The failed Algiers putsch against de Gaulle in 1961 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algiers_putsch_of_1961 did not lack American admirers. From an editorial in National Review:
"Maurice Challe — now portrayed as "reactionary," "fascist," thug and gangster by the FLN and our journalistic scavengers — has been, for France, the highest living embodiment of the ideal of the soldier: absolute in courage, skill, dedication, loyalty, self-sacrifice. Like Raoul Salan — France's most decorated hero, almost mythical figure of the Resistance, victor over Nazi armies, one who endured in Vietnam — Maurice Challe has the further attribute that France expects of her great soldiers, and found so splendidly in de Gaulle himself: the strain of wide-ranging but rigorous intellectuality.
"So far from being "reactionaries," Challe and Salan are strongly integrationist toward Moslem-French relations, and have always insisted that the military side of the war in Algeria is insoluble without a vigorous program of land reform and economic and social improvement. They are strategists and students of history, and they therefore know that the northern coast of Africa is Europe's southern flank. They know that throughout history, the fate of Europe — of the West — has time after time been decided in North Africa: by what happened in North Africa to Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, Ottoman Turks — and in modern times, by what happened to Nelson and Napoleon, Rommel and Montgomery and Eisenhower. They know that, with the Western guard withdrawn from the Suez gate, the great enterprise now based in the Eurasian heartland is thrusting into and across North Africa, in order to outflank Europe and paralyze her ability to resist a direct drive on the eastern front. They know, finally, that the FLN — even if this is not the deliberate intent of all its leaders — must succumb, exactly as Castro's movement has succumbed, to the Communist embrace.
"These soldiers and their associates were the men who brought de Gaulle to power in 1958, because they believed — and had good reason to believe — that he thought as they did. With what seems an almost obsessive and robotic rigidity, de Gaulle destroyed and betrayed their hope. All normal and legal means having been exhausted, these soldiers — in the most tragic decision of their lives, more tragic infinitely than the death that each has faced serenely a hundred times — placed their duty to their country, their civilization, and their God above their duty to their commander in chief. By sheer interposition of their united will, they made a desperate and supreme attempt to block the enemy’s advance, and thus save France and Europe, and the Free World from a mortal danger."
What if people who felt this way controlled the US government--and the US supported the coup attempt and in a way making "plausible deniability" impossible?
(Of course in OTL there were allegations that the CIA did help, but this seems to have been disinformation--and surprisingly, it may have been not KGB disinformation but French conservative disinformation prompted precisely by resentment of JFK's and the CIA's sympathies with Algerian anticolonialists! https://books.google.com/books?id=f1HwAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA124)
"Maurice Challe — now portrayed as "reactionary," "fascist," thug and gangster by the FLN and our journalistic scavengers — has been, for France, the highest living embodiment of the ideal of the soldier: absolute in courage, skill, dedication, loyalty, self-sacrifice. Like Raoul Salan — France's most decorated hero, almost mythical figure of the Resistance, victor over Nazi armies, one who endured in Vietnam — Maurice Challe has the further attribute that France expects of her great soldiers, and found so splendidly in de Gaulle himself: the strain of wide-ranging but rigorous intellectuality.
"So far from being "reactionaries," Challe and Salan are strongly integrationist toward Moslem-French relations, and have always insisted that the military side of the war in Algeria is insoluble without a vigorous program of land reform and economic and social improvement. They are strategists and students of history, and they therefore know that the northern coast of Africa is Europe's southern flank. They know that throughout history, the fate of Europe — of the West — has time after time been decided in North Africa: by what happened in North Africa to Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, Ottoman Turks — and in modern times, by what happened to Nelson and Napoleon, Rommel and Montgomery and Eisenhower. They know that, with the Western guard withdrawn from the Suez gate, the great enterprise now based in the Eurasian heartland is thrusting into and across North Africa, in order to outflank Europe and paralyze her ability to resist a direct drive on the eastern front. They know, finally, that the FLN — even if this is not the deliberate intent of all its leaders — must succumb, exactly as Castro's movement has succumbed, to the Communist embrace.
"These soldiers and their associates were the men who brought de Gaulle to power in 1958, because they believed — and had good reason to believe — that he thought as they did. With what seems an almost obsessive and robotic rigidity, de Gaulle destroyed and betrayed their hope. All normal and legal means having been exhausted, these soldiers — in the most tragic decision of their lives, more tragic infinitely than the death that each has faced serenely a hundred times — placed their duty to their country, their civilization, and their God above their duty to their commander in chief. By sheer interposition of their united will, they made a desperate and supreme attempt to block the enemy’s advance, and thus save France and Europe, and the Free World from a mortal danger."
What if people who felt this way controlled the US government--and the US supported the coup attempt and in a way making "plausible deniability" impossible?
(Of course in OTL there were allegations that the CIA did help, but this seems to have been disinformation--and surprisingly, it may have been not KGB disinformation but French conservative disinformation prompted precisely by resentment of JFK's and the CIA's sympathies with Algerian anticolonialists! https://books.google.com/books?id=f1HwAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA124)
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