Appointment in Geneva

CAMEROUN

For years, one of Africa's busiest agitators was a dapper French Camerounese medical doctor named Felix-Roland Mou-mie. In 1955, at the age of 29, he privately wrote Vyacheslav Molotov: "If ever I succeed in taking power in my country, I assure you I will build a socialist republic." But he indignantly denied that he was a Communist, described himself as no more than a pious Presbyterian. He was a familiar of the U.N.'s corridors, arguing that only he represented the will of the French Cameroun people. He turned up in Moscow, was always welcomed by Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Sekou

Toure in Guinea, kept his terrorists busy making trouble in the Cameroun.

Early last month Moumie's business, currently reported to be obtaining Communist arms for the Congo's Patrice Lumumba, brought him to Geneva, a crossroads for left-wing African politicians flying between Africa and the Iron Curtain countries. Supplied, as always, with seemingly inexhaustible cash, and traveling for the moment on a Ghanaian diplomatic passport, he settled down to a comfortable life in a good Geneva hotel near the Lake Leman shore. Moving in with him was a pretty French-Swiss brunette by the name of Liliane Friedli, 25, whom he had first picked up on a previous Geneva visit in June.

The Red Hand. Four weeks ago, after lunching with Liliane, Moumie excused himself, explained to her, "I have an important engagement. We're going to talk politics. You wouldn't be interested." When he returned late at night, he tossed fitfully, next morning awoke complaining of agonizing stomach pains. With a medical student's precision, he diagnosed his poison as thallium, a paralyzing ingredient in certain rat poisons. Hurried to a hospital and placed in an iron lung, he came out of a coma long enough to murmur "Red Hand," the name of a counterterrorist organization which operates in West Germany and Belgium against suspected arms suppliers to Algerian French Africa. He also muttered something about having been served two glasses of Pernod. The first tasted "all right," the second was "bitter." Last week he died, and blood tests showed that his diagnosis was right: it was thallium poisoning.

Liliane disappeared. Eventually she turned up in another clinic telling a wild story. Before he became ill, said Liliane, Moumie had told her, "If anything ever happens to me you must get hold of my briefcase at any cost." After leaving Moumie in the hospital, she said she had taken the case, hired a taxicab to take her to Paris, where she delivered the briefcase to the ambassadors of Ghana and Guinea. "They were crazy with joy to get it," she said. Returning to Geneva, she said she had seen a headline that police were looking for her, in her nervousness had gulped an overdose of sedatives.

In the Clear. For a while, Swiss police were inclined to accept Liliane as a casual pickup and a frustrated suicide. As she herself told reporters prettily, "I'm no Mata Hari." Then the Tribune de Geneve reported that the afternoon Moumie died, Liliane had received a cable from the Guinea embassy in Cairo. The bulk was in code, but there was one oddly solicitous sentence in clear: "Please send us immediately your telephone number and some information on Moumie's health." Cairo, for a time, had been the headquarters from which Moumie directed terrorist activities in French Cameroun.

At week's end, police were only certain that Moumie, who lived by intrigue, had died the same way.

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