OAS scheme to hire the Jackal to assassinate de Gaulle

The Secret Army Organisation’s scheme to hire The Jackal turned an exhausted campaign of failed assassination attempts into a carefully financed professional operation against Charles de Gaulle. Its danger lay not only in the hired killer’s skill, but in the gap between what the conspirators could learn about the President’s movements and what the assassin had already decided to do. As the plot became legible to investigators, its intended target remained exposed and its perpetrator continued to act on a timetable known only to himself.

Recruitment and Strategic Premise

The plan followed a succession of failures. Of six earlier attempts by the organization’s supporters to eliminate de Gaulle, three were exposed during preliminary planning, one was betrayed the day before it was to take place, and two were carried out but missed. The conspirators were considering a professional because the existing approach had not produced a successful killing. The Englishman they consulted judged the President vulnerable: de Gaulle appeared in public often enough for an assassin’s bullet to be a possibility. But a professional would have to manage the danger of escape, while a fanatic willing to die in the attempt offered a surer method. The failed attacks at Pont-de-Seine and Petit-Clamart, he argued, had lacked someone prepared to risk his own life to guarantee the result.

The organization also recruited people to support the operation at a more local level. In July, a man accompanied by a cell leader approached Jacqueline Dumas about a special assignment. She agreed despite being told that it might be dangerous and distasteful. Three days later, she was shown a man emerging from a block of flats, told who he was and what position he held, and instructed what to do. She met him in a restaurant by asking to borrow the salt cellar. Her reserve and apparent modesty encouraged him to lead the conversation; within a fortnight, the encounter had become an affair. The operation thus depended on cultivated access as well as the assassin’s technical preparation.

Money and the Intelligence Problem

The contract depended on funds the organization did not yet fully possess. Its combined Swiss bank accounts had risen to more than $250,000, and Marc Rodin wrote instructions transferring that sum to The Jackal. He expected the balance to follow after de Gaulle’s death: right-wing industrialists and bankers who had financed the organization in its stronger period would, he believed, compete to support the soldiers who might become the rulers of a restored France. Those same financiers had recently refused a further advance, citing the lack of progress and initiative among the organization’s forces. Rodin’s expectation was therefore not simply that the assassination would remove de Gaulle, but that success would reverse the organization’s worsening financial prospects.

André Casson objected to sending the money immediately. The conspirators had promised their Englishman a contact in Paris who could provide accurate, continuing information about the President’s movements and any changes in security routine. Casson had just learned that his chief representative in Paris had placed an agent close to someone in de Gaulle’s immediate entourage. The agent needed several more days before he could reliably obtain the President’s whereabouts, travel plans, and public engagements, which were no longer announced well in advance. Casson wanted to give The Jackal a Paris telephone number through which he could receive that information. Rodin considered the argument and agreed to wait. Neither man knew that The Jackal had already chosen his day and was proceeding with his preparations and contingencies according to a fixed schedule.

How the Plot Became Legible

The organization’s funding and the killer’s identity came together through clues that initially seemed unrelated. After interrogation, Viktor Kowalski’s damaged, uncertain words were reinterpreted: what had been understood as an insult was recognized as “jackal,” a code name. The other fragments identified a blond foreigner and connected him to a meeting with the three OAS chiefs at Pension Kleist in Vienna, shortly before they entered heavily protected hiding in Rome. The clue changed the meaning of the robberies that had shaken France for eight weeks. Investigators inferred that the blond man needed money for a job on behalf of the OAS, and that the scale of the payment pointed to the one target whose death could justify it: the President.

The resulting investigation had to begin without a name or a usable description. When Claude Lebel contacted senior crime investigators abroad, he could offer little beyond the possibility that the unknown man was among the world’s leading professional contract assassins, a political killer with successful operations behind him. The request was deliberately tentative: the French authorities were not yet sure whether an offence had been formulated or preparations had begun. The sparse information was itself consequential. It forced the investigation to search records and professional files without yet being able to identify the man it sought.

The Manhunt Against a Private Timetable

Once the plot reached the French authorities, the Minister of the Interior gave Lebel a directive rather than a request. He was to establish his own office, draw on the resources of the organizations represented at the briefing, and incur whatever costs were needed. Lebel immediately converted that authority into working arrangements: his normal secretary was to be removed from access to the secret, Inspector Caron would serve as his assistant, a camp bed and basic supplies would be installed, and ten outside telephone lines would be kept available. The office was designed for sustained, confidential work, not a routine inquiry.

Lebel and Caron then spent hours making encrypted international calls. They offered foreign police forces only a poor description and no name, while asking whether their files suggested a politically motivated assassin with a record of successful killings. The inquiry depended on presenting a threat that could not yet be described in conventional terms. Its significance was plain to the investigators, however: only one target in France could attract a first-rank political killer.

A later search of border and hotel records supplied an identity to test. An archive card showed Alexander James Quentin Duggan entering France from Brussels on the Brabant Express on July 22. A customs report listed him travelling back to Brussels on the Etoile du Nord Express on July 31, and a hotel registration placed him near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30. The records showed that the identity had been used in France, but they did not establish where the man was now. Lebel’s central difficulty remained that the killer knew the plan had been exposed in principle, while the police did not know how far he had progressed or where he was under his new name.

When investigators suspected that Duggan had been identified, Lebel reasoned that the killer must have bought paint to transform his car. If he had driven overnight from Gap to Ussel in a vehicle already changed, the paint might have been bought in Gap, suggesting that someone had warned him. Lebel could not establish the existence or identity of a leak, but he concluded that The Jackal had been tipped off both about the assassination investigation and about the discovery of his Duggan identity. He suspected that the contact might be Valmy, whose message to Rome had been intercepted. A search was ordered around Ussel, beginning from the place where the car was found and extending to farms, village shops, cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ huts; the press was to be kept away, and any discovery of the fugitive was to be met by surrounding him rather than approaching him.

The investigation’s most important correction was temporal. Lebel realized that The Jackal had not spent a week in France because he lacked a plan or an opportunity: he had chosen a day for the attempt and was waiting for it. Meanwhile, at the ceremony perimeter, a guard reported letting through an apparently sick, old cripple with an identity card and a war-disabled veteran’s card. The man’s stated address was 154 Rue de Rennes. That small exception to the cordon marked the point at which a disguise and a preselected timetable brought the exposed conspiracy to the threshold of its intended act.