For many years suspected by the French DST (counter-espionage service) of being involved in international terrorism, Maître Vergès always denied this allegation. But in 1995 East German secret police (Stasi) files were leaked in Paris, and they disclosed the lawyer’s long-standing links with the terrorist group led by “Carlos the Jackal”. His Stasi code name had apparently been “Paula”.
Long seen as a man of the extreme Left, Vergès became an international celebrity in 1987 when he defended the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie in Lyon. His client, who had been commander of the Lyon Gestapo during the German occupation, received 23 life sentences for wartime crimes against humanity, but Vergès considered that his original method of defence, which essentially consisted of insulting the prosecution and the surviving victims, a notable success.
In fact, having decided that Barbie was clearly guilty, Vergès used the occasion to bait the Jewish lawyers opposing him and attack the trial as based on “victors’ justice”. He also spent many days attacking Israeli policy towards the Palestinians.
Vergès had recently been representing his long-time friend Khieu Samphan, Cambodia’s former communist head of state, who faces charges of crimes against humanity for his role in the reign of terror presided over by the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. Vergès insisted bluntly: “There was no genocide in Cambodia.”
Vergès enjoyed his notoriety. In 2008 he told Der Spiegel magazine: “The interesting thing about my clients is discovering what brings them to do these horrific things. My ambition is to illuminate the path that led them to commit these acts. ... One of my principles is to have no principles. That’s why I would not turn down anyone. I would have defended Hitler. I would also accept Osama bin Laden as a client, even George W Bush — as long as he pleads guilty.”
Jacques Vergès was born in Thailand (then Siam) on March 5 1925, the twin son of a French colonial doctor, Raymond Vergès, and a Vietnamese mother, Pham Thi Khang. The boys’ mother died when they were three, and they grew up on the island of La Réunion, both suffering, as they later recalled, from the racial prejudice of the white community.
Jacques considered that his father had been deliberately ruined by the French colonial administration to punish him for his marriage to a native woman, and the son’s subsequent career can partly be explained by a need to avenge his father. His twin brother, Pierre, became a founder of the Communist Party of La Réunion, and was for many years a communist deputy in the National Assembly. Following military service with the Free French, Jacques also joined the PCF (the Parti Communiste Français), in 1946. As a law student in Paris he was considered the best advocate of his year, being elected First Secretary of the Conference du Stage.
Jacques Vergès’s political engagement became more idiosyncratic in 1957, when he broke with the PCF during the Algerian war and allied himself with the Algerian armed independence movement, the FLN. This move — made at the height of a violent terrorist campaign — put him beyond the pale of French society.
One of his fellow lawyers working with the FLN was assassinated by the French secret service. Vergès himself quoted with approval the FLN tag “a bomb is a leaflet that goes bang”.
Among his clients was a young Algerian woman, Djamila Bouhired, who was sentenced to the guillotine for planting bombs. Vergès succeeded in winning her a reprieve, and in 1965, after she had been freed from prison, he married her and settled in Algiers.
Following national independence the government of Algeria retained him to travel to Israel to defend the first Palestinian fedayeen, but it was not long before Vergès was expelled by the Israeli government. He then managed to obtain a loan of several million francs from the Bank of Algeria and went underground, disappearing from Paris between 1970 and 1979. He himself referred to this period as “my nine-year sabbatical”, and always refused to say what he had been doing.
For a time it was thought that he had been working with Pol Pot, the insurgent leader and future dictator of Cambodia. In retrospect, it seems that he was living in Damascus and assisting the Palestinian terrorist leader Walid Haddad, who had founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
It was at this time that Vergès first made the acquaintance of Illich Ramirez Sanchez, the Venezuelan terrorist popularly known as “Carlos the Jackal”, who had launched an undisciplined campaign of terrorism in Britain, France, Austria and West Germany, ostensibly in the Palestinian cause. Vergès’s role was to link Carlos with established terrorist groups in Europe.
When Vergès returned to Paris in 1979 to resume his legal practice his first prominent clients were two members of the Revolutionary Cells, a group of West German terrorists based in Frankfurt, two of whose members had been arrested in possession of explosives in France. One of his clients, Magdalena Kopp, received a four-year prison sentence. She happened to be the mistress of Carlos, who promptly started a bombing campaign solely to obtain her release.
The outrages, during which 14 people died, included the bombing of a Jewish restaurant in the Rue Marbeuf off the Champs Elysées, the bombing of the TGV express train from Marseille to Paris, and an attack on the French cultural centre in West Berlin.
While these attacks were going on Vergès offered his services to the French government as a mediator with the Cells, one of whose members was also a Stasi agent. As a result of his efforts the bombing campaign stopped and Magdalena Kopp was released from prison early. Vergès escorted her out of France and she was reunited with Carlos, gave birth to his daughter and retired to Venezuela to live with his wealthy family.
When questioned about the true extent of his involvement with the Cells, Vergès always put up an elegant performance. He insisted that he had been acting on behalf of the French government, and suggested that the Stasi had very little knowledge of what was really going on. But his cover was blown when Carlos was arrested by the French secret service in the Sudan in 1994. Facing charges of murdering 83 people in France alone, Carlos at first retained Vergès as his lawyer but fell out with him after telling the French authorities that “Maître Vergès is a bigger terrorist than me”.
In semi-retirement Vergès continued to relish his role as an enfant terrible. He was frequently seen about town in smart restaurants or at the Drouot auction rooms. He never faced criminal charges, and he survived a series of attempts by the Paris Bar’s disciplinary committee to suspend him — once for advising Magdalena Kopp on ways of escaping from prison. Vergès airily described this as “all part of his after-sales service”.
Vergès died in Paris, in the house once inhabited by Voltaire.
His marriage to Djamila Bouhired was quickly dissolved, and he never remarried. He had two sons and a daughter.
Jacques Vergès, born March 5 1925, died August 15 2013
"Keep lying, some of it will stick" - Voltaire
