The Day of the Jackal

In response to pressure from the bankers and jewellers, who complained bitterly to the Government about this crime wave, police checks on banks at night were increased in frequency, but to no avail, since the robbers were not professional cracksmen able to open a bank vault skilfully during the hours of darkness, but simply thugs in masks, armed and ready to shoot if provoked in the slightest way.

The danger hours were in daylight, when any bank or jeweller’s shop throughout the country could be surprised in the middle of business by the appearance of two or three armed and masked men, and the peremptory cry ‘Haut les mains’.

Three robbers were wounded towards the end of July in different hold-ups, and taken prisoner. Each turned out to be either a petty crook known to be using the existence of the OAS as an excuse for general anarchy, or deserters from one of the former colonial regiments who soon admitted they were OAS men. But despite the most diligent interrogations at police headquarters, none of the three could be persuaded to say why this rash of robberies had suddenly struck the country, other than that they had been contacted by their ‘patron’ (gang boss) and given a target in the form of a bank or jeweller’s shop. Eventually the police came to believe that the prisoners did not know what the purpose of the robberies was; they had each been promised a cut of the total, and being small fry had done what they were told.

It did not take the French authorities long to realise the OAS was behind the outbreak, nor that for some reason the OAS needed money in a hurry. But it was not until the first fortnight of August, and then in a quite different manner, that the authorities discovered why.

Within the last two weeks of June, however, the wave of crime against banks and other places where money and gems may be quickly and unceremoniously acquired had become sufficiently serious to be handed over to Commissaire Maurice Bouvier, the much-revered chief of the Brigade Criminelle of the Police Judiciaire. In his surprisingly small work-strewn office at the headquarters of the PJ at 36 Quai des Orfèvres, along the banks of the Seine, a chart was prepared showing the cash or, in the case of jewellery, approximate re-sale value of the stolen money and gems. By the latter half of July the total was well over two million new francs, or four hundred thousand dollars. Even with a reasonable sum deducted for the expenses of mounting the various robberies, and more for paying the hoodlums and deserters who carried them out, that still left, in the Commissaire’s estimation, a sizable sum of money that could not be accounted for.

In the last week of June a report landed on the desk of General Guibaud, the head of the SDECE, from the chief of his permanent office in Rome. It was to the effect that the three top men of the OAS, Marc Rodin, René Montclair and André Casson, had taken up residence together on the top floor of a hotel just off the Via Condotti. The report added that despite the obvious cost of residing in a hotel in such an exclusive quarter, the three had taken the entire top floor for themselves, and the floor below for their bodyguards. They were being guarded night and day by no less than eight extremely tough ex-members of the Foreign Legion, and were not venturing out at all. At first it was thought they had met for a conference, but as the days passed SDECE came to the view that they were simply taking exceptionally heavy precautions to ensure that they were not the victims of another kidnapping as had been inflicted on Antoine Argoud. General Guibaud permitted himself a grim smile at the sight of the top men of the terrorist organisation themselves now cowering in a hotel in Rome, and filed the report in a routine manner. Despite the bitter row still festering on between the French Foreign Ministry at the Quai d’Orsay and the German Foreign Ministry in Bonn over the infringement of German territorial integrity at the Eden-Wolff Hotel the previous February, Guibaud had every reason to be pleased with his Action Service men who had carried out the coup. The sight of the OAS chiefs running scared was reward enough in itself. The General smothered a small shadow of misgiving as he surveyed the file of Marc Rodin and nevertheless asked himself why a man like Rodin should scare that easily. As a man with considerable experience of his own job, and an awareness of the realities of politics and diplomacy, he knew he would be most unlikely ever to obtain permission to organise another snatch-job. It was only much later that the real significance of the precautions the three OAS men were taking for their own safety became clear to him.

In London the Jackal spent the last fortnight of June and the first two weeks of July in carefully controlled and planned activity. From the day of his return he set himself among other things to acquire and read almost every word written about or by Charles de Gaulle. By the simple expedient of going to the local lending library and looking up the entry for the French President in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he found at the end of the entry a comprehensive list of reference books about his subject.

After that he wrote off to various well-known bookshops, using a false name and a forwarding address in Praed Street, Paddington, and acquired the necessary reference books by post. These he scoured until the small hours each morning in his flat, building up in his mind a most detailed picture of the incumbent of the Elysée Palace from his boyhood until the time of reading. Much of the information he gleaned was of no practical use, but here and there a quirk or character trait would emerge that he noted in a small exercise book. Most instructive concerning the character of the French President was the volume of the General’s memoirs, The Edge of the Sword (Le Fil de l’Epée) in which Charles de Gaulle was at his most illuminating about his own personal attitude to life, his country and his destiny as he saw it.

The Jackal was neither a slow nor stupid man. He read voraciously and planned meticulously, and possessed the faculty to store in his mind an enormous amount of factual information on the offchance that he might later have a use for it.

But although his reading of the works of Charles de Gaulle, and the books about him by the men who knew him best, provided a full picture of a proud and disdainful President of France, it still did not solve the main question that had been baffling him since he accepted in Rodin’s bedroom in Vienna on June 15th the assignment to go through with the assassination. By the end of the first week in July he had still not worked out the answer to this question—when, where and how should the ‘hit’ take place? As a last resort he went down to the reading room of the British Museum and, after signing his application for permission to research with his habitual false name, started to work his way through the back copies of France’s leading daily newspaper Le Figaro.

Just when the answer came to him is not exactly known, but it is fair to presume it was within three days from July 7th. Within those three days, starting with the germ of an idea triggered by a columnist writing in 1962, cross-checking back through the files covering every year of De Gaulle’s presidency since 1945, the assassin managed to answer his own question. He decided within that time precisely on what day, come illness or bad weather, totally regardless of any considerations of personal danger, Charles de Gaulle would stand up publicly and show himself. From that point on, the Jackal’s preparations moved out of the research stage and into that of practical planning.

It took long hours of thought, lying on his back in his flat staring up at the cream-painted ceiling and chain-smoking his habitual king-size filter cigarettes, before the last detail had clicked into place.

At least a dozen ideas were considered and rejected before he finally hit on the plan he decided to adopt, the ‘how’ that had to be added to the ‘when’ and ‘where’ that he had already decided.

The Jackal was perfectly aware that in 1963 General de Gaulle was not only the President of France; he was also the most closely and skilfully guarded figure in the Western world. To assassinate him, as was later proved, was considerably more difficult than to kill President John F. Kennedy of the United States. Although the English killer did not know it, French security experts who had through American courtesy been given an opportunity to study the precautions taken to guard the life of President Kennedy had returned somewhat disdainful of those precautions as exercised by the American Secret Service. The French experts’ rejection of the American methods was later justified when in November 1963 John Kennedy was killed in Dallas by a half-crazed and security-slack amateur while Charles de Gaulle lived on, to retire in peace and eventually to die in his own home.

What the Jackal did know was that the security men he was up against were at least among the best in the world, that the whole security apparatus around De Gaulle was in a state of permanent forewarning of the likelihood of some attempt being made on their charge’s life, and that the organisation for which he worked was riddled with security leaks. On the credit side he could reasonably bank on his own anonymity, and on the choleric refusal of his victim to co-operate with his own security forces. On the chosen day, the pride, the stubbornness and the absolute contempt for personal danger of the French President would force him to come out into the open for a few seconds no matter what the risks involved.

The SAS airliner from Kastrup, Copenhagen, made one last swing into line in front of the terminal building at London, trundled forward a few feet and halted. The engines whined on for a few seconds, then they also died away. Within a few minutes the steps were wheeled up and the passengers started to file out and down, nodding a last goodbye to the smiling stewardess at the top. On the observation terrace the blond man slipped his dark glasses upwards on to his forehead and applied his eyes to a pair of binoculars. The file of passengers coming down the steps was the sixth that morning to be subjected to this kind of scrutiny, but as the terrace was crowded in the warm sunshine with people waiting for arriving passengers and trying to spot them as soon as they emerged from their aircraft, the watcher’s behaviour aroused no interest.

As the eighth passenger emerged into the light and straightened up, the man on the terrace tensed slightly and followed the new arrival down the steps. The passenger from Denmark was a priest or pastor, in a clerical grey suit with a dog collar. He appeared to be in his late forties from the iron-grey hair cut at medium length that was brushed back from the forehead, but the face was more youthful. He was a tall man with wide shoulders and he looked physically fit. He had approximately the same build as the man who watched him from the terrace above.

As the passengers filed into the arrivals lounge for passport and Customs clearance, the Jackal dropped the binoculars into the leather briefcase by his side, closed it and walked quietly back through the glass doors and down into the main hall. Fifteen minutes later the Danish pastor emerged from the Customs hall holding a grip and a suitcase. There appeared to be nobody to meet him, and his first call was made to the Barclays Bank counter to change money.

From what he told the Danish police when they interrogated him six weeks later he did not notice the blond young Englishman standing beside him at the counter apparently waiting his turn in the queue but quietly examining the features of the Dane from behind dark glasses. At least he had no memory of such a man.

But when he came out of the main hall to board the BEA coach to the Cromwell Road terminal the Englishman was a few paces behind him holding his briefcase, and they must have travelled into London on the same coach.

At the terminal the Dane had to wait a few minutes while his suitcase was unloaded from the luggage trailer behind the coach, then wend his way past the checking-in counters to the exit sign marked with an arrow and the international word ‘Taxis’. While he did so the Jackal strode round the back of the coach and across the floor of the coach-park to where he had left his car in the staff car-park. He hefted the briefcase into the passenger seat of the open sports model, climbed in and started up, bringing the car to a halt close to the left-hand wall of the terminal from where he could glance to the right down the long line of waiting taxis under the pillared arcade. The Dane climbed into the third taxi, which cruised off into the Cromwell Road, heading towards Knightsbridge. The sports car followed.

The taxi dropped the oblivious priest at a small but comfortable hotel in Half Moon Street, while the sports car shot past the entrance and within a few minutes had found a spare parking meter on the far side of Curzon Street. The Jackal locked the briefcase in the boot, bought a midday edition of the Evening Standard at the newsagent’s in Shepherd Market, and was back in the foyer of the hotel within five minutes. He had to wait another twenty-five before the Dane came downstairs and handed back his room key to the receptionist. After she hung it up, the key swayed for a few seconds from the hook, and the man in one of the foyer armchairs apparently waiting for a friend, who lowered his newspaper as the Dane passed into the restaurant, noted that the number of the key was 47. A few minutes later as the receptionist bobbed back into the rear office to check a theatre booking for one of the guests the man in the dark glasses slipped quietly and unnoticed up the stairs.

A two-inch-wide strip of flexible mica was not enough to open the door of room 47 which was rather stiff, but the mica strip stiffened by a whippy little artist’s palette knife did the trick and the spring lock slipped back with a click. As he had only gone downstairs for lunch the pastor had left his passport on the bedside table. The Jackal was back in the corridor within thirty seconds, leaving the folder of traveller’s cheques untouched in the hopes that without any evidence of a theft the authorities would try to persuade the Dane that he had simply lost his passport somewhere else. And so it proved. Long before the Dane had finished his coffee the Englishman had departed unseen, and it was not until much later in the afternoon, after a thorough and mystified search of his room, that the pastor mentioned the disappearance of his passport to the manager. The manager also searched the room, and after pointing out that everything else, including the wallet of traveller’s cheques, was intact, brought all his advocacy to bear to persuade his bewildered guest that there was no need to bring the police to his hotel since he had evidently lost his passport somewhere in transit. The Dane, being a kindly man and not too sure of his ground in a foreign country, agreed despite himself that this was what must have happened. So he reported the loss to the Danish Consulate-General the next day, was issued with travel documents with which to return to Copenhagen at the end of his fortnight’s stay in London, and thought no more about it. The clerk at the Consulate-General who issued the travel documents filed the loss of a passport in the name of Pastor Per Jensen of Sankt Kjeldskirke in Copenhagen, and thought no more about it either. The date was July 14th.

Two days later a similar loss was experienced by an American student from Syracuse, New York State. He had arrived at the Oceanic Building of London Airport from New York and he produced his passport in order to change the first of his traveller’s cheques at the American Express counter. After changing the cheque he placed the money in an inside pocket of his jacket, and the passport inside a zipped pouch which he stuffed back into a small leather hand-grip. A few minutes later, trying to attract the attention of a porter, he put the grip down for a moment and three seconds later it was gone. At first he remonstrated with the porter, who led him to the Pan American enquiries desk, who directed him to the attention of the nearest terminal security police officer. The latter took him to an office where he explained his dilemma.

After a search had ruled out the possibility that the grip might have been taken by someone else accidentally in mistake for their own, a report was filed listing the matter as a deliberate theft.

Apologies were made and regrets were expressed to the tall and athletic young American about the activities of pickpockets and bag-snatchers in public places and he was told of the many precautions the airport authorities took to try to curb their thefts from incoming foreigners. He had the grace to admit that a friend of his was once robbed in a similar manner on Grand Central Station, New York.

The report was eventually circulated in a routine manner to all the divisions of the London Metropolitan Police, together with a description of the missing grip, its contents and the papers and passport in the pouch. This was duly filed, but as weeks passed and no trace was found of either the grip or its contents no more was thought of the incident.

Meanwhile Marty Schulberg went to his consulate in Grosvenor Square, reported the theft of his passport and was issued with travel documents enabling him to fly back to the United States after his month’s vacation touring the highlands of Scotland with his exchange-student girl-friend. At the consulate the loss was registered, reported to the State Department in Washington and duly forgotten by both establishments.

It will never be known just how many incoming passengers at London Airport’s two overseas arrivals passenger buildings were scanned through binoculars from the observation terraces as they emerged from their aircraft and headed down the steps. Despite the difference in their ages, the two who lost their passports had some things in common. Both were around six feet tall, had broad shoulders and slim figures, blue eyes and a fairly close facial resemblance to the unobtrusive Englishman who had followed and robbed them. Otherwise, Pastor Jensen was aged forty-eight, with grey hair and gold-rimmed glasses for reading; Marty Schulberg was twenty-five, with chestnut-brown hair and heavy-rimmed executive glasses which he wore all the time.