Overseas, the speculation about Kennedy’s murder – and the suspicious shooting of his alleged assassin – was even more rampant.
Suspicions of a conspiracy were
particularly strong in France, where President de Gaulle himself had been the
target of CIA machinations and had survived a barrage of gunfire in his own
limousine. After returning from Kennedy's November 24 funeral in Washington, de
Gaulle gave a remarkably candid assessment of the assassination to his
information minister, Alain Peyrefitte. “What happened to Kennedy is what
nearly happened to me,” confided the French president. “His story is the same
as mine…It looks like a cowboy story, but it’s only an OAS (Secret Army
Organization) story. The security forces were in cahoots with the extremists.”
“Do you think Oswald was a front?”
Peyrefitte asked de Gaulle.
“Everything leads me to believe it,”
he replied. “They got their hands on this communists who wasn’t one, while
still being one. He had a subpar intellect and was an exalted fanatic – just the
man they needed, the perfect one to be accused. ..The guy ran away, because he
probably became suspicious. They wanted to kill him on the spot before he could
be grabbed by the judicial system. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen exactly the
way they had probably planned it would…But a trial, you realize, is just
terrible. People would have talked. They would have dug up so much! They would
have unearthed everything. Then the security forces went looking for [a clean-up
man] they totally controlled, and who couldn’t refuse their offer, and that guy
sacrificed himself to kill the fake assassin – supposedly in defense of Kennedy’s
memory!
“Baloney! Security forces all over
the world are the same when they do this kind of dirty work. As soon as they
succeed in wiping out the false assassin, they declare that the justice system
no longer need be concerned, that no further public action was needed now that
the guilty perpetrator was dead. Better to assassinate an innocent man than to
let a civil war break out. Better an injustice than disorder.
“America is in danger of upheavals.
But you’ll see. All of them together will observe the law of silence. They will
close ranks. They'll d’ everything to stifle any scandal. They will throw Noah’s
cloak over these shameful deeds. In order to not lose face in front of the
whole world. In order to not risk unleashing riots in the United States. In
order to preserve the union and to avoid a new civil war. In order to now ask
themselves questions. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to find out.
They won’t allow themselves to find out.”
A half century later, this extraordinary commentary
by the French leader – a political colossus of the twentieth century – remains one
of the most disturbing and insightful perspectives on this traumatic American
event. They don’t want to find out. They won’t allow themselves to find out.
