Special Branch

Special Branch is the British police body drawn into the international search for the assassin threatening Charles de Gaulle. Its contribution begins as a deliberately limited records check, conducted without the full French suspicion being disclosed, and grows into a secretive, time-sensitive investigation that combines archives, tax records, telephone enquiries, and local inquiries. The organization’s scenes show both the value of its professional expertise and the difficulty of pursuing an unnamed suspect across institutional and national boundaries.

Remit and Initial Briefing

The initial approach comes through Assistant Commissioner Anthony Mallinson, who is asked to establish whether British records contain a political assassin capable of killing a well-guarded statesman. The distinction matters: the inquiry is not about ordinary underworld violence or a local feud, but about a professional political killer with successful assassinations behind him. Mallinson intends to refer the matter to Special Branch, whose remit includes watching potential threats to visiting politicians and investigating embittered or politically volatile people living in Britain.

Assistant Commissioner Dixon, the Head of Special Branch, recognizes the difference between the familiar problem of amateur fanatics and the threat described by the French. The French authorities have already defeated the OAS, but a foreign professional hired by the organization presents a different problem. Dixon considers the likely pool of British candidates exceptionally small, yet orders the records checked rather than dismissing the request. His expectation that there will be no Englishman of the required calibre on the books reflects the narrowness of the search, not certainty about the suspect’s identity.

A Search Without the Full Story

The inquiry is shaped by what Special Branch is not told. Dixon instructs Bryn Thomas and two detective inspectors to investigate the archives and records for a professional operator, but deliberately withholds the French police’s suspicion that the man may be planning to kill Charles de Gaulle. The search therefore proceeds under an incomplete brief: the officers know the capability they are looking for, not the political stakes that have made the request urgent.

That secrecy is part of the operation’s design. Lebel’s appeal to police forces abroad is likewise initially framed as a routine tip-off rather than a formal enquiry, because the French do not yet know whether a crime has been prepared or even fully formulated. When he describes the unknown man as a political assassin with several successful kills, the significance is left for his counterparts to infer. Special Branch is thus one part of a wider investigation in which information is restricted even as authorities try to circulate enough of it to find a suspect.

Thomas and the two inspectors clear their desks and begin checking records, political activity, convictions, and suspicions. The absence of a name does not make the work abstract: it creates a large amount of painstaking file-checking, while the suspect’s professional standing offers one narrowing criterion. The organization’s procedural strength lies in the ability to turn that criterion into searches across stored records; its immediate limitation is that the information supplied does not yet identify a person or explain why the search must be treated as exceptional.

From Records to a Task Force

The British operation changes sharply when new authority becomes available. Thomas assembles six of Special Branch’s best detective inspectors. The group is drawn together from disparate duties: one inspector is recalled from leave, two are removed from surveillance connected to suspected leaks of classified information, two are the officers who had already searched for the unnamed killer, and another is called in from his day off while working in his greenhouse. Thomas briefs the team fully and swears its members to silence.

The investigation then moves from general suspect checks toward a specific man. Just after six in the evening, the Inland Revenue locates the tax returns of Charles Harold Calthrop. One inspector retrieves the file; the others begin telephone enquiries, while another goes to Calthrop’s address to ask neighbours and local tradespeople where he might be. Photographs from the passport application Calthrop had submitted four years earlier are printed, and each inspector carries one. The sudden circulation of a photograph marks a decisive change: the search is no longer for a hypothetical type but for a named individual whose whereabouts must be established.

Calthrop’s tax history provides a further route into his past. He has been unemployed for the past year and abroad for the year before that, but had worked for much of the 1960–61 financial year for a leading British manufacturer and exporter of small arms. Thomas recognizes the firm’s name, finds its managing director, Patrick Monson, and travels to see him at his country house near Virginia Water. Monson confirms that the firm employed Calthrop for just under a year and that, in December 1960 and January 1961, it sent him to Ciudad Trujillo to try to sell British Army surplus submachine guns to the police chief there. The personnel search has now yielded a concrete history of arms work and overseas travel, details that make the file more than a list of possible identities.

Cross-Border Investigation and Limits

Special Branch’s activity belongs to a pursuit conducted on both sides of the Channel. In France, the discovery of the forged identity Alexander James Quentin Duggan comes through repeated checks of the archives: records show his entry on the Brabant Express from Brussels on July 22 and his departure on the Etoile du Nord Express on July 31. A hotel registration card then links Duggan’s passport number to a small hotel near the Place de la Madeleine, where the visitor stayed from July 22 through July 30. These are French investigative findings, but they illuminate the larger procedural problem faced by the British search as well: the suspect’s movements become legible only when separate records, collected by different offices, can be compared.

The investigation also has to reason from incomplete and potentially compromised information. Lebel tells the French conference that the assassin alone knows his timetable, and that the police cannot tell at what point their investigation has interrupted it. Later, he infers that Calthrop may have been tipped off after paint bought in Gap suggested that his car had already been transformed. The suspected leak could have passed through switchboard operators, telex staff, or junior and middle-level officials; Valmy is another possibility because of the intercepted message to Rome. These developments frame the British organization’s secretive search within a wider contest over information: the police need to share enough to act, while the suspect may learn from the very machinery mobilized to find him.

Special Branch’s role is therefore neither a lone detective’s revelation nor a self-contained British case. It is a disciplined contribution to a multi-agency hunt: first a discreet check for a rare professional profile, then a concealed archive search, and finally a concentrated team investigation that identifies Calthrop and reconstructs part of his employment history. The narrative also makes clear that finding a name does not end the problem. The assassin’s timetable remains unknown, the investigation may have been exposed, and records can establish past movements without immediately revealing where the suspect has gone or what he intends to do next.