Alexander Duggan's forged passport

Alexander Duggan’s forged passport is the deceptively ordinary document through which The Jackal turns a dead child’s identity into a working international alias. Its significance lies in the gap between the official authority of a passport and the improvised deception behind it: the document is issued through a routine government process, but its applicant is an assassin who has assembled the supporting identity from a gravestone, parish records, forged attestations, and a child’s printing set. The passport helps him cross borders unseen, yet its number and associated travel records eventually give investigators a route into the identity he has constructed.

Construction of the identity

The Jackal decides to use a false identity throughout the forthcoming assassination and follows a method he understands to be common among mercenaries and smugglers seeking to cross national boundaries under an alias. In the third cemetery he visits, he finds the gravestone of Alexander Duggan, who died aged two and a half in 1931. He then presents himself to the elderly vicar of St Mark’s, Sambourne Fishley, as an amateur genealogist searching for the Duggan family. A courteous conversation, a compliment on the Norman church, and a contribution to its restoration fund help make the request seem harmless.

The parish register supplies the fuller identity he needs: Alexander James Quentin Duggan, born on April 3, 1929, in the parish of St Mark’s, Sambourne Fishley. The Jackal carries those details to the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths in London, where he presents a visiting card identifying him as a solicitor’s partner and claims to be tracing grandchildren entitled to an inheritance. The assistant checks the records and confirms the birth entry; the records also show that the child died on November 8, 1931, in a road accident. For a few shillings, The Jackal obtains copies of both certificates. He destroys the death certificate, retaining the document that can support the identity he intends to claim.

The passport application

Back at his flat, The Jackal completes the application in Duggan’s name, entering the correct age, birth date, and parents’ full names while supplying his own height, hair and eye colour, and the occupation “business man.” He lists the vicar as his referee, using the full name and academic title printed on a board outside the church. The vicar has spoken with him that morning, but the account gives no indication that he knows his name is being used for a passport application.

The supporting papers are manufactured to look like ordinary administrative evidence. The Jackal forges the vicar’s signature in thin ink with a thin nib, then uses a child’s printing set to make a stamp reading “St Mark’s Parish Church Sambourne Fishley.” He sends the application, a copy of the birth certificate, and a one-pound postal order to the Passport Office in Petty France. The passport arrives by post four days later at his accommodation address. The operation depends not on a counterfeit document made outside the state, but on authentic records and a false applicant persuading state procedures to produce a valid passport in a borrowed name.

Travel under the borrowed name

With the new passport in hand, The Jackal locks his London flat and flies to Copenhagen, paying cash rather than using a cheque-book. The passport is part of a larger discipline of concealment: he also carries two thousand pounds in a hidden compartment in his suitcase and arranges onward travel to Brussels before leaving Kastrup Airport. At this point the alias is not merely a name on paper; it is the identity under which he moves through airports and prepares for the next stage of his journey.

In Brussels, he presents himself to M. Goossens as the man whose passport would identify him as Alexander Duggan. He later takes the recently issued passport to a forger while seeking a new front page for his driving licence. He says that the licence belonged to a dead man and claims he needs a replacement because he is banned from driving in Britain. The Belgian recognizes that the passport is only three days old, but the encounter does not prevent The Jackal from continuing to use it. The document thus serves both as travel identification and as an apparently official foundation for the additional papers he wants to adapt.

Records, detection, and significance

The passport’s most consequential afterlife is in the records created when it is used. French archives later yield an entry showing that Alexander James Quentin Duggan entered France on the Brabant Express from Brussels on July 22, 1963. A separate report places Duggan on the Etoile du Nord Express from Paris to Brussels on July 31. A Paris hotel registration card, filled out in Duggan’s name, gives the same passport number as the information received from London and records a stay near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30.

These records demonstrate both the reach and the limits of the identity. The passport has enabled The Jackal to leave a documented trail, but the trail is initially dispersed across border reports, hotel cards, and police archives. France’s police record system holds millions of personal dossiers and extensive collections of fingerprints and border and hotel cards; finding a useful record requires searching those stores under the relevant name. When Claude Lebel and his colleagues turn to Duggan, the crossing and hotel entries make the alias visible as a sequence of recorded movements. The hotel proprietor confirms that the man had left by August 15, and Lebel chooses a discreet visit rather than a raid that would disturb the other guests.

The document therefore embodies the central risk in The Jackal’s method. He can exploit the helpfulness of officials and the credibility of ordinary paperwork, but the same bureaucratic habits that let him obtain and use the passport also preserve traces of his passage. A dead child’s identity grants him a route across borders; the name on the passport, repeated in routine registrations, gives investigators a means to reconstruct part of that route.