The Insider

In their frustrating and interminable war in Algeria, where cruelty answers cruelty, and heroism has its ugly necessities, the French have found one continuing source of solace: the dramatic exploits of a tough, leathery colonel named Marcel Bigeard. The son of a railway mechanic, Bigeard was a humdrum bank clerk in Toul when he was called up just before World War II. Today, a weatherbeaten and wiry 41, he is a legend.

Bigeard first made a name for himself as a sergeant in 1940 when he held out in a Vosges dugout five days after the rest of the army had surrendered to the Nazis. After escaping from a German prison camp, he joined De Gaulle, eventually took charge of the resistance in the Ariege department in the south of France. At Dienbienphu, in 1954, he characteristically fought until his last round was spent, then walked out of his bunker to surrender with his hands stuffed ostentatiously and contemptuously in his pockets.

Onions v. Wine. Though he lost an eye in Indo-China, he was sent to Algeria to take command of the crack Third Colonial Parachute Regiment. A martinet but the idol of his men, Bigeard whipped them into shape by running them as much as 15 miles at a time. He made them shave every day, no matter where they were, doled out raw onions instead of the traditional wine ration because "wine reduces stamina." With all-night marches and sudden paratroop raids, he won every engagement, became so successful at outwitting the rebels ("He thinks like a fellagha," says one of his officers) that the army put him in charge of a special school which next month will begin to give French officers intensive training in combatting "subversive war." Last week the French army let out one chapter in Bigeard's career that hitherto had been kept secret--the cloak-and-dagger tale of how he, in effect, became commander of a band of enemy terrorists in Algiers' casbah.

"A Great Honor." It all began last fall when Bigeard's men captured an Algerian terrorist named Zerrouk, and persuaded him to change sides. Still outwardly a rebel, Zerrouk slipped back into the casbah as Bigeard's chief informer. Thanks to him, one terrorist leader after another fell into French hands, until Zerrouk found himself Terrorist No. 2, outranked only by the wily and elusive Yacef Saadi. Communicating only through a network of F.L.N. intermediaries and "letterboxes," Zerrouk (in messages dictated by Bigeard) described his own feats so glowingly that Saadi ordered him to be more cautious. One day Zerrouk was named by Saadi to take over the entire "Algiers military zone." Replied Zerrouk, on Bigeard's orders: "It will be a great honor."

When the unsuspecting Saadi appealed to Zerrouk to furnish fresh Arab recruits to make bombs, Zerrouk suggested that Saadi get in touch with F.L.N. leaders in nearby Kabylia. Saadi innocently followed the suggestion, only to learn later that as soon as the Kabylia recruits arrived in Algiers, the French promptly seized them. By last Sept. 24, all that was left of Saadi's once formidable terrorist empire was Saadi himself. That day (TIME, Oct. 7) the French ringed his casbah hideout and captured him and his mistress.

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