Saturday, February 21, 2015

The former correspondent and Mossad agent, Roger Augue

From James: "Roger Auque was clearly a Zionist agent all along. Soha Bechara, the Lebanese Communist Party cadre who tried to execute Antoine Lahad, head of Israel’s mercenary South Lebanon Army, talks about his treacherous interview with her in Khiam prison: “But this interview haunted me: why did they permit a Westerner to talk with me? I became convinced that everything revolved around Ron Arad. [Israeli pilot shot down and held captive by Amal.] They thought that I could be of use to them in this matter even though the Communist Party was totally removed from it; anyway, that’s what I told Roger Auque. I explained clearly to him that I belonged to the LCP and that, in any case, I would not ask Arad’s captors to negotiate an exchange of him for someone else, since I was for the liberation of all detainees, regardless of their identity. . . .

"A month later, they tried to use me another way: the heads of the camp asked me to write a letter to a recipient of my choice to plead for the liberation of Ron Arad. I wrote three letters: one to my family, the second to the Communist Party, and the third to the Secretary general of the UN. But I didn’t mention the name of Ron Arad in any of them. I took my time in my letter to the Communist Party, insisting on the the importance of the armed struggle. This earned me a whole night outside, in the open air, soaked from my head to my feet. . . .

"Several years later, I learned that Roger Auque did transmit the letter to my family who, to that point, didn’t know if I was still alive. But Auque didn’t do me any favors beyond that, as I found out ten years later, when reading one of his articles in the weekly, Paris-Match. The title of his article was “Portrait of a Murderess.” He described me as a poised and intelligent young woman, who politely crossed her hands, without bother to mention that I was handcuffed. . . . He continued by saying I was never tortured [she was, for weeks], that I never received anything more than a few light slaps [an Israeli interrogator knocked out a tooth filling], that I was eating well, and that I was able to bathe three times a week. But the worst thing was that he had me saying exactly what I had refused to write: that I demanded the Communist Party and all the Lebanese groups negotiate for the exchange of Ron Arad and the Western hostages of Hezbollah for the Lebanese prisoners detained by Israel, since my only hope for freedom  would be following these detainees out of jail." (My translation from Soha Bechara and Cosette Ibrahim, La fenêtre: Camp de Khiam 88-90)".