The French police manhunt for the Jackal is an institutional race against an assassin whose identity, timetable, and whereabouts remain uncertain. Led by Claude Lebel, it expands from a secret assignment into a nationwide search drawing on archives, border records, local police, security services, and an unprecedented street-level sweep of Paris. Its decisive end comes not through a single record or inference, but when Lebel reaches the Jackal’s position during the ceremony and kills him in a close-range gunfight.

A secret mandate and a problem of identification

An hour after the Interior Minister’s briefing, Lebel emerged from the conference room dazed by the scale of the task. He had spent fifty minutes absorbing the report and the directive: he was to establish his own office, receive unrestricted access to necessary information, and command the resources of the agencies represented around the table, without limits on cost. The assignment was not a request for advice. It made Lebel the operational centre of an investigation whose target was not yet identified.

Lebel immediately converted that authority into working arrangements. He made Lucien Caron his sole assistant, combining secretarial and investigative support, and ordered the ordinary secretary removed from the confidential operation. A camp bed, washing and shaving supplies, and a coffee percolator turned the office into a place where the two men could work continuously. Ten outside telephone lines and a permanent operator were to be reserved for them; Caron was empowered to request facilities from department chiefs in Lebel’s name. The practical details mattered: secrecy and speed depended on ensuring that routine administrative delays did not block the investigation.

The first international appeals exposed the central difficulty. For three hours, Lebel and Caron contacted leading police officials abroad over secure high-frequency links. Lebel could not describe the approach as a formal enquiry between police forces, because the available information did not establish whether the intended offence had reached the preparation stage. He had no name and only a poor description. What he could offer was a profile: the unknown man would have to be a leading professional political assassin, with successful killings behind him, rather than an ordinary gangland gunman. That distinction gave foreign investigators a useful category, but not yet a face or a location.

Records, borders, and the Duggan trail

The search relied on an extensive system of records, especially the archives maintained by the central records office. Its Pantheon headquarters held four and a half million personal dossiers, cross-indexed along five and a half miles of shelving. The files could include not only convicted people but suspects, witnesses, and people acquitted in court. Separate fingerprint records included every set taken in France, even unidentified prints; a further ten and a half million cards recorded, among other things, arrivals at border crossings and guests at hotels outside Paris. The scale promised reach, but it also meant that investigators had to find the right identity and record among enormous stores of information.

The counter-espionage service screened incoming travellers at ports, airports, and borders before disembarkation cards entered the archival system. Paris hotel records, however, went to the Prefecture of Police rather than to the central records office. The manhunt therefore depended on information divided across agencies and repositories. When Lebel had the archives searched again for the name Alexander Duggan, investigators found that Alexander James Quentin Duggan had entered France aboard the Brabant Express from Brussels on July 22 and appeared on a passenger report for the Etoile du Nord Express travelling from Paris to Brussels on July 31. A Paris hotel card, bearing a passport number that matched information supplied from London, showed a stay near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30.

Caron favoured raiding the hotel, but Lebel chose a discreet visit to the proprietor in the early hours. The owner was able to establish that Duggan had left by August 15; Lebel avoided waking the other guests and gained the information without turning the enquiry into a conspicuous police action. Yet the record trail did not mean that the man was still at the address, or that Duggan remained the identity under which he could be found. Lebel warned the conference that the killer alone knew his timetable. The police had been investigating for seventy-two hours and could not tell where in that schedule they had intervened. They could hope to arrest him only after identifying and locating him under his assumed name, while the killer might know that the plot had been exposed without knowing how far the investigation had advanced.

From the abandoned car to a search around Ussel

When a car associated with the fugitive was found, Lebel instructed the Regional Headquarters of the French Judicial Police at Clermont-Ferrand to send as many capable men as possible to Ussel. He ordered a square search centred on the discovery site, with enquiries at farmhouses, village shops and cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ shacks. The search description was specific enough to guide interviews: a tall, blond man, English by birth but speaking good French, carrying three suitcases and a handgrip, well dressed and carrying substantial cash, though likely to look as if he had slept rough.

Lebel also treated publicity as a danger to the search. Local reporters were to be diverted with a cover story about a car crash and a possibly dazed occupant, presented as a mission of mercy rather than a hunt for an assassin. If officers found the fugitive, they were not to approach him; they were to surround the location and hold him there until Lebel arrived. The instruction reflected the disparity between a large search party and a man believed to be armed and dangerous: locating him was not the same as safely arresting him.

At sunset, police vans from Clermont-Ferrand and Ussel established a headquarters in the village square nearest the car. Regional Headquarters directed squad cars outward from a five-mile radius and planned to work through the night, when residents would be more likely to be at home. The terrain made the plan hazardous in a practical sense: twisting valleys and hillsides could cause officers to lose their way or miss an isolated shelter. The search was therefore both extensive and vulnerable to small omissions, especially when witnesses, routes, and scattered buildings had to be checked in darkness.

Lebel’s reconstruction of the car’s transformation produced a further, more troubling inference. He reasoned that the fugitive must have bought paint to alter it; if enquiries confirmed that the car had been driven from Gap to Ussel overnight already transformed, he had probably obtained the paint in Gap. That would mean somebody had warned him that the Duggan identity had been uncovered and that the police were closing in on his car. Lebel could not prove the source of the warning. He considered the possibility of an agent in the chain of telephone, telex, or departmental communications, and suspected that Valmy, whose message to Rome had been intercepted by the counter-espionage service, might be the killer’s sole contact. He also concluded that the Jackal had learned the overall assassination plan was exposed and had chosen to continue regardless.

The search contracts around a changing identity

The inquiry followed the fugitive’s trail through the chateau, the taxi evidence, and the route to Tulle. At nine one evening, Lebel received a message from Commissaire Valentin at the Tulle headquarters and learned that the car and the chateau room had both been fingerprinted, producing hundreds of matching sets. In the reconstruction later given to the Interior Ministry, the trail ran from the forest clearing to Egletons, included the absence of a crucial taxi driver and a murder at the chateau, and ended with a tall, grey-haired Dane boarding the Paris express at Tulle. By the time the account reached the conference, the killer was believed to be in Paris under a new name and with a new appearance.

That conclusion prompted a fresh administrative surge. Lebel asked for Superintendent Thomas and the Danish Consul General to be reached, and the Prefecture of Police delivered more than 980 hotel registration cards for Danes staying in Paris. At four in the morning the cards were already being sorted into probable, possible, and other categories. Meanwhile, engineers at the counter-espionage service had prepared a recording that Lebel and Caron listened to in a basement communications laboratory. The investigation had moved from tracing paper identities and travel to testing communications, but each new lead still had to be interpreted before it could identify the man in the city.

As the Paris search intensified, the Interior Minister set out a public and operational plan. Once a name was available, every policeman and member of the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité in Paris was to stop people and inspect their papers. The counter-espionage service would check known OAS sympathisers with help from the central records office. The Jackal’s use of successive identities made that instruction both powerful and limited: it could turn an identified name into a citywide alert, but the police first had to determine which name and appearance belonged to the fugitive at that moment.

Paris searched, and the hunt ends in gunfire

For two days, Paris was searched on a scale the city had not experienced before. Police checked hotels from the most expensive establishments to the roughest lodgings, as well as pensions, hostels, rooming houses, and other places where a traveller might sleep. Plainclothes officers visited bars, restaurants, night-clubs, cabarets, and cafés, showing the wanted man’s photograph to staff. Police raided the homes and flats of known OAS sympathisers. More than seventy young men who bore some resemblance to the killer were taken for questioning and released; hundreds of thousands of people in streets, taxis, and buses had their papers examined, while road-blocks were set up on major routes into Paris.

The effort extended beyond formal police institutions. Corsicans moved through underworld haunts warning that anyone withholding information would face the Union’s wrath. State employees from senior detectives to soldiers and gendarmes joined the search, while the underworld and its associated trades were also pressed to scrutinise passing faces. People working in tourism were briefed, youthful-looking detectives entered student cafés and social groups, and agencies placing foreign-exchange students with French families were warned. The sweep turned the city’s ordinary spaces and networks into points of observation, but its breadth also produced a flood of mistaken resemblances and routine checks.

On the evening of August 24, Lebel was summoned from home to meet the Interior Minister. The next day, during the public ceremony, the Jackal fired at the President and missed by a fraction of an inch. Lebel reached the sixth floor, where Pierre Valremy and a member of the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité joined him. Hearing a soft report behind one of the doors, Lebel directed the officer to shoot the lock. Valremy entered first. The Jackal, still disguised, fired from the hip and hit him in the chest with an explosive bullet, killing him.

Lebel then faced the gunman at close range. As the Jackal prepared to fire again, Lebel seized the fallen officer’s MAT 49 submachine gun and fired. Half a magazine struck the Jackal in the chest, killing him and ending the pursuit. The sound was publicly explained as a faulty motor-cycle silencer, concealing the gunfight from the crowd below. That evening, Superintendent Thomas was told by telephone that the Jackal had been caught in Paris. The operation’s final success came at the point where the elaborate machinery of records, searches, and surveillance had to meet the fugitive directly—and where its cost included Valremy’s death.