Elaine Mokhtefi, American Witness to Algeria’s Revolution, Dies at 98

Late one night in June 1969, Elaine Mokhtefi, a journalist with the Algerian government news service, received a call from a representative of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, a militant group fighting the white-supremacist government of Southern Rhodesia.

He needed help. Eldridge Cleaver, a leader of the Black Panther Party, had jumped bail on an attempted murder charge in California, fled to Cuba and was now hiding in Algiers, the capital. Could she lean on her contacts in the Algerian government to arrange a visa?

African guerrillas, American radicals, top Algerian officials — Ms. Mokhtefi was used to it. What was strange was how she got there.

Born Elaine Klein in Brooklyn and educated in Georgia, she improbably found herself as an indispensable fixer for the Algerian independence movement in the 1950s and, after it separated from France in 1962, for the young Algerian republic, connecting its leaders with the revolutionaries and rebels who saw Algeria as a beacon for developing-world freedom movements.

“In the ’60s, we had the impression that what we did could have an impact,” Ms. Mokhtefi told Publishers Weekly in 2018. “We felt that we were on the edge of a new world.”

Ms. Mokhtefi died on Sept. 11 in Manhattan. She was 97.

The death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Zeynep Çelik, a neighbor and close friend.

After dropping out of college and moving to Paris in 1951, Ms. Mokhtefi became drawn to the plight of Algerian workers, who faced constant discrimination, and to their homeland’s smoldering campaign for independence from France, which broke out into full-scale war in 1954.

By decade’s end, she was working for the provisional Algerian government, first in Paris and later in New York, helping its officials navigate the United Nations and cultivate ties with the U.S. government.

Fluent in French, she proved adept at moving between cultures and causes, helping link the Algerian struggle to the broader fight against European colonialism in Africa and Asia.

Following independence, Ms. Mokhtefi moved to Algiers, where she continued her work as a fixer.

She met Fidel Castro in Cuba. She hosted North Korean delegates in Algiers. She was close friends with Frantz Fanon, the Martinican-born French psychiatrist and writer, and in 1961 took care of his son while Mr. Fanon lay dying of leukemia in a Maryland hospital.

In 1969, she was a lead organizer of the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers. At one point, she and the South African singer Miriam Makeba had to cajole, threaten and finally carry a very drunk Nina Simone from her hotel room to the stage, where she sang songs that brought Houari Boumédiène, the Algerian president, nearly to tears.

Ms. Mokhtefi had a cameo in Gillo Pontecorvo’s acclaimed 1966 film “The Battle of Algiers,” a cinéma-vérité depiction of the Algerian war of independence; she appears at a news conference held by a French officer.

She was in Algeria in 1970 when Timothy Leary, the American psychologist and counterculture celebrity, escaped to the country after breaking out of prison in California, where he was being held on a drug conviction. She arranged for him and his wife, Rosemary, to meet with government officials and stay in Algiers.

And she was the main point of contact between the Algerian government and Mr. Cleaver, arranging for him, his wife and his associates — eventually about 30 Panthers — to receive something like diplomatic status in Algeria, which included a stipend and the use of a villa outside Algiers.

The Panthers added to Algeria’s mystique as an international center for revolutionaries, but their flashy American lifestyle raised eyebrows among what was, still, a conservative Muslim country.

One day Mr. Cleaver confessed a secret to Ms. Mokhtefi: He had killed one of his close associates, Clinton Smith, known as Rahim. He said the man had been trying to steal from the Panthers. Ms. Mokhtefi later learned that Mr. Smith had been seen dancing closely with Mr. Cleaver’s wife at a disco while he had been on a trip to North Korea, and she suspected the killing had a different motivation.

Mr. Cleaver was never charged in the killing.

By the early 1970s, Ms. Mokhtefi had begun to turn against Algeria’s increasingly repressive government. She refused a request by government agents to spy on a close friend, a transgression that got her expelled from the country in 1974. She later lived in Paris and New York City.

“She remained cleareyed about the authoritarian nature of the post-independence regime,” Adam Shatz, a writer who befriended her in 2014, said in an interview. “But she retained an abiding love for the country.”

Elaine Klein was born on Dec. 10, 1928. Her parents, Charlie and Mildred Klein, owned a dry goods store in Hempstead, a Long Island suburb, but it failed at the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.

The family moved repeatedly, first back to the city from Long Island, then to Texas, then to upstate New York and finally to Ridgefield, Conn., an experience that established Elaine’s comfort with different surroundings and affinity for outsiders.

She attended Wesleyan College, a women’s institution in Macon, Ga., but was expelled after a year for speaking out against Jim Crow segregation and for breaking curfew to visit Atlanta on the weekends.

Back in New York, she studied Spanish and became active in the United World Federalists, a left-wing group that advocated for world government. Her involvement led to surveillance by the F.B.I., and was one reason she moved to Paris in 1951.

There, she fell in with the left-wing political and artistic scene, including the Algerian independence movement. Eventually she returned to New York to represent the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, working out of a small office near the United Nations.

She did not visit Algeria until after its independence. For more than a decade, she was the only American and among the only women working at a high level within the government.

Her expulsion in 1974 stung. By then she had fallen in love with a former freedom fighter, Mokhtar Mokhtefi, who left with her. They lived for 20 years in Paris, where she sold jewelry, and married in 1991. They moved in 1994 to New York City, where she became an accomplished painter.

She also became involved in various protest movements, and was a regular presence at demonstrations against the Iraq War and for Palestinian rights.

Mr. Mokhtefi died in 2015. Ms. Mokhtefi does not leave any immediate survivors.

Just after his death, Mr. Mokhtefi’s memoir was published in French; Ms. Mokhtefi translated it into English and published it as “I Was a French Muslim” in 2021. By then she had also published her own memoir, “Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers” in 2018.

The book, which Mr. Shatz helped arrange for publication, was well received and won her acclaim on the left. Despite her age — she was 90 when it appeared — she took to the road for speaking tours, including visits to Algeria, whose new democratic government welcomed her openly.

She received Algerian citizenship in July of this year. At her death, she was finalizing plans to visit Algiers again in October, where she was to receive an award from the government.