Finis for S.A.O.?

As Swissair Flight 227 to Zurich taxied onto the runway at Munich last week, it was followed closely by a black police limousine. Not until the Convair disappeared into the night did the plainclothesman inside the car return to headquarters to report that Georges Bidault, 63, former Premier of France and now self-styled operational chief of the terrorist Secret Army Organization, had left West Germany. For the first time since Bidault was traced to his hideaway in a rural villa last month, Bavaria's Minister of Interior Heinrich Junker breathed easily. Sighed he: "A heavy cross is off my back."

Bidault did not leave Munich without a vow to "continue my fight against De Gaulle until freedom has been restored in my country.'' Landing in Portugal under an assumed name, he was given even less chance to plot against De Gaulle's life than he enjoyed in easygoing Bavaria; almost as soon as he turned up at a Lisbon rooming house, security cops hauled him off to a suburban Lisbon villa. He was expected to seek refuge in South America.

Drifting aimlessly like a man without a country, Bidault today is a pathetic fugitive who drinks too much and talks too much. With the kidnaping of ex-Colonel Antoine Argoud in Munich five weeks ago, and the virtual removal from active operations of Jacques Soustelle, the S.A.O.'s political boss, France's government claims that the movement that once struck terror in the hearts of Frenchmen has just about fallen apart. Hounded by the 61,000-man police force of Interior Minister Roger Frey, the S.A.O. is no longer able to maintain commando units in each of France's nine military districts, as it once did. Today, top officials claim, there are probably no more than 30 hardcore activists left in the country. While hundreds of fanatic anti-Gaullists have found refuge in neighboring countries (500 in Spain alone), they too are now almost all under close police surveillance.

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