Colonel Rolland

Colonel Rolland is the head of the SDECE Action Service and one of the central intelligence officers in the effort to identify and stop The Jackal. His decisive contribution is not a single dramatic interception but a sequence of close readings: he notices a word recurring in routine reports, reopens Viktor Kowalski’s file, and corrects a mistranscribed clue in the dying man’s confession. That patient work turns scattered records into a credible assassination warning. As the manhunt develops, Rolland’s analytical precision is matched by a hard view of operational risk and a willingness to draw on forces outside ordinary policing.

Identity and Intelligence Work

Rolland operates inside an institutional world of routine paperwork, compartmented reporting, and surveillance. On one morning, two ordinary reports arrive on blue flimsy, each circulated to department chiefs. In the normal course of business he would read them, retain the relevant information, and file them separately. Instead, one word appearing in both catches his attention. The detail matters: Rolland’s investigation begins not with a dramatic confession but with a small recurrence across documents that would otherwise pass through a large bureaucracy without consequence.

One report summarizes the Rome station’s surveillance of Marc Rodin, René Montclair, and André Casson. The three OAS chiefs remain in a top-floor hotel suite with eight guards, where they have stayed since June 18. Additional staff from Paris have joined the round-the-clock watch, but instructions are not to approach the men. The courier maintaining their contact with the outside world is Kowalski. That report gives Rolland a current picture of the leaders and their communications, but its significance depends on connecting it to other records rather than acting on it alone.

The archive supplies the other side of that connection. Kowalski’s military dossier had been preserved after he made a will leaving his worldly goods to the daughter of Josef Grzybowski, a former legionnaire living in Marseille. When Kowalski’s name surfaced in connection with terrorism in Bone and Constantine in 1961, the dossier was retrieved and came to the attention of Rolland’s Action Service. Rolland therefore has a documentary trail that reaches back beyond the immediate Rome surveillance: the file contains a personal connection that can help explain how the courier might be brought into custody.

From Kowalski’s File to The Jackal

Rolland spends an hour studying Kowalski’s personal file and repeatedly returns to a particular passage. He then convenes a small working group: his personal secretary, a handwriting specialist from the documentation department, and two members of his private guard. Their task is to compose and send a letter with the unwilling but necessary assistance of someone not present. The episode shows Rolland treating a written communication as an operation requiring coordinated expertise, rather than as a simple piece of correspondence.

The decisive evidence arrives after Kowalski’s interrogation and death. Rolland receives the twenty-six-page confession and reads it rapidly for its overall meaning, but one passage makes him stop. He searches the confused text for a name or place, writing down “Kleist” as a possible lead. Because Kowalski was Polish and Rolland retained some German from his wartime experience, he recognizes that the transcriber may have rendered the word incorrectly. He asks staff to search a Viennese telephone directory; the result offers two columns of possible matches, not an immediate answer.

A recorded version of the confession resolves the critical error. Kowalski had not described the foreigner as good or annoying, as the transcription seemed to indicate; he had called him blond. Rolland listens to the tape and makes several corrections to the transcript. With that change, the repeated word “jackal,” previously read as Kowalski’s insult for the men torturing him, takes on a different meaning: it is the code name of a blond foreign killer. The three OAS chiefs had met this man at Pension Kleist in Vienna before settling under guard in Rome. Rolland’s breakthrough depends on recognizing how a faulty transcription has distorted both a description and the meaning of a recurring word.

He sets out the danger in a report that remains conditional about what has not yet been corroborated. If the plot exists as Kowalski described it, the foreign-born assassin known only as The Jackal has been hired to kill Charles de Gaulle and may already be preparing to act. Rolland calls such a threat a national emergency. The qualification is important: the identification is powerful, but the evidence still has to be checked, and the investigation must proceed while the assassin’s preparations remain unknown.

Managing Uncertainty and Risk

The threat’s exposure does not tell Rolland how much of the plan has been disclosed to its participants. A later intercepted call reports that Kowalski was captured and spoke before dying, and warns that The Jackal has been exposed. Rolland’s reaction is first a brief, clear expression of frustration; he then immediately supplies the operational history. To bring Kowalski from Rome, the service had used his old friend JoJo Grzybowski as bait. JoJo, his wife, and their daughter had been kept in protective custody until Kowalski was secured, then allowed to return home. Rolland explains that the original aim had been to obtain information about the chiefs, not to uncover the assassination plot. He thinks JoJo may subsequently have alerted the agent Valmy. The account makes the leak intelligible without suggesting that Rolland’s service had initially understood the importance of the courier’s information.

As the pursuit considers Charles Calthrop, Rolland argues against treating the exposure of the plot as proof that the danger has passed. He entertains the possibility that Calthrop has learned of the leak through Rodin and Valmy and has left his flat to dispose of his preparations, including a gun and ammunition that could be dumped in a Scottish lake. If so, Calthrop might later present himself to British police without incriminating equipment. But Rolland does not regard that possibility as a reason to let him go. Even if Calthrop has dismantled the immediate operation, he may have hidden rather than destroyed his equipment and could resume the attempt with new preparations.

Rolland’s position is severe: the orders are to locate and destroy the suspect, and he insists that Calthrop must still be dealt with. His reasoning is set against the uncertainty raised by Claude Lebel, who points out that the assumption that Calthrop has called off the operation is only a theory. Calthrop may never have received the warning, or may have received it and chosen to continue. The disagreement reveals a practical limit of intelligence: learning that a plot has been exposed does not reveal what the assassin has heard or decided. Rolland’s caution is directed toward the possibility that the threat remains active; Lebel’s objection keeps that possibility from becoming an untested certainty.

The same pressure appears in Rolland’s response to the possibility of an officer being killed during the pursuit. He assents to the principle that a police officer’s life cannot be allowed to prevent protection of the President. The statement places the operation’s priorities plainly, while also exposing its cost: the effort to stop an uncertain but catastrophic threat can require accepting immediate danger to those carrying it out.

Deployment and Unofficial Allies

When a car is found near Ussel, Rolland orders a substantial team to the area. The search is to begin at the spot where the car was discovered, with the map marked for a square search. His instructions extend beyond formal checkpoints: investigators are to ask at farmhouses, question farmers who regularly travel the road, and visit village stores, cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ shacks. The method turns a broad rural landscape into a network of possible observations. Rolland’s response is practical and local, built around the people most likely to have seen traffic or a stranger rather than around a single central lead.

In Paris, the problem of finding the fugitive eventually leads Rolland toward a less official source of reach. At a meeting attended by General Guibaud and Commissaire Maurice Bouvier, Rolland considers help from the Union Corse. Bouvier dislikes the Corsicans but knows that Rolland’s Action Service uses them extensively. Rolland judges that if The Jackal is as astute as reported, the Union may be able to find him where ordinary searches cannot. The approach does not erase the division between policing and the criminal underworld; it makes that division part of the means available to the investigation.

The contact is arranged through a public photograph. A society picture of Colette de la Chalonnière, taken at a Paris party five years earlier and now appearing in every newspaper, is connected to the search. Carrying a copy of France-Soir, Rolland enters a small café off Rue Washington at 6:30 and is recognized by the barman, who directs him toward a man at the back. The man introduces himself as the Capu of the Union Corse and acknowledges that Rolland is looking for someone. The meeting gives concrete form to Rolland’s judgment that locating The Jackal may require access beyond official channels.

Character and Narrative Role

Rolland is defined by the movement between apparently minor information and operational consequence. A repeated word on routine reports leads him back to a file; an archival will links Kowalski to a possible means of capture; a single misheard description changes “jackal” from an insult into an identification. The sequence makes his competence depend on correction and comparison, not on certainty at first sight. He repeatedly works with evidence that is incomplete, mistranscribed, or delayed, and his decisions must account for what the service cannot yet know.

His methods also show the scale and friction of the institutional response. Surveillance in Rome, archives in Paris, a Viennese directory, an intercepted telephone call, a rural search around Ussel, and a meeting with the Union Corse belong to the same pursuit, but they do not produce one seamless flow of knowledge. Rolland’s explanations expose the time lag between capturing Kowalski and understanding what his confession meant, as well as the risk that information about the capture travelled through an unintended channel. The result is a portrait of intelligence work as both interpretation and coordination: identifying The Jackal is essential, but so is deciding what to do while the suspect’s intentions, equipment, and whereabouts remain uncertain.