DID Mehdi Ben Barka's killers put his body on a cargo aircraft at Rouen and dump him into the sea? Or was the Moroccan opposition leader imbedded, Mafiastyle, in a concrete slab? The most gruesome version of his demise, recounted in a book published here earlier this year, They Killed Ben Barka, says the victim of one of the century's great murder mysteries was decapitated so that the Moroccan Interior Minister, Mohamed Oufkir, could present his head to King Hassan II.
Under King Hassan, who died in July, the royal palaces of Morocco were an incestuous world of intrigue and vengeance. Ben Barka had been maths tutor to Moulay Hassan before he ascended the throne in 1961. Gen Oufkir would later be shot dead by the king for plotting a nearly successful coup against him. But in the Ben Barka affair, Morocco's sordid political feuds seeped into the intelligence agencies of France, Israel and probably the US.
Two days from now the family and friends of Ben Barka will gather outside the Brasserie Lipp, in the Boulevard St Germain, to mark the 34th anniversary of his disappearance. Up to 100 people participate in the yearly ceremony "to remember that there was a kidnapping, that it is still unresolved", his eldest son, a 49-year-old mathematics professor named Bachir, told me.
That October lunchtime, Mehdi Ben Barka was arrested by Commissioner Souchon and Inspector Voitot of the Paris police on the pavement outside the restaurant where he was to meet friends. The plainclothes officers detained the Moroccan at the request of Antoine Lopez of the French intelligence agency SDECE.
He was taken to a villa outside Paris belonging to a former convict named Georges Boucheseiche. "From there on, there are several versions," Bachir Ben Barka says. "We have no reason to believe one rather than another." Mehdi Ben Barka was almost certainly tortured.
In 1975, to prevent French authorities permanently closing the case, Bachir Ben Barka filed a lawsuit for murder, and the affair is still officially under investigation.
Souchon, Voitot and Lopez served prison sentences for the kidnapping. Four French gangsters who fled to Morocco were convicted in absentia, along with the Moroccan interior minister, Gen Oufkir. "We still don't know how high up in the police hierarchy and in politics the plan to kidnap my father was known," Mr Ben Barka says.
In 1982, Francois Mitterrand ordered the Ben Barka file to be opened, but the examining magistrate said two-thirds of the documents were still top secret. There is no 30-year secrecy rule in France, and the Ben Barka family this year requested again that the documents be declassified.
"We've been waiting 34 years for the answers," Bachir Ben Barka says. "Today there is no longer any political reason to keep these documents secret; there are no more state interests to protect."
The Ben Barka kidnapping occurred in the middle of a French presidential election campaign. Despite outrage that an intellectual Third World opposition figure could be kidnapped in broad daylight by French police, Charles de Gaulle nonetheless won re-election. Yet the first press conference of his second term was dominated by what he called "this vulgar and second-rate affair".
An Israeli magazine, Bul, reported that Mossad was involved in the kidnapping. Like the French of the SDECE, Mossad spies were willing to do favours for friendly intelligence agencies. The Israeli journalist and editor-in-chief who published the story were arrested and jailed. But the New York Times reprinted the article, which claimed that Mossad kept Ben Barka under surveillance and assisted in disposing of his body. Both the Israeli and French intelligence agencies underwent upheavals as a result.
At the time of his kidnapping, Ben Barka was organising a meeting in Havana of the "Tricontinental", a grouping of Soviet and Chinese-backed "liberation" movements from Africa, Asia and Latin America.
"Obviously, the CIA was interested," Bachir Ben Barka says. He has no solid evidence of CIA involvement in his father's Cold War-era kidnapping and murder. But a late 1970s Freedom Of Information Act request revealed the CIA has 3,000 pages on Ben Barka. The agency refused to release them on the grounds of national security. Bachir Ben Barka is renewing his request now.
Bachir was a 15-year-old living in exile with his mother, Rhita, and three brothers in Cairo when he heard on the radio that his father had been kidnapped in Paris. "The pain is still sharp," he says.
Encouraged by the conciliatory tone of the new King Mohamed VI, the Ben Barka family this month applied to renew their Moroccan passports, which expired in 1966. They were received "cordially, with dignity" at the embassy in Paris, and plan to return to Morocco before the end of this year. There, Bachir Ben Barka will try again to find out what happened to his father's body.
