Anglo-French police hunt for the Jackal

The Anglo-French police hunt for the Jackal is a covert race to identify an assassin before he can reach Charles de Gaulle. It begins with uncertainty: the French have a report derived from the now-dead Viktor Kowalski, but no confirmed identity for the killer, while the assassin retains the advantage of knowing his own timetable. Rather than a single detective’s sudden insight, the pursuit unfolds through delegated authority, record searches, discreet inquiries, and improvised coordination between French and British police. Its central difficulty is that the state must search widely without letting the public, or the target, know how much it knows.

Threat and limits

The danger is shaped by the Jackal’s professional status and by the earlier failures of attempts against Charles de Gaulle. When Marc Rodin’s English intermediary assesses the possibility of a further assassination, he argues that de Gaulle is unusually difficult to reach precisely because the previous attempts have alerted the authorities to the general intention. Security routines will not relax, and an attack would provoke an immediate response rather than the confusion an assassin might exploit. The warning establishes the conditions of the hunt: the target is conspicuous, but so is the danger of exposing the investigation or provoking the assassin to change his plans.

That tension governs the French Government’s first response. Alexandre Sanguinetti wants immediate protective action, but the Minister of the Interior stresses that the Kowalski-derived report has not yet been verified and that the alleged assassin is known only by a codename. A public, nationwide search for an unidentified foreigner would be difficult to justify and could advertise the threat. Charles de Gaulle therefore orders secrecy: no publicity, no national search, and no indication outside a small circle that anything is wrong. He also refuses to let the threat dictate a visible retreat from public life. The hunt must protect him without making him appear to be hiding from one man.

Lebel receives the operation

The French investigation changes scale when Claude Lebel is summoned to a conference with senior officials. For fifty minutes he listens to the briefing and reads Colonel Rolland’s report while the other men assess him in silence. The Minister does not invite an opinion; he gives Lebel a directive. Lebel is to establish his own office, draw on the participating organizations’ resources, and incur whatever costs the work requires. The abrupt transfer of authority places the practical burden on a detective who has not yet solved the basic problem of who the target is.

Lebel turns that authority into a working command post. He makes Lucien Caron his combined assistant and secretary, excludes the ordinary secretary to protect the secret, and orders a camp bed, washing equipment, and a coffee percolator for the office. He also demands ten external telephone lines and a dedicated operator, with any resistance referred to Maurice Bouvier. The arrangements are utilitarian rather than ceremonial: a room, communications, and a trusted aide are assembled to sustain an investigation that may run continuously and depend on rapid contact with many departments.

The hunt initially has to proceed without a name. Lebel and Caron spend three hours in the basement communications room contacting leading crime investigators abroad over secure high-frequency links. Lebel presents the request as a tip-off rather than a formal international enquiry because the French cannot yet say that a criminal plan has reached the stage of preparation. He can offer only a poor description and the defining hypothesis that the unknown man must be a political contract killer with successful assassinations behind him. The silence at the other end of the line, when he explains that qualification, marks how extraordinary the request is—and how little concrete information the French can supply.

British cooperation and the search for an identity

The British investigation acquires force after Superintendent Thomas is given personal instructions by the British Prime Minister. Thomas is told to pursue the enquiry with unprecedented vigour, use the manpower and documentation available to him, and cooperate fully with the French. If a British passport-holder can reasonably be identified as the man France seeks, he is to be detained. This order turns an exploratory exchange into an active cross-border operation, but it does not remove the central obstacle: the French still cannot provide a known name.

Thomas forms a Special Branch task force, recalling detectives from leave or routine assignments and requiring them to keep the investigation secret. The discovery of Charles Harold Calthrop’s tax returns gives the British team a possible lead. His records show a period of unemployment and an earlier year abroad; before that, he had worked for a British arms manufacturer. Thomas learns that the firm sent Calthrop to Ciudad Trujillo in December 1960 and January 1961 to try to sell surplus British Army submachine guns to the police chief there. Thomas then broadens the search: inspectors are given enlarged passport-application photographs and directed to examine recent applications in successive fifty-day periods, on the theory that an assassin travelling under a false passport may have used a recognizable method of obtaining one.

The clues do not immediately settle the matter. French officials fear the assassin may already be in Paris, while the investigation has been under way for seventy-two hours without a reliable way to locate him in his personal schedule. Lebel argues that the Jackal may know the plot has been exposed in principle, but cannot know what progress the police have made. That uncertainty cuts both ways: it may allow them to arrest him unsuspecting once they identify his assumed name, but it leaves open the possibility that the attempt is imminent. The French and British teams therefore search on the basis of competing possibilities rather than a confirmed itinerary.

Records, locations, and discreet deployment

A decisive lead comes from records that had been searched before but are examined again under the name Alexander James Quentin Duggan. A frontier card shows Duggan entering France on the Brabant Express from Brussels on July 22. A separate report records him travelling from Paris to Brussels on the Etoile du Nord Express on July 31. A hotel card, bearing a passport number matching the information from London, places him at a small hotel near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30. Lebel rejects an indiscriminate raid and visits the hotel proprietor quietly in the early hours; the proprietor confirms that Duggan was gone by August 15 and appreciates that the other guests were not disturbed. The records establish past presence, not current whereabouts, but they give the pursuit a usable identity and a trail to test.

The French police system makes such reconstruction possible through its accumulated records. The general records office holds four and a half million personal dossiers, cross-indexed along five and a half miles of shelving by names and types of crime. Its files include people convicted or merely suspected, witnesses, and people acquitted; linked fingerprint holdings and millions of cards add further traces of movement and contact. The scale of this archive is both an investigative resource and a practical problem: it can connect obscure records to a name, but only if investigators know which name, date, or document to seek.

Once Lebel directs a quiet nationwide search for Duggan under a changed appearance, British police are assigned to examine airline-ticket offices and cross-Channel ferry records. If Britain locates him on British soil, it is to detain him; if he has left, the French are to be informed. If France finds him within its borders, the French are to arrest him. A third-country sighting may require waiting for him to enter a jurisdiction where he can be seized—or taking another course. Lebel secures agreement from officials senior to him by insisting that the search be conducted his way, discreetly, until the man is located.

Field searches and the final precautions

When a car connected to the fugitive is found, Lebel orders Commissaire Valentin to send the best available team to Ussel and work outward in a square search. Police are to ask at farmhouses, village shops and cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ shacks, as well as question farmers who regularly use the road. The description combines appearance and circumstance: a tall, blond Englishman who speaks good French, with three suitcases and a handgrip, carrying substantial cash and looking possibly as if he has slept rough. The press must be kept away; local reporters are to be given a harmless explanation about a dazed person after a car crash. If the man is found, the officers are told to surround him rather than approach him. The instruction recognizes that locating a professional assassin is not the same as safely arresting him.

As the threat converges on the Liberation Day ceremonies, the security plan becomes markedly more visible in its physical detail, even while the investigation remains secret. Steel barriers are to hold crowds farther back; the enclosed spaces, including sewers, are to be searched; buildings and nearby rooftops are watched. Police are placed on Notre-Dame’s roof and among its spires, and priests, acolytes, and choirboys are to be searched. Special lapel badges are prepared for police and CRS officers to make impersonation harder. Bullet-proof windows are secretly fitted to Charles de Gaulle’s Citroën, whose driver is told to move faster than usual, while unusually tall officers are assigned to screen the President without attracting his notice.

These precautions do not give Lebel a final answer. He acknowledges that the security measures seem overwhelming, but the Jackal has survived betrayal and pursuit by two formidable police forces and may be hiding under yet another identity. Lebel cannot explain how the assassin might bring a gun close to Charles de Gaulle; he can only insist that the man believes he can do so and must emerge for the planned attack. The hunt thus reaches its most concentrated phase without certainty. Its method remains the same as at its beginning: preserve secrecy, follow the records and reports, and keep watching for the moment when an anonymous figure becomes identifiable.