“You’re French born, right?”
“Non, monsieur, completely English.”
He switched his gaze to the man beside me and dropped back into English.
“Better get him over there. I’ve never heard a Rosbif talk like that.”
My flatlet was on a weekly rent. Living in London, I had given up my car. My possessions were one valise and a haversack. I had no ties. I phoned my parents in Kent and was on the morning flight to
Paris. A new chapter was opening that would eventually, and totally unforeseeably, lead to a book called The Day of the Jackal.
PARIS AFLAME
The situation I had tried to analyze for Maurice in London was no exaggeration. The uprising against the authoritarian Charles de Gaulle was highly dangerous.
For six years, the Algerians under the FLN had been fighting for independence, getting ever stronger and more dangerous. Successive French governments had poured men, arms, and wealth into the war, with accompanying cruelties on both sides that were pretty hair-raising. Many French soldiers had died, and the mood in France was split down the middle.
In 1958, de Gaulle, who had retired in 1947, or so it was presumed, was recalled as prime minister, and the following year was elected president. In his campaign he had used the magic words: Algérie française, “Algeria is French.” So the army and the right wing worshipped him. A few weeks into office as premier, he realized the situation was hopeless. France was being bled white in a war it could not win. As president, he began secret negotiations to end it. When that news broke, it was like a nuclear explosion.
In Algeria, vital sections of the army mutinied and marched into exile, taking their weapons with them. Five generals went with them. These were not the raw recruits, but the Foreign Legion and the Paras (Airborne), the cream of the cream. The numerical bulk, the military service inductees, wanted to come home, so they stayed loyal to Paris. But hundreds of French civilians, settled in Algeria, realizing they would be thrown out or at least dispossessed by a new Algerian government, threw in their lot with the rebels who called themselves the Secret Armed Organization, or OAS. Their aims: to assassinate de Gaulle, topple his regime, and install the hard right.
The Paris into which I landed that May 1962 was in turmoil. The biggest Communist Party in Europe, west of the Iron Curtain, was French, completely loyal to Moscow, which had been arming and funding the Algerians. Far-left students marched and clashed violently on the streets of Paris with those supporting the right. Plastic bombs exploded in cafés and restaurants.
Between the warring sides was the newly formed anti-riot police, the CRS, whose methods were not gentle. Almost every street corner featured a couple of them, demanding identity papers, as in a city under occupation. Surrounding de Gaulle’s person and keeping him alive were two forces: the Civic Action Service of the counterintelligence arm and his personal squad of four bodyguards, backed by the Gendarmerie Nationale. For a young foreign correspondent, it was some baptism and the peak of all the possible postings.
On arrival, I reported to the bureau chief, the formidable Harold King. He was a legend. Born German, he had fought in the First World War, but for the Kaiser. He emigrated to Britain and naturalized. In 1940, he was Reuters’s man in Moscow, following the Red Army deep into Poland before being repatriated to London. Then he followed the Free French into France and became utterly convinced of the claims and policies of Charles de Gaulle. After the liberation, he told Reuters he would head up the Paris bureau or quit. He got Paris.
When de Gaulle resigned in disgust in 1947, he was presumed to be gone forever. Only Harold King, like a Jacobite waiting for the return of the king, insisted de Gaulle would one day return to lead France back to glory, and until it all came true in 1958, King was indulgently regarded as a fantasist. Now in 1962, he was the king (literally) of the Paris foreign press corps. His loyalty to de Gaulle was quietly rewarded with tip-off after tip-off.
I walked into his office, to confront a burly man in his early sixties, glasses perched high on his forehead like accusatory headlights. He was writing, and with one hand gestured that I sit until he was finished. I had been warned about him in London. He was regarded by few with liking, by many with fear, and had a reputation for eating young journalists for breakfast and spitting out the pips. Quite a few in London had been sent back within days of arrival, and hated him.
He finished writing, roared for a copy boy to take his folios to the telex machine, turned his chair to face me, thrust his spectacles even higher on his forehead, where he mostly wore them, and glared at me. Then the interrogation began. This was the ritual that could lead to rejection and a flight back to London. Strangely, he took to me and I became his protégé.
I think the unusual reaction was based on two factors. He perked up when told I had actually volunteered for the RAF instead of fighting to stay out of military service, and then got my wings on Vampires. The other factor was that, while never short of respectful, I declined to be browbeaten. Beneath the gruff exterior, he hated crawlers.
After an hour, he glanced at his watch and asked, “Do you eat?”
“Yes, Mr. King, I do.”
Without further ado, he rose and lumbered out of the office. I followed. He had a Citroën at the door, with his loyal driver at the wheel, a perk he insisted on or he would resign. He growled “André” or something at the driver, who set off and deposited us at a restaurant called Chez André, clearly a favorite and regular lunch hole. He was welcomed in and bowed to his regular table.
A new sommelier shimmied up and proposed a bottle of white wine to start with. He raised his specs back to his forehead, stared at the waiter as one contemplating a boll weevil, and growled: “Jeune homme, le vin est rouge” (Young man, wine is red). He was right of course. Wine is red and the other stuff is juice, with or without bubbles.
He did not order, because the staff knew what he would have. He listened to me order in French and then asked me how I had learned it. Spending schoolboy holidays in the depths of the Limousin, in la France profonde, or deep France, seemed to please him.
Back then, French lunches lasted nearly three hours. We strolled back into the office at close to four. I did not know it, but I had been, in a way, adopted, and the friendship lasted until he died. The mentoring that Frank Keeler had started in King’s Lynn, Harold King completed in Paris, upholding Reuters’s house style of rigorous accuracy and complete impartiality—even though he was very partial toward Charles de Gaulle, and the compliment was constantly repaid. He was the only Britisher the French autocrat had any time for.
Because I was the youngest and the most junior, and a single man with no family to hurry home to, Harold King gave me a rather unusual assignment. It was to shadow Charles de Gaulle every time he left the Elysée Palace. I was not the only one.
There was an international corps of media people in permanent attendance tagging along behind his DS 19 Citroën saloon every time he had some journey to make outside the presidential mansion on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. He knew exactly what we were there for. It was not to cover his visit to the Senate or whatever. It was for that cataclysmic moment when he was assassinated. He knew and he did not give a damn. He despised his enemies and he despised danger. He just shoved his beak of a nose even higher and stalked through.
Whenever his motorcade stopped for whatever function he was attending, the press group split into two and found cafés in which to while away the waiting time. In one group were the British, Americans, Canadians, Nordics, Germans, and all those whose common language was English.
In the other group were the French speakers—French, Belgians, Swiss, and a couple of Québecois. And me. We were often joined by de Gaulle’s personal bodyguards, or the pair on duty that day. That was how I got to know Roger Tessier, the Parisian; Henri d’Jouder, the Kabyle from Algeria; and Paul Comiti, the Corsican. I forget the fourth.
Listening to their chitchat and noting the concentric rings of security around the president of France, I became increasingly convinced the OAS would not succeed. There was a large file on every one of them—ex-army mutineers and civilian pieds-noirs from Algeria. Their faces, fingerprints, and records were intimately known.
It also became plain—and the security detail was extraordinarily loose-lipped—that the OAS was so penetrated by counterintelligence agents that they could hardly have a four-man conference without their entire conspiracy being quickly “blown” because one of those present was a “grass.”