OAS plot to hire the Jackal to assassinate de Gaulle

The OAS plot to hire the Jackal to assassinate de Gaulle was an attempt to bypass the French security network by entrusting the killing of Charles de Gaulle to a foreign professional assassin. Marc Rodin conceived the arrangement because the organization’s known attackers were already hunted and vulnerable to informers; its secrecy, payment, and operational terms gave the Jackal unusual independence, while leaving his employers with little ability to supervise him. Once investigators reconstructed the scheme from Viktor Kowalski’s confession and other clues, the plot became a national emergency—but the Jackal still had his own timetable and chose to proceed.

Why the OAS turned to an outsider

Rodin argued that the OAS’s available men, however capable and willing, were already known to the Secret Police. They could not move inside France without facing conventional police pursuit and the danger of betrayal by informers. He proposed an outsider as the remaining means of striking at Grand Zohra while bypassing the intelligence network and confronting the authorities with an attack they might not be able to prevent even if they learned of it.

The choice also followed from Rodin’s view that secrecy itself had become scarce. Infiltrators had attained responsible positions within the OAS and reported its plans to French authorities; among National Resistance Council politicians, he believed, some were unwilling to grasp the full implications of the cause. Rodin accordingly restricted knowledge of the hiring plan to himself, René Montclair, and André Casson. Montclair’s role as treasurer and paymaster was to meet the fee; Casson was to arrange a small, carefully selected group inside France who could assist if the assassin asked for help. Rodin presented their loyalty and discretion as essential safeguards, not as a reason to widen the circle.

Terms of the hiring arrangement

The Englishman agreed to kill de Gaulle but made clear that the job would cost a great deal. He described it as a once-in-a-lifetime undertaking: its risks made future employment unlikely, and the fee had to support him afterward and protect him against Gaullist revenge. The proposed transaction thus joined the OAS’s political objective to the assassin’s demand for financial security, without giving the employers control over how he would carry it out.

The Englishman made secrecy and autonomy conditions of the agreement. He asked how many people knew of the proposal and insisted that the answer remain three. Records of meetings, files, and dossiers were to be destroyed; if any of the three were captured, he reserved the right to call off the operation. He would do the planning himself and disclose its details to no one, including his employers. After leaving his London telephone number and address, he intended to abandon both and disappear. Contact would be limited to emergencies, and he would act only when the first $250,000 had reached his Swiss account or when he was fully ready, whichever came later. Rodin’s offer of intelligence from highly placed OAS men in France did not displace that division of control: the assassin, not his employers, would decide the plan and its timing.

Rodin arranged for the combined OAS accounts in Switzerland to transfer the first $250,000 to the hired assassin. He expected the remaining $250,000 to follow de Gaulle’s death, when industrialists and bankers of the extreme right who had previously refused further advances would, he believed, compete to support the soldiers expected to rule a reborn France. Casson objected to notifying the assassin of the transfer too soon. The promised value of a contact in Paris, he argued, lay in supplying current information about the President’s movements and any changes in security; an early payment notice might prompt the assassin to act before that intelligence could help him.

Discovery and identification

The plot came into view after Rolland reconsidered the words recorded from Kowalski. What had been transcribed as a reference to a blond foreigner and a killer, alongside the repeatedly crossed-out word jackal, resolved into a description of the assassin and his code name. Rolland connected that description to a meeting of three OAS chiefs with a foreigner at the Pension Kleist in Vienna, shortly before the chiefs went into hiding in Rome. He also interpreted the preceding wave of bank and jewellery robberies as fundraising for the contract: the amount required, he reasoned, pointed to an attempt on de Gaulle rather than an ordinary criminal dispute.

Rolland treated the conclusion as urgent but not yet proven. His restricted report described the account as conditional on corroboration and warned that, if accurate, the foreign-born assassin known only by the code name The Jackal posed the most dangerous threat to the President’s life and constituted a national emergency. He had Vienna operatives investigate the Pension Kleist. The desk clerk recognized at least two of the men and recalled Marc Rodin registering as Schulz on June 15, holding a business conference, and leaving the next day. He also described an evening visitor with long, swept-back blond hair, fluent French, and wraparound dark glasses. The clerk could not see the visitor’s face clearly enough to provide a secure identification, leaving investigators with a description rather than a name.

Claude Lebel’s search faced a related problem: the police knew neither the suspected assassin’s real name nor the stage his preparations had reached. In calls to police colleagues abroad, Lebel described the man as a political contract killer with successful assassinations behind him, distinguishing him from a gangland gunman. The uncertainty mattered. The authorities knew a plot existed, but, as Lebel explained to officials, the killer alone knew his timetable. Investigators could therefore hope to catch him unaware once they identified the name he was using and located him under it; they could not know how close he was to acting.

An exposed plot, an independent assassin

The Jackal’s isolation was part of the arrangement from the beginning. After Kowalski’s death, nobody—not even Rodin and his associates—knew where he was. The scheme had given him freedom from routine contact, but that freedom also meant the OAS could not reliably recall him or monitor his preparations. With the plot exposed in principle, the Jackal faced a guarded target; turning back, meanwhile, risked a dispute with Rodin’s men over the $250,000 in his Zurich account. He anticipated that they might track him down, torture him to obtain the signed authority to release the money, and kill him if he refused to return most of it. Continuing would consume money and bring further danger, but retreat had its own cost.

The police later inferred that someone had warned him as investigators closed in on his Alexander Duggan identity. Lebel reasoned that if the car had been transformed with paint bought in Gap, the timing would suggest that the Jackal had been tipped off and fled quickly. He could not establish whether the leak came from the conference room or from an intermediary carrying orders, but suspected the clandestine contact known as Valmy. His further deduction was that the Jackal had not spent a week in France merely by chance: he had selected a day for the attempt and was waiting for it. The plot’s defining imbalance had therefore survived exposure. The OAS could hire the assassin and provide money and possible information; it could not set his timetable, and the police, though alert to the threat, had to infer that timetable from his movements.