shocked by the generals coup that they had to find a scapegoat. At the same time he quoted one of the highest officials of the French government as saying:

Of course, your government, neither your State Department nor your President, had anything to do with this. But when you have so many hundreds of agents in every part of the world, it is not to be wondered at that some of them should have got in touch with the generals in Algiers.7

Time magazine discounted the story, saying too that the United States was being made a scapegoat and that the CIA had become a favorite target in recent weeks .8 James Reston wrote in the New York Times that the CIA:

was involved in an embarrassing liaison with the anti-Gaullist officers who staged last weeks insurrection in Algiers ... [the Bay of Pigs and Algerian events have] 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.9

However, C.L. Sulzberger, who had been the man at the New York Times closest to the CIA since its founding, stated flatly that No American in Algeria had to do with any insurrectional leader ... No consular employee saw any rebel. (A few days later, though, Secretary of State Dean Rusk disclosed that an emissary of the rebellious French generals had visited the US Consulate in Algiers to request aid but had been summarily rebuffed.)

The affair, wrote Sulzberger, was a deliberate effort to poison Franco-American relationships begun in Moscow but abetted by anti-American French officials and naive persons in Washington ... When one checks, one finds all this began in a Moscow Izvestia article April 25. 10 This last, as we have seen, was incorrect.

Dean of American columnists, Walter Lippmann, who had seen de Gaulle in Paris shortly before the putsch, wrote:

the reason why the French Government has not really exculpated the CIA of encouraging the Algerian rebel generals is that it was already so angry with the CIA for meddling in French internal politics. The French grievance, justified or not, has to do with recent French legislation for the French nuclear weapon, and the alleged effort of CIA agents to interfere with that legislation.11

Newsweek repeated the claim that it was French officials who had been the main sources of the rumors in the first place. When challenged by the American administration the French denied their authorship and tended to soften the charges. Some French officials eventually declared the matter to be closed, though they still failed to explicitly rule out the allegations about American involvement.12

In early May 1961, LExpress, the widely-read French liberal weekly, published what was perhaps the first detailed account of the mysterious affair. Their Algerian correspondent, Claude Krief, reported:13

Both in Paris and Washington the facts are now known, though they will never be publicly admitted. In private, the highest French personalities make no secret of it. What they say is this; The CIA played a direct part in the Algiers coup, and certainly weighed heavily on the decision taken by ex-general Challe to start his

putsch.

Not long before, Challe had held the position of NATO Commander-in-Chief, Allied Forces, Central Europe, as a result of which he had been in daily contact with US

military officers.14 Krief wrote that certain American officials in NATO and the Pentagon had encouraged Challe, and that the general had several meetings with CIA officers who told him that to get rid of de Gaulle would render the Free World a great service . Krief noted that Challe, despite an overweening ambition, was very cautious and serious-minded: All the people who know him well, are deeply convinced that he had been encouraged by the CIA to go ahead.

At a luncheon in Washington the previous year, Jacques Soustelle, the former Governor-General of Algeria who had made public his disagreement with de Gaulles Algeria policy, had met with CIA officials, including Richard Bissell, head of covert operations. Soustelle convinced the Agency officials, according to Krief, that Algeria would become, through de Gaulles blundering, a Soviet base . This luncheon became something of a cause celebre in the speculation concerning the CIAs possible role. The New York Times and others reported that it had been given by the Agency for Soustelle.15 US officials, however, insisted that the luncheon had been arranged by someone at the French Embassy at Soustelles request. This French official, they said, had been present throughout the meeting and thus there could have been no dark conspiracy.16 Why the French Embassy would host a luncheon for a prominent and bitter foe of de Gaulle, a man who only two months earlier had been kicked out of de Gaulles cabinet for his ultra sympathies, was not explained. Nor, for that matter, why in protocol-minded Washington of all places, the CIA would attend. In any event, it seems somewhat fatuous to imply that this was the only chance Soustelle and the CIA had to talk during his stay in the United States, which lasted more than a week.

A clandestine meeting in Madrid also received wide currency within the controversy. Krief dates it 12 April 1961, and describes it as a meeting of various foreign agents, including members of the CIA and the Algiers conspirators, who disclosed their plans to the CIA men . The Americans were reported to have angrily complained that de Gaulles policy was paralyzing NATO and rendering the defense of Europe impossible , and assured the generals that if they and their followers succeeded, Washington would recognize the new Algerian Government within 48 hours.

It may well be that the French Government did have evidence of the CIAs complicity. But in the unnatural world of international diplomacy, this would not necessarily lead to an unambiguous public announcement. Such a move could result in an open confrontation between France and the United States, a predicament both sides could be expected to take pains to avoid. Moreover, it might put the French in the position of having to do something about it. And what could they do? Breaking relations with the United States was not a realistic option; neither were the French in any position to retaliate economically or militarily. But French leaders were too angry to simply let the matter pass into obscurity. Thus, to complete the hypothetical scenario, they took the backdoor approach with all its shortcomings.

In a similar vein, the United States knew that the Russians, for at least one year, were intercepting telephone calls in the US of government and congressional officials, but said nothing publicly because it was unable to end the practice for technical reasons.17 And this concerned an enemy , not an ally.

Between 1958 and the middle of the 1960s, there occurred some 30 serious assassination attempts upon the life of Charles de Gaulle, in addition to any number of planned attempts which didnt advance much beyond the planning stage.18 A world record for a head of state, it is said. In at least one of the attempts, the CIA may have been a co-conspirator against the French president. By the mid-1960s, differences

between de Gaulle and Washington concerning NATO had almost reached the breaking point; in February 1966, he gave NATO and the United States a deadline to either place their military bases in France under French control or dismantle them.

In 1975, the Chicago Tribune featured a front-page story which read in part:

Congressional leaders have been told of Central Intelligence Agency involvement in a plot by French dissidents to assassinate the late French President Charles De Gaulle. Within the last two weeks, a CIA representative disclosed sketchy details of the scheme ... Sometime in the mid-1960s-probably in 1965 or 1966- dissidents in the De Gaulle government are said to have -made contact with the CIA to seek help in a plot to murder the French leader. Which party instigated the contact was not clear... According to the CIA briefing officer, discussions were held on how best to eliminate De Gaulle, who by then had become a thorn in the side of the Johnson administration because of his ouster of American military bases from French soil and his demands that United States forces be withdrawn from the Indochina War. Thus the following plan is said to have evolved after discussions between CIA personnel and the dissident French. There is, however, no evidence the plot got beyond the talking stage.

A hired assassin, armed with a poison ring, was to be slipped into a crowd of old soldiers of France when General De Gaulle was to be the host at a reception for them. The killer would make his appearance late in the day when it could be presumed De Gaulles hand would be weary and perhaps even numb from shaking hundreds of hands. The assassin would clasp the generals hand in lethal friendship and De Gaulle would fail to detect the tiny pin prick of poison as it penetrated his flesh. The executioner would stroll off to become lost in the crowd as the poison began coursing through De Gaulles veins either to his heart or brain, depending on the deadly poison used. How quickly death would come was not divulged, if that was even discussed at the time ...

In the outline presented to the congressional leaders, there is no hint of what the CIAs actual role might have been had the plot reached fruition.19

The dissidents involved in the alleged plot were embittered French army officers and former Algerian settlers who still bore deep resentment toward de Gaulle for having sold out French honor by his retreat from the North African colony.

There was no mention in the reported CIA testimony about any involvement of Lyndon Johnson, although it was well known that there was no love lost between Johnson and de Gaulle. The French leader was firmly convinced that the United States was behind the failure of his trip to South America in 1964. He believed that the CIA had used its network of agents in South America to prevent a big turnout of crowds.20 There is some evidence to indicate that the General was not just paranoid. In 1970, Dr Alfred Stepan, a professor of political science at Yale, testified before Congress about his experience in South America in 1964 when be was a journalist for The Economist.

When De Gaulle was going to make his trip through Latin America, many of the Latin Americans interviewed [officers of various embassies] said that they were under very real pressure by various American groups not to be very warm towards De Gaulle, because we considered Latin America within the United States area of influence.21

After the appearance of the Chicago Tribune story, CIA Director William Colby confirmed that foreigners had approached the Agency with a plot to kill de Gaulle. The Agency rejected the idea, Colby said, but he did not know if the French government had been advised of the plot.22 It is not clear whether the incident referred to by Colby was related to the one discussed in the Tribune.