DST

DST, France’s counter-espionage service, watches the country’s airports, docks, and borders and screens records made by people entering France. During the hunt for the Jackal, its work ranges from reviewing routine travel information to capturing a telephone call that points investigators toward Valmy. But the agency’s reach is not the same as immediate knowledge: a border report arrives late, and its findings depend on records held across several institutions. The pursuit makes DST both an essential instrument of state surveillance and a participant in a larger, imperfect intelligence system.

Mandate and information infrastructure

DST is described as France’s counter-espionage force, with a standing responsibility to monitor airports, docks, and borders. At points of entry, its officers examine disembarkation cards before the records proceed to the archives. This gives the agency an early screening role: information gathered as part of ordinary travel administration can also help identify people considered undesirable.

The records DST can consult belong to a wider institutional network. The RG serves as the central records office and the memory of the police services. Its Pantheon archives contain four and a half million personal dossiers, cross-indexed along five and a half miles of shelves. The files include not only people convicted of crimes but people merely suspected, witnesses, and people acquitted. The same archive holds fingerprints taken in France, including unidentified sets, while a separate accumulation of ten and a half million cards includes border disembarkation records and hotel registrations from outside Paris. These materials are not a single, instantly searchable database: the system is not computerised, and the cards must be cleared periodically to make room for new arrivals. Paris hotel cards, moreover, go to the Prefecture of Police rather than the RG.

This division of work matters to DST’s role. It screens records at the frontier, while the RG preserves and retrieves extensive police and travel files; the Prefecture holds a distinct set of Paris hotel registrations. The pursuit succeeds only when those separate records are located, compared, and transmitted to investigators in time to act.

Border records and the search for Duggan

The archive search uncovers travel evidence for Alexander Duggan. A card shows that Alexander James Quentin Duggan entered France on the Brabant Express from Brussels on July 22. A report from a customs unit travelling on Brussels–Paris trains also records Duggan on the Etoile du Nord Express leaving Paris for Brussels on July 31. A Paris hotel card, held by the Prefecture of Police, records a stay near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30 and gives a passport number matching information supplied from London. Together, the documents establish a sequence of movements that neither a single border check nor a single agency’s files would show by itself.

The records’ eventual value is undercut by the delay in their circulation. After the Brussels authorities report that Duggan spent only five hours in the city and flew on to Milan, Lebel calls the Milanese police. DST then reports that a routine account of people entering France from Italy through the Ventimiglia crossing had identified Alexander James Quentin Duggan the previous morning. Lebel reacts angrily to the nearly thirty-hour gap. The border system has recorded the Jackal’s return, but the information has not reached the investigators quickly enough to prevent him from moving further into France.

The episode exposes an important difference between surveillance and timely intervention. A name can be correctly entered on a form and still fail to guide an operation while the subject is in motion. DST’s routine screening supplies the lead; the lag between collection and notification gives the fugitive time to exploit the space between record-making and response.

Communications intelligence and coordination

DST contributes another kind of evidence through work by its engineers. After Lebel gives them instructions shortly after midnight, he is summoned to the agency’s headquarters at six in the morning. In a basement communications laboratory, he and Lucien Caron listen to a recording of a telephone call. The number is reconstructed from the interval as the rotary dial spins back between digits: MOLITOR 5901. Given the address on a slip of paper, Lebel and Caron set out to visit Monsieur Valmy.

The recording converts an intercepted communication into a practical lead. Its usefulness depends on several steps: the call must be captured, the dialing interval interpreted, the number identified, and the result passed to investigators who can follow it. DST’s contribution is therefore not simply watching a border or maintaining a file; it also supplies technical means for turning a communications trace into a place investigators can pursue.

As the search expands, DST is ordered to check every known OAS sympathiser, with assistance from the Central Records Office. This assignment shows how its counter-espionage remit intersects with the wider manhunt: the service brings its knowledge of suspected political networks to a coordinated review of records, while other bodies mobilise their own personnel and information. The operation depends on institutional cooperation rather than on DST acting alone.

Secrecy, scale, and operational limits

The investigation is initially constrained by the President’s insistence on secrecy. The authorities are not yet certain that Colonel Rolland’s analysis of Viktor Kowalski’s confused final statements is correct, and enquiries in Vienna are still under way. The government therefore rejects publicity and a nationwide search, ordering that no one outside a small circle be told that anything is wrong. The concern is not only operational: public precautions could make it appear that the President of France is hiding from one foreign assassin. In this early phase, DST and the other services must pursue leads without openly displaying the full scale of the threat.

Once the manhunt becomes extensive, the machinery of surveillance reaches far beyond agency offices. During two days of searching, police check hotel and lodging-house registers, question people who resemble the killer, examine identity papers in the streets, and raid the homes of known OAS sympathisers. The Corsican underworld is also pressed for information, while workers in the tourist trade, students’ meeting places, social groups, and unions are told to watch for the fugitive. An estimated one hundred thousand state employees and fifty thousand people associated with the underworld and its fringe industries are drawn into looking for him. DST’s review of OAS sympathisers and use of central records form one part of this much larger surveillance effort.

Yet the Jackal remains difficult to see precisely because the information system is built around identities and records that he can evade. The police have learned to search under Alexander Duggan, but the investigation later concludes that he was warned that this identity had been uncovered. Rather than leave France, he moves into its centre, still pursuing the President and apparently able to use another face and identity card. The state can compare travel records and mobilise an immense search, but those methods do not guarantee that the person being tracked will still match the identity on file.

The security measures for the ceremonies on August 25 underscore the scale of the response: barriers are to be erected, enclosed areas and sewers searched, nearby buildings examined, and rooftops watched by armed observers. Those measures reflect a threat heightened by the earlier assassination attempts, which have made the President’s security unusually alert rather than mechanically routine. Even so, Claude Lebel acknowledges that the assassin is in France, armed and concealed, and says that the remaining task is to recognise him when he emerges. DST’s records and technical surveillance can narrow the search and expose contacts; they cannot by themselves resolve the final problem of identifying a disguised man in public.