Albert Camus was murdered by KGB, new book claims

'The Death of Camus' author discovered something in the diary of Czech poet Jan Zábrana

Sixty years after the French Nobel laureate Albert Camus died in a car crash at the age of 46, a new book argues that he was assassinated by KGB spies in retaliation for his anti-Soviet rhetoric.

Italian author Giovanni Catelli first aired his theory in 2011, writing in the newspaper Corriere della Sera that he had discovered remarks in the diary of the celebrated Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana that suggested Camus’s death had not been an accident, according to The Guardian.

Now Catelli has expanded on his research in a book titled The Death of Camus. 

Camus's death took place on January 4, 1960, when his publisher Michel Gallimard lost control of his car and it crashed into a tree. The author was killed instantly, with Gallimard dying a few days later.

Three years prior to that, the author of L’Étranger (The Outsider) and La Peste (The Plague) had won the Nobel prize for “illuminat[ing] the problems of the human conscience in our times”.

“The accident seemed to have been caused by a blowout or a broken axle; experts were puzzled by its happening on a long stretch of straight road, a road 30 feet wide, and with little traffic at the time,” Herbert Lottman wrote in his 1978 biography of the author.

Catelli believes a passage in Zábrana’s diaries explains why: the poet wrote in the late summer of 1980 that “a knowledgeable and well-connected man” had told him the KGB was to blame. “They rigged the tyre with a tool that eventually pierced it when the car was travelling at high speed.”

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