France's nationwide manhunt for Jackal

France's nationwide manhunt for Jackal is a race to make a nearly anonymous political assassin visible before he can reach Charles de Gaulle. Led by Claude Lebel, the search mobilizes national records and police departments, then shifts from broad checks at the borders to the pursuit of a man moving under a newly identified name. Its reach is formidable, but its central difficulty remains: the authorities do not know the assassin's timetable, and each new lead may already be out of date.

Command, secrecy, and resources

An hour after the Interior Minister's briefing, Lebel emerged dazed from a meeting in which he had been ordered—not merely asked—to lead the investigation. He had read Colonel Rolland's report under the scrutiny of senior officials, then received authority to establish his own office, access the information he needed, draw on the resources represented around the table, and incur whatever costs the operation required. The extraordinary mandate gave a relatively junior investigator room to act, but also placed responsibility for coordinating a sprawling response in his hands.

Lebel immediately converted that authority into working arrangements. He made Inspector Caron his sole assistant and secretary, removed the existing secretary from the secret operation, and equipped the office for continuous work with a camp bed, washing supplies, and a coffee percolator. He also demanded ten outside telephone lines and a permanently assigned operator. A circular was to tell every department chief who had attended the ministerial meeting that Caron could request anything Lebel himself could request. The details make the investigation's secrecy practical rather than abstract: the office needed to work around the clock, but access to its business had to remain tightly restricted.

The operation also depended on systems built for ordinary policing. The French National Police's central records included four and a half million personal dossiers, cross-indexed across five and a half miles of shelves, covering people who had come to police attention as suspects, convicted offenders, witnesses, or even acquitted defendants. The files could connect investigators to an obscure trial or an old village arson case, while the associated stores of fingerprints and millions of border and hotel cards offered other routes to identification. These records were not computerized, and some cards had to be cleared periodically to make room for new ones; the manhunt therefore relied on human archivists, classified paperwork, and the speed with which departments could search them.

From an unknown assassin to a named target

At first, Lebel could give foreign police forces little more than a poor description and a warning about the kind of person they should seek. In discreet calls to senior crime investigators abroad, he explained that the suspected target was a professional political assassin with several successful killings behind him, not an ordinary gangland gunman. He could not yet present the request as a fully specified international inquiry: the authorities did not know whether the intention to kill had progressed into practical preparations, and they had neither a name nor a dependable description. The calls thus combined caution with an unusually grave implication: only one person in France could plausibly be the intended target.

When information from London supplied the name Charles Calthrop, the search acquired a workable identity. Without publicity, the authorities agreed to look throughout France for a man under that name and to consider disposing of him if necessary. The French General Intelligence Directorate could search border-disembarkation and hotel records, the Paris police could check registrations within the capital, and the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) could distribute the name and description to border posts, harbours, and airfields, with instructions to hold him upon entering French territory. The intended advantage was silence: if Calthrop had not yet arrived, the authorities would wait without alerting him; if he did arrive, they expected to intercept him.

That first identification proved insufficient. Lebel later explained that the killer controlled his own timetable and that the police had no way to know how far along it they had intervened. They knew the assassin had learned that a plot against the President existed, but not how much he knew about the investigation. The distinction mattered: he might still be unaware that the police had identified his new name, creating a chance to find and arrest him before he understood the danger. At a subsequent conference, Lebel ordered a discreet nationwide search for Alexander Duggan, while British police examined airline-ticket and cross-Channel-ferry records. If the British located him on British soil, they would arrest him; if he had left, they would inform the French. In France, he was to be arrested; in a third country, the authorities could wait for him to enter France or choose another course. The search had become a coordinated effort across borders, but the plan depended on identifying the right alias and locating its bearer before he moved again.

Records, field searches, and the changing picture

The archive search reconstructed Duggan's movements through specific records rather than a continuous trail. A card showed Alexander James Quentin Duggan entering France on the Brabant Express from Brussels on July 22. Another report recorded him travelling from Paris to Brussels on the Etoile du Nord Express on July 31. A Paris hotel registration under Duggan's name, with a passport number matching the information from London, placed him at a small hotel near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30. Caron favoured a raid, but Lebel instead visited the hotel proprietor quietly in the early hours; he established that Duggan had left by August 15 without waking the other guests. The records narrowed the search while also showing how quickly an address could cease to be useful.

As the investigation moved beyond paper trails, Lebel ordered Commissaire Valentin to send as many capable men as possible to Ussel and begin a square search centred on the place where a car had been found. They were to ask at farms, village shops and cafés, hotels, and woodcutters' huts, including people who regularly used the road. The searchers were given a detailed description: a tall blond man, English by birth but speaking good French, carrying three suitcases and a handgrip, with considerable cash and good clothes, though he might look as if he had slept rough. Lebel also demanded that the Press be kept away; if local reporters asked questions, the police were to use a cover story about a car accident and a possibly dazed occupant. If they located the man, they were not to approach him, but to surround him and hold him in place until Lebel arrived.

Each piece of evidence invited competing explanations. Lebel reasoned that the assassin must have bought paint to alter the car and suspected that, if the vehicle had travelled from Gap to Ussel overnight, it might already have been transformed. If inquiries confirmed that he had bought paint in Gap, that would suggest that someone had warned him about the discovery of the Duggan identity, prompting him to escape before the police reached his car. Lebel could not identify the source of such a warning: orders passed through switchboard and telex operators and through middle- and junior-level staff, any of whom might have been compromised. He suspected that the assassin had one clandestine contact, possibly Valmy, whose message to Rome had been intercepted by the DST. The evidence made a leak plausible, not proven, while showing how the investigation's own communications could expose its progress.

Later, Lebel received fingerprint news from Commissaire Valentin in Tulle. The car and the room at the château had been fingerprinted, and the hundreds of sets recovered there matched. Such a result linked sites through physical traces, even as the search continued to depend on reports gathered from people and places across the region.

Timetable, evasion, and the limits of the net

The manhunt's central strategic problem was that the assassin could adapt to what the police knew. Lebel considered the possibility that, after hearing from Marc Rodin through Valmy that the plot had been exposed in principle, the killer might have disposed of his weapon and ammunition in Scotland and planned to return to his own police appearing innocent. If so, it would be difficult to bring charges. The authorities also considered seizing one of the OAS chiefs in Rome, but the proposal was ruled out after the Quai d'Orsay objected on diplomatic grounds; the President, who knew why the arrest was being considered, backed that position. The search could not simply remove suspected intermediaries without creating a separate political and diplomatic crisis.

Lebel eventually recognized that the assassin's unexplained delay after leaving Gap was itself a clue. If he intended to become Pastor Jensen, why had he not gone straight to Valence and taken an express to Paris? Why had he entered France and then spent a week apparently waiting? Lebel concluded that the delay reflected a chosen date for the attack. He therefore asked whether the President had engagements outside the palace that day or over the following days. The inference redirected the search from the question of where the assassin had gone to the more urgent question of when he intended to act.

The nationwide net could also be penetrated by an apparently legitimate disguise. At a street closure, a sentry reported that no one had passed through a gap except an old, visibly ill cripple who lived nearby. The man presented an identity card and a Mutile de Guerre card, and the sentry had let him through because he seemed exhausted and unwell. In the context of the search, the episode revealed the weakness in treating documents and appearance as reassurance: the very signs that persuaded a guard to make an exception could help the disguised assassin enter a protected area. The manhunt's reach was extensive, but it could not eliminate the judgement calls on which individual checkpoints still depended.

Significance

The pursuit is presented as an institutional contest rather than a lone detective's simple act of deduction. Lebel's authority matters because it allows him to make departments act together; Caron's improvised office, the foreign telephone calls, the old paper archives, passport scrutiny, hotel cards, field interviews, and concealed press strategy each supply a different part of the search. Yet the same machinery creates delays and vulnerabilities: a record may lag behind a traveller, a secret order must pass through numerous hands, and a guard can be deceived by a convincing appearance.

The manhunt therefore advances through repeated revisions of what the authorities believe. A nameless professional assassin becomes Calthrop, then Duggan; a plan assumed to be exposed may still be active, and a week of apparent inactivity proves to have strategic meaning. The contrast between the vast state apparatus and the assassin's ability to change identity gives the pursuit its defining tension: France can search everywhere, but it must first know which person, under which name, and at what moment it is trying to find.