The Mission C killings of seven barbouzes marked a brutal turning point in the covert conflict between the Secret Army Organisation and Charles de Gaulle’s authorities in Algiers. The deaths exposed the reciprocal violence of an underground war in which infiltration, intelligence, and retaliation blurred the boundary between state security work and clandestine killing.

Background and killings

The SDECE Action Service formed the core of the campaign against the Secret Army Organisation. Its men operated undercover, including by entering the organisation’s ranks and passing information that enabled arrests of its emissaries. As the organisation’s violence intensified, the Service was unleashed against it; wanted men who could not be drawn into France were sometimes killed abroad. The agents became known as barbouzes, or Bearded Ones, and the Secret Army Organisation hated them more than it hated the police.

In the final days of the struggle for power in Algiers, the Secret Army Organisation captured seven barbouzes alive. Their bodies were later found hanging from balconies and lampposts, with their ears and noses removed. The account leaves the wider record of the underground war unresolved: who died under torture, and at whose hands in which cellar, would never be fully known.

Vendetta and its wider meaning

The killings triggered a vendetta against the Secret Army Organisation, drawing the Action Service’s Corsican connections into a conflict that already fed on reprisals. Corsicans dominated both the Paris and Marseille underworld and the Service; the book links this history to an earlier bargain, when Corsican underworld figures helped the Allies during the 1944 landings in southern France and later gained control of much of the Côte d’Azur vice trade. In the early 1960s, Corsicans again fought for France, this time against the Secret Army Organisation. The conflict could become almost fratricidal: many members of the organisation were pieds-noirs, French people born in Algeria, and the account stresses that they shared characteristics with the Corsicans who opposed them. The killings thus mark not only an episode of covert violence but the point after which the struggle was understood as a vendetta between groups with overlapping origins and underworld ties.

The Service behind the reprisals

The killings took place against the operations of a force built for clandestine violence. The SDECE Action Service, headquartered in a complex of nondescript buildings off Boulevard Mortier near Porte des Lilas in north-east Paris, sent out roughly a hundred men, many of them Corsicans. After intensive physical training, recruits went to Satory Camp, where a special section taught them destruction, small-arms and unarmed combat, karate and judo, radio communication, demolition, sabotage, interrogation with or without torture, kidnapping, arson, and assassination. Some spoke only French; others were fluent in several languages and at home in foreign capitals. They were authorized to kill in the course of duty, and often did. The contrast between this institutional apparatus and the mutilated bodies found in Algiers sharpens the episode’s significance: the Mission C killings were a reprisal within a conflict where both sides used violence beyond ordinary policing, and where the full record of what happened in the clandestine war remained unknowable.

The disputed boundary of state action

The aftermath also sharpened uncertainty about who acted for the state and under what authority. Some barbouzes remained outside the OAS and at the SDECE’s disposal; a number had worked as professional thugs before recruitment and retained underworld contacts, sometimes enlisting former associates for particularly dirty government jobs. Such practices gave rise to talk of a parallel police supposedly directed by one of Charles de Gaulle’s closest aides. The account rejects the existence of a separate force: the activities attributed to it were carried out by the SDECE Action Service or by gang bosses temporarily brought in from the milieu. Against that distinction, the seven killings stand in a landscape where formal state service, undercover operations, and underworld networks could converge, while the hidden war’s full chain of responsibility remained impossible to establish.