-Caveat Lector-
excerpts from:
Unhealed Wounds - France and the Klaus Barbie Affair
Erna Paris©1985 All Rights Reserved
ISBN 0-394-55390-X
Grove Press, Inc.
196 West Houston St.
New York, NY 10014
Methuen Publications, Canada(1985)
252pps. - first edition - out-of-print
--[2]--
-9-
HOW THE MERGER OF THE LEFT AND THE RIGHT
LED DIRECTLY TO THE KLAUS BARBIE AFFAIR
In 1939, Amin El Hussein, the ex-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, took refuge from
the British, escaped to Germany and attached himself and his followers to the
Nazi cause. Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief, was delighted. It wasn't every
day that a regiment of sympathetic Moslems joined the German war movement.
Himmler respected the Mufti and often complimented him on his blue eyes,
which he liked to describe as "appropriately Nordic"; but it was in a written
note to the Mufti that Himmler eventually struck a chord that would resound
as a leit-motif for the future and survive four decades to influence the
context of the Klaus Barbie affair. "The struggle against Judaism is at the
very heart of the natural alliance between National Socialism and those Arab
Moslems who burn with a desire for freedom," he wrote. "This alliance will
endure until the final victory."[1]
In 1955, the Mufti resurfaced at the seminal conference of Bandung,
Indonesia, where the idea of the Third World first took hold. Twenty-nine
countries from Africa and Asia (representing more than one-half of the
world's population) sent delegates to discuss common problems, with an
emphasis on colonialism. Among the Arab countries, however, hatred of Israel
quickly emerged as a common theme. The representative from Iraq spoke of "the
force of evil," and called Zionism "one of the blackest, most somber chapters
in human history." Nasser had a few choice words to say in a similar vein.
But the most surprising and convincing polemic of all came from Amin El
Hussein who arrived on a surprise visit as the representative of Yemen (a
country he had apparently never seen) and proceeded to reveal to the
collected constituents that the real ambition of Israel was to annex the
entire Middle East.[2]
The anti-Israel resolution was one of the very few everyone agreed upon.
Israel, the conference concluded, was a base for imperialism and a threat to
peace in the Middle East and the entire world.
The Bandung conference consecrated a new era in the history of
anticolonialism and soon acquired a profound symbolic significance. Jacques
Verge's referred to it emotionally in 1960 during the trial of the Jeanson
network, while lecturing one of the judges:
What has been asked of you ... for six years since the beginning of the war
in Algeria i's this: that you condemn ... these Algerians, these men who do
not speak the French language, these men whose religion is Islam, these men
who thrill to belong to the fraternity of Bandung, the fraternity of the
African people, all of whom are now independent ... [3]
In retrospect, Bandung can also be seen as the first comprehensive,
international opposition on the part of Third World liberation movements to
Israel, Zionism and eventually to Jews outside of Israel. That same year,
propaganda coming out of Cairo had already begun to blur the distinction
between "Zionist" and "Jew." "Our duty is to war against the Jews for the
love of God and religion . . . " read a statement that appeared not in a
theological treatise, but in a local newspaper, Al Ahram.[4] By the time
Adolf Eichmann was tried in Israel in 1961, revisionist history claiming to
link Zionists and Hitler was beginning to appear on a regular basis,
particularly in the Soviet Union. The "Zionist-Hitler conspiracy theory" was
precisely the same "line" that Francois Genoud put forward in his interview
with L'Hebdo magazine in Lausanne a full quarter of a century later. Genoud,
of course, was already working in Egyptian information services when the new
Left-Right anti-Zionist ideology began to take shape.
In the 1950s, radical anti-Zionist propaganda began to dip into a ready pool
of traditional anti-Semitic literature that had been circulating years before
both in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion was republished for an entirely new audience. In 1983, French historian
Leon Poliakov estimated that there were more than a dozen editions of the
book available in Arabic alone.
Hitler's Mein Kampf was also translated into Arabic, along with other
mainstays of Nazi anti-Semitic literature. Talmudic Human Sacrifices appeared
in 1962; The Danger of World Jewry for Islam in 1963; Why I Hate Israel in
1964; and Sexual Crimes of the Jews in 1965. In 1968, some Arab theologians
began referring to "the innate nature of the Jews" and suggesting that
non-Jews could acquire these nefarious characteristics "by coexisting with
Jews."[5] And three of Joseph Goebbels' former associates[6] immigrated to
Egypt, where their main contribution was to put together a work called The
Plot Against the Church, in which they sought to subvert the liberal plans of
Pope John XXIII to remove anti-Jewish content from the Catholic liturgy.
>From time to time the seams showed in the most revealing way. For example, in
September 1972, the Soviet embassy in Paris put out a bulletin containing a
basically conventional attack on the policies of the Israeli government.
Astonishingly, the document included part of the text of The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, which had been reprinted word for word, including spelling
mistakes, just as it was originally reedited for the Czar. There was,
however, one change: throughout the text, the word "Zionist" had been
substituted for the word "Jew."
A decade later, the mix of neo-Nazi and Palestinian anti-Semitic propaganda
was still in evidence. Present at the 1983 meeting of the Institute for
Historical Review in Los Angeles, an association openly dedicated to
rewriting the history of World War II, were well-known individuals
representing themselves and/or every extremist, racist association in the
world. They included the Ku Klux Klan, Robert Faurisson of France (who was
one of the first to assert in the name of "free speech" that there were no
gas chambers in Auschwitz), and Wallis Carto, president of the right-wing
Liberty Lobby in the United States with direct connections to Palestinian
businessman Issah Nakhleh, purveyor of anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic literature
to the United States, -among other countries.[7]
After the humiliating defeat of the Arab states by Israel in 1967, the
Bandung fraternity turned its collective attention to the crisis of the
Palestinian people. Negotiation seemed out of the question on both sides as
mutual Israeli-Arab recriminations mushroomed. El Fatah and the PFLP of
George Habbash intensified their efforts to attract financing and other aid
from the non-Arab world, particularly from neo-Nazis in Europe and Latin
America who had money as well as propaganda and military experience. In April
1969, a congress of the neo-Nazi Neue Europaische Ordnung was held in
Barcelona with fifty delegates from Europe and Latin America, most of them
former SS officers, nostalgic Vichyists and Franco supporters. The New
European Order had been a strictly Nazi-oriented outfit, but now, fifteen
years later, the focus of their international meeting was the Palestinians.
Yasser Arafat sent a representative from El Fatah to explain the needs of the
PLO and present two requests. The first concerned the need to recruit
non-Arabs for sabotage operations, fund-raising, arms supply and the
mobilizing of mercenaries and foreign instructors for training camps. The
second request was for money for the dissemination of anti-Zionist propaganda
in Europe and South America, including a wider distribution of the Protocols.
The El Fatah representative convinced several former Nazis to work directly
for the cause. Karl Van de Put, a Belgian who had served Germany in the
Afrika Korps, offered to recruit young Europeans with military experience for
El Fatah. Former Nazi officer Johann N. Schuller was already involved in arms
sales to El Fatah. He had also begun to recruit former Nazi officers as
instructors in El Fatah guerrilla training camps.
Even the ubiquitous ex-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem turned up in discussion. It
was announced that he had recently formed a new unit of sabotage.
Palestinian leaders began advertising in the Nationalzeitung in Munich asking
for volunteer "war correspondents" with "tank experience" to fight Zionist
imperialism. By the late 1960s, satellite television was able to transmit
events all over the globe, rendering the possibilities for propaganda almost
limitless. "We think that killing one Jew far from the field of battle is
more effective than killing a hundred Jews on the field of battle, because it
attracts more attention," Dr. Habbash confided several years later in an
interview with Oriana Fallaci.[8] It is worth noting that he spoke of "Jews"
and not "Zionists" as the targets of terrorism. Before 1970 his PFLP had
hijacked several foreign planes in full view of an international audience and
blown up four, killing Jews and Gentiles alike.
Given his passionate involvement with the cause of Arab nationalism, no one
was particularly surprised to see Jacques Verges resurface in 1965 as defense
lawyer for Mohammed Hajjazzi, one of the first El Fatah terrorists
apprehended in Israel. Since the sensational FLN trials, Verges's reputation
had grown considerably, and he was asked by Arafat to take on the Hajjazzi
case and politicize it in his own way. In particular, the PLO leadership
wanted him to hold an international press conference in which he would level
accusations at Israel. Verges agreed, with some reservations, warning the PLO
that he would be expelled from Israel if he followed such instructions. The
leadership insisted, nonetheless; Verge's gave his speech; and he was
expelled from Israel, as expected.
One day the following year, while idly flicking through a newspaper, Verges
happened to notice that the Hajjazzi trial was about to open the next day in
Israel. Never one knowingly to miss out on the action or to let an
opportunity for propaganda slip by, Verges informed two people that he was
leaving immediately for Israel: a reporter from Le Monde and the information
officer from the Israeli embassy.
"But you can't go there," shouted the information officer.
"I'll take responsibility for that," replied Verges. "You take responsibility
for arresting me."
Verges was greeted by a police officer on his arrival at Tel Aviv airport and
taken to a hotel for the night before being dispatched back to Paris. His
every act was political, if not childish. He ordered a meat meal with milk to
insult the Israelis whom he supposed were kosher in their eating habits. He
insisted on having a bottle of Evian mineral water to remind those watching
him of the Evian agreement between France and Algeria.
A reporter from Haaretz stood under his window and called out: "A
declaration, Maitre Verges."
Verge's just happened to have a declaration prepared, in which he attacked
the state of Israel. He threw it out of the window.
The following morning, in the airplane, the stewardess showed him the latest
issue of Haaretz. "And that is how Hajjazzi learned about the PLO position on
his trial," Verge's later recounted.[10]
Such abrupt comings and goings compelled a spokesman for the Israeli embassy
in Paris to provide an explanation. "Monsieur Verges was more interested in
progapanda[sic] than the defense of his client. In public declarations he
permitted himself to deny the existence of Israel and to defame the judiciary
of our country," explained a spokesman.[11] The propaganda mission, however,
had been a resounding success.
In December 1968 and February 1969, PFLP terrorists hijacked El Al planes in
Athens and Zurich respectively, and at their subse-quent trial in Winterthur,
Switzerland, they chose Jacques Verges as their legal counsel. Although he
was once again refused permission to participate, Verges went anyway, as an
adviser. Also present as an "adviser" was Francois Genoud.
The possibilities for propaganda at the Winterthur trial were too important
to be left to amateurs. There were international press con-ferences, and an
anti-Zionist brochure called The White Book was widely circulated. The
defense was paid by the Banque Commerciale Arabe, which had by then adopted
the Palestinians primarily on the
recommendation of Ali Hassan Salameh, otherwise known as Abu Hassan, the
leader of the Black September terrorist cell that was later responsible for
the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Abu Hassan lived
in Switzerland, where he had established an easy friendship with Francois
Genoud.
(In 1982, Genoud publicly acknowledged his deep involvement with El
Fatah.[12] In fact, he had long looked after their European oper-ations from
every point of view. He gave advice regarding the invest-ing of huge amounts
of money donated to the cause, not least from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi who
contributed $50 million to the PLO after the Munich assassinations. He
provided legal counsel for Fatah men who needed help in Switzerland and
underwrote other costs — including at least a partial subsidizing of a
multinational terrorist organization that had set up shop in Paris first
under the leadership of Mohammed Boudia — who was murdered by the Israeli
secret service in 1973 — then under Carlos the Jackal.[13] He was, in his own
words, "an economic counselor with a special interest in the development
problems of the Third World"[14] Indeed, his interest in "development
problems" led him to continue his business dealings as an arms mer-chant
specializing in sales to the Palestinians.15)
As for Jacques Verges, his contribution to the important propaganda function
of the 1969 Palestinian trials in Winterthur was two- fold. First he held a
press conference, during which he claimed that an article in L'Express had
accused Israel of using El Al passenger flights to transport military
material at the time of the June 1967 war. The plane the writer had traveled
on "contained military equipment for Mirage fighters that was loaded at
Bordeaux. There were no passengers on board, with one illustrious exception:
Baron Rothschild," said Verges, presumably quoting from the article. "There
you have a reference [to Israeli activity] that does not come from a
Palestinian source but from a fellow journalist," he told the reporters.
No one in the room could have been expected to remember the actual article,
which had appeared two years earlier, and reporters dutifully filed their
copy. But the next day, journalist Jacques Derogy, the author of the
L'Express article that Verges had quoted," was more' than surprised to read
the Paris papers. His article had said nothing at all about military
equipment on board the El Al jet. Furthermore, he had written that there were
162 passengers on board.[16]
Derogy knew Verge's personally, and he confronted him the next time they met.
"Verge's said he didn't remember," recalled Derogy. "But what he said at the
press conference was an absolute he."
Verges's second propaganda contribution was to write a book on behalf of the
Palestinians, picking up on the charges he had attributed to Jacques Derogy.
For the Fedayeen was published in 1969 by Les Editions de Minuit, with a
laudatory preface by the publisher, Jerome Lindon. Both Lindon and Verges
concluded their remarks with a highly romantic apologia for armed liberation.
Indeed, ten years before the Islamic revolution in Iran, Verges forshadowed
the notion of holy combat. "There are privileged places where the heart of
the Palestinian resistance beats," he wrote. "The prison Corydalos of Athens
is one of them. On Christmas Eve, 1968, the Resistance confided to Mohammed
Mahmoud, the teacher, and to Souleiman Maher, the student, their mission of
sacrifice . . . "[17]
In the book, Verge's defended the "resistance fighters" by blaming El Al and
the government of Israel for the fact that there were passengers in the plane
when the terrorists destroyed it; and he characterized the killing of one of
the Palestinians at the Zurich airport as a "war crime." But the central —
and more sinister — message of the book lay in the warning (really a threat)
it contained. "Why conduct attacks on foreign territory?" asked Verges
rhetorically. "Common sense provides the answer. El Al is everywhere. As for
the neutrality of the host countries ... [they] loan their airports for
military purposes, the logistical apparatus of the Israeli camp . . .
"Countries that provide transit permits [and other privileges] to these
planes have only to provide guarantees that the planes will not be used for
military purposes ... The Palestinian Resistance cannot accept secret Zionist
agents in these neutral states."
Verges had reintroduced his strategy of disruption. The accused becomes
accuser; the terrorist is a hero who is sinned against; and the real
aggressor is the victim. It was Israel's fault that the Palestinians killed
El Al passengers, and the fault of Switzerland and Greece that terrorist
actions occurred on their soil. The book also afforded a re-vealing glimpse
into the ideology that informed Verge's's thinking. Is-rael is described as
the "New Empire" populated by a "race of seigneurs "Zionist" and "Jew" appear
interchangeably. Talk of the Hitler death camps is "blackmail." The Eichmann
trial was a "parody." Zionism is "racism" and is supported by such
"international millionaires" as the "Rothschild barons." For the Fedayeen
seemed to resurrect the worldwide Jewish conspiracy for new service in a new
age.
By the late 1960s, the Palestinians were heroes in Europe, and nowhere more
so than in Paris. The war in Algeria was succeeded by the U.S. war in
Vietnam, and for a while thousands of young intellec-tuals In Europe and
North America made sure they owned at least the minimal badge of political
correctness -a poster of Che Guevara dis-played on the dormitory wall. The
world divided for a time into sim-plistic categories of "us" and "them," of
good and evil; and perhaps nowhere more so than in France, where to follow
intellectual fashion was absolutely de rigueur, and where divisions between
the political Right and Left had existed since the days of the 1789
Revolution.
During the 1960s, Jacques Verges was a man to contend with. He exuded fame.
Success clung to him like an erotic perfume, the macho aura of a fearless
tough guy who had proved he could slay giants. So on February 23, 1970, the
news that he had disappeared — simply vanished into thin air — took just
about everyone by surprise. On that day, Verge's attended an anticolonial
rally in Paris. Speakers stood under portraits of Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh
and Lenin. (Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver was supposed to show up but
didn't.) It was an important event, and "Ie tout Paris" of a left-wing
persuasion was present.
After the meeting ended, Verges announced he was going on a business trip to
Spain. Then he seemed to disappear off the face of the earth. Most people
thought he had been murdered (the most widely believed story was that he had
been set in concrete and dropped into the Mediterranean, Mafia-style). He
certainly had plenty of enemies. The French Algerians who had been forced to
leave the former colony after the war ended might well have wished him dead.
Ahmed Ben Bella hadn't exactly been a friend since Verge's had veered in the
direction of Chairman Mao. The Israeli secret services might have decided he
should disappear; as might a rival Palestinian faction. After a few months,
however, Jerome Lindon received a postcard. It said, "I am free and in good
health." There was no return address.
Speculation then began in earnest. Some people were convinced Verges was in a
Libyan terrorist training camp under the tutelage of Colonel Gaddafi; others
thought he was in the Soviet Union training to be a secret agent; still
others, believed he was in Cambodia with his old friend Pol Pot, while the
latter briefly occupied the center of the world stage. If any of his friends
knew where he was, they weren't saying.
Jacques Verges was spotted one day in late 1978, buying groceries on the rue
Lepic in Montmartre. He had nothing at all to say about his eight lost years
except to add mischievously to the mystery that surrounded his person. "I am
a discreet man," he allowed in 1983. "I stepped through the looking glass,
where I served an apprenticeship . . . "
Verge's returned to the practice of law with a vengeance, this time as
counsel for Klaus Croissant, one of the lawyers for the Baader-Meinhof band.
Croissant had been extradited from France at the request of the West German
government on charges of having assisted a terrorist association. Croissant
was convicted and imprisoned in Stuttgart from November 1977 until December
1979, and on his release he expressed a wish to return to France. Verge's
took the case to the media — as usual — and in doing so explained what he
considered the role of a lawyer to be. "A lawyer worthy of the name, whether
he be of the Left or the Right, has the duty to help [a political prisoner]
enlighten the court on the political context of his legal struggle ... Did I
do anything other than this during the Algerian war?" he asked.
But it was 1982 before the connections between the Palestinian Left and the
Nazi Right resurfaced anew, and once again Jacques Verge's was a principal
player in the drama. So was his old friend Francois Genoud. The case
concerned the Paris trial of two terrorists known as the "friends of Carlos."
Bruno Breguet, a twelve-year veteran of proPalestinian terrorist action, and
Magdalena Kopp, formerly of the Baader-Meinhof band, had been intercepted by
the Paris police while carrying grenades and guns and four kilos of
explosives in a borrowed car, that was parked just off the Champs Elysees.
Jacques Verges was their lawyer and public apologist.
Bruno Breguet had been on the terror circuit for more than a de-cade. In
1970, at the age of twenty, the young Swiss had been sent by George Habbash
to plant a bomb in the Israeli port of Haifa (he was caught with dynamite on
his person and jailed in Israel); but the most intriguing fact about the
young left-wing revolutionary was that he became a protege of his fellow
countryman Francois Genoud, a Nazi.
(Genoud later acknowledged his relationship with the PFLP.[18] He cor-rected
a journalist who had written he had "no connection" by saying he had "no
particular connection," but had "met Habbash one or two times. ")
In 1970, when the original Bruno Breguet case broke in Israel, Genoud, who
was, in his own words, "very available," traveled to Breguet's hometown of
Tessin, Switzerland, to meet with the young man's family. "They were lovely
people," he recalled with the mild-ness of a fond uncle. "I tried to help
them. "
Help consisted once again of "advice" and the recommendation of a young
lawyer (who later became Genoud's son-in-law).
"I was quite taken by the youth of this fellow citizen who had participated
in this affair a little bit like a Boy Scout. At a time when so many young
people didn't care about anything at all, he set off ... to do something
'interesting'," recalled Genoud. According to Le Monde," Genoud paid for
Breguet's legal costs and set up a support committee on his behalf. Given his
relationship as a banker to the FLN and his connections with El Fatah and the
PFLP, providing such financing was perfectly consistent behavior for Genoud.
Breguet was sentenced to fifteen years in prison in Israel, but released
after seven following a vigorous publicity and lobbying campaign conducted by
the Breguet support committee. His first free act was to visit Lausanne to
thank his benefactor. Genoud is vague about their subsequent relationship.
"I've seen him a few times since [his release from prison]. Sometimes he
sends me a postcard," he allowed.[20] Bruno Breguet resumed his activities.
By the late 1970s he, too, was involved in assisting the PLO in Europe
through the Carlos network. When the Breguet-Kopp case came to trial in 1982,
it was widely believed that Francois Genoud had once again paid Breguet's
legal costs with money that had, after all, been earmarked for aid to the
Palestinian cause. Breguet was a member of the PFLP, and Genoud was a
longtime supporter of the same organization. Breguet had also lived in Berlin
for a period during the 1970s, where he had had easy access to the neo-Nazi
groups that were dear to the heart of his benefactor. According to writer
Claire Sterling, Genoud helped finance the Carlos network in Paris in the
early 1970s. Ten years later it became evident that Bruno Breguet and
Magdalena Kopp worked in the same network. In February 1982, Carlos sent a
letter to the French embassy in The Hague demanding the release of Breguet
and Kopp. "You have arrested members of my organization,"[21] he wrote by way
of information. Carlos gave the French government one month to accede to his
request, but the letter was leaked to the press, and naturally the government
refused.
There was no hard evidence to connect the events, but four days after the
deadline expired a bomb exploded on the Paris-Toulouse train killing five
people. The following day, the French Cultural Center in Beirut was damaged.
On April 15, a French military officer and his pregnant wife were shot at
point-blank range when they opened the door to their apartment in Beirut. On
April 18, two bombs exploded simultaneously in Vienna, one, at the Air France
head office, the other in the garden of the French embassy.
When the trial opened on April 17, Jacques Verge's suggested that the
explosives found in his clients' car might have been planted there by an
Israeli agent. He also made his own position perfectly clear. "I do not hide
the fact that I respect and esteem the two accused," he declared. Then he
dropped a bombshell. There was, he claimed, an "unwritten but negotiated
agreement" between France and the PLO to the effect that apprehended
terrorists would be driven to the border and released as long as they had not
committed any act against France itself. Robert Badinter, the minister of
justice, denied the charge vehemently. "The government of France will never
permit the planning and preparation of [violent] acts destined for another
country," he retorted.
It was difficult to argue the case for an "unwritten agreement, but Verge's
was undeniably correct in affirming that France had a history of offering
asylum to political refugees of every stripe, who, traditionally, were indeed
free to wage their battles as long as they didn't actually involve France or
the French. But the armed liberation armies that adopted Paris as their
headquarters in the late 1960s and early 1970s had added a new wrinkle to
this policy. Their targets were not necessarily distant at all. Within a few
years they were shooting at U.S. and Israeli military and diplomatic
personnel, setting car bombs and blowing up synagogues and restaurants where
Jews were known to gather. Within a short time their field of operations had
expanded. Unlike the PLO, which remained primarily opposed to Israel, the
Carlos network, which comprised disparate elements of the Left and the Right,
saw Israel as an ally of their other enemy: U.S. imperialism and the
established democratic order. "We must recognize that our revolution is a
phase of world revolution. It is not limited to reconquering Palestine,"
explained George Habbash.[22]
The Mitterrand government couldn't protest too forcibly because, on assuming
power in 1981, it had actually amnestied terrorists who promised on their
word of honor to be very, very good. But once the Carlos letter was leaked to
the press, no deal would have been possible even had the French government
wanted to negotiate (and there is nothing to suggest that they did). Jacques
Verges lost the Breguet-Kopp case, appealed and lost again; but the following
year he returned to his clients in print, as part of his strategy for
propagandizing the issues. The book, Pour en finir avec Ponce Pilate (which
loosely translates as "Let's Have Done with Pontius Pilate") described
Breguet and Kopp as "courageous" and innocent victims of the state. Besides
the French government, the other culprit was, of course, "the Zionists," by
which Verges meant not just Israelis but French Jews as well.
In Pour en finir avec Ponce Pilate, as in For the Fedayeen, Verges wasted
little time on the dull particularity of the charges brought against his
clients. In both books, the underlying cause of the action is assumed to be a
noble one, terror is justified as self-defense and the victim of the attack
is characterized as being at fault. Breguet and Kopp had become the latest
means to promote Jacques Verges's central interest -a campaign on behalf of
the Palestinians and against the French government, whom he accuses of being
"a protectorate" of Israel. If France were not being controlled by the
"Zionists," his clients would automatically have been freed.
Verges received a number of death threats during the Breguet-Kopp trial. He
replied by denouncing Israel and the Israeli ambassador in Paris. "If
anything happens to me, I shall hold the Israeli embassy responsible "[23] he
stated in classic Catch-22 style. If nothing happened, he might claim that
the Israelis had been frightened off because he was on to their tricks. If
something did happen to him, well, he had already fingered the putative
culprit in advance.
To conclude his book, Verges insisted that the Breguet-Kopp trial was wholly
political. Then he quoted his own courtroom plea, followed by an explicit
threat:
Judges, because blood is flowing today in Jerusalem and in the occupied
territories, you are being asked to strike at those who are friends of the
dead and the wounded ... and in the name of their assassins. You are being
asked to replace Easter with the Day of Atonement, the day when the priests
charge scapegoats with all the sins of Israel ... The truth is that Magdalena
Kopp and Bruno Breguet will be freed. You know it and they know it. They are
soldiers imprisoned for a noble cause, the cause of dignity ...
The rest of their army will not cease to fight and strike until they are free
. . . [24]
Following the Breguet-Kopp affair, Jacques Verges became the lawyer for
Mohand Hamami and Frederic Oriach, both members of the Paris-based
multinational terror band called Direct Action, which was created in 1979.
Hamami and Oriach were accused of breaking into an arsenal of arms that was
under police surveillance. Oriach was also the editor of a glossy
anti-Zionist, antiimperialist review called Subversion (a descendant of
Verges's seminal publication Revolution), which was described as "a political
and theoretical instrument at the disposition of militant
revolutionaries."[25] Furthermore, according to Italian magistrates
interviewed by Le Figaro, Hamami was at the heart of a triple connection: Red
Brigades, Direct Action and the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction.
Verge's's courtroom style during the Breguet-Kopp trial had been variously
described by the French media as "curious," "strange," and, more
picturesquely, "retro-bolshevist." The Hamami-Oriach trials presented the
public with a defense in a similar vein. As during the Breguet-Kopp affair,
Verges publicly denounced what he called the "Zionist lobby" in France as
being the real guilty party.
Both Oriach and Verges continued to publish (Oriach from his jail cell), each
man maintaining his own connections with the world of international terror.
In 1983, a new journal called Correspondances Internationales appeared on the
scene, edited by Verges. In the opening issue, Verges saluted "the imprisoned
comrades who have succeeded in communicating from the depths of the cells in
which they have been buried by the bourgeoisle."[26] The "comrades" to whom
Verges referred were members of the Red Brigades. Indeed, the review
contained a long statement by a member of the Red Brigades, Carmina Fiorillo,
who was currently in prison.
Verges was noticeably uneasy when asked to describe his relationship to
Correspondances Internationales, particularly since he claims to be "only a
lawyer" and to have "no political activity:"
"I am editor because they needed a French person to direct the publication in
France. The journal itself is devoted to the activities of what some people
call the 'armed resistance,' or 'urban guerrillas,' or 'terrorists.' It
publishes studies concerning social problems in Europe. Perhaps you know that
there are 4,000 political prisoners in Italy. When you have that many, you
are no longer dealing with a problem of individual criminals. You have a
political problem, a public defiance of society. Well, the journal is a place
where these problems can be debated."
When asked whether the debate included opinions from people opposed to
terrorism, he replied: "No, it doesn't. But no one can say that my opinions
are the same as those of the journal."[27]
And what are the views of the comrades in the Red Brigades? Like Verges
himself they constantly tell us what they think, what they plan to do and
what their next steps will be. When Mario Moretti, who is considered to be
the brain of the Red Brigades, was arrested in Milan on April 4, 1981, he
declared: "In Italy and elsewhere we will hit our targets." Those targets had
been enumerated earlier the same year in his Journal of the Red Brigades.
They included, chronologically, an attack on the judiciary, then the
politicians, followed by the press and business management. Next came NATO ,
"the armed protection of the criminal multinationals." Moretti explained that
the war would be waged "everywhere, and in collaboration with foreign
revolutionaries."[28]
And it was. In October 1983, neo-Nazis in Brussels were found to be working
with the Syrians. In February 1984, the Italian-based Fighting Communist
Party openly claimed responsibility for the murder of General Leamon R. Hunt,
chief of the multinational forces in the Sinai. And in early 1985, a rash of
attacks on NATO and Jewish targets in Germany, France, Belgium, Portugal and
Spain pointed to a combined effort on the part of several terrorist
organizations that had been thought to be independent of each other.
Also in February 1985, Jacques Verges turned up (predictably) as chief lawyer
for three members of the Secret Armenian Liberation Army accused of a bomb
attack at the Paris-Orly airport in July 1983. When his clients were found
guilty, Verges reverted to a familiar pattern. The court should not be
dealing with a "political problem," he said, then continued with a clear
threat of reprisals. "The friends of [the condemned] will not let them down,"
he warned,[29] just as he had threatened in 1983 that "the rest of their army
[of Breguet and Kopp] will not cease to fight and strike until they are free."
By 1985, the alliance of the old-style fascist Right and the newstyle
revolutionary Left had become more visible. The seeds of Nasser's Cairo in
the 1950s and the 1969 meeting of the New European Order in Madrid were
bearing fruit. In 1985, one of the left-wing Armenian terrorists defended by
Jacques Verges was found to be carrying a German passport that had been
stolen by the neo-Nazi Hoffmann group[30] and distributed in a PFLP training
camp in Lebanon. And in April 1985, an important double arrest in Paris
netted Odfried Hepp, the last member at large of the same Hoffmann
organization, in the company of a Tunisian member of the Palestine Liberation
Front. (Hepp was suspected of having planned and/or participated in the
anti-Semitic attack on Goldenberg's restaurant in Paris in 1982.) Hepp,
however, claimed to be a member in good standing of the Palestine Liberation
Front, Aboul Abas branch, with its base in Tunis.
According to Arndt Heinz Marx, associate president (until his arrest in 1984)
of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Front in Frankfurt, both Hepp and Marx
trained in an El Fatah camp in Lebanon from July 1980 until June 1981 with a
group of fifteen German neo-Nazis. "I was a member of El Fatah, a fedayeen,"
said Marx. "El Fatah and the PLO are fighting for the rights of their people
as we are fighting for the German people. The Palestinians and ourselves have
the same enemy: International Zionism, the Jews . . . "[31]
Marx added that guerrillas training in Lebanon were not intending to attack
Israel directly, but were preparing "for combat in Europe."
As for Francois Genoud, his connections to both nazism and the extreme Left
were evident and ongoing. In June 1984, a Zurich newspaper pointedly reported
that he had close ties with the Libyan embassy in Berne.[32] And his own
daughter, Martine, had been married to a revolutionary who was killed in an
internecine battle in Lebanon in the early 1980s.
Finally, there was the case of former general Otto Ernst Remer, a friend of
Hitler and Goebbels who also has spent the postwar years in the service of
his "ideals." Like Francois Genoud, Remer went to Cairo in the 1950s, where
he was a political adviser to Nasser. Like Genoud, he is suspected of working
with a "trading company"[33] that supplied the FLN with arms from Eastern
Europe during the Algerian war.
Interviewed in Germany, Remer advocated an alliance between Germany and the
Soviet Union against the United States. "There is a problem concerning who
holds the real power in the United States. Without a doubt, the Zionists
control Wall Street. That's where the evil originates, because Israel has a
pro-war foreign policy. Israel is the instrument of Wall Street, and as a
result, the Middle East foments war . . . "[34]
And there it was, as clear as Hitler at Nuremberg in 1934, as clear as Mein
Kampf, as clear as the Protocols. For both Arndt Heinz Marx and Otto Remer,
the struggle of the combined Left/ Right guerrillas against the United States
was, at its core, the struggle against the Jews — the Jews who controlled
Wall Street, the Jews who held the real power in an America that used Israel
as a willing handmaiden of war, the Jews who ... controlled the world.
"The struggle against Judaism is at the very heart of the natural alliance
between National Socialism and those Arab Moslems who burn with a desire for
freedom," Himmler had written in a prescient little note forty years earlier.
In the interim, the alliance had taken root, ripened and exploded on to the
international stage with renewed vigor. And in the not-so-strange association
of Klaus Barbie and Jacques Verges, Himmler's words had merely acquired a
rich new context.
pps. 168-183
--[notes]--
Chapter 9
1 . Centre de documentation juive, Paris DXXIII-1309, 1310, 1313, quoted in
Poliakov, De Moscou II Beyrouthe, p. 54.
2. Ibid., p. 54, passim.
3. September 8, 1960. Quoted in Hamon and Rotman, Les Porteurs de valises,
p. 289.
4. November 26, 1955. Quoted in Poliakov, De Moscou a Beyrouthe, pp. 85-86.
S. Ibid., p. 94.
6. Johannes von Leers, Leopold Gleim and Ludwig Heiden.
7. "L'Espion qui vient de l'extreme droite," Antenne 2, April 26, 1984.
8. Oriana Fallaci, Interview with History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1977).
9. Revue Actuel, April 1984.
10. Quoted in Ibid.
11. Gabriel Padon, cited in Le Monde, March 11, 1966.
12. Le Matin, Lausanne, March 12, 1982.
13, Sterling, The Terror Network, pp. 111-17.
14. L'Hebdo, Lausanne, March 19, 1982.
15. David Irving, quoted in "L'Espion qui vient de l'extreme droite," Antenne
2,
April 26, 1984.
16. L'Express, June 12-18, 1967.
17. Verges, Pour les fidayine, p. 17.
18. L'Hebdo, Lausanne, March 19, 1982.
19. Le Monde, March 7-8, 1982.
20. L'Hebdo, Lausanne, March 19, 1982.
21. L'Express, April 23, 1982.
22. Oriana Fallaci interview, March 1972, quoted in Sterling, The Terror Net-
work, p. 113.
23. Le Quotidien, cited in radio interview, "Le Tribunal des flagrants
delires,"
June 7, 1983.
24. Verges, Pour en finir avec Ponce Pilate, pp. 121-22.
25. Valeurs Actuelles, February 27, 1984.
26. L'Express, July 4, 1983.
27. Interview with Verges, December 24, 1984.
28. Quoted in Le Point, February 10, 1985. This is precisely what happened in
February 1985 when Direct Action (French) and the Red Army Faction (German)
publicly coordinated their activities.
29. Le Quotidien, March 5, 1985.
30. The Hoffmann group was a nucleus of six members or former members of the
ANS (Aktionsgruppe Nationaler Sozialisten) who specialized during the early
1980s in attacks on American army bases in West Germany.
31. Quoted in the 1984 documentary about the far Right that was broadcast in
France (as "L'Espion qui vient de l'extreme droite") and in Britain (as "The
Other Face of Terror").
32. Die Wochenzeitung, June 29, 1984.
33. The Orient Trading Company.
34. "L'Espion qui vient de l'extreme droite."
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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