France's nationwide pursuit of Jackal

France’s nationwide pursuit of The Jackal grows from a concealed investigation into an extraordinary deployment of state and civilian resources. Led by Claude Lebel, it depends not on a single decisive clue but on the accumulation of records, calls, field inquiries, and competing explanations for the fugitive’s movements. Its central difficulty is that the police know an attempt against the President is planned, yet initially lack both the assassin’s name and a reliable way to find him.

Command and Organization

The pursuit begins with an order rather than a consultation. After fifty minutes of briefing by the Minister of the Interior, Lebel emerges dazed: he has been given his own office, access to necessary information, the resources of the senior officials around the table, and no spending limit. The scale of the assignment is matched by its secrecy. Lebel directs that his regular secretary be transferred or placed on paid leave, appoints Lucien Caron as his combined assistant and secretary, and arranges a camp bed, coffee, and ten outside telephone lines with a permanently assigned operator. Caron is also empowered to request from department chiefs whatever Lebel might have requested himself. The office is made operational as a protected command post, not simply a desk from which to receive reports.

Lebel’s first outreach reflects how little the investigation can disclose. For three hours, he and Caron contact senior crime investigators abroad over secure high-frequency lines. Lebel presents the approach as a routine tip-off, not yet an official inquiry between police forces: the suspected offence may not have advanced beyond intention, and the investigators have no name and only a poor description. He then explains the quality of the threat. The unidentified man would have to be a leading professional contract assassin with successful political killings behind him, not an ordinary gangland gunman. The pause that follows on the other end of each call registers the implication: there is only one target in France likely to attract such a killer.

Records, Identities, and the Search for a Name

The investigation draws on an extensive machinery of records. The French General Intelligence Directorate’s archives hold four and a half million personal dossiers, arranged across five and a half miles of shelving and cross-indexed by names and suspected or proven offences. The files can also include witnesses and acquitted people, and the system is not computerized. Alongside them are fingerprints taken in France and ten and a half million cards, among them border disembarkation records and hotel registrations from outside Paris. Paris hotel cards are held separately by the Paris Police Prefecture. These collections give the inquiry reach, but their scale and division among offices make searching and matching a matter of human retrieval and coordination.

A renewed check of the archives produces a trace for Alexander James Quentin Duggan. A card records his arrival from Brussels on the Brabant Express on July 22; another, from a customs unit working aboard the trains, places him on the Etoile du Nord Express from Paris to Brussels on July 31. A hotel card shows that a man using the name stayed near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30, with a passport number matching information received from London. Rather than order an immediate raid, Lebel visits the hotel proprietor quietly during the night. He establishes that the wanted man was no longer there by August 15, while avoiding the disruption of waking the other guests.

The search for Duggan also illustrates the vulnerability of routine identification systems. Hotel registrations and border records can provide a sequence of movements, but that sequence depends on the fugitive continuing to use the same identity. When the wanted car has not been spotted and no hotel card appears under Duggan’s name, Lebel sets out alternatives rather than treating the missing record as proof of escape. The man may still believe he is unsuspected and be travelling openly; he may have abandoned the Alfa Romeo and be relying on his own resources; or he may have changed to another false identity. If he has no further identity, he will eventually need a hotel or a frontier crossing. If he has another, he remains extremely dangerous.

Field Searches and Changing Assessments

When the car is found, Lebel orders Commissaire Valentin to assemble the strongest available team at Ussel and begin a square search centered on the discovery site. Officers are to question farms, people who regularly use the road, village shops and cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ shelters. The searchers receive a detailed description: a tall, blond man, English by birth but speaking good French, travelling with three suitcases and a handgrip, carrying substantial cash, well dressed but likely to look as if he had slept rough. Lebel also orders the press kept away. If local reporters ask questions, the police are to describe the operation as a search for a possibly dazed survivor of a car accident, minimizing the chance that publicity will alert the fugitive.

Lebel uses the evidence of the car to test a further hypothesis. The vehicle must have been repainted, he reasons, and if it was driven overnight from Gap to Ussel, it was probably already transformed. That would suggest the paint was bought in Gap—and that The Jackal had been warned that Duggan’s identity was exposed. Lebel cannot establish who passed the warning, or how it reached the fugitive. He distinguishes that uncertainty from what the circumstances suggest: The Jackal has one known contact, possibly the agent called Valmy, whose message to Rome had been intercepted by the French counter-espionage service. In Lebel’s assessment, the assassin has learned both that the larger plot is known and that his Duggan identity has been uncovered, yet has continued his operation.

The investigation’s urgency sharpens when Lebel recognizes the significance of the delay after The Jackal left Gap. The fugitive did not immediately become Pastor Jensen or take the express to Paris through Valence. Instead, he spent a week killing time. Lebel concludes that this was not wasted time but preparation for a chosen day: The Jackal knows when he intends to strike. The pursuit consequently shifts from asking only where the fugitive is to determining the timetable that governs his movements.

From Concealed Inquiry to Nationwide Manhunt

As the search intensifies, the authorities initially distribute the description of the wanted car routinely, to avoid provoking suspicion. When a crime scene makes secrecy untenable, Lebel orders a general alert: it is now a murder hunt, and police should follow the trail from the scene and establish the fugitive’s direction of flight. The practical emphasis changes from quietly assembling clues to alerting forces across the country.

The mobilization reaches into records and public space alike. The Ministry orders the French Judicial Police to take every detective off other work and transfer them to the hunt. The French counter-espionage service is to check known OAS sympathizers with the help of the records office. In Paris, police and CRS personnel are to stop people in the streets and examine their papers as soon as the authorities have a name. The Presidential Security Corps is instructed to tighten the protection around the President, while officials seek a complete account of his movements, even if that means acting without first informing him of the extra precautions.

For two days, Paris is searched on an exceptional scale. Police check guest lists at hotels from the most expensive establishments to the poorest lodging houses, along with pensions, hostels, and rooming houses. Plainclothes officers show the wanted man’s picture in bars, restaurants, nightclubs, cabarets, and cafés. Known OAS sympathizers’ homes and flats are raided; more than seventy young men who bear some resemblance to the killer are questioned and released. Hundreds of thousands of people in streets, taxis, and buses have their papers examined, while roadblocks cover the principal routes into the city. The sweep extends beyond formal policing: Corsican underworld figures warn people in criminal networks not to withhold information, and students’ meeting places, social groups, unions, and agencies placing foreign-exchange students with French families are watched or visited.

Scale and Limits

The scale of the effort is measured not only by the visibility of street checks but by the number of separate institutions and communities enlisted. A hundred thousand state employees, from senior detectives to soldiers and gendarmes, are looking for the fugitive; an estimated fifty thousand people in the underworld and its surrounding trades are also asked to watch passing faces. Those serving tourists are briefed, while investigators sort incoming hotel cards and compare identities across local and national records. At one point, more than nine hundred and eighty registrations from Danes staying in Paris hotels are collected overnight and divided into probable, possible, and other categories. The hunt tries to make the city legible by turning its ordinary traces—lodging, travel, papers, acquaintances, and telephone calls—into leads.

That reach does not abolish uncertainty. Records can reveal that Duggan entered France and later left Paris, but they cannot guarantee that the name remains in use. A missing hotel registration has several possible explanations; a changed car may indicate advance warning, but does not by itself reveal the source; a broad description produces lookalikes as well as useful sightings. The pursuit is therefore presented as a process of repeated inference and revision, with Lebel coordinating a large apparatus while resisting the temptation to treat any single absence or clue as conclusive. Its defining tension is between the state’s capacity to gather and compare information and The Jackal’s ability to move through that system under identities the records may not yet connect.