In the 1985 book Unhealed Wounds: France and the Klaus Barbie Affair, author Erna Paris carefully traces what she describes as the “merger of the Left and the Right.” Members of the Nazis–old guard as well as neo-Nazis–actively collaborated with the Leftist radicals in perpetrating heinous acts of international terrorism. Paris explains how the “Palestinian” cause played a central role in bringing them together:
In 1985, the alliance of the old-style fascist Right and the new-style Left had become more visible. […]
[I]n April of 1985, an important double arrest in Paris netted Odfried Hepp, the last member at large of the same Hoffman organization, in the company of a Tunisian member of the Palestine Liberation Front. (Hepp was suspected of having planned and/or participated in the anti-Semitic attack on Goldenberg’s restaurant in Paris in 1982.) […]
According to Arndt Heinz Marx, associate president (until his arrest in 1984) of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Front in Frankfurt, both Hepp and Marx trained in an El Fatah camp in Lebanon from July 1980 until June 1981 with a group of fifteen German neo-Nazis. “I was a member of El Fatah, a Fedayeen,” said Marx. “El Fatah and the PLO are fighting for the rights of their people as we are fighting for the German people. The Palestinians and ourselves have the same enemy: International Zionism, the Jews…”31
Marx added that guerillas training in Lebanon were not intending to attack Israel directly, but were preparing “for combat in Europe.”
As for Francois Genoud, his connections to both Nazism and the extreme Left were evident and ongoing. […]
Finally, there was the case of former general Otto Ernst Remer, a friend of Hitler and Goebbels who also spent the postwar years in the service of his “ideals.” Like Francois Genoud, Remer went to Cairo in the 1950s, where he was a political adviser to Nasser. […]
Interviewed in Germany, Remer advocated an alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union against the United States. “There is a problem concerning who holds the real power in the United States. Without a doubt, the Zionists control Wall Street. That’s where the evil originates, because Israel has a pro-war foreign policy. Israel is the instrument of Wall Street, and as a result, the Middle East foments war…”34
And there it was, as clear as Hitler at Nuremberg in 1934, as clear as Mein Kampf, as clear as the Protocols. For both Arndt Heinz Marx and Otto Remer, the struggle of the combined Left/Right guerrillas against the United States was, at its core, the struggle against the Jews who controlled Wall Street, the Jews who held real power in an America that used Israel as a willing handmaiden of war, the Jews who…controlled the world.
“The struggle against Judaism is at the very heart of the natural alliance between National Socialism and those Arab Moslems who burn with a desire for freedom,” Himmler had written in a prescient little note forty years earlier. In the interim, the alliance had taken root, ripened and exploded on to the international stage with renewed vigor.
Read more here about the genesis of this Left/Right alliance from Unhealed Wounds:
In 1939, Amin El Hussein, the ex-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, took refuge from the British, escaped to Germany and attached himself and his followers to the Nazi cause. Heinrich Himmler, the ss chief, was delighted. It wasn’t every day that a regiment of sympathetic Moslems joined the German war movement. Himmler respected the Mufti and often complimented him on his blue eyes, which he liked to describe as “appropriately Nordic”; but it was in a written note to the Mufti that Himmler eventually struck a chord that would resound as a leitmotif for the future and survive four decades to influence the context of the Klaus Barbie affair. “The struggle against Judaism is at the very heart of natural alliance between National Socialism and those Arab Moslems who burn with the desire for freedom,” he wrote. “This alliance will endure until the final victory.”1
In 1955, the Mufti resurfaced at the seminal conference of Bandung, Indonesia, where the idea of the Third World first took hold. Twenty-nine countries from Africa and Asia (representing more than one-half of the world’s population) sent delegates to discuss common problems, with an emphasis on colonialism. Among the Arab countries, however, hatred of Israel quickly emerged as a common theme. The representative from Iraq, spoke of “the force of evil,” and called Zionism “one of the blackest, most somber chapters in human history.” Nasser had a few choice words to say in a similar vein. But the most surprising polemic of all came from Amin El Hussein who arrived on a visit as the representative of Yemen (a country he had apparently never seen) and proceeded to reveal to the collected constituents that the real ambition of Israel was to annex the entire Middle East.2
The anti-Israel resolution was one of the very few everyone agreed upon. Israel, the conference concluded, was a base for imperialism and a threat to peace in the Middle East and the entire world.
The Bandung conference consecrated a new era in the history of anticolonialism and soon acquired a profound significance. Jacques Verges referred to it emotionally in 1960 during the trial of the Jeanson network, while lecturing one of the judges:
What has been asked of you…for six years since the beginning of the war in Algeria is this: that you condemn… these Algerians, these men who do not speak the French language, these men whose religion is Islam, these men who thrill to belong to the fraternity of Bandung, the fraternity of the African people, all of whom are now independent…3
In retrospect, Bandung can also be seen as the first comprehensive, international opposition on the part of the Third World liberation movements to Israel, Zionism and eventually to Jews outside of Israel. That same year, propaganda coming out of Cairo had already begun to blur the distinction between “Zionist” and “Jew.” “Our duty is to war against the Jews for the love of God and religion…” read a statement that appeared not in a theological treatise, but in a local newspaper, Al Ahram.4 By the time Adolf Eichmann was tried in Israel in 1961, revisionist history claiming to link Zionists and Hitler was beginning to appear on a regular basis, particularly in the Soviet Union. The “Zionist-Hitler conspiracy theory” was precisely the same “line” that Francois Genoud put forward in his interview with L’Hebdo magazine in Lausanne a full quarter of a century later. Genoud, of course, was already working in Egyptian information services when the new Left-Right anti-Zionist ideology began to take shape.
In the 1950s, radical anti-Zionist propaganda began to dip into the pool of traditional anti-Semitic literature that had been circulating years before both in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Protocols for the Elders of Zion was republished for an entirely new audience. In 1983, French historian Leon Poliakov estimated that there were more than a dozen editions of the book available in Arabic alone.
Hitler’s Mein Kampf was also translated into Arabic, along with other mainstays of Nazi anti-Semitic literature. Talmuldic Human Sacrifices appeared in 1962; The Danger of World Jewry for Islam in 1963; Why I Hate Israel in 1964; and Sexual Crimes of the Jews in 1965. In 1968, some Arab theologians began referring to “the innate nature of the Jews” and suggesting that non-Jews could acquire these nefarious characteristics “by coexisting with Jews.”5 And three of Joseph Goebbels’ former associates6 immigrated to Egypt, where their main contribution was to put together a work called The Plot Against the Church, in which they sought to subvert the liberal plans of Pope John XXIII to remove anti-Jewish content from the Catholic liturgy.
From time to time the showed in a most revealing way. For example, in September 1972, the Soviet embassy in Paris put out a bulletin containing a basically conventional attack on the policies of the Israeli government. Astonishingly, the document included part of the text of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which had been reprinted word for word, including spelling mistakes, just as it was originally reedited for the Czar. There was, however, one change: throughout the text, the world “Zionist” had been substituted for the word “Jew.”
A decade later, the mix of neo-Nazi and Palestinian anti-Semitic propaganda was still in evidence. Present at the 1983 meeting of the Institute for Historical Revisionism in Los Angeles, an association openly dedicated to rewriting the history of World War II, were well-know individuals representing themselves and / or every extremist, racist association in the world. They included the Ku Klux Klan, Robert Faurisson of France (who was one of the first to assert in the name of “free speech” that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz), and Wallis Carto, president of the right-wing Liberty Lobby in the United States with direct connections to Palestinian businessman Issah Nakhleh, purveyor of anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic literature to the United States, among other countries.7
After the humiliating defeat of the Arab states by Israel in 1967, the Bandung fraternity turned its collective attention to the crisis of the Palestinian people. Negotiation seemed out of the question on both sides of the mutual Israeli-Arab recriminations mushroomed. El Fatah and the PFLP of George Habbash intensified their efforts to attract financing and other aid from the non-Arab world, particularly from neo-Nazis in Europe and Latin America who had money as well as propaganda and military experience. In April 1969, a congress of the neo-Nazi Neue Europaische Ordnung was held in Barcelona with fifty delegates from Europe and Latin America, most of them former ss officers, nostalgic Vichyists and Franco supporters. The new European Order had been strictly Nazi-oriented outfit, but now fifteen years later, the focus of their international meeting was the Palestinians. Yasser Arafat sent a representative from El Fatah to explain the needs of the PLO and present two requests. The first concerned the need to recruit non-Arabs for sabotage operations, fund-raising, arms supply and the mobilizing of mercenaries and foreign instructors for training camps. The second request was for money for the dissemination of anti-Zionist propaganda in Europe and South America, including a wider distribution of the Protocols.
The El Fatah representative convinced several former Nazis to work directly for the cause. Karl Van de Put, a Belgian who had served Germany in the Afrika Korps, offered to recruit young Europeans with military experience for El Fatah. Former Nazi officer Johann N. Schuller was already involved in arms sales to El Fatah. He had also begun to recruit former Nazi officers as instructors in El Fatah guerilla training camps.
Even the ubiquitous ex-Gran Mufti Jerusalem turned up in discussion. It was announced that he had recently formed a new unit for sabotage.
Palestinian leaders began advertising in the Nationalzeitung in Munich asking for volunteer “war correspondents” with “tank experience” to fight Zionist imperialism. By the late 1960s, satellite television was able to transmit events all over the globe, rendering the possibilities for propaganda almost limitless. “We think that killing one Jew far from the field of battle is more effective than killing a hundred Jews on the field of battle, because it attracts more attention. “ Dr. Habbash confided several years later in an interview with Oriana Fallaci.8 It is worth nothing that he spoke of “Jews” and not “Zionists” as the targets of terrorism. Before 1970 his PFLP had hijacked several foreign planes in full view of an international audience and blown up four, killing Jews and Gentiles alike.
Given his passionate involve with the cause of Arab nationalism, no one was particularly surprised to see Jacques Verges resurface in 1965 as defense lawyer for Mohammed Hajjazzi, one of the firs El Fatah terrorists apprehended in Israel. Since his sensational FLN trails, Verges reputation had grown considerably, and he was asked by Arafat to take on the Hajjazzi case and politicize it in his own way. In particular, the PLO leadership wanted him to hold an international press conference in which he would level accusations against Israel. Verges agreed, with some reservations, warning the PLO that he would be expelled from Israel if he followed such instructions. The leadership insisted, nonetheless; Verges gave his speech; and he was expelled from Israel, as expected.
One day the following year, while idly flicking through a news paper, Verges happened to notice that the Hajjazzi trial was about to open the next day in Israel. Never one knowingly to missout on the action or to let an opportunity for propaganda slip by, Verges informed two people that he was leaving immediately for Israel: a reporter from Le Monde and the information officer from the Israeli embassy.
“But you can’t go there,” shouted the information officer.
“I’ll take responsibility for that,” replied Verges. “You take responsibility for arresting me.”9
Verges was greeted by a police officer on his arrival at Tel Aviv airport and taken to a hotel for the night before being dispatched back to Paris. His every act was political, if not childish. He ordered meat mean with milk to insult the Israelis whom he supposed were kosher in their eating habits. He insisted on having a bottle of Evian mineral water to remind those watching him the Evian agreement between France and Algeria.
A reporter from Haaretz stood under his window and called out: “
A declaration, Maitre Verges.”
Verges just happened to have a declaration prepared, in which he attacked the state of Israel. He threw it out of the window.
The following morning, in the airplane, the stewardess showed him the latest issue of Haaretz. “And that is how Hajjazzi learned about the PLO position on his trial,” Verges later recounted.10
Such abrupt comings and goings compelled a spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Paris to provide an explanation. “Monsieur Verges was more than interested in propapanda than the defense of his client. In public declarations he permitted himself himself to deny the existence of Israel and to defame the judiciary of our country,” explained a spokesman.11 The propaganda mission, however, had been a resounding success.
In December 1968 and February 1969, PFLP terrorists hijacked El Al planes in Athens and Zurich respectively, and at their subsequent trial in Winterthur, Switerland, they chose Jacques Verges as their legal counsel. Although he was once again refused permission to participate, Verges went anyway, as an advisor. Also present as an “advisor” was Francois Genoud.
The possibilities for propaganda at the Winterhur trial were too important to be left to amateurs. There were international press conferences, and an anti-Zionist brochure call The White Book was widely circulated. The defense was paid by Banque Commerciale Arabe, which had by then adopted the Palestinians primarily on the recommendation of All Hassan Salameh, otherwise known as Abu Hassan, the leader of the Black September terrorist cell that was later responsible for the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Abu Hassan lived in Switzerland, where he had established an easy friendship with Francois Genoud.
(In 1982, Genoud publicly acknowledged his deep involvement with El Fatah.12 In fact, he had long looked after their European operations from every point of view. He gave advice regarding the investing of huge amounts of money donated to the cause, not least from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi who contributed $50 million to the PLO after the Munich assassinations. He provided legal counsel for Fatah men who needed help in Switzerland and underwrote other costs—including at least partial subsidizing of a multinational terrorist organization that had set up shop in Paris first under the leadership of Mohammad Boudia—who was murdered by the Israeli secret service in 1973—then under Carlos the Jackal.13 He was, in his own words, “an economic counselor with a special interest in the development problems of the Third World.” 14 Indeed, his interest in the “development problems” led him to continue his business dealings a an arms merchant specializing in sales to Palestinians.15)
As for Jacques Verges, his contribution to the important propaganda function of the 1969 trials in Winterhur was two-fold. First he held a press conference, during which he claimed that an article in L’Express had accused Israel of using El Al passenger flights to transport military material at the time of June 1967 war. The plane the writer had traveled on “contained military equipment for Mirage fighters that was loaded at Bordeaux. There were no passengers on board, with one illustrious exception: Baron Rothchild,” said Verges, presumably quoting from the article. “There you have a reference [to Israeli activity] that does not come from a Palestinian source but from a fellow journalist,” he told reporters.
No one in the room could have been expected to remember the actual article, which had appeared two years earlier, and reporters dutifully filed their copy. But the next day, journalist Jacques Derogy, the author of the L’Express article that Verges had “quoted,” was more than surprised to read the Paris papers. His article had said nothing at all about military equipment on board the El Al jet. Furthermore, he had written that there were 162 passengers on board.16
Derogy knew Verges personally, and he confronted him the next time they met. “Verges said he didn’t remember,” recalled Derogy. “but what he said at the press conference was an absolute lie.”
Verges second propaganda contribution was to write a book on behalf of the Palestinians, picking up on the charges he had attributed to Jacques Derogy. For the Fedayeen was published in 1969 by Les Editions de Minuit, with a laudatory preface by the publisher, Jerome Lindon. Both Lindon and Verges concluded their remarks with a highly romantic apologia for armed liberation. Indeed, ten years before the Islamic revolution in Iran, Verges foreshadowed the notion of holy combat. “There are privileged places where the heart of the Palestinian resistance beats,” he wrote. “The prison Corydalos of Athens is one of them. On Christmas Eve, 1968, the Resistance confided to Mohammed Mahmoud, the teacher, and to Souleiman Maher, the student, their mission and sacrifice…”17
In the book, Verges defended the “resistance fighters” by blaming El Al and the government of Israel for the fact that there were passengers in the plane when the terrorists destroyed it; and he characterized the killing of one of the Palestinians at the Zurich airport as a “war crime.” But the central—and more sinister—message of the book lay in the warning (really a threat) it contained. “Why conduct attacks on foreign territory?” asked Verges rhetorically. “Common sense provides the answer. El Al is everywhere. As for neutrality of the host countries…[they] loan their airports for military purposes, the logistical apparatus of the Israeli camp…
“Countries that provide transit permits [and other privileges] to these planes have only to provide guarantees that the planes will not be used for military purposes….The Palestinian Resistance cannot accept secret Zionist agents in these neutral states.”
Verges had reintroduced his strategy of disruption. The accused becomes the accuser; the terrorist is a hero who is sinned against; and the real aggressor is the victim. It was Israel’s fault that the Palestinians killed El Al passengers, and the fault of Switzerland and Greece that terrorist actions occurred on their soil. The book also afforded a revealing glimpse into the ideology that informed Verges thinking. Israel is described as the “New Empire” populated by a “race of seigneurs.” “Zionist” and “Jew” appear interchangeably. Talk of Hitler death camps is “blackmail.” The Eichmann trial was a “parody.” Zionism is “racism” and is supported by such “international millionaires” as the “Rothchild barons.” For the Feyadeen seemed to resurrect the worldwide Jewish conspiracy for new service in a new age.
By the late 1960s, the Palestinians were heroes in Europe, and nowhere more so than in Paris. The war in Algeria was succeeded by the U.S. war in Vietnam, and for a while thousands of young intellectuals in Europe and North America made sure they owned at least the minimal badge of political correctness—a poster of Che Guevara displayed on the dormitory wall. The world divided for a time into simplistic categories of “us” and “them,” of good and evil; and perhaps nowhere more than in France, where to follow intellectual fashion was absolutely de rigueur, and where divisions between the political Right and Left had existed since the days of the 1789 Revolution.
During the 1960s, Jacques Verges was a man to contend with. He exuded fame. Success clung to him like an erotic perfume, the macho aura of fearless tough guy who had proved he could slay giants. So on February 23, 1970, the news that he disappeared—simply vanished into thin air—took just about everyone by surprise. […]
After a few months, however, Jerome Lindon received a postcard. It said, “I am free and in good health.” There was no return address. […]
Jacques Verges was spotted one day in late 1978, buying groceries on the rue Lepic in Montmartre. He had nothing to all to say about his eight lost years except to add mischievously to the mystery that surrounded his person. “I am a discreet man,” he allowed in 1983. “I stepped through the looking glass, where I served an apprenticeship…”
Verges returned to the practice of law with a vengeance, this time as counsel for Klaus Croissant, one of the lawyers for the Baader-Meinhof band. Croissant had been extradited from France at the request of the West German government on charges of having assisted a terrorist association. Croissant was convicted and imprisoned in Stuttgart from November 1977 until December 1979, and on his release he expressed a wish to return to France. Verges took the case to the media—as usual—and in doing so explained what he considered the role of a lawyer to be. “A lawyer worthy of the name, whether he be of the Left or the Right, has the duty to help [a political prisoner] enlighten the court on the political context of his legal struggle….Did I do anything other than this during the Algerian war?” he asked.
But it was 1982 before the connections between the Palestinian Left and the Nazi Right resurfaced anew, and once again Jacques Verges was principal player in the drama. So was his old friend Francois Genoud. The case concerned the Paris trial of two terrorists known as the “friends of Carlos.” Bruno Breguet, a twelve-year veteran of pro-Palestinian terrorist action, and Magdalena Kopp, formerly of the Baader-Meinhof band, had been intercepted by the Paris police while carrying grenades and guns and four kilos of explosives in a borrowed car that was parked just off the Champs Elysee. Jacques Verges was their lawyer and public apologist.
Bruno Brequet had been on the terror circuit for more than a decade. In 1970, at the age of twenty, the young Swiss had been sent by George Habbash to plant a bomb in the Israeli port of Haifa (he was caught with dynamite on his person and jailed in Israel); but the most intriguing fact about the young left-wing revolutionary was that he became a protégé of his fellow countryman Francois Genoud, a Nazi. (Genoud later acknowledged his relationship with the PFLP.18 He corrected a journalist who had written he had “no connection” by saying he had “no particular connection” but had “met Habbash one or two times.”)
In 1970, when the original Bruno Breguet case broke in Israel, Genoud, who was, in his words, “very available,” traveled to Breguet’s hometown of Tessin, Switzerland, to meet with the young man’s family. “They were lovely people,” he recalled with the mildness of a fond uncle. “I tried to help them.”
Help consisted once again of “advice” and the recommendation of a young lawyer (who later became Genoud’s son-in-law).
“I was quite taken by the youth of this fellow citizen who had participated in this affair a little bit like a Boy Scout. At a time when so many young people didn’t care about anything at all, he set off …to do something ‘interesting’,” recalled Genoud. According to Le Monde,19 Genoud paid Breguet’s legal costs and set up a support committee on his behalf. Given his relationship as a banker to the FLN and his connections with El Fatah and the PFLP, providing such financing was perfectly consistent for Genoud.
Breguet was sentenced to fifteen years in prison in Israel, but released after seven following a vigorous publicity and lobbying campaign conducted by the Breguet support committee. His first free act was to visit Lausanne to thank his benefactor. Genoud is vague about their subsequent relationship. “I’ve seen him a few times since [his release from prison]. Sometimes he sends me a postcard,” he allowed.20
Bruno Breguet resumed his activities. By the late 1970s he, too, was involved in assisting the PLO in Europe through the Carlos network. When the Breguet-Kopp case came to trial in 1982, it was widely believed that Francois Genoud had once again paid Breguet’s legal cost with money that had, after all, been earmarked for aid to the Palestinian cause. Breguet was a member of the PFLP, and Genoud was a longtime supporter of the organization. Breguet had also lived in Berlin for a period during the 1970s, where he had had easy access to the neo-Nazi networks that were dear to the heart of his benefactor.
According to writer Claire Sterling, Genoud helped finance the Carlos network in Paris in the early 1970s. Ten years later it became evident that Bruno Breguet and Magdalena Kopp worked in the same network. In February 1982, Carlos sent a letter to the French embassy in The Hague demanding the release of Breguet and Kopp. “You have arrested members of my organization,”21 he wrote by way of information. Carlos gave the French government one month to accede to his request, but the letter was leaked to the press, and naturally the government refused.
There was no hard evidence to connect the events, but four days after the deadline expired a bomb exploded on the Paris-Toulouse train killing five people. The following day, the French Cultural Center in Beirut was damaged. On April 15, a French military officer and his pregnant wife were shot at point-blank range when the opened the door to their apartment in Beirut. On April 18, two bombs exploded simultaneously in Vienna, one at the Air France head office, the other in the garden of the French embassy.
[p. 178] When the trial opened on April 17, Jacques Verges suggested that the explosives found in his clients’ car might have been planted there the explosives found in his clients’ car might have been planted there by an Israeli agent. He also made his own position perfectly clear. “I do not hide the fact that I respect and esteem the two accused,” he declared. Then he dropped a bombshell. There was, he claimed, an “unwritten but negotiated agreement” between France and the PLO to the effect that apprehended terrorists would be driven to the border and released as long as they had not committed any act against France itself. Robert Badinter, the minister of justice, denied the charge vehemently. “The government of France will never permit the planning or preparation of [violent] acts destined for another country.” He retorted.
It was difficult to argue the case for an “unwritten agreement,” but Verges was undeniably correct in affirming that France had a history of offering asylum to political refugees of every stripe, who, traditionally, were indeed free to wage their battles as long as they didn’t involve France or the French. But the armed liberation armies that adopted France as their headquarters in the late 1960s and the early 1970s had added a new wrinkle to this policy. Their targets were not necessarily distant at all. Within a few years they were shooting at the U.S. and Israeli military and diplomatic personnel, setting car bombs and blowing up synagogues and restaurants where Jews were known to gather. Within a short time their field of operations had expanded. Unlike the PLO, which remained primarily opposed to Israel, the Carlos network, which comprised of disparate elements of the Left and the Right, saw Israel as an ally of their other enemy: U.S. imperialism and the established democratic order. “We must recognize that our revolution is a phase of world revolution. It is not limited to conquering Palestine,” explained George Habbash.22
The Mitterrand government couldn’t protest too forcibly the issue because, on assuming power in 1981, it had actually amnestied terrorists who promised their word of honor to be very, very good. But once the Carlos letter was leaked to the press, no deal would have been possible even had the French government wanted to negotiate (and there is nothing to suggest that they did). Jacques Verges lost the Breguet-Kopp case, appealed and lost again: but the following year he returned to his clients in print, as part of his strategy for propagandizing the issues. The book, Pour en finir avec Ponce Pilate (which loosely translates as “Let’s Have Done with Pontius Pilate) described the Breguet and Kopp as “courageous” and innocent victims of the state. Besides the French government, the other culprit was, of course, “the Zionists,” by which Verges meant not just Israelis but French Jews as well.
In Pour en finir avec Ponce Pilate, as in For the Fedayeen, Verges wasted little time on the dull particularity of the charges brought against his clients. In both books, the underlying cause of the action is assumed to be a noble one, terror is justified as self-defense and the victim of the attack is characterized as being at fault. Breguet and Kopp had become the latest means to promote Jacques Verges central interest—a campaign on behalf of the Palestinians and against the French government, whom he accuses of being “a protectorate” of Israel. If France were not being controlled by the “Zionists,” his clients would automatically have been freed.
Verges received a number of death threats during the Breguet-Kopp trial. He replied by denouncing Israel and the Israeli ambassador in Paris. “If anything happens to me, I shall hold the Israeli embassy responsible,”23 he stated in classic Catch-22 style. If nothing happened, he might claim that the Israelis had been frightened off because he was on to their tricks. Is something did happen to him, well, he had already fingered the putative culprit in advance.
To conclude his book, Verges insisted that the Breguet-Kopp trial was wholly political. Then he quoted his own courtroom plea, followed by an explicit threat:
Judges, because blood is flowing today in Jerusalem and in the occupied territories, you are being asked to strike at those who are friends of the dead and the wounded…and in the name of their assassins. You are being asked to replace Easter with the Day of Atonement, the day when the priest charge scapegoats with all the sins of Israel…The truth is that Magdelena Kopp and Bruno Brueguet will be freed. You know it and they know it. They are soldiers imprisoned for a noble cause, the cause dignity…
The rest of their army will not cease to fight and strike until they are free…24
Following the Breguet-Kopp affair, Jacques Verge became the lawyer for Mohand Hamami and Frederic Oriach, both members of the Paris-based multinational terror band called Direct Action, which created in 1979. Hamami and Oriach were accused of breaking into an arsenal of arms that was under police surveillance. Oriach was also the editor of a glossy and anti-Zionist, antiimperialist review called Subversion (a descendant of Verges seminal publication Revolution), which was described as “a political and theoretical instrument at the disposition of militant revolutionaires.”25 Furthermore, according to Italian magistrates interviewed by Le Figaro, Hamami was at the heart of a triple connection: Red Brigades, Direct Action and the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction.
Verges courtroom style during the Breguet-Kopp trial had been variously described by the French media as “curious,” “strange,” and, more picturesquely, “retro-bolshevist.” The Hamami-Oriach trials presented the public with a defense in similar vein. As during the Breguet-Kopp affair, Verges publicly denounced what he called the “Zionist” lobby” in France as being the real guilty party.
Both Oriach and Verges continued to publish (Oriach from his jail cell), each man maintaining his own connections with the world of international terror. In 1983, a new journal called Correspondances Internationales appeared on the scene, edited by Verges. In the opening issue, Verges saluted “the imprisoned comrades who have succeeded in communicating from the depths of the cells in which they have been buried by the bourgeoisie.”26 The “comrades” to whom Verges referred were members of the Red Brigades. Indeed, the review contained a long statement by a member of the Red Brigades, Carmino Fiorillo, who was currently in prison.
Verges was noticeably uneasy when asked to describe his relationship to Correspondances Internationales, particularly since he claims to be “only a lawyer” and to have “no political activity:”
“I am editor because they needed a French person to direct the publication in France. The journal itself is devoted to the activities of what some people call the ‘armed resistance,’ or ‘urban guerillas,’ or ‘terrorists.’ It publishes studies concerning social problems in Europe. Perhaps you know that there are 4,000 political prisoners in Italy. When you have that many, you are no longer dealing with a problem of individual criminals. You have a political problem, a public defiance of society. Well, the journal is a place where these problems can be debated.”
When asked whether the debate included opinions from people opposed to terrorism, he replied: “No, it doesn’t. But no one can say that my opinions are the same as those of the journal.”27
And what are the views of the comrades in the Red Brigades? Like Verges himself they constantly tell us what they think, what they plan to do and what their next steps will be. When Mario Moretti, who is considered to be the brain of the Red Brigades, was arrested in Milan on April 4, 1981, he declared: “In Italy and elsewhere we will hit our targets.” Those targets had been enumerated earlier the same year in his Journal of the Red Brigades. They included, chronologically, an attack on the judiciary, then the politicians, followed by the press and business management. Next came NATO, “the armed protection of the criminal multinationals.” Moretti explained that the war would be waged “everywhere, and in collaboration with foreign revolutionaries.”28
And it was. In October 1983, neo-Nazis in Brussels were found to be working with the Syrians. In February 1984, the Italian-based Fighting Communist Party openly claimed responsibility for the murder of General Leamon R. Hunt, chief of the multinational forces in the Sinai. And in early 1985, a rash of attacks on NATO and Jewish targets in Germany, France, Belgium, Portugal and Spain pointed to a combined effort on the part of several terrorist organizations that had been thought to be independent of each other.
Also in February 1985, Jacques Verges turned up (predictably) as chief lawyer for their members of the Secret Armenians Liberation Army accused of a bomb attack of the Paris-Orly airport in July 1983. When his clients were found guilty, Verges reverted to a familiar pattern. The court should not be dealing with a “political problem,” he said, then continue to with a clear threat of reprisals. “The friends of [the condemned] will not let them down,” he warned, 29 just as he had threatened in 1983 that “the rest of their army [of Breguet and Kopp] will no cease to fight and strike until they are free.”
In 1985, the alliance of the old-style fascist Right and the new-style Left had become more visible. The seeds of Nasser’s Cairo in the 1950s and 1969 meeting of the New European Order in Madrid were bearing fruit. In 1985, one of the left-wing Armenian terrorists defended by Jacques Verges was found to be carrying a German passport that had been stolen by the neo-Nazi Hoffmann group30 and distributed in a PFLP training camp in Lebanon. And in April of 1985, an important double arrest in Paris netted Odfried Hepp, the last member at large of the same Hoffman organization, in the company of a Tunisian member of the Palestine Liberation Front. (Hepp was suspected of having planned and/or participated in the anti-Semitic attack on Goldenberg’s restaurant in Paris in 1982.) Hepp, however, claimed to be a member in good standing of the Palestine Liberation Front, Aboul Abas branch, with its base in Tunis.
According to Arndt Heinz Marx, associate president (until his arrest in 1984) of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Front in Frankfurt, both Hepp and Marx trained in an El Fatah camp in Lebanon from July 1980 until June 1981 with a group of fifteen German neo-Nazis. “I was a member of El Fatah, a Fedayeen,” said Marx. “El Fatah and the PLO are fighting for the rights of their people as we are fighting for the German people. The Palestinians and ourselves have the same enemy: International Zionism, the Jews…”31
Marx added that guerillas training Lebanon were not intending to attack Israel directly, but were preparing “for combat in Europe.”
As for Francois Genoud, his connections to both Nazism and the extreme Left were evident and ongoing. In 1984, a Zurich newspaper pointedly reported that he had close ties with the Libyan embassy in Berne.32 And his own daughter, Martine, had been married to a revolutionary who was killed in an internecine battle in Lebanon in the early 1980s.
Finally, there was the case of former general Otto Ernst Remer, a friend of Hitler and Goebbels who also spent the postwar years in the service of his “ideals.” Like Francois Genoud, Remer went to Cairo in the 1950s, where he was a political adviser to Nasser. Like Genoud, he is suspected of working a “trading company”33 that supplied the FLN with arms from Eastern Europe during the Algerian war.
Interviewed in Germany, Remer advocated an alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union against the United States. “There is a problem concerning who holds the real power in the United States. Without a doubt, the Zionists control Wall Street. That’s where the evil originates, because Israel has a pro-war foreign policy. Israel is the instrument of Wall Street, and as a result, the Middle East forments war…”34
And there is was, as clear as Hitler at Nuremberg in 1934, as clear as Mein Kampf, as clear as the Protocols. For both Arndt Heinz Marx and Otto Remer, the struggle of the combined Left/Right guerrillas against the United States was, at its core, the struggle against the Jews who controlled Wall Street, the Jews who held real power in an America that used Israel as a willing handmaiden of war, the Jews who…controlled the world.
“The struggle against Judaism is at the very heart of the natural alliance between National Socialism and those Arab Moslems who burn with a desire for freedom,” Himmler had written in a prescient little note forty years earlier. In the interim, the alliance had taken root ripened and exploded on to the international stage with renewed vigor. And in the not-so-strange association of Klaus Barbie and Jacques Verges, Himmler’s words had merely acquired a rich new context.
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