French National Security Police

The French National Security Police leads the state response to the attempt on Charles de Gaulle’s life, turning an exposed conspiracy into a nationwide investigation. Its pursuit depends not on a single revelation but on a network of police services, records, field searches, and urgent coordination. The same machinery that identifies plotters after a routine stop later searches France for The Jackal, making the institution both the engine of the manhunt and a measure of how difficult it is to find one person inside a mass of records and faces.

Structure and Information Systems

The French National Security Police operates alongside other state security and law-enforcement bodies. Its section heads include the Public Security Bureau, the French General Intelligence Directorate, DST, and CRS. The Public Security Bureau protects state buildings, communications, highways, and other public assets against sabotage or damage. The French General Intelligence Directorate serves as the central records office, described as the institutional memory of the other sections. DST handles counter-espionage and keeps watch on airports, docks, and borders; its officers examine disembarkation cards as people enter France, screening for individuals considered undesirable.

The scale of the records system is strikingly physical. The French General Intelligence Directorate’s Pantheon headquarters holds four and a half million personal files, cross-indexed along five and a half miles of shelving by name and by the crime for which a person was convicted or merely suspected. Files also include witnesses and people acquitted in trials. Though the system is not computerized, archivists can retrieve obscure information, such as the details of an old village arson or witnesses in a little-reported case, within minutes.

The archives extend beyond personal files. They include fingerprints taken in France, including unidentified sets, and ten and a half million cards recording such information as tourist arrivals at border crossings and hotel stays outside Paris. These cards must be cleared periodically to make room for new records. Hotel registrations from Paris instead go to the Paris Police Prefecture. The arrangement distributes information across institutions, while giving investigators several ways to test a name against a movement, a lodging record, or a physical identity.

From Routine Checks to a National Investigation

After the attempted assassination, the French National Security Police heads an operation supported by the secret service and the French National Gendarmerie. The account describes it as the largest police operation in French history to that point, soon becoming the country’s largest manhunt; that record is later surpassed by the search for The Jackal. The first break comes not from a spectacular raid but from a routine roadblock outside Valence on September 3. Police stop a car carrying four men, and one passenger has no identity papers, saying he has lost them. The other three are eventually released after explaining that they had only given him a lift.

The unidentified passenger’s fingerprints are sent to Paris. Twelve hours later, the return identifies him as Pierre-Denis Magade, a twenty-two-year-old deserter from the Foreign Legion; the name he had supplied is accurate. Taken to the French Judicial Police headquarters in Lyon, Magade is asked about Petit-Clamart. He agrees to speak, and over eight hours names all the participants in the attempt as well as nine others who had smaller roles in planning or obtaining equipment: twenty-two people altogether. The investigation now has names to pursue. By December, interrogations and the preparation of charges against Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, Alain Bougrenet de la Tocnaye, and other plot leaders are complete; the group goes on trial in January 1963. Georges Watin alone escapes capture and is presumed to be living in Spain with other OAS leaders.

Authority and Investigative Practice

The institution’s scale is matched by exceptional authority in the search for The Jackal. After reading the report on the threat, Claude Lebel is summoned to a briefing by the Minister of the Interior. The assignment is a directive, not a request: Lebel is to establish an office, receive necessary information, and draw on the resources of the organizations represented at the meeting, without a limit on costs. The arrangement concentrates a wide interdepartmental effort in the hands of one investigator and his assistant, Maurice Bouvier’s subordinate Lucien Caron.

Lebel’s first instructions turn that authority into working infrastructure. He orders the office kept secret, has his ordinary secretary removed from the arrangement, and makes Caron both assistant and secretary. A camp bed, washing and shaving supplies, and a coffee percolator are brought in for the sustained work ahead. He also obtains ten outside telephone lines and a permanently assigned operator, with departmental chiefs instructed to provide other facilities on request. The improvised office is a small operational center inside the larger state apparatus: confidential, continuously staffed, and able to demand cooperation across departments.

Lebel also seeks help from police colleagues abroad before he can offer them a formal case file. He explains that investigators do not yet know whether an offence has been formulated or preparation begun, and that they have neither a name nor more than a poor description. What he can tell them is the qualification that matters: the suspect would have to be a political contract assassin with successful killings behind him. The exchange shows the difficulty of turning a grave but incomplete warning into usable international intelligence. The police must ask others to search their knowledge even while admitting how little they themselves know.

Records, Searches, and the Jackal Manhunt

The archive becomes a practical instrument in the hunt for The Jackal. When investigators check the name Alexander Duggan, they find a record showing that Alexander James Quentin Duggan entered France from Brussels on the Brabant Express on July 22. A second border report places the name on the Etoile du Nord Express travelling from Paris to Brussels on July 31. A Paris hotel card, bearing the passport number supplied in information from London, shows a stay near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30. Lebel chooses to visit the hotel proprietor quietly rather than order a raid; he learns the wanted man was no longer there by August 15 and avoids waking the other guests.

When a car is found near Ussel, Lebel orders a broad local search rather than an immediate approach to the suspect. A team is to work outward in a square around the vehicle, questioning farmhouses, farmers who regularly use the road, village shops and cafes, hotels, and woodcutters’ shelters. Investigators are to ask where the tall, blond Englishman went, what he tried to buy, and where he had been. Lebel also insists that the press be kept away, authorizing a cover story about a road accident and a possibly dazed occupant. If the man is found, the team must surround him and hold position rather than move in. The instructions combine a detailed search for ordinary traces with caution about triggering a confrontation.

The search expands into a citywide system of observation. During two days in Paris, police check guest lists at hotels, pensions, rooming houses, hostels, and even the cheapest lodging houses; plainclothes officers show the suspect’s picture to people working in bars, restaurants, nightclubs, cabarets, and cafes. Homes of known OAS sympathizers are raided. More than seventy young men who resemble the killer are questioned and released. Hundreds of thousands of people in streets, taxis, and buses have their papers examined, while roadblocks cover major approaches to the city and late-night pedestrians may be stopped repeatedly.

The effort extends beyond official police. Corsicans move through underworld haunts warning that withholding information will bring consequences. In all, an estimated one hundred thousand state employees, from senior detectives to soldiers and gendarmes, are on the lookout; another estimated fifty thousand people from the underworld and its associated trades vet passing faces. Tourism workers are briefed, youthful-looking detectives enter student cafes and social groups, and agencies placing foreign-exchange students with French families are visited and warned. The operation attempts to make the whole city an information network, though its reach also means that many innocent people are scrutinized and then released.

Reach and Limits

The investigation’s achievements depend on records that turn movement into evidence: a fingerprint links Magade to his identity, while border and hotel cards reconstruct Duggan’s passage through France. A later telephone recording, obtained through instructions to DST engineers, gives Lebel and Caron another kind of trace to examine. At the same time, the manhunt repeatedly confronts gaps between collecting information and acting on it: investigators begin without a name, a description is poor, and a search can cover a city without making its target visible. The French National Security Police embodies both sides of that tension. It can mobilize extraordinary manpower and draw on archives accumulated over decades, yet its work remains dependent on routine checks, local questioning, patient comparison, and the uncertain passage of a useful clue from one part of the system to another.