The Jackal enters France as Alexander Duggan

The Jackal enters France as Alexander Duggan, turning a false name into both a means of movement and a clue for the police. His route is pieced together from routine records rather than a single dramatic sighting: border cards, a hotel registration, and reports passed between police services. As those fragments converge, Claude Lebel’s pursuit becomes a contest over who can act on the information first.

Identity and First Recorded Entry

Lebel learns of the assignment in a conference attended by senior officials. After reading Colonel Rolland’s report, he is given a directive, extensive briefing, and access to the resources of the organizations represented in the room. The scale of that authority contrasts with the thinness of the initial lead: the investigators do not yet know the suspect’s name, and can offer foreign police only a poor description.

Lebel and Lucien Caron begin building the investigation around that uncertainty. Lebel has his usual secretary removed from the secret work and makes Caron his combined assistant and secretary. He arranges a camp bed, washing and shaving supplies, coffee, and dedicated telephone lines, preparing the office for sustained work. The practical details establish the manhunt’s working conditions: the investigation is secret, continuous, and authorized to demand help across departments.

The first substantial identity trail appears in the archives. A record shows Alexander James Quentin Duggan entering France on the Brabant Express from Brussels on July 22. A second report records a passenger of that name travelling from Paris to Brussels on the Etoile du Nord Express on July 31. A hotel card places Duggan at a small hotel near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30; its passport number matches information received from London. Rather than stage a conspicuous raid, Lebel visits the hotel proprietor quietly in the early hours. He establishes that Duggan was no longer there by August 15, while sparing the other guests a disturbance.

A Route Reconstructed Across Borders

The records do not describe one uninterrupted journey. Brussels police report that Duggan spent only five hours in the city on a later Monday: he arrived from London on a British European Airways flight and left that afternoon for Milan on an Alitalia flight. He paid cash for the ticket, though it had been booked by telephone from London on the preceding Saturday. Lebel passes the lead to the Milanese police.

Another report then places Duggan among those who entered France from Italy at the Ventimiglia crossing. The information reaches Lebel almost thirty hours after the crossing, delayed while entry cards from across France are sorted. He is furious at the lag, but the report establishes the essential fact that the man is inside France. Soon afterward, the regional police headquarters at Lyon reports that Duggan has registered for two nights at the Hotel du Cerf in Gap, beginning the previous evening. A name that had been a line on scattered forms now points to a specific place and a narrowing window of opportunity.

The Manhunt Becomes Operational

Once the trail leads beyond Gap, Lebel directs Commissaire Valentin to send a strong team to Ussel and search outward from the place where the car was found. The proposed search is methodical: mark the location at the centre of a square, ask at farmhouses, village shops, cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ shelters, and seek anyone who saw a tall, blond man, English-born but speaking good French. Lebel’s description includes three suitcases and a handgrip, substantial cash, and the likelihood that the man looked as though he had slept rough.

The order also addresses the dangers of a public search. The press is to be kept away; if local reporters ask questions, police are to explain the activity as a search for someone dazed after a car crash. If the fugitive is found, the officers are not to approach him but to surround him and hold the position until Lebel arrives. The instructions show how the manhunt’s procedure responds to the same uncertainty as its intelligence: the authorities have a name and a broad description, but do not yet know exactly where the suspect is or how he will react.

Exposure, Delay, and the Chosen Date

Lebel later connects the car’s transformation to the exposure of Duggan’s identity. He reasons that the Jackal must have bought paint to alter the vehicle, probably in Gap, and may have been warned that the police had uncovered the Duggan name. In Lebel’s account, that warning would explain why the fugitive left quickly, ahead of the police closing in on the car. He cannot identify the source with certainty: information might have passed through someone inside the chain of communications, or through the Jackal’s single suspected contact, Valmy. The leak remains a possibility, not a settled finding.

The false identity also obscures the timing of the assassination plan. Lebel realizes that the Jackal’s week of apparent delay after reaching France was not evidence that he had abandoned the operation. The assassin had selected his day and could afford to wait for it. Thus Duggan serves two purposes in the pursuit: it gives the Jackal a usable identity, while its eventual discovery enables the police to reconstruct his route. But by the time the investigators can follow that route, the trail may already have told the fugitive how much they know.