Several Algerian websites including the English and French language sites of the newspaper Echorouk quoted the U.S. Ambassador to Algeria, David R. Pearce, as denouncing the book, Between Terror and Tourism, as containing “lies” by quoting remarks made to Mr Mewshaw in an interview with the former Deputy Chief of Mission at the Embassy, Thomas Daughton. Algerian officials evidently took umbrage at the candid remarks made by the diplomat as the military-backed Algerian Government is at loggerheads with France over French concern about potential terrorist threats from militant Islamic groups active in Algeria, diplomatic sources said.

However Mr Mewshaw told Italian Insider he stood by his account and insisted he had quoted the official correctly in his book. In the interview Daughton, now based at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, said that “if Algeria didn’t have oil this would be Zimbabwe.”

“The need for regime and leadership change is similar in both Algeria and Zimbabwe,” Mr Daughton told Mr Mewshaw. The U.S. diplomat added that in his view “the (Algerian) Government is sclerotic and self-serving.”

A U.S. State Department official in Washington claimed that Daughton had been speaking off the record and that in any case he was misquoted.

However Mr Mewshaw, the author of more than a dozen books and a regular contributor to newspapers such as the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, has not been told how exactly he purportedly misquoted the U.S. envoy.

Mr Daughton observed that despite the bloodshed of the ’90s, many Algerians continued to sympathize with the fundamentalist groups that had caused so much havoc. “Some people still feel the answer lies within an Islamic framework,” he told Mr Mewshaw.

Asked whether Algerian President Bouteflika’s programme of amnesty and reconciliation was not a step in the right direction, the American diplomat replied: “You’d think so. But some of the recent suicide bombers, it turns out, were repentant terrorists. How akward is that? Bouteflika declared victory after the amnesty but now he has repentant terrorists switching back to the other side and blowing themselves up.”

Mr Daughton also said Americans were in “real danger” travelling in Algeria and that Mr Mewshaw represented a “juicy target” for “any number of groups.”

He mentioned Al Qaeda in the Maghreb and said “There’s evidence of contacts between them and Ayman Al Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s second in command. The Algerians have adopted Al Qaeda tactics — suicide car bombs, multiple timed events. Suicide bombs are the most troubling … AQIM would like to get an American or a Frenchman. False roadblocks are the biggest danger. You don’t want to be the guy that they kidnap.”

“You don’t want to have your head cut off. We truly believe that Americans should not travel overland, especially not in the northeast” Mr Daughton said.

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