SDECE Operations Branch

The SDECE Operations Branch is the French External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service’s covert action unit and the operational core of the government’s underground war against the OAS. Its importance lies in the contradiction at the heart of that conflict: the state’s answer to political violence was a secret service trained and authorized to use many of the same methods.

Identity and Structure

Within the SDECE, the fifth service had a single-word remit: Action. Its headquarters occupied a complex of inconspicuous buildings off Boulevard Mortier, near Porte des Lilas in northeastern Paris. From there, about a hundred operatives went out on assignments against the OAS. Most were Corsican, and the account presents them as a force built not for ordinary police work but for clandestine operations and physical confrontation. The unit’s preparation was deliberately specialized. After intensive physical training, recruits went to Satory Camp, where a section isolated from the rest of the camp taught techniques of destruction. They trained in small-arms combat, unarmed fighting, karate, and judo, alongside radio communication, demolition, and sabotage. Their instruction also covered interrogation with and without torture, kidnapping, arson, and assassination. The breadth of that curriculum made the branch capable of moving from intelligence collection to direct violence without relying on a conventional police procedure.

Authority and the Underground War

The branch’s mandate changed as the OAS campaign grew more violent. General Guibaud, director of the SDECE, eventually gave its operatives free rein against the organization. Some entered the OAS and penetrated its highest councils, where they supplied information for others to act on. Their intelligence enabled the interception of OAS emissaries travelling into France or other places where they were exposed to police. When wanted men could not be lured into France, the branch sometimes killed them abroad. Relatives of OAS members who disappeared often believed that the Action Service had liquidated them, though the account does not establish the fate of every missing person.

The operatives’ undercover role earned them the name Barbouzes, or Bearded Ones. The OAS hated them even more than it hated the police. That hostility belonged to a reciprocal campaign of brutality: during the final struggle for power between the OAS and the Gaullist authorities in Algiers, the OAS captured seven operatives alive; their bodies were later found hanging from balconies and lampposts, with ears and noses removed. The account presents torture and killing on both sides as part of a clandestine war whose full record—who died, under whose torture, and in which cellar—would never be known.

Not every operative worked inside the OAS. Others remained outside it, available to the SDECE, and some brought underworld experience and old criminal contacts into government service. On occasion they enlisted former underworld associates for particularly dirty work. These arrangements helped generate rumours of a parallel, unofficial police answering to one of Charles de Gaulle’s close associates. The account rejects the existence of such a separate force: the activities attributed to it were carried out by Action Service operatives or by gang leaders recruited temporarily from the milieu. The distinction did little to soften the larger paradox: operations pursued in the name of the state could resemble the violence they were meant to defeat.

The Abduction of Antoine Argoud

The branch’s most consequential operation in the account was the covert seizure of former French Army colonel Antoine Argoud. After German security organizations refused a formal counter-espionage request, an internal memorandum called for the operation to be carried out with maximum speed and discretion; the assignment went to the SDECE Operations Branch. Argoud had returned to Munich from Rome on February 25, where he had met other OAS leaders. Instead of going directly to his usual address, he took a taxi to the Hotel Eden-Wolff, apparently for a meeting he never reached. Two men addressed him in faultless German. Taking them for German police, he reached for his passport, and they seized him, knocked him unconscious, and put him in a waiting laundry van.

The operation ended with a deliberately audacious delivery. About twenty-four hours later, an anonymous caller claiming to speak for the OAS told the French Judicial Police that Argoud was tied up in a van behind its Paris headquarters. When officers opened it, Argoud had been blindfolded for a day; his face was bloodied, and a gag had left his mouth aching. The branch had taken him across the frontier during the night and deposited him in the police’s own parking lot. He remained imprisoned until June 1968. His removal badly demoralized the OAS, but it also cleared the way for his little-known deputy, Lieutenant-Colonel Marc Rodin, to take command of operations aimed at assassinating Charles de Gaulle—a consequence the operation’s planners had not anticipated.

Covert Force and Official Pursuit

The SDECE Operations Branch also clarifies the difference between the state’s hidden war against the OAS and its response to the threat against Charles de Gaulle. The novel first describes a service authorized to infiltrate, abduct, and kill; when the later danger becomes a national manhunt, however, the account follows an overtly institutional chain of command. The Interior Minister gives Claude Lebel access to the resources of the assembled agencies, while insisting that the suspected plot remain secret: no publicity, nationwide search, or indication to outsiders that anything is wrong. The contrast is not a claim that the Branch took no part; its role in that pursuit is not specified. Instead, the narrative places its history of covert violence beside a police operation constrained by secrecy and presidential orders.

That distinction shapes how the state’s power is shown. Lebel begins with uncertainty about whether a crime is even being prepared, and his first international appeal can offer colleagues neither a name nor more than a poor description—only the possibility that the unknown man is a professional political assassin. His response is to build a procedural network: he secures a dedicated office, makes his assistant responsible for confidential communications, and directs inquiries through records and local police rather than announcing a hunt. The SDECE Operations Branch represents concentrated force in the underground conflict; the search for the assassin instead unfolds through controlled information, police coordination, and the effort to prevent the threat itself from becoming public.