One of the finest minds of the 20th century, French philosopher Albert Camus, who died in a car accident in 1960, may have fallen prey to the KGB.
The 46-year-old author of A Happy Death, The Outsider and The Plague died instantly on the way back from his home in Provence to Paris after his publisher’s car ploughed into a tree on an icy road.
A new theory suggests, however, that what was considered a tragic road accident in reality was an evil KGB plot.
The possible explanation has been unveiled by Italian academic Giovanni Catelli in Il Corriere della Sera daily. His research revolves around a passage in a diary written by a celebrated Czech poet Jan Zabrana. Published as a book, an extract from it for some reason came to be absent from the Italian translation.
According to the Italian researcher, it is this missing part, however, that allegedly described a secret rendezvous between Zabrana and his Russian KGB contact.
“I heard something very strange from a man who knew lots of things and had very informed sources. He said the road accident that cost Albert Camus his life in 1960 was organized by Soviet spies. They damaged a tire on the car using a piece of equipment that blew out the tire at a certain speed.”
According to Catelli, the order to kill Camus, a former communist, came from none other than then-Soviet Foreign Minister Dmitry Shepilov as a reaction to an article published in a French magazine back in March 1957, in which Camus blamed the high-ranking Soviet official for the events in Hungary the previous year. “In his piece, Camus had denounced the ‘Shepilov Massacres’ – Moscow’s decision to send troops to crush the Hungarian uprising of 1956.”
Camus’ biographers and experts, however, remained skeptical about the KGB involvement in his death, pointing out the fact that Camus’ decision to travel with his publisher and friend Michel Gallimard in his fancy Facel Vega car was taken at the last minute. At the time of his death, the Nobel Prize-winning writer had an unused train ticket to Paris to travel together with his wife and two children.