France's oil giant Elf - a state intelligence apparatus for corruption - a case study

[Jan Klimkowski]

Fascinating article.

Tragically, the hypothesis that to impress the military-multinational-intelligence complex, politicians have to stage the massacre of a "terrorist" or "militant" group, even when it transpires that the militants are predominantly women and children, some perhaps frozen in a death rictus by the use of chemical weaponry, is only too believable.

There were a number of curious, if not downright bizarre aspects to it.
Seddat: An Exercise in Overkill
For one thing, it was a massive, lopsided operation, one that pitted the Algerian military and security forces, numbering in the hundreds of thousands all told, against a few dozen poorly equipped Islamic guerrilla fighters in hiding in Kabylie caves with their women and children. Reminds one of the U.S. invasion of Grenada in the early 1980s.
The assault team, led by Algerian General Ahmed Gaid Salah, major general of the Algerian National Army, was several thousand strong with communications and logistical support from the entire Algerian state apparatus. It was heavily armed with tanks, armored cars, attack helicopters, perhaps chemical weapons and all those military toys that make military dictators from Algiers to Guatemala pee in their pants with joy. Algiers seemed to be eager to prove that when "necessary" it was willing as it had done in the 1990s to use the full power of its military machine against its own people.
Seddat was an exercise in overkill of gargantuan proportions to counter a Lillaputian threat (if it existed at all). Mostly it was for show. Most anti-guerrilla operations are done in secret but the Seddat operation was publicly announced several months before in the Algerian press as something approaching a sporting event and followed closely by the Algerian media from beginning to end. It was all a show of sorts, as if the Algerian military had to prove its overwhelming strength to the world at large, and to the United States and France in particular.
It is a fact of no little significance that the U.S. military attache to the Algiers embassy at the time was 'invited' to accompany General Gaid Salah on this anti-terrorist mission and to watch the slaughter unfold from up close. Indeed, one could make a persuasive case that the whole affair was stage managed down to the last detail to impress the Americans that when necessary, the Algerian military could be as effective and ruthless in fighting terrorism as any government in the region and should be trusted as such. Washington should take note!
To insure the success of the operation, the Algerian authorities made sure that there was not to use an exhausted expression 'an even playing field' that would insure that the government's casualties would be few, while the rebels would die in large numbers. The government's own statistics stated that there were no more than 75-100 militants holed up in caves near Seddat at the most. Even this proved to be an exaggeration. If Seddat had been a purely military or counter-insurgency operations, certainly, the rebels could have been flushed out and neutralized with a much smaller force and much less publicity. Nor was all that communication and military hardware necessary as the group's location was already pinpointed.
Unlike in In Amenas, where the Algerian special forces lost control of the script (more on that in a latter segment), at Seddat, everything went as planned. The 'militants' were defeated and decisively so. Obviously it was not a particularly difficult task. The American military was duly impressed. The show was apparently worth the effort as shortly after Seddat cooperation between the U.S. and Algerian militaries ratcheted up considerably.
Still, news reports of the contrived confrontation, even coming from Algeria's controlled media, were unsettling. As the details of the operation found their way here and there in the Algerian press, a more cynical picture of what had actually happened began to take shape. For example, the 75 to 100 'guerrilla fighters' turned out to be only six. The rest were women and children killed in the assault, 'collateral damage' which the Algerian security forces didn't hesitate to inflict. Never one to be too concerned about collateral damage, Washington was impressed.
Chemical Weapons?
There were few local witnesses to the aftermath. At least one witness claimed to have seen the bodies of a woman breast-feeding her baby, both frozen in death. There is some speculation that the only way people die frozen in their last life activity like that, is if they are the victims of poison gas attack which kills instantly. The allegation, will, like the mother and children, be frozen in uncertainty because the day after burying the victims' bodies, they were, according to witnesses, disinterred by the military and cremated, thus eliminating the possible evidence. But it is suggestive, isn't it, that when deemed necessary, the Algerian military has no compunctions about gassing its own people?

Then there is the question: who runs Algeria?

There, in May of 2006, with much fanfare, a major military operation was launched by the Algerian army to 'neutralize' (which translates in plain language as 'wipe out') a supposed Islamic terrorist cell holding out in a cave in the vicinity of Seddat. Despite the fact that the so-called war against Islamic terrorism had supposedly ended by 1998, the Algerian government had not been able to eliminate the last pockets of militant Islamic armed resistance. For nearly eight years Algiers had been repeatedly talking about "the last Islamic strongholds."
There was another problem which plagued the Algerian government, formally a parliamentary democracy, but informally and perhaps more accurately, a military dictatorship which had been run from the shadows since independence by a group of military officers, derisively referred to as the D.A.F. (which stands for Deserteurs de l'armee francaise, or deserters from the French Army. It refers to a group of Algerian officers in the French military during the Algerian War of Independence 1954-1962, who, six months before the end of the conflict, jumped ship from the French army and joined the Resistance and then quickly took power once independence came).
By 2006 the ruling Algerian military junta could not simply brush off the repeated accusations that many of the militant Islamic groups that it claimed to be fighting in the 1990s were both infiltrated by and run by the country's powerful intelligence service, the Departement de Renseignment et de la Securite, otherwise known by its initials the DRS. It all cast a shadow over the bloodshed the 1990s and raised serious questions as to what the fighting was about in the first place.

(snip)

The Sahara and the Algerian War for Independence: 1954-1962
Not much has been written about the fact that the French had started secretly negotiating with the Algerian rebels the FLN (Front de la liberations nationale) as early as 1956 and that even at this early date, the French offered the Algerians a modicum of independence; but it was a truncated independence that Paris was willing to concede, one which granted independence to Algeria essentially north of the Atlas Mountains with France retaining control of the Algerian Sahara.
What figured large into the French plan was the fact that oil, oil in very large quantities, was discovered in 1956 in the Sahara. France thought of that oil as its own and was unwilling to part with it. The Algerians, for their part, were unwilling to accept a truncated independence. One probable reason for the utter ferocity of the independence war both by the French and Algerians was that oil-related economic stakes were so high.
France hoped to sever the Algerian Sahara from the north and connect it in a vast industrial, communication network zone that it would control that would be spread out over much of the region, which during the colonial period was known as French Sudan. At independence in 1960, that region would become four independent countries from west to east: Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad. The economic integration of the Sahara itself was a part of a larger plan to link the former French colonies by roads, railway from the Congo Brazzaville further south with metropolitan France.2
In the postwar decade from 1945-1955, the region had been heavily surveyed by French geologists and geographers whose reports still valid today gave indications and hints of vast as yet untapped mineral and petro-chemical wealth that France was anxious to dominate. While the OCSR would formally recognize the independence of these countries, the program, a classic neo-colonial venture, was based on effective French economic, political and military control of this vast region.
Financial backing for such a large undertaking, considered essential for France's future energy and economic security, were undertaken. There was considerable support for the idea in the French parliament and in the ruling circles in general. Much organizational infrastructure for the project, the political reorganization of the region, some infrastructural development was already underway even before 1960.

Which reminds me of: Vieil État-Major and de Gaulle assassination attempt

The Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS) is generally identified as the group responsible for the attempted assassination of Charles de Gaulle in August 1962 (which is represented, reasonably faithfully, in the opening scenes of The Day of the Jackal).

The OAS was a Gladio-infiltrated organisation, perhaps involving elements of the 11th Choc regiment.

However, Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, the lead assassin, who was executed by firing squad for the assassination attempt, is alleged not to have been a member of the OAS, but rather of the "Vieil État-Major".

See comments below:

Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry (19 October 1927 11 March 1963) was a French military air weaponry engineer (creator of the Nord SS.10/SS.11 missiles) who attempted to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle on 22 August 1962, following Algerian independence. Sentenced to death, he remains the last person to be executed by firing squad in France.

Bastien-Thiry, who was involved with the still-mysterious organization, "Vieil État-Major" (which was probably supported by high-ranking officials, politicians and the heads of large companies[citation needed]), soon made contact with the Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS), which was already carrying out assassinations and bombings to try to prevent Algerian independence. Bastien-Thiry was not, however, actually a member of the OAS organization.

It is currently unclear whether "Vieil État-Major" was:

- a small and influential high level cell, perhaps a Sponsorship group (in the Evica-Drago sense);
or
- an individual (such as Giscard D'Estaing);
or
- a metaphor (for some other process/guidance).

I include metaphor as a possibility because one path of investigation of the OAS and Gladio in France leads to Priory of Sion metaphysical territory: AMORC, Synarcism, La Rose des Vents and Arc-en-ciel mysticism, even the Order of the Solar Temple.