Claude Lebel—Lucien Caron

Claude Lebel—Lucien Caron is a working partnership formed under the pressure of a secret national-security investigation. When Lebel is ordered to lead the inquiry into a possible political assassination, he makes Caron his sole assistant and secretary, entrusting him with the practical machinery that allows the investigation to begin. Caron converts Lebel’s authority into appointments, communications, and records; Lebel supplies the investigative direction and represents the case to foreign police. Their collaboration gives the manhunt an operational center before its investigators even know the suspected killer’s name.

Assignment and confidential partnership

Lebel emerges from a fifty-minute briefing by the Minister of the Interior dazed and bewildered. He has been summoned without being consulted, and the directive gives him his own office, access to necessary information, and the resources of the organizations represented around the conference table. The scale of that mandate makes effective administration as important as individual deduction. Lebel’s first concrete response is to place Caron inside the investigation as the person who will help turn the extraordinary powers into usable arrangements.

Caron’s appointment is deliberately exclusive. Lebel orders that his usual secretary be transferred or placed on paid leave, that no one else be admitted to the secret, and that Caron serve as both assistant and secretary. He asks him to arrange a camp bed, washing and shaving supplies, and a coffee percolator with milk and sugar: the office is to become a sustained working base, not a place for a brief consultation. The percolator, cups, and a truckle bed are in place by the time Lebel returns shortly before six in the morning. These practical details show the partnership taking shape through shared work and the preparation of a space where the inquiry can continue through the night.

Lebel also gives Caron authority to act on his behalf. Caron is to obtain ten outside telephone lines and a permanently assigned operator, refer resistance to the senior officials who have approved the investigation, and prepare a circular telling department chiefs that he is empowered to request whatever Lebel would request personally. The arrangement makes Caron more than a note-taker: within the office, he becomes the channel through which Lebel’s exceptional authority can reach the institutions supporting the inquiry. His role remains delegated, but the investigation depends on his capacity to make that delegation effective.

Building the international inquiry

Their first major joint task is to contact foreign police forces. Lebel asks Caron to arrange seven confidential calls between seven and ten in the morning, at twenty-minute intervals, through the International Criminal Police Organization’s communications network. Each call is to be person-to-person on a UHF frequency, without eavesdropping; Caron must also ensure that the foreign homicide chiefs are present in their own communications rooms and prepare a sequenced schedule by six. The safeguards and timetable reflect the inquiry’s central difficulty: the authorities need to ask for help without publicly establishing that a specific assassination plot is already under investigation.

Caron returns to Lebel with several pages of handwritten notes and a list pairing names with times. The calls are arranged with Washington, Brussels, Amsterdam, Bonn, Johannesburg, Scotland Yard, and Rome. Because the South African official Lebel first wanted cannot be reached, Caron secures an appointment with Assistant Commissioner Anderson instead. He also works out the language arrangements: Lebel will speak French with the Belgian and German contacts, while Caron remains on the extension to interpret for the other five. The schedule is not simply a list of international contacts; it is a practical plan that accounts for time zones, availability, language, and confidentiality.

At the communications room, Lebel and Caron sit together over the telephone for three hours. Lebel makes the appeal, carefully describing it as an official request for assistance while withholding the full character of the threat. He initially offers little more than a poor description of an unidentified man and asks colleagues to consider whether such a person has come to their attention. Caron’s presence on the extension makes the calls possible across language barriers, while Lebel’s questioning gives them their investigative purpose. When Lebel finally explains that they are seeking an experienced political assassin with successful killings behind him, the pauses at the other end of the line register the gravity that the inquiry has so far had to conceal.

A method of investigation

The partnership illustrates a procedural division of labor rather than a contest between two detectives. Lebel frames the questions and evaluates what the investigation can reasonably infer; Caron records, schedules, interprets, and secures the channels through which information can be gathered. The distinction is especially visible in their first international sweep: Caron’s meticulous preparation allows Lebel to approach seven senior police contacts in succession, while Lebel’s restrained wording protects the inquiry from becoming an indiscriminate public alarm.

Their work also reflects the investigation’s uncertain knowledge. Lebel tells his foreign counterparts that even the intent to commit an offense may not yet have reached the stage of preparation. He is looking for someone whose past professional work might have left traces in other countries, not claiming that the police already possess a name or a complete description. Caron’s schedules and notes give structure to a search that begins with these gaps. Their joint method is therefore both expansive and cautious: mobilize information across borders, but do not overstate what the French investigators know.

Continuing cooperation and its limits

The evidence also places Caron beside Lebel at several later points in the investigation’s developing picture. During a conference, Lebel explains that the killer controls his own timetable and that the police cannot know where in it their intervention has occurred. The danger may already be immediate, yet the investigators still hope to identify and locate him under a new name before he realizes how much they have discovered. This reasoning extends the same division visible in the initial calls: Caron’s recorded schedules and accumulated information support an inquiry whose conclusions Lebel must continually revise as the evidence changes.

Records eventually sharpen the search. A French frontier report shows Alexander James Quentin Duggan entering France on the Brabant Express from Brussels on July 22 and leaving on the Etoile du Nord Express on July 31; a hotel registration under the same name, with a passport number matching information from London, places him at a small hotel near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30. Lebel chooses a quiet visit to the proprietor over Caron’s preference for a raid. The contrast gives a concrete glimpse of their distinct contributions: Caron favors an immediate police action, while Lebel weighs discretion and the likelihood that the suspect has already gone. It does not establish that Caron accompanied him on the visit, but it shows him participating in the investigative discussion and pressing a more forceful option.

Later, Lebel works through further deductions about the suspect’s movements and tells Commissaire Valentin to organize a concealed search around Ussel, specifying the man’s appearance, luggage, cash, and likely condition after sleeping rough. He also reasons that paint bought in Gap may explain the transformed car, and that a tip-off about the discovery of Duggan’s identity could have prompted the suspect to move quickly. These episodes demonstrate the expanding investigation in which Lebel operates, but the supplied evidence does not identify Caron as the person directing the Ussel search or making those later calls. The relationship is most clearly defined by the documented first phase: Caron makes Lebel’s office and international outreach function, while Lebel leads the reasoning and choices. Their partnership is consequently significant less as a fully narrated personal bond than as the practical alliance that gives a bewildering, tightly secret assignment its first workable form.