The Intelligence State in Tunisia: Security and Mukhabarat, 1881-1965

338 Pages·2020·10.382 MB·English

by  Omar Safi

Contents
Abbreviations viii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1 The Beylical Intelligence State, 1705–1881 9
2 French invasion and the implementation of the Protectorate, 1881–5 31
3 The French Colonial Intelligence State, 1885–7 43
4 The emergence of the Tunisian national movement, 1887–1939 69
5 Towards the independence of Tunisia and the final failure of the
French Colonial Intelligence State, 1939–54 95
6 A paradoxical independence and the advent of the Bourguibist
Intelligence State, 1954–6 115
7 The implementation of the Bourguibist Intelligence State and the
first failures, 1956–65 151
Conclusion 181
Notes 197
Bibliography 267
Appendices 288
Chronology 313
Index 322
Abbreviations
ALN Armée de Liberation Nationale
ANT Tunisian National Archives
CGTT Confédération Générale des Travailleurs Tunisiens
CV Comités de Vigilance
DSP Destourian Socialist Party – Parti Socialiste Destourien
FLN Front de Libération Nationale
RCC Regional Committees of Coordination
SDECE Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage
TCP Tunisian Communist Party – Parti Communiste Tunisien
UGAT Union Générale des Agriculteurs Tunisiens
UGET Union Générale des Etudiants de Tunisie
UGTT Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail
UNAT Union Nationale des Agriculteurs Tunisiens 
UNFT Union Nationale des Femmes Tunisiennes
UTT Union des Travailleurs Tunisiens
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my profoundest appreciation to the many people, in many
countries, who so generously contributed to the work presented in this book.
Many of them, due to the confidential, and to this day dangerous, nature of
the topic, must remain unnamed. Our long discussions helped me in detecting
sensitive elements that at the time escaped my interpretation and they made this
research an unforgettable experience. This book is prompted by the research
carried out during my PhD at King’s College London from 2012 to 2016 and
I’m grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), which has
generously granted me a scholarship. Furthermore, I cannot fail to thank my
family for their indefatigable support and help. Yasmine and Giuliana, you are
simply the best. Pia, you were always there when I needed your help. And finally
allow me to thank Magda. Since you arrived in my life you have made everything
brighter.

Introduction
On the morning of 14 January 2011, the newspaper La Presse used as its headline
the statement of long-time president Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali: ‘I understand all
of you, I understand everything.’1 On the evening of the same day, President
Ben Ali fled the country in the face of growing anti-government demonstrations
by the Tunisian people. In less than one month, the Tunisian uprising, which
had begun as a spontaneous protest, following the self-immolation of a street
merchant, Mohamed Bouazizi, had become strong enough to overwhelm one of
the most repressive and pervasive Mukhabarat states.2
The term ‘Mukhabarat’ is the Arabic word for intelligence or secret services.3
It is generally used with a negative connotation of repression, often by means of
secret or political police and state terror, implemented by Arab administrations
to compensate for their ‘profound weakness’, in particular the intrinsic lack of
popular legitimacy.4 As noted by Owen Sirrs, a former senior intelligence officer
with the US Defense Intelligence Agency and noted authority in the field, ‘All
Arab states rely on an elaborate security establishment [or security apparatus] for
regime security.’5 In fact, as Sirrs argues, their fundamental mission has consisted
of ‘neutralising an array of threats from ruling establishment conspiracies to
terrorist groups and foreign espionage’.6 Such a system is therefore pathologically
insecure and makes the search for, discovery and elimination of enemies an
overriding state objective.7 In such circumstances, a situation may arise in which
intelligence and, more broadly, the administrative security apparatus are used
primarily to serve the interests of the leadership. At its worst, the leadership
takes advantage of the security apparatus to pursue its political ends.8 This was
emphatically the case of Tunisia, in which the security apparatus constituted
a concrete instrument of the state’s power. For the state, intelligence produced
domestic political effects that were more advantageous than would otherwise
have been the case.9 In Tunisia, the security apparatus was composed of an
evolving collection of civilian and military intelligence agencies, a plethora of
state institutions and civil associations, and in some cases agencies run by the
dominant or hegemonic political party. In the broadest sense, it functioned as
2 The Intelligence State in Tunisia
a unique intelligence community and incorporated not only the intelligence
function but also an administrative function as a ‘permanent counterintelligence
enterprise, to which all other major political, social and economic questions
were subordinated’.10
In light of the centrality of the security apparatus to the stability of Arab
regimes and, by extension, the Arab world’s importance to global security, it
is surprising that so little has been written about intelligence or Mukhabarat
in any Arab state. There is a plethora of analyses conducted on North African
regimes and in particular on the Tunisian system of government, but these
studies only mention in passing the preponderant role played by the security
apparatus in domestic politics. With few exceptions, there is a lack of systematic
studies or critical theorizations on the individual North African secret services
and more broadly on the phenomenon of the Mukhabarat or intelligence state.11
The great majority of these analyses concentrate mainly on the Middle East’s
secret services and in particular on Syrian and Egyptian cases. For example, the
excellent work of the French–Algerian journalist Mohamed Sifaoui, Histoire
Secrète de l'Algérie Indépendante – L’Etat DRS, is an exception.12 Sifaoui recounts
the story of fifty years of independent Algeria in the grip of a security apparatus
as opaque as it is omnipresent, described by many Algerians as ‘the first political
party in the country’. The lack of accessible primary sources on security services
has represented a fundamental problem for scholars. Indeed, without Arab
primary sources, these studies on Arab security services have often entered into
intelligence or historical studies only as victims of covert Western operations in
the third world or as perpetrators of state-sponsored terrorism.13
In analysing the role of the Tunisian security apparatus, this study will
investigate, through an historical approach, the role of intelligence as that
fundamental and generally ignored ‘missing dimension’ of North African
domestic politics. This study is a pioneering work, which is based on the
exploration of the national, diplomatic and military archives of Tunisia, France,
Italy and the UK, including official reports, records of different administrative
institutions, legal materials, leaked and declassified documents and so forth.
What made this project possible was the unprecedented and unrestricted access,
granted to the author by the Tunisian National Archives (hereafter, ANT), to
the papers of the Interior Ministry and the First Ministry during Bourguiba’s
regime. The work on these previously inaccessible sources has allowed for the
first archival-based analysis of the evolution of the Tunisian security apparatus,
and has enabled an empirically informed appreciation of the degree of influence
wielded by intelligence on Tunisian domestic politics. Naturally, being one of
Introduction 3
the first historians to explore these sources led to several difficulties. Aside from
those normally associated with working through declassified state papers, the
contents of the Tunisian archives are uncatalogued by the archivists and largely
in a disorganized state. The lack of accurate finding aids and catalogues made it
difficult to orient my research. Some documents recorded in the deposit slips
of the archives were missing and many of the key dossiers are only partially
preserved. Despite these difficulties, this study constitutes one of the few non-
Anglo-American-archive-based studies of intelligence.
This work with the primary sources was supplemented with interviews with
political, military, civil and intellectual exponents of the Bourguiba regime and
with well-informed persons, many of whom, due to the confidential, and to this
day dangerous, nature of the topic, must remain unnamed. For instance, the
interviews with cultural associations, human rights leagues or former politicians
were particularly important in offering considered insights into specific
operational procedures, as well as into the violence employed by the different
security agencies to prevent or repress their opponents, and in analysing the
regime’s attempts at moulding and controlling social pressures.14 This work was
prompted by the research of the author’s PhD, awarded in 2016, and ethical
approval for this research was granted by the SSPP ethical approval committee
at King’s College London (approval code REP(WSG)/13/14-6).
Besides primary sources and interviews, the substantial body of literature
written on Tunisian history has been an essential source for reconstructing
the background of the events, the administrative structure of the state and
the cultural mindset of Tunisians in different historical phases.15 In addition
to the historical literature, the work on authoritarianism provided some
valuable concepts and frameworks for my analysis, such as the concept of path-
dependency.16 It is through history that this study analyses how the Tunisian
system of power and its use of intelligence readapted its predominant mental
patterns, habits, strategies and networks in each new regime, despite what often
appeared to be a dramatic political change. As we shall see, each new political
system could only be constructed ‘not on the ruins, but with the ruins’ of the past
regimes.17 History is therefore crucial to unravelling the origins and evolving
roles of institutions, such as those of the Tunisian security apparatus, and in
order to highlight the important continuities and the ability of the security
state to recreate itself over and over again, my research employs a ‘longue durée’
approach. As Professor Gary T. Marx showed, ‘The deep foundation of an ancient
building, a police-state apparatus, so entrenched in civil society that the border
between the public and private is often blurred, rarely disappears. Apart from
4 The Intelligence State in Tunisia
the symbolic removal of some leading figures much of it remains in place – old
agents with new uniforms and activities.’18 The objective is to show to what extent
the French Colonial Intelligence State exerted its influence over Tunisia and to
highlight the nature and role of intelligence in the constantly evolving security
apparatus’s intelligence agency as well as its importance in the process of state
formation and in the country’s political culture. Indeed, the predominant mental
patterns, habits, strategies and network formed during the Beylical Regime and
under French colonial rule continued to mould the structures, responses and
actions of Bourguiba’s system and to reverberate their logic also under Ben Ali’s
regime. The persistence of these patterns illustrates the value of the concept of
path-dependency, the resilience or stickiness of this system and above all the
continuity and therefore the fundamental impact that the model of intelligence
state wielded on the newly created Tunisian government.
In addition to the extensive use of the existing historical literature and
academic works on authoritarianism, this research also took advantage of the
comparative studies on the political systems of the Maghreb and development
studies.19 These studies combine the analysis of socio-economic and cultural
change with that of political and institutional development and offer a deeper
understanding of North African countries’ processes of state formation and
evolution. The literature on the problematic process of democratization has
provided an interesting contribution that elucidated the functioning and the
evolution of the Tunisian security apparatus. In particular, despite their focus
on Ben Ali’s Tunisia, some of these analyses helped in fostering a different
interpretation of the evolving nature and adaptability of the practices of the
security apparatus in moulding and controlling popular consent.20 In the
same way, the literature on modernization and decolonization was extremely
useful to better assess the consequences of colonialism and, above all, the role
played by the security apparatus.21 Finally, although the literature is heavily
weighted towards British and American historical examples and concepts, this
research also draws on intelligence studies for insights into how intelligence
organizations do and should work.22 In this respect, a decisive contribution
to this work came from the research of the British historian of French empire
professor Martin Thomas. In his studies of the French empire, Thomas argued
that the different colonial administrations in North Africa and Middle East
from the nineteenth century up to the end of the Second World War shared
the fundamental characteristic of being, at their core, intelligence states.23 In
these regimes, intelligence and more broadly the colonial security apparatus
represented the fundamental aid to policy formation and the pivotal
Introduction 5
instrument to their survival.24 According to the cultural inclinations, traditions,
capabilities and the perceived threats to society, these colonial intelligence
states constituted the ‘ruins’ with which the new independent administrations
and agencies were created.25
Building on the work of Martin Thomas on the colonial intelligence state, this
study will therefore address the following set of questions: To what extent did
the colonial intelligence state exert its influence on Tunisia’s domestic politics
from 1881 to 1956? How did the Tunisian security apparatus and the Tunisian
state adapt to internal threats through these years? What was the nature and role
of intelligence in the constantly evolving security apparatus during the state-
making process in Tunisian history from 1881 to 1965?
By exploring the dynamics behind the origins and development of the
Tunisian security apparatus and its role in domestic politics, it will be argued
that the security apparatus was a determinant element in the struggle for power
in Tunisia even before the implementation of the protectorate in 1881. Indeed,
French colonial authorities were significantly influenced in their organization
and methods by the existing Beylical Regime.26 The French colonial system
fully developed the Beylical Regime’s embryonic intelligence through the
implementation of the instruments of a modern bureaucracy, which contributed
to the state surveillance of the subjected population and to countering domestic
dissent, coups, mass insurrections and external threats. While in the colonial
intelligence state the security apparatus was designed to maintain colonial control
over a territory, with Tunisian independence it evolved into an instrument that,
from the onset, was driven by the political agenda of the leader or the ruling
elite. Indeed, the agency of the security apparatus, with or without terror, is
generally unaccountable to the wider society and not subjected to effective legal
controls. It might be composed of a congeries of more or less well-coordinated
institutions and organizations that perform their functions of surveillance,
containment and repression with relative impunity against all elements, internal
or external, perceived as threats by the regime. Intelligence, as that determinant
element in ‘the art of creating power’, is a fundamental aid to rule and a pivotal
instrument to the regime’s survival.27
This study will explore the evolution and the mechanisms that have
characterized the implementation of the Tunisian Intelligence State or
Mukhabarat state.
In doing so, it will be necessary to explore the evolution of the different
degrees of interpenetration that the Tunisian government experienced with
its intelligence services. Thus, the analysis will cover the whole process of state
6 The Intelligence State in Tunisia
formation, from the implementation of the French Protectorate in 1881 to 1965.
In this way, it will be possible to present a first comprehensive overview of the
evolution and characteristics of the regime and its security community, as well as
the gradual affirmation of the Mukhabarat state, epitomized by the assassination
of Salah Ben Youssef in 1961 and the congress of Bizerte in 1964. The first chapter
will be an introductive background on the pre-protectorate period, in which
it will be illustrated to what extent the Beylical Regime (the Ottoman colonial
regime in Tunisia) constituted the precursor of the colonial intelligence state,
later implemented with French rule. The next four chapters will use Professor
Martin Thomas’s framework to investigate the phase of French colonialism in
Tunisia, and the last two chapters will explore the final stage of the fight for
independence and the complex period that followed the implementation of the
new independent administration.
The analysis of the process of state formation will also permit us to examine
how the leadership’s intrinsic legitimacy crisis (i.e. the lack of a popular mandate
for rule) and the resultant insecurity shaped how threats to the national security
were perceived. Therefore, one of the central threads will be the analysis of the
pathological insecurity suffered by these systems that devoted the greater part of
their energy to protective counterintelligence agency.
By focusing on the evolution of the structure, the functioning and the cultural
mindset of the Tunisian security apparatus, this work will try to highlight
their degree of influence on the nature of the information collected and, more
broadly, on the process performed by the whole intelligence community. The
failures of the security apparatus will thus become a rare perspective from
which to identify patterns and connections, be they shown or hidden. In doing
so, and starting with those of the Janissaries’ revolt in 1811/1816, it will build
the research on the study of Thomas and complement the analytical framework
with Professor Sir Christopher Alan Bayly’s work. Bayly uses the concept of the
‘information order’ as a heuristic device to understand a wide and complex range
of sources of formal and informal knowledge. These sources, prompted by the
use of state intelligence gathering, represented the determinant instrument for
controlling and exerting influence over the autonomous indigenous networks,
such as ‘local language media, religious forums and mass social gatherings,
indigenous marketplaces, and meeting places of the indigenous elite’.28 He argues
that the progressive implementation of a bureaucratized information system,
propaedeutic for the maintenance of order, gradually deprived the apparatus of
this fundamental type of knowledge, in favour of a ‘more routinised, abstract
information’ based on statistics and surveys, thereby inevitably compromising