 Okay, good evening everyone and welcome to this evening's seminar in the Sir Michael Howard new directions in the history of war and violence series. For those of you who don't know me my name is Dr Mark condos I'm the convener of the series and one of the co directors of the Sir Michael Howard Center. And this evening is my great pleasure to introduce Professor Martin Thomas from Exeter, who is going to be giving a paper tonight. So, Professor Thomas is present previous research has examined a wide range of topics including colonial policing intelligence and violence across different European empires with a, I guess, a particular focus on French Empire and also British Empire as well. He's the author of numerous books, including empires intelligence security services and colonial disorder. One of my personal favorites of your work, Martin. He's also author of violence and colonial order of police work is in protest in European colonial empires and fight or flight Britain France and their roads to empire or from empire. He's also co author alongside Richard toy of arguing about empire imperial rhetoric in Britain and France 1882 to 1956. As I understand his current research examines the meanings and impacts of colonial disintegration and decolonization during the sort of mid 20th century and this evening. Professor Thomas is going to be sharing a paper with us entitled after the war was over Franco Algerian security cooperation in the 1960s. So Martin, please do take it away. Thanks very much mark and thanks again everybody for coming this evening. I'm really really pleased to be able to talk with you about this. I was saying to markers we were chatting earlier on that this is really an attempt to bring together a lot of material that I've had for quite a long time from Algiers and Paris. But which to be honest I haven't quite known what to do with so do please tell me if you think there's a lack of coherence here or or anything else because I'm trying to perhaps bolt together things that might look a little disparate. But the starting point really is the disjunction I suppose between what looks to be happening in Algeria at the point of nominal independence in 1962, and what seems to be happening behind the scenes. So for example, that Francis violent exit is often taken I suppose as a kind of quintessential climactic decolonization, one in which a war is fought to its bitter end, one in which settlers are substantially forced to leave or choose to leave at the immediate point of independence, and one in which there is a really violent last ditch reaction against the prospect of independence and that reaction of course is typified by the organization down the secret the OAS. And it's kind of campaign of bombing not only in Algeria but also in mainland France. On the Algerian side, we know to that the FLN the front of Liberation National regime that's about to take office seems to be pretty intolerant of those who find themselves on the wrong side of history as it were. It's quite a spring and summer of bloodletting, all of which is very much studied and very much well known, and all of which seems to underline the idea that Algerian independence marks a rupture, a total break with France, a new beginning. And if you like that the new Algeria is going to be the beacon of third world ism. What of course Jeffrey burn in a brilliant book calls the mecca of revolution. Well, I don't really disagree with any of that. But I suppose what I'm going to be doing this evening is presenting, I hope, quite a lot of evidence that suggests a rather different picture, because behind the scenes and this is where the second image neither the settler exodus, nor the kind of image of a young Algeria are riding the crest of a revolutionary ray, revolutionary ray perhaps but certainly a wave. Neither of those things quite sit with the speed with which Algerians and French in government begin working together once again. Put differently, then the upheavals of the war's violent outcome have obscured the security connections that are very swiftly reestablished and arguably actually never totally broken between the French authorities and the security forces of the now independent Algerian Republic. And what I'm going to do with this paper, which is substantially based as I said on the material from our jeers and also from something called the service de liaison. It's not a very well known bureaucratic office, and it's never been in the limelight it's papers I think are pretty much sort of left untouched, but it's in those that I found quite a lot of what I think is is rather revelatory material. Those papers and others within the algeas government records of the early phase the first phase of reorganized Algerian foreign ministry. They suggest that both the French government on Charles de Gaulle of course the fifth Republic and Ahmed Ben Bella's new FLN regime were quite eager to build bridges between one another. And that of course is taking place against perhaps a better known story which is the increasing factionalization within the infant Algerian Republic. And then the finalization, I suppose has been personified at least in popular histories and perhaps in popular memory by the rivalry between the president up at Ben Bella, and his defense minister, who are we boom at yen. And you can see those in the next PowerPoint slide. And as perhaps that picture suggests the sort of revolutionary darling of the third world is left a man of multiple international and transnational connections, very much different to his defense minister there in his Chinese fatigues who are a boom at yen, who had avoided Ben Bella who had avoided capture during the Algerian war but had done so substantially by working from across the frontier within Morocco as we will see. And that different war history those different trajectories Ben Bella as perhaps Algeria's foremost political prisoner boom at yen as a kind of external military leader were absolutely crucial to what I'm going to relay and to what happened next. Better known, of course, is that boom at yen would actually overthrow Ben Bella in mid June 1965 on the eve of what was supposed to be the second bandung conference a conference that have been rescheduled for Algiers. And indeed people, it is said mistook the coup for kind of a last minute dress rehearsal for that second bandung. And of course it was a second bandung that was never to take place. The regime was not just divided between those two leaders but much more deeply further down. Maggie's our former fighters in other words in two of the regional centers of FLN operations will airs three and four. That is the sort of central Highlands the Berber Highlands of Kabilia and the eastern Algerian region of Constantine. Those would rebel against the hijacking. So they said by the FLN of a sort of true revolutionary path by a kind of narrow minded socialist and very highly Arabized statism. And we'll be joining that by members of the socialist forces front the FSS, which are in the next PowerPoint up if you like. An organization grouped around one of the original nine founders of the FLN Hossin et Ahmed, who it is sort of commonly said in in kind of Algerian popular history was the true inheritor of the FLN's phononian tradition of kind of people's revolution. The FFS and Ahmed, eight Ahmed would lead a rebellion in 1964 against what they described as the regime sort of high degree of centralization, it's overbearing Arabization, and it's creeping authoritarianism. All of those regime opponents would face sanction imprisonment, some some would be murdered during the course of 1963 and 1964. That repression would sort of catalyze the growth of what would become the new army national popular. I'm not going to bombard you I hope with acronyms but this is one of them the ANP, the army national popular. That is independent Algeria's military security forces inheritors in other words of what had been the FLN the independence movements armed wing, which is the last of the acronyms was called the ALN the Armée de libération national and you can put the fifth PowerPoint up there please. Now, in theory, the new ANP the new Algerian National Army was consistent with France finals famous injunction to the FLN to foster Algerian national consciousness among the people whose capacity to express their authentic cultural identity had been so restricted by decades of really deep French colonialism. The title of the ANP is significant it was an army national popular it was supposed to be a people's army, much like its Chinese antecedent on which in theory would supposedly be based. It was supposed to become an organization with political commissars it was supposed to have a very flat hierarchy. It was supposed in other words to be the antithesis of the French security forces that it's predecessor the ALN the army de libération national had been at war with. That was the theory in practice though the ANP became the reservoir of authoritarian power in a regime that while outwardly anti colonialist would cleave to multiple external partners to assure its survival. But it was only after Ben Bella's overthrow by move, maybe boomer yet in June 65 that a much more permissive security environment was created for the kind of deep seated and deep state, I would argue security partnerships that I'll be describing. Former chief of staff of the ALN and leader of the movements military forces in Morocco as I said boomer Jens influence would rest on the security networks he built around him within this new military within the ANP. And these would grow in aggregate power and repressive capabilities in the years after independence. All I would suggest at variants with what Ben Bella. Median's rival had claimed to want to the new Algerian Republic, and at variants it seems with what an awful lot of Algerians wanted as well. So, what's the point of all this what what's the point of my paper what am I trying to say. There are a few things really one did the predominance of covert warfare in the final years of colonial Algeria the years in other words of the dirtiest phase of the Algerian war paradoxically make possible. Easy security cooperation after the war was over. And I'll explain that paradox a bit more as I go along. If that's the case, what if anything did decolonization signify in the early development of Algeria's deep security state. Was this a real decolonization is held up as I said earlier on as the kind of emblematic one arguably in the history of all the colonization. But clearly something else is going on behind the scenes. And I'd further suggest that matters are intelligence culture are absolutely pivotal to finding some sort of answer to those questions. They're also significant in unraveling the paradox behind them. In other words, the enmity of contested decolonization, which, as I suggested just just now is critical to the consolidation of security exchanges between former enemies who prided themselves on knowing one another's hidden objectives. In other words, just as supposedly there aren't any secrets between friends. In the case of France, France and Algeria in 1962 to about 6869 they don't seem to be that many secrets between enemies. Neither the politics of secrecy nor the practices needed to facilitate them disappeared with Algerian independence. Indeed, security cooperation between France and Algeria rested on a shared understanding that the creation of policing agencies and the securitization of the new regime would go hand in hand. Well, before independence the FLN's political program that fluctuated between a kind of secular and broadly pan Arabist socialism and strains of much more distinctly Algerian nationalism that wedded a moderate Islamism to the modernizing ideals of liberationist anti colonialism. Now, none of that surprised those who were observing the war or who were fighting the war. Those sort of conflicting tendencies if you like between a kind of NASA right Algeria to sort of stereotype it a bit, and a rather more authentically Islamic and Algerian Algeria were at the heart of those rivalries and those early phases of repression I mentioned just now. So diminishing is the FLN took power, the tensions intrinsic to those alternate visions of how to govern for what purpose and for whom only became more intense. Next slide please different constructions of Algeria's post independent future divided then along lines of ideology, cultural orientation, ethnic attachment and gender inclusion. The argument over those issues mirrored the cleavages between a nationalist movement within a nationalist movement I should say, whose internal divisions had widened the closer it came to winning. As a result, the FLN although it definitely won immediately fractured in 1962. At the high political level of I've discussed already the most obvious split was between rivals inside the provisional government group to round either Ben beller or boom it yet. But this executive level split had much wider permutations. Some were grounded in regional connection. At Ahmed's socialist forces front, for example, others in war experience, those who remained in ice inside Algeria throughout the conflict. Those who'd either been imprisoned outside it, or like boomed yen have remained across the frontier in Morocco for most of the conflict. Still others in disputes over strategy and international affiliation rivalry was also endemic between those if you like who worked within the FLN civilian wing and those who cleave to the old ALN. Some of the arguments between them were tactical, and they reflected long running disagreements about the nature of the Algerian society to be built after decolonization. It was ideological. Which way should this country go. What was its ultimate purpose. How should the new Algeria be be be built. And a lot more of it was actually really instrumental. How could people's lives be improved after eight years of such a devastating war how in other words we're living standards to be addressed. The scale of the tasks facing the post independent regime were huge. The OAS had sabotaged Algeria's input, industrial infrastructure systematically smashing plant equipment and bombing the country's electricity grid. At independence in July 62 the FLN estimated that only 20% of the country's factory capacity capacity was functional. And still my father majority occupation had broken down in the war's final years with less less than half of all cultivatable land in use unemployment was over 2 million in a population that was nudging 10. Millions more between 2.5 and 3.4 to be precise, we're internally displaced or living abroad as refugees. So for Ben Bella status direction in these circumstances with that was unavoidable. To him it was also very much desirable and adjunct to Algeria socialization. And that's where multiple offers of foreign financial aid and technical expertise came in, because for those around Ben Bella the obvious point was well why wait to begin the social societal transformation that we've been fighting for. We've got lots of suitors available who will enable us to get on with it. As I've said already, Ben Bella would of course be stopped in his tracks, but well before he was ousted in June 65. The FLN's divine shaped the ways in which Franco Algerian security cooperation would develop. Seeing from a French perspective, the provision of military equipment training and technical advice were all means to promote the rate the interest of favored regime insiders. In material terms, the initial priority was to equip internal security forces capable of imposing order in a post colonial state, which as I've said, rebellions were pressing danger. In other words, the French did not want Algeria to descend into a civil war, which looked decidedly possible in 1963 and 64. In the Algerian perspective, securing French aid conferred other advantages. Military cooperation confirmed the normalization of relations with an erstwhile enemy, and with it a sort of diplomatic maturity if you like of the Algerian Algerian state. It will certainly help legitimize it in the West. In the figure in the Algerian military, the ANP, France was uniquely well placed to provide much needed basic supplies, pistols, rifles, boots, clothing, all of which the ANP didn't have in the summer of 1962, and which it claimed desperately needed in order to, if you like, make governmentality a reality. In other words, were crucial to make the new regime's authority legible in those months immediately after independence. Away from the weapons and the violence for the regime's technocrats of which there were many French advice was equally essential in multiple spheres. The expertise in engineering and management science would get factories working again. Others built from the ground up. Medical provision would help re-equip hospitals and provide training to local staff. As we all know, friendly competitors like West Germany and USA, as well as France's rivals, more hostile rivals like China, the USSR, East Germany, Egypt and Cuba, were also adept to offering healthcare support, barefoot doctors, surgeons, medicines, mobile clinics, etc. For the Algerian regime, encouraging this marketplace of competing assistance made a lot of sense because it drove down the political costs attached to such provision. And the requirements of remedial healthcare in a war-torn nation lacking basic medical infrastructure far outstrip the totality of aid on offer. Even if the Algerian government said yes to everybody offering to help, it still needed more. Closer to government, French civil servants, housing officers, auditors and accountants lent advice about basic bureaucratic procedures, particularly fiscal record keeping. The French, in other words, were absolutely fundamental to creating the taxation regime in independent Algeria, which arguably was the foundation of much else. That said, for all the sort of civilian appearance of these dimensions to aid, from construction engineers to doctors and administrators, it was Algerian army personnel who took the key decisions on what aid to accept and how much. Now, with that in mind, it was perhaps less surprising than you might imagine that the Algerian provisional government, the FLN authority that negotiated the independent settlement back in 1962, had taken steps towards working with the French even before the war ended. During the Evienne talks that would end the war, provisional government negotiators have put out feelers about French help in organizing an Algerian gendarmerie, a paramilitary that it was thought would have to take up positions very quickly after independence in order to keep order. In practice, that didn't happen. Instead, it was the ALN, the existing guerrilla army under Boumedienne that policed the independence transition. And so it was under Boumedienne that the violence of the spring and summer of 1962, the killing in particular of upwards of 30,000 haki former auxiliaries who'd worked with the French security forces, took place. Now, that too, one might think would be a barrier to Franco-Algerian cooperation and particularly cooperation with Boumedienne. But the first point to stress about these records that I'm drawing on is that there is absolute consensus that the haki problem, as it's rather insultingly or rather callously described, is not to get in the way of normalization of relations. And it's that I think that's behind the French decision to cause decision in July 62 not to offer immigration passes to haki and their families who are desperate to get out of the country. Meanwhile, Ben Beller, the president of course becomes rather more closely involved in matters, aware that the ALN under Boumedienne had sort of taken the initial lead in working with the French. Ben Beller tries to reorient things over the autumn and winter of 1962, going back to that original Evian negotiation proposition that the French might be able to equip the Algerian police. After all, there's lots of French equipment hanging around in Algeria. And much of it is due to be sort of packed up and sent home, which frankly the French don't really want to be bothered with. So if they can find a useful outlet for jeeps, small arms, clothing, equipment, so much the better. By October of 62 that kind of arrangement has already been agreed, and the French are simply allowing the Algerians effectively to enter their old garrisons and supply centers and take what equipment they want and what equipment they need. And all of that is being supervised from within the Elysees Palace within the presidential office in Paris by three people. And that's the next PowerPoint please. Michel de Bray, de Gaulle's Prime Minister, his chef de cabinet, Constantine Melnick, who's also a senior security service official, and the Minister of State for Algerian Affairs, the man who taken the lead in negotiating Evian Louis Jux. They are happy for the sorts of relatively impromptu arrangements to proceed. But what they emphasize is that there needs to be a much more comprehensive and ambitious mutual assistance agreement made. And that is the sort of end objective in view for de Gaulle's government by the end of 62. Meanwhile, Boumed Yen, the Defense Minister, aware if you like, and there's this sort of towing and throwing emerging I suppose in what I'm describing aware that Ben Beller had stolen a march in the Jean d'Amari equipment issue. Steps back into the fray. In November at a meeting and sort of high profile dinner on the ninth. He says that he hopes the sort of the embarrassment what he calls the atrocities committed by all sides in the recent war to quote him will soon be forgotten. Not letting bygones be bygones and uses the phrase exchanging documentation between Algeria and France. Now I kind of puzzled over that for a little while, until I realized from some of the subsequent correspondence between him and his French counterparts, what he was talking about. The first official step towards the creation of a covert security partnership, a sort of secret deal, if you like, to help entrench the ANP, the military regime that it was ultimately to become in power. And Boumed Yen should raise the matter of intelligence sharing and security cooperation was really no coincidence he done his, his time if you like, as a senior FLN leader, very much on the cusp of its security apparatus. He created what would become the FLN intelligence service, and he built up the outlines if you like, of what would become after independence the so called security military, the. Well part paramilitary but largely covert secret intelligence arm of the Algerian army. All of that had been done from within Morocco, and all of that had been done at the instigation of boom and yen and those around him in the so called uja clan, so named after the Algerian border town where they were based. There are other figures within that you might that you might know. Well, Abdul Aziz booty flicker, until recently Algeria's semi semi comatose president of course, who was foreign minister in Ben Beller's and then boom and yen's government. I bet abdel hafi busuf, who was arguably the the sort of strongman figure in the huge uja clan, who would really serve if you like as boom and yen's principal guide in the creation of what will become this kind of Algerian deep state. The first under busuf in Morocco and then under boom and yen after independence in Algeria the FLN had effectively become a state within a state. The movement had, as we know levied lots of taxes, some legitimate some illegitimate on not only Algerians but on refugee communities across the market. And it had also begun a sort of quest to raise money through a host of business interests and security deals, very much akin I think to what would become a fairly sort of widespread apparatus of security service involvement in business that characterizes much of the sort of deep state regimes across some of the Arab world. Now, alongside these security activities boom and yen devoted increasing resources to expanding a specific intelligence service service this security military. And he entrusted that if we could have the next slide please to a very young man called Kazdi Merba. Along with busuf, you can see on the left there would arguably become the two pivotal figures in all of these security relationships with grants that I'm describing. And busuf, because he was the figure who had made ends here, and who basically drove the process of working with the French forward. Because he very much directed the growth of the security. And the figure in the middle of that picture on the left there. He was arguably the only serious rival to boom and yen after the overthrow of Ben Bella and 65 cream bell cahima former leader of will air three or former sort of FLN hero if you like one of the original nine founders of the movement. But unfortunately for him, an individual who launched a sort of one lot of sort of launched an assassination bid against boom and yen in 1967 which went wrong, then fled the country and would ultimately be strangled in a Frankfurt hotel room in 1970 on the instructions of Kazdi Merba. So, there's, there's a power struggle still going on, surprise to say. Boom ed yen, casting my minds and paper back to the immediate post independence month and years boom ed yen was soon making really substantial requests to Paris. By the end of 1962 he'd already asked for aircraft, he was starting to ask for tanks. And he was also suggesting that the French take a lead in providing military advisors. That's very important, because the kind of stock story if you like, is that the Algerians cleave to two other sources of support entirely. One is the Soviet block, particularly the Soviets themselves but also the Cubans, and the other is NASA's Egypt. The problem with that characterization is twofold. On the one hand as I'm sure you all know NASA's Egypt is on the brink of a disastrous war in Yemen, which will eat up most of its available surplus equipment if you like material that it could have assisted the Algerians with them. The Egyptians basically write themselves after the script by 1964. As for the Soviets. Well, yes, the Soviets, as we'll see are absolutely crucial, but perhaps less crucial than the customary story as told. And I'll try to explain why. One is that the Soviets were attractive to the Algerian regime as a providers, because they tended to make no strings are attached arrangements or so it seemed. In other words, they did not make offers of military and technical support conditional on either repayment loans, or on political exchanges or political dependency. I find that surprising. But the reason for that is quite simple. The USSR is much keener at the time in its sort of development and aid provision on barter arrangements on securing raw materials primary goods that can assist with ongoing industrialization and food provision schemes. Secondly, Chris chev's regime is very keen to, if you like, supplant the mouse China as the sort of expert in agricultural transformation in land reform peasant socialism, if you like. And for all of those reasons, it makes its aid support effectively very cheap to take up to be specific in 1964 Moscow offers a cheap line of credit to the Algerian government, which no other aid provider can match because it effectively defers all repayments indefinitely. So, to put it bluntly, Algeria is offered substantially Soviet military and commercial aid, more or less for free, or so it seems. I know that that's a rather naive position. And it's unlikely to have been quite like that. Certainly the Algerian regime does not look upon this supposedly cheap or quasi free Soviet support as risk free anything but the reason for that is that the Algerian regime at the time is still primarily exporting two things wine, which of course is a French colonial introduction to Algeria, but more significantly of course hydrocarbons particularly natural gas. Now, both of those, and more particularly hydrocarbons over time will become immense sources of wealth through the Algerian regime. And with them comes the risk of economic dependency. This of course is the era of neocolonialism, Kwame and Krumah Walter Rodney, others are writing fervently about the risks of newly independent postcolonial countries falling under the remit of a globalization that's either going to be Western dominated, or a sort of red globalism, if you like, that will be no less restrictive in its political implications. So how did the French react to that? Well, if we could have the next PowerPoint, we can get one clue. What alarms the most is this place which is the Frans military Academy I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong by the way my apologies in Moscow. That's where Boumedien begins to send Algerian officer trainees of the ANP in 1963 and 1964. Now the French are terrified by that because they see it, perhaps rightly, as evidence that if you like the USSR is getting in at the ground floor of the sort of state building of this authoritarian and highly militarized ANP led regime. And that reason that the French effectively open up their own training academies, their own universities indeed to Algerian officers and students more generally. And yet a countermand Soviet influence, they are certain, that's Debré, Melnik, Joxe, De Gaulle and others, that they have to act very, very quickly. But one sort of piece of evidence that suggests that they're doing so is that they invest immediately in two things. One, an Algerian Jean-Damey College and the other an Algerian military academy in Algiers itself. Both are backed by French money, and both will be staffed by French personnel. And crucially, the French security service personnel who were involved in those early phases of military liaison equipment provision and training begin to suggest that if you like the the brakes can be taken off in the provision of equipment. And as previously, French support had been largely confined to those sort of low level supplies to Algeria's police agencies, and the French state had been very reluctant to meet Boomer Dien's first request for tanks for heavy equipment, etc. By 1964, much more widespread arrangements are agreed. We agreed with two big French arms makers, the Société Pénard, which later becomes an affiliate of Citroën, and the Société industrielle et mécanique de carrosserie, which is better known as Simca. Both of those begin to supply heavy equipment to the Algerian ANP. Meanwhile, the French army begins what will become a long term pattern of selling off its surplus small arms to the Algerian army. In other words, sort of material that is being replaced automatically begins to get fed towards Algeria. Now I could go into much more detail about that, but I'm conscious of time so I'm going to skip a little bit ahead to two things. One is another extraneous event to all of this, which is if we could have the next slide please. The defeat of Algeria by Morocco in the so-called Sands War of November 1963. Some would say that's actually rather more of a skirmish than a war, but it's fought around Tindouf in the southwestern Algeria, southwestern Sahara, sorry. And Morocco, as a result, basically seizes a finger of territory in southwestern Algeria, which abuts what had been Spanish Morocco and this is the origins of Algeria's ongoing support for Polisario and for western Saharan independence. It's quite an important regional conflict in its own sort of strategic dimensions, but it also absolutely transforms the Algerian regime's attitude towards foreign military equipment, and in particular French military support. The second big development is of course, as we move a little bit ahead, the continuing consolidation of Boumèd Yen's position as Defense Minister and as head of the ANP, the National Army, and his use of those platforms to begin plotting Benbella's overthrow. The upshot, as we know, is the 1965 coup, by which time cooperation with the French has already moved on to a kind of systemic level, if you like, which it is utterly regularized, and I'm moving towards my conclusion here. Because the clearest evidence I would suggest of that if we have a look at the next slide comes in the training of the next generation of the ANP's officer corps. By 1966, Boumèd Yen, by this time of course, President, has decided that this is an officer corps that is going to be formed, trained, and really shaped within the French Military Academy. And by the autumn of 1966, over 10,000 intending Algerian army officers are being sent to various French military academies each academic year, and that will continue on into the early 1970s. Now that I would suggest is far more significant than the levels of sort of material aid that are coming into Algeria, still from multiple sources from the Russians, from the Cubans, a little bit from the Egyptians, from the Chinese and from others. It's the ANP, the people in other words who are going to be the next generation of this kind of Algerian deep state, who are so critical, and whom I think the French realize aren't really there, they're kind of ace in the hole if you like that absolute critical advantage. Proof of that. Well, I suppose proof and this really is where I will conclude comes in October 1967, because in October 67, not only does that individual whom I mentioned earlier, Belkakem Krim, try to overthrow and murder Boumèd Yen. But one of the reasons he does so in October 67 is because news slips out that Boumèd Yen has actually asked the French, if they will assist him in creating an intelligence service, modeled on that of France, modeled on the SDAC, service in documentation, exterior. And that is an offer that the French find far too good to refuse. And so from the autumn of 1967 onwards, France takes the leading role in training, not only the Algerian overseas intelligence service, but members of Kazdi Marda's security military. In other words, what I'm suggesting is that within a couple of years of Boumèd Yen's overthrow of Ben Bela in 65, France has become wholly complicit in creating a new kind of Algerian deep state, and one that will remain in power in Algeria in various guises to this very day. Thanks very much for listening.