Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Not All Propaganda is Art 8: Signature Acoustique

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

 ]Richard Wright died from a mysterious illness on November 28th, 1960. Or was he murdered? Tune in for a new listen to the final chapter of Richard Wright’s life: forged letters, fake terrorist groups, fraudulent doctors and French Radio.Shownotes: Françoise Vergès writes about decolonialism, and French history and thought, Kathleen Gyssels is writing about the Moulin d’Andé. Thomas Riegler writes about the Red Hand, Madeleine S’s father was assassinated by the Red Hand, Lauren du Graf wrote about Richard Wright and Jean Paul Sartre, Richard Wright’s  daughter Julia Wright published The Man who Lived Underground in 2021.  Richard Gibson is a BIG BIG LIAR. Support ToE and get access to the incredible exclusive bonus companion series to Not All Propaganda is Art by subscribing at https://theoryofeverything.supercast.com/, or subscribe directly in Apple Podcasts by hitting “Subscribe” right on the show page.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. Previously on Not All Propaganda is Art. During the Cold War, Richard Wright was one of many African-American artists who moved to France to escape American racism. Men are not prejudged here on the basis of their skin color and nationality. And I have never heard a Frenchman American racism. When he arrived in Paris in 1946, he wrote that a strange white American took him aside at a cocktail party and whispered into his ear, listen, for God's sake, don't let them foreigners make you into a brick to hurl at our windows. In the 1950s, Richard Wright began to write about Pan-Africanism and colonialism, both sensitive subjects for an American artist who hoped to remain in France. A long lost novel by iconic African-American author Richard Wright has been published and released decades after his death. In 2021, just as I started work on this series, a new Richard Wright book was published.

The novel, The Man Who Lived Underground, was written in the same period as his classic texts, but rejected by publishers before being turned into a short story. But many of its themes are still relevant today. In the original version of The Man Who Lived Underground, an innocent black man is brutally tortured into confessing to a killing he did not commit. And after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, Richard Wright's daughter, Julia Wright, convinced the Library of America that it was time to publish it. Joining me now for more is Julia Wright. We're talking about Mama Julia Wright. My featured guest is going to be none other than the great Julia Wright.

For more, we're joined by Julia Wright. When the book was released, Julia Wright went on a number of TV shows, podcasts, and YouTube channels to talk about the book's history and significance. Good morning, Mama Julia. Good to see you. Hope you can hear us okay. Can you hear me? Julia Wright first encountered the full unpublished version of The Man Who Lived Underground on a visit to her father's archive at Yale University. The uncut version of the book had been turned down, had been pushed underground, because the white publishers felt those pages about torture committed by state-sanctioned white police officers against an innocent black man would be too, quote,

uncomfortable, unbearable, unquote. In other words, too close to the truth. In some of her media appearances, Julia Wright spoke about her father's final years in Paris. It was the Cold War and writers were used in the Cold War against one another. It was a terrible cloak and dagger period, but it was to the death. To the death of creativity, but also to the death of life.

My name is Benjamin Walker, and this is episode eight of Not All Propaganda is Art. This one is called Signature Acoustique, and it's a new look and listen to the final chapter of Richard Wright's life. It's a story that involves forged letters, fake terrorist groups, fraudulent doctors, and French radio broadcasts. There is another unpublished novel by Richard Wright in his archive at Yale.

This one is called Island of Hallucination, and it's the only novel he wrote set in Paris. It's actually a sequel to The Long Dream, his 1958 novel about the corrupt Mississippi South. In fact, Island of Hallucination picks up right where the long dream ends, with young Rex Tucker, or Fishbelly as he calls himself, on a plane to Paris. But Richard Wright's Paris is not the City of Lights. It's the City of Spies. A City of Spies, sp city of spies spying on spies spying. Until the late 1990s, this novel sat in a restricted box in the Richard Wright archive. So very few scholars have actually read it, let alone written about it. Which is unfortunate, because Island of Hallucination is also a Romana clay.

The plot mirrors a significant event, a cloak-and-dagger affair, that caused rift in the African-American community in Paris during the late 1950s. An affair that sets the stage for the final act in Richard Wright's life. It's hard to reconcile the fish belly of the long dream, who has only known the cruel and corrupt racism of the American South, with the fish belly in Island of Hallucination. But this disorientation serves the novel and the reader, because in Paris, everything is different. Friendly Parisians stop Fishbelly on the street to talk to him about jazz. He sees white women walking hand in hand with black men.

And after a disastrous encounter with a prostitute, he meets an African-American expat who calls himself Mechanical. He promises to introduce Fishbelly to some good girls who will do it for free. What's wrong with him? Fishbelly asked. Pregnatism? Clapism? Syphilism? Ah, bone, Mechanical replied. You're sharp, but dead wrong. These gals suffer from another disease. Marxism.

Mechanical takes Fishbelly to a Parisian café filled with wealthy young university communists. He introduces him to Yvette, the daughter of an important French senator, who he immediately takes up with. But soon, to his horror, Fishbelly realizes that Mechanical is a spy, informing on Yvette and her friends. We're in a cold war, Mechanical explained. Information is needed about everything, everybody, everywhere. You can get $50, Fish, just for going into any of the little offices scattered all over Paris and writing all you know on a given subject. Mechanical also reveals that while it appears that he's just posing as a communist. He is actually a genuine Trotskyite. What kind of business is this?

Fishbelly asked. Commies catching commies? Ah, boom. You're keen, fish. Tough-minded, Mechanical replied. You can see, but you can't understand. All of the characters in Island of Hallucination are based on real-life members of the Paris African-American community. Richard Wright even based a character on himself, a friendly lawyer named Ned Harrison, who explains to Fishbelly the truth about Paris and Mechanical. Paris is the center of the Cold War, Ned spoke slowly. UNESCO's here, NATO's here. Paris is a crossroad of the world's thought, art, politics, and pleasure. The French police give people a lot of rope,

and those people think that nobody's watching them, and that makes them act wild, crazy, but they're being watched. You mean the French are Mechanical's boss? Fishbelly asked, amazed. In a way, yes, Ned explained. You see, the whole spy business centers on the drive against communism. Communism is international, and the tracking down of communists is international in scope, method, and tactic. It's quite natural for the French to request from the Americans a few clever blacks to help ferret out communists from their students and artists.

Mechanical is based on James Baldwin. And his feelings for the fictional Ned Harrison are in sync with the real James Baldwin of everybody's protest novel. Mechanical hates you, Ned, Fishbelly explained. He hates the idea of you, your life, everything. Mechanical hatches a plot to get Ned deported from France using a new member of his revolutionary cell,

another African-American expat named Bill Hart. Here's how he explains his plot to Fishbelly. I'll write a letter to the Letter to the Editors column of Life magazine in New York. Implicate Ned in communism and sign Bill Hart's name. Good? A bourgeois organ like Life will surely publish it. That's the play. Chances are that Bill won't even hear or see of this letter, but the French secret police and the American FBI will read it and Ned's cooked. Mechanical's plot, as ludicrous as it sounds, is actually based on a real-life plot and a real-life letter to the editor that appeared in the October 21, 1957 issue of Life magazine. Here's what that letter said. said, Any American who thinks that France will grant Algeria independence of some status where

7 million Algerians will not be crushed politically and economically is mad. This letter was signed by Ollie Harrington, the Paris-based African-American cartoonist and friend of Richard Wright's. But it was not written by Ollie Harrington. In the first episode of this series, I explained how American artists who lived in France in the 1950s understood they could not speak out about France's colonial problems. That is, if they hoped to remain in France. This letter was written by someone who wanted to get Ollie Harrington deported. In Richard Wright's novel, Ned Harrison is able to clear his name by getting a hold of the typewriter Mechanical used to write his fake letter. And this is exactly how Ollie Harrington was able to clear his name.

He led the French police, the DST, to the guy who wrote the letter bearing his name, Richard Gibson. One morning, the police arrived, the DST, and they seized the typewriter, which I'd written it on. And more or less overwhelmed by the fact that they knew, I said, well, yes, you know, I admit it. I did it. I did it. That's Richard Gibson telling

a South African reporter how he was caught by the French police and forced to admit to writing the letter that appeared in Life magazine. I got this recording from this South African reporter. He spoke to Richard Gibson for a story he hoped to write on Gordon Winter, an ex-South African spy who wrote a book in the 1980s called Inside Boss. Richard Gibson sued Gordon Winter and his publisher for calling him a CIA agent.

And so, in this interview, Richard Gibson tells the South African reporter about some of the other times that he was falsely accused of being a secret agent, like in France in 1957. You see, after he admitted his guilt to the French police, Richard Gibson suffered no consequences. And the African-American community in Paris took this as evidence that Richard Gibson was a spy. Apparently, people thought I was on a mission, you know, deported, sent out or something. And for reasons unknown to me, I was not held up in either.

I was released. But this was interpreted by those who knew this, that I had hard protection in the American Embassy of Dublin, CIA, or something like that. The most intriguing entry on Richard Gibson's resume is his involvement in the Fair Play

for Cuba committee. I founded the committee with Bob Tabor, you know, at Collegiate Paris. This is why Richard Gibson is famous. He's one of the founders of the group Lee Harvey Oswald got involved with just before the JFK assassination. In 2018, the Trump administration dumped a bunch of JFK files, revealing Richard Gibson's long-standing ties

to American intelligence agencies. His CIA codename was Sugar. And so, even though he's still alive as I record this, I feel I can get away with calling Richard Gibson a big liar without fear of being sued. And I wish we could leave it at that. But in 2005, an academic gave Richard Gibson a copy of Island of Hallucination to read.

And Richard Gibson wrote about it for the scholarly journal Modern Fiction Studies. And to this day, his essay, which he called Richard Wright's Island of Hallucination and the Gibson Affair, remains the most authoritative piece on Richard Wright's unpublished novel and the real-life scandal it is based on. My Days in Rome no doubt prompted Wright's tagging me in Island of Hallucination as Bill Richard Gibson cannot contain his excitement that Mechanical, the forger, is based on James Baldwin and not himself. But still, he uses Richard Wright's unpublished novel as evidence to rewrite the historical narrative. He even tries

to transfer blame to another deceased African-American writer for being the true villain of the Gibson affair, something he does not do in his CIA file. In fact, in the new version of this file, unredacted in December of 2023, Gibson's case officer notes that Gibson confessed to having created a tall tale to convince the Cubans he was trying to get close to in 1960 that his smear of Harrington was not petty revenge, but rather part of a coordinated protest effort among African Americans in Paris to support the Algerian struggle. This is a tall tale he repeats in his essay for Modern Fiction. This is not a scholarly essay. It is a character

assassination. While I do not think that Island of Hallucination is a great book, Gibson wrote, it is a very important document about Richard Wright's state of mind at the end of his life and reveals, as in a cracked mirror, tensions and sad delusions. Gibson also makes a curious reference to Julia Wright in this essay. In 1991, Julia Wright made a surprise visit to see me in London. Most of her questions were about her father's sexuality, perhaps because of allegations of homosexuality made by Margaret Walker in her biography of Wright. In the interview he did with the South African journalist, Richard Gibson also talked about this visit. But there, he says, Julia Wright showed up to ask if he killed her father. What has happened here, in Paris, among American Negro Negroes is quite wild and unbelievable,

but I have the documents to prove it. This is the first reference Richard Wright makes to the documents he collected about the Gibson affair. It's from a letter he wrote to his Dutch translator, Margaret de Sablenaire, on March 28, 1960. And in this letter, he brings up another forgery. Last month, I got a letter from Jean-Paul Sartre, but it turns out not to be a letter from him at all, but a forgery. Why was this letter sent to me, and who sent it? I'm trying to find out, and this is not the first time forged documents have been aimed at American Negroes living in France. I have the letter in my possession. If I did not have it, I'd not speak about it,

for no one would believe it. In his 1973 book on Richard Wright, the French scholar Michel Fabre wrote that he could not find this unkind letter. But he quotes the same lines I just read you, so he has no justification for using this word, unkind. And this is egregious, because many of the Wright biographies that follow cite this mystery unkind letter as evidence of Richard Wright's irrational paranoia. But here's the thing. This Sartre letter

Richard Wright is referring to in his letter to his Dutch translator is in his archive at Yale. In fact, there are multiple photostats of this letter. Richard Wright made copies of it. But to this day, no one has ever pursued this letter and the connections it has to the intellectual and political turmoil that engulfed France in the fall of 1960. Here's a rough translation. Jean-Paul Sartre is asking Richard Wright to help out a writer named Francis Chesek, who wants to get into a writer's colony called the Moulin d'Andes. Sartre is asking Wright, who is close with Suzanne Lipinska,

who runs the Moulin d'Andes, to put in a good word, because Francis Chesek has a bad reputation. When Richard Wright received this letter, he was at the Moulin d'Ande, working on his novel, Island of Hallucination. In 1959, he had to sell off his own farmhouse in Normandy to raise funds, so the Moulin was now his country home. 19 February, 1956, Jean-Paul Sartre. So the Moulin was now his country home. The date of this letter, February 19th, reveals its significance.

On February 19th, the French police began arresting members of the Francis Jansson network. These were the French nationals who provided material support to members of the Algerian FLN, hosting them in their homes and driving them through France as they collected funds for their struggles. This is why they were called the portes de valise, or the suitcase carriers. The French police did not manage to arrest the entire network. In fact, Francis Jansson himself escaped to Switzerland. We will probably never know the full extent of this network, because just after his death in 2009, a mysterious fire consumed Jansson' personal library and archive. February 19th was also the day Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir left France for Cuba. And while this is exactly the kind of letter

someone would write as they were leaving town for a long trip, a letter asking a friend to help out another friend. It's also a request to help someone with a bad reputation get access to the Moulin d'Ande, a place the French police were most definitely watching in 1960. Richard Wright was not paranoid. Le Moulin d'Ande was an artistic place very much still today, but for me it's much more important to see the hidden side, which is extremely impressive. This is Kathleen Hazels. She's a research professor at Antwerp University in Belgium. Lately, she's been writing about Suzanne Lepinska and her mill in Normandy, the Moulin d'Andée, and its place in the history of French decolonialism.

A story she stumbled upon during a visit to the Moulin back in 2018. I was just a bit by accident making a stop at the Moulin d'Andée on my way to Rouen. And here was Suzanne Lipinska. And I present myself as having done a PhD on André Schwarzbart. And out of the blue, she tells me, wow, let's go to the library where I have this livre d'or. A livre d'or is a guest book. And the Moulin d'Ande has a five-volume livre d'or

containing the names of all the writers and artists who lived or passed through the Moulin d'Ande has a five-volume livre d'or containing the names of all the writers and artists who lived or passed through the Moulin. And in tome one, which covers the first years of the Moulin from 56 to the 60s, I have on page 12 the picture by André Schwarzbart. Now, I have tremendously archived and studied all that has to do with André Schwarzbart. Nowhere is mentioned Le Moulin d'Andé. Intrigued, Kathleen Hazels took a closer look at the livre d'ores. Along with novelist André Schwarzbart, she saw the names of other Shoah writers and filmmakers, like Claude Lanzmann. Kathleen Hazels is also a scholar of

decolonial writers from the 50s and 60s, and the small presses and left-wing journals that published and supported them. And so she also recognized other familiar names. I think it's related to post-colonial militant action, this move or movement towards independence. So I saw this whole network coming to the surface when I was just going through those pages. In episode four, I told you about the Congress of Black Writers and Artists that took place in Paris in September of 1956, Suzanne Lipinska was one of the few women who attended this event. And afterwards, as Kathleen Hazels explains in one of her recent articles on the Moulin,

Suzanne Lipinska invited a number of the writers she met, including Richard Wright, to come and visit the Normandy mill she'd recently inherited from her family, a moulin she hoped to turn into a writer's colony. So the very first start of the Moulin d'Ande as a residence, it was really 1956. It's all indeed thanks to Susan Lipinska that you have this left-wing counter-cultural network taking root at Moulin. On September 5th, 1960, the 17 French and 6 Algerian members of the Jansons Network, who were arrested in February, went on trial in Paris. And in a coordinated show of support, 121 writers, artists, and intellectuals signed a Declaration for the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War. This is the famous Manifeste des Cent Vingt-et-Un, the Manifesto of the 121.

Janet Flanner, the New Yorker's Paris correspondent, received a copy in the mail. The document consisted of a large sheet of paper folded in two to make four pages. On the front page was the title, printed in a handsome 18th century style of type, she wrote. The account she published in The New Yorker is invaluable, as the French press was forbidden to even write about it. As she explained, No French paper has dared print it in full for fear of having the edition seized on army orders so that relatively few people have ever seen the full text of the original. The second amazing fact about the influential importance of this document, she added,

is that two of the Declaration's main points, its support of insubordination in the army and its corollary advocacy of aid to the enemy, are quite naturally shocking and unacceptable to practically everybody everywhere. Only the third point, the army's embrace and use of torture, she reported, has troubled the French and fueled the moral outrage. The Manifesto was written mostly by the philosopher Maurice Blanchot and the publisher Dionysius Mascalo. But all of the signatories had an opportunity to contribute to the text. And a large number of the signatories were individuals associated with the Moulin d'Ande. Cézanne Lipinska was very, very proud that two-thirds of the signatures of the Manifest des 121

were from people who came actually to the Moulin. Some early supporters, like the situationist Guy Debord, were miffed that their names did not appear on the original list. Muscallo chose 121 because he liked the way it sounded, but the plan was always to gather as many signatures as possible. On the back page of the copy Janet Flanner received was an appeal. Declare your agreement with this text by signing

it, by having it signed by those around you. Address it to Coexistence, an address in Brussels. Obviously, a mail drop, Janet Flanner surmised. Jean-Paul Sartre's journal, Le Temps Moderne, ran two blank pages in their October issue and a note explaining that their printer had refused to print the manifesto. The manifesto, the 121, came with repression. They had to repress that, to censor and repress.

This is Francoise Verges, one of France's greatest decolonial writers and activists. We should remember the incredible censorship at the time. It was incredible censorship. There was not even a question of war. The French state was not calling what was happening in Algeria a war of liberation. They were calling it les événements d'Algérie, the event in Algeria. Françoise Verges' uncle, Jacques Verges, was one of the lawyers who represented the Jansons Network for their September 1960 trial in Paris. My uncle, the twin brother of my father, he was part of a collective of lawyers who decided very early to really defend all the Algerian nationalists.

So it was a very, really incredible commitment. One of them and two of them who were Algerian were assassinated in Paris. Françoise Verges' parents were both decolonial communist activists. And growing up on the island of Réunion, she learned about the Algerian struggle and the Manifesto of the 121

as a child. And so I learned about it, of course, because it was about my uncle. It was not for us, you know, some kind of unexpected discovery by, you know, hearing it on the radio. It was really there. Jacques Verges used the Manifesto of the 121 to disrupt the trial, and his strategy was successful. By calling some of the famous men and women who signed it as witnesses, he brought this radical declaration into the Paris courtroom. They were calling for really disobedience. Disobey the state. Do not obey the state. And it is legitimate to disobey the state

because the state here is illegitimate, is doing something wrong. On September 20th, Jacques Verges and his fellow defense lawyers pulled off the ultimate disruption. They read into the trial a letter from the most famous signatory of the 121, Jean-Paul Sartre. If Jansson had asked me to carry suitcases or to give sanctuary to Algerian militants

and I could have done so without putting them in danger, I would have done it without hesitation. Okay, I know this is going to sound too good to be true, but this letter is absolutely a forgery. Although in this case, it was done with Sartre's blessing. He was once again out of the country, this time in Brazil. And there were fears that if he sent a letter, the French police would intercept it. This letter was an intellectual bomb and the fallout was immediate. There were calls to shoot Sartre and protests that turned into bloody riots. France's security agencies were given new powers and mandates to crush its dissenting intellectuals. And this is when Richard Wright went on the radio. In the fall of 1960,

RTF, the radio station owned and operated by the French government, aired a series of radio programs constructed from interviews host Georges Charbonnet recorded with Richard Wright the previous summer. The first program went out Friday, October 7th at 9.42 p.m. This one is called An Unbalanced Relationship. And Georges Charbonnet asks Richard Wright what he says is the most important question that can be asked of a black writer. What is fundamentally lacking in the relationship between whites and blacks? There is a lot of distrust between the two races, Richard Wright answers.

Then, the two discuss a few of his books to illustrate this distrust, including his autobiography, Black Boy. But Richard Wright is critiquing present-day America. During my youth in Memphis, Tennessee, I wanted to read books. It is a southern city where restrictions against Negroes are very strong, even today as they were yesterday. Today, young blacks are fighting to be allowed in the libraries and read the works which contain the achievements of mankind. But this is forbidden. They are against the law. The same day this radio program went out on the air, Le Monde printed a counter-manifesto to the Manifesto of the 121, signed by 200 intellectuals of the French right. The French public has seen the appearance of recent times a certain number of scandalous declarations.

In episode 4, I told you about the French doctrine of revolutionary war, propaganda that linked decolonialism with communism. This counter-manifesto is a textbook example. These exhibitions constitute the logical mile of a series of actions carefully orchestrated for years against our country, against the values it represents, and against the West. They are the work of a fifth column, which is inspired by foreign propaganda, even by international slogans brutally dictated and slavishly applied. Such activities did not begin with the war in Algeria.

Yesterday there were others. There will be others tomorrow. A week later, on Friday the 14th, the second installment of Conversations with Richard Wright broadcasts on RTF. The theme of this broadcast was the novel, and in the opening seconds, Georges Charbonnet threw down with a ridiculously French question. What is a novel? This is a rather difficult question in my case, Qu'est-ce qu'un roman?

This is a rather difficult question in my case. As I came to literature in a rather strange way, I was a Negro boy in the South. In the city where I lived, there were no big schools where one could study literature. What is a novel for me? It is a way of enlarging and increasing our sense of life. It can shed light about other people. The more direct, the more light.

The more intense, the more light. On the same day this broadcast went out, French police in Toulouse raided the bookstalls on the Garonne River. And every novel written by a signatory of the Manifesto of the 121, was thrown into the river. A show by Georges Charbonnier. Today, a novel by Richard Wright, Fishbelly. Text read by Michel Bouquet. The dog's rapping tongue passed through his skin. The broadcast from Friday, October 21st,

focused on the new French translation of Richard Wright's novel, The Long Dream. And it included a number of dramatic readings by Michel Bouquet. This is the book that precedes Island of Hallucination, and the French translation used the book's protagonist, Fishbelly, for the title. Richard Wright actually envisioned Fishbelly's story as a trilogy. In the third book, he was going to send his hero to Algeria. The same day this episode went out for broadcast,

Le Monde reported on a press conference given by Jacques Soustel. Jacques Soustel is a very important and influential character in our story. He was one of the architects of Algeria Nouvelle, a plan that would have kept New Algeria French. In 1960, he broke with Charles de Gaulle, the French president, over his acceptance of Algerian independence. During World War II, Soustel worked in intelligence, and by 1960, he had strong

connections with a number of America's top spies, many of whom were also disillusioned with de Gaulle over his resistance to America's vision for NATO. During this press conference in which he announced his new political party, Sustel demanded harsher punishments and consequences for the signatories of the Manifesto of the 121. I do not agree with the measures of petty persecution, administrative and arbitrary, which only give those concerned an additional opportunity to pose as martyrs. Soustel understood the value of propaganda. It is useless to intercept convoys of arms, he once wrote, if October 27, students organized a huge anti-war demonstration in Paris. During the protest, police attacked students and journalists.

The next day, Richard Wright was on the radio once again, with a broadcast entitled Between Two Worlds. Georges Charbonnet asks Richard Wright to define the psychological reactions of a man who presents himself as part of the black and white worlds at the same time. Now, much can and has been made about Richard Wright's double vision. But there is another duality that I want you to hear. Listen. He's speaking freely on official state radio. At the very moment, the French state is censoring writers and intellectuals

for speaking out against torture and colonialism. What world does he belong to? On November 3rd, in Geneva, a Cameroonian anti-colonial activist named Félix Moumié died in a hospital after two weeks of agony, losing all his teeth and his hair. Effects of the poison given to him by a French government assassin posing as a journalist. This is what happened. Secret agent and his victim sat together in a bistro in Geneva, and he poured the poison into the drinking glass. And then, of course, the mummié drank it and he died a very painful death from it. Very gruesome death, actually. After Amoumié drank the two glasses

of poison, the Frenchman fled. But when Swiss police went through his belongings, they discovered he was a member of an assassination squad called Le Monde Rouge, or the Red Hand. The Red Hand was a fake terrorist organization created by the French intelligence service. They were like conducting a campaign of state-sponsored murder. Thomas Riegler is an Austrian intelligence analyst, and he's kind of obsessed with the red hand. Over the years, he's written numerous articles about some of the assassinations committed by this fake French kill team. Giving it the name of the red hand and added a certain mystique to all these killings. And they even gave a fake press conference.

So everything was done to cover the tracks, actually, of who was really responsible for all of this. During the Algerian War, the Red Hand murdered members and supporters of the FLN. But the assassination of Félix Moumié proves, without a doubt, that the French state also used the red hand in its fight against decolonialism. Shortly after Moumié's death, a Swiss TV station interviewed Ernest Ouhande,

another Cameroonian decolonial activist. colonial activists. He called the Red Hand an official French death squad and said that it was operating throughout Europe killing Africans of all nations. The Swiss journalist pushed back, but Bouande was correct. The Red Hand was a means, actually, in an illegal war against anti-colonialist movements in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and also other parts of Africa. Another Red Hand murder Thomas Riegler's written extensively on is the 1958 assassination of Marcel Leopold, an arms dealer who was providing weapons to the FLN. This one also took place in Geneva. They shot him with a poison dart. It was a blowpipe gun, which was very unusual. And it was probably built for this assassination

by some guys like you in the James Bond movie. The door to his apartment was right outside the elevator. And as he opened the door, the gentleman on his right down the hall shot him in the neck with a dart. And he fell in the room and told Helene, his first wife, I've been poisoned. Madeline S. grew up in Southern California with foster parents. One day, thanks to a back issue of Time magazine she bought at Harlow's on Hollywood Boulevard, she learned that her real father had been assassinated by the red hand. Marcel Leopold was my father.

Thomas Riegler has written about Madeline S.'s quest to learn the full story about her father's murder, and he put us in touch. She actually went to Geneva to talk to officials about her father's case file, which to this day is still open. Attorney Crossler, he's in Geneva. I went and saw him and he said, be very, very careful. He says people are still alive and be happy you're an American. Go back to America and don't ruffle any feathers.

You told Thomas Regler that you felt like the Swiss government just wanted you to go home, go away. Did you ever have a sense of why? I think there's quite a few more than you and I know about. More assassinations?

Yes. I think that the red hand was a real, the real deal. And I don't need anybody knocking at my door. How's that? Well, let me just ask you this then. If you could get the French government to tell you one thing about what happened to your father what would you ask i i don't really know benjamin what i would ask i feel i know what happened to him and i'm just sad so it's sad. The problem is that the documents from the French archives are restricted. There's no way to access them.

The French government made a point not to keep archives from the Algerian events. And the few documents that do exist are still off-limits to scholars like Thomas Riegler. So there's just a lot we do not know about the Red Hand. We don't even know how many people they killed. There are French officials who offer in their memoirs quite high numbers, but it's unsubstantiated. To some degree, it's guesswork, really, how many people actually became victims to this. So there's still a lot to be detected. Thomas Riegler and other scholars have had more luck mapping out the red hand's role in the international fight against communism. The organization forged links with Western security agencies like the CIA and far-right anti-communist death squads in Spain and Portugal.

There was quite a hardened anti-communist attitude at the heart of the French establishment and the military and intelligence services. Those were really cold warriors and it allowed them to see the struggle in pure good versus evil terms. And this facilitated also how these people were bombed and poisoned on European streets actually. It made it possible to some degree. On November 8th, the United States elected a new president, John F. Kennedy. He showed a much greater openness to decolonization than Eisenhower ever did. And soon after the election, Jacques Sustel, the French Cold Warrior with American security ties we talked about earlier,

traveled to America. And like Moumié's killer, he went undercover as a journalist. Ladies and gentlemen, we are discussing the nation's future as we do each Saturday night at this time, and we are concerned with what is the solution to the Algerian problem. We have as speakers tonight Mr. Jacques Soustel, a former associate of General de Gaulle, now covering the UN debate for the French newspaper Le Roi. Mr. Jacques Soustel, would you state your position?

Jacques Soustel arrived in the U.S., a bitter opponent of the De Gaulle government, determined to thwart France's plans for a peaceful referendum on the future of Algeria. And yet the press covered him as if he were a high-ranking French official, amplifying his propaganda at every turn. Is the war in Algeria a liberation war waged by a majority? No, it is a subversive war waged through the most cruel means by a minority of terrorists supported by Red China and Soviet Russia. This is from his appearance on a radio show called Our Nation's Future. For an article in Newsweek, Sustel joked about bumping into FLN fighters who had tried to kill him at the United Nations. It's possible he also encountered Richard Gibson,

who was reporting on the UN for the Cuban newspaper Revolution. Jacques Sustel definitely met with the CIA. Those meetings are well documented and serve as the basis for a number of wild conspiracy theories. And while I don't want to add to the speculation, his intentions were unmistakable. Now, we are going to ask for questions from our audience here in New York, and I am going to ask all of you to indicate that you want to ask a question by raising your hand. Yes, sir. My name is George Haber, and I have a question for Mr. Susten.

If the people were to decide for self-determination, would you in that case support the will of the people and thereby the government or would you lend yourself to an active opposition leading possibly to a coup? Well, I suppose that the only fact that I am asked if I'm prepared to make a coup or to help

one is in itself what you might call a leading question, I suppose. Jacques Soustel came to America to deliver a sales pitch for a new France, a new friend whom the U.S. could count on to defend the free world in Europe and Africa, a true friend who would never provide refuge to the U.S.'s enemies or allow them to hurl bricks at America's windows from French soil. To this day, Richard Wright's death on November 28, 1960, remains a mystery largely because of his relationship with a French doctor named Vladimir Schwarzman. It's a relationship he discusses in detail in letters he wrote in

the final year of his life to his Dutch translator, Margaret de Sablenaire. He is one of the top doctors in France, he wrote on February 8th. Luckily, he admires my work and does not charge me any fees. Richard Wright suffered from amoebic dysentery, which he may have picked up during his travels. Dr. Schwarzman prescribed oral bismuth, common at the time, but recognized since the 1970s as a poison. Margaret de Sablinaire suggested Richard Wright try vitamins instead. She even sent him some to take with tea and biscuits. And on March 28th, in the letter we talked about earlier, the one in which he told her about the documents he'd collected related to the Gibson affair

and the forgery from Jean-Paul Sartre. He thanked her. I can go outdoors. I can drive my car. I can do errands. I couldn't do that three weeks ago. When Dr. Schwarzman returns from the States, I will have a talk with him. On April 7th, Richard Wright wrote to say that he was still following Dr. Schwarzman's orders. I am to continue with my treatment, just as in the past. But listen, he added, the doctor asked me, say, I'm going to Holland for a medical conference.

Why don't you come along? It'll be good for you. It'll be held in Leiden. I told him I'd let him know. Leiden is where Margaret de Samblinere lived, and she wrote Richard Wright back immediately to say that she would be thrilled to spend some time with him. On April 20th, Richard Wright wrote to thank her for making hotel arrangements for him, the doctor, and the doctor's father, who was coming too. I'm puzzled why he's going to Leiden and asking me along. He admits that there's nothing new at this medical conference that he can learn.

And then, he added, I'm bringing along some documents. On April 26th, back in Paris, he wrote, Dear Margaret, it was indeed good to see you and talk with you, He wrote, Richard Wright had left all his documents relating to the Gibson affair in her possession. This letter also includes a disturbing passage. You see, Richard Wright couldn't make sense of why he had failed to tell the doctor that Marguerite had also booked a hotel room for him and his father. Was I reacting unconsciously to something in the doctor? I've puzzled over this for hours

since I've been back. The doctor and his father are friends of mine and only wish me well. I'm convinced of this, but there is something between me and the doctor that creates tension, but I don't know what it is. On May 16th, Richard Wright wrote to say that he was going to leave Dr. Schwartzman. He is still a strange man, stranger than ever. At the end of this month, I shall return to my old doctor, who is now back in Paris. I've definitely decided that. But in June, as the radio men were installing the cables for his recordings with Georges Charbonnet, Richard Wright's letters reveal that he was still in the

care of Dr. Schwarzman. He said that my intestines were all healed, but I must continue to take bismuth for at least a year longer. He also brought up the documents again. I've promised Dr. Schwarzman to show him the documents I'd left with you. Maybe this fall, when I'm back in Paris, you could send them to me, registered mail, express, and then I could return them to you. Or maybe Dr. Schwarzman would like to visit me while I'm at the Moulin. If that happens, you could mail them to me there. But I'll send them back to you. I want those documents in the hands of somebody I trust. The letter Richard Wright wrote just before his final public lecture at the American Church in Paris on November 8th

includes another bizarre note about the doctor. Schwarzman and his father think that I ought to take a quick trip by plane into Africa. They even say they'll go with me. They have a friend who owns an airline and the travel wouldn't cost anything. In his final letter to Margaret de Sablinaire, four days before his death, Richard Wright informed her that he fell deathly ill after his lecture on the 9th,

and that he was once again in Dr. Schwarzman's care. The doctor, he said, was injecting him with penicillin. It makes me weak and I feel dizzy. Jean-Paul Sartre returned to France on Monday, November 7. By this point, de Gaulle was feeling pressure from critics outside his government, like Jacques Soustel, but as well as from ministers in his own party, to charge Sartre and the other signatories of the Manifesto with treason. But de Gaulle refused. You don't arrest Voltaire, he would later say. The security services instead redoubled their efforts to unearth

the malign influencers, the outsiders responsible for leading France's intellectuals astray. And then, on Friday, November 11th, Richard Wright returned to the airwaves. La radiodiffusion télévision française présente Entretien avec Richard Wright, une émission de Georges Charbonnier begins with a direct question. He asks Richard Wright, For whom do you write? Now, as I mentioned earlier, these episodes were created from recordings made over the summer.

And this is the first episode where you can really hear the edits in Richard Wright's responses. Richard Wright explains that his primary audience are whites. I would like to hurl words in my novels in order to make them aware that there exists a black life with the same dimensions as theirs. Richard Wright is also asked if he finds the strength of black nationalism dangerous.

Things will become dangerous, he replies, if the West prevents the expression of these nationalisms. Richard Wright then says he needs to explain something important. It is American Negroes from the south of the United States and the Caribbean who brought the idea of black nationalism to Africa. He mentions Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois and his friend, the British pan-Africanist George Padmore, adding, I worked with Padmore. Richard Wright basically sets himself up

as the enemy of the whites who want to retain political power in Africa. He says, these whites tell tribal leaders, don't listen to Richard Wright and George Padmore. You don't need to industrialize. You are fine the way you are. Charbonnet also brings up their initial conversation about the mistrust between blacks and whites. Then he says, We all think that the white world is the one who should change. In fact, you, Richard Wright, are addressing the white world to tell them this. Oui.

But is it fair to say the responsibility rests with the white man alone? Yes, Richard Wright answers. I believe the burden for the larger part of the responsibility rests with the whites, because the whites set limits to the existence of Negroes. But I also believe that Negroes have a responsibility too. I believe that the duty of creative artists is to speak and write ceaselessly about this problem. Indeed, it is a sacred duty. As I mentioned earlier, the Manifesto of the 121 was censored and repressed by the French government. Most French people had no idea what the Declaration said or who had signed it.

And the crisis was at its tipping point upon Sartre's return to France on November 7th. France's security forces were on the hunt for the outsiders responsible for the intellectual insurrection. Richard Wright's generic Sartrean answer that the black writer had a sacred duty to speak out about events in Africa. Well, on November 11th, the meaning of these words resonated loud and clear. So, in fact, he does an audio signature.

He does not write it and ink on the paper, but he does it in his own way. Yeah, I would say the same. Kathleen Hazels is the scholar writing about the Moulin d'Ande that we heard from earlier. When I played her this bit from Richard Wright's radio broadcast from November 11th, she too heard obvious connections to both the manifesto of the 121 and Jean-Paul Sartre. He almost repeats, I would say, the lessons by Jean-Paul Sartre, who strongly believes and everywhere repeats again and again that it is the responsibility of the author to make justice.

Three days before this broadcast went out, Richard Wright delivered the same message in person at the American church in Paris. The Negro artisan intellectual has the duty of injecting ideas into this situation to wake these people up. He runs full tilt against the first resistance. I mentioned this lecture, his final public appearance, earlier. He fell deathly ill afterwards. So ill, as he explained to Margaret de Sablinaire in one of his last letters, he had to postpone his trip to the Moulin d'Ande. Dr. Schwarzman ordered him to remain in Paris. He was in fine shape when he delivered this lecture.

He even made a number of jokes about paranoia. Dr. Whiskey was very tired, and as he was sitting there, he noticed the man staring at him very intently. We are going to deal with this lecture, including the section on James Baldwin, which was erased from the recording, and the next and final episode in our series. Here, I want to remain focused on the relationship between Richard Wright and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1945, Sartre launched his journal, Les Temps Modernes, with a plan to publish examples of literature engagée, writing that was committed to issues of social justice. Richard Wright's name is on the cover of issue one. first issue of Les Taux Modernes and the first writer who is included as an example of the sort of literature that Sartre is trying to uphold is Richard Wright. Writer and scholar Lauren de Graaf investigated Richard Wright's impact on existentialists like Sartre for the Yale French

Review. She's not the first to have done this, nor will she be the last. Because in the 1950s, American propagandists, literary critics, and book reviewers all pushed a counter-narrative. Richard Wright is often portrayed as a writer who just, you know, took up and went off to France and was influenced by a bunch of existentialists. And the opposite is true. There's another reason Wright's influence on Sartre remains obscured. Richard Wright understood that his connection to Jean-Paul Sartre could and would be used against him. And he went out of his way to downplay it. The most profound illumination of Richard Wright's connection to Jean-Paul Sartre that I've found comes also from French radio.

A newscast from November 29th. This is the day Jean-Paul Sartre's hearing at the Palace of Justice was cancelled. It was never rescheduled. The French government determined Jean-Paul Sartre was untouchable. This same newscast from November 29th also announced traitant. Richard Wright souffrait de troubles gastriques et rien ne pouvait laisser prévoir une mort aussi foudroyante. Il était bien connu en France depuis 1947, date de la parution en France d'un premier livre de lui, Un enfant du pays. Né à Natchez dans le Mississippi, Wright fit toutes sortes de métiers avant 1937, année où parut son premier ouvrage Les enfants de l'oncle Tom. Écrivain de combat, il n'a cessé de dénoncer le problème racial et son dernier ouvrage Fish The final episode in Georges Charbonnet's series with Richard Wright was scheduled to broadcast on Friday, December 2nd.

This one is called Time and History, but it never aired. It's another supposedly lost program. In this one, Charbonnet asks, how important is political action for you? Richard Wright's answer is simple and direct. I have a great interest in political ideas because I'm Black. If there were no laws against Blacks, no political discrimination, I could forget about political life. I am not a political man at heart. Thank you. written and researched and produced by me, Benjamin Walker. It was mixed by the one and only Andrew Calloway. Special thanks go out to all the guests in this one. You can find more information about them and their work in the show notes. And special, special thanks to Mathilde Biot,

who has been listening to me talk about this story for the past four years. I could not have done this series, especially this story, without her help and support. She not only translated all of the French documents I pulled out of various archives, but she also patiently, patiently tried to help me pronounce the French words correctly, and she takes no blame for the final results. She also helped me understand the lasting effects of the Algerian War on French history and French thought. There are a lot of notes for this episode, and you can listen to them all in the special companion podcast that I have created for this series. It's called Propaganda Notes and Sources.

They are audio footnotes. We have one final episode left in this series. That's next. And it's going to wrap up not only Richard Wright's story, but Dwight McDonald's and Kenneth Tynan's as well. That episode is called Freedom or Death. And that's next in two weeks.