It seemed to me that the only way the OAS would get a bullet through those rings of protection might be if they could find and commission a complete outsider, a professional hit man with no record or dossier known to Paris. Later I would create such a man and call him the Jackal. But that was then. I never really thought to write such a story. So I never told anyone. It was just an idea.
The small flat I had taken on my meager salary was in walking distance of the office, but in the Ninth Arrondissement, home of the Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergère, Place Blanche, Montmartre, and the maze of streets containing hundreds of smaller cabarets and late-night bars. The Ninth was also the red-light district and home of much of the milieu, the city’s criminal underworld. Being kept awake by the wailing of police sirens was extremely common.
OAS sympathizers also frequented the bars of the Ninth, and so did I. This was largely because the second day shift at the office ended at ten p.m. and I did not need or wish to sleep until well after midnight. So I nursed a beer, stared vacantly at the wall, and listened. That gave me some knowledge of de Gaulle’s deadly enemies.
I also developed my “Bertie Wooster mode,” an adopted persona based on P. G. Wodehouse’s witless hero: helpless, well-meaning, affable, but as dim as a five-watt bulb. Affecting to speak little French and with the usual appalling British accent, it was assumed by both bar staff and customers that I could not understand what they were talking about. The reverse was the case. In the years to come, Bertie would get me out of a lot of trouble. This is because the harmless fool with a British passport is what Europeans want to see and believe.
It was
a Friday evening in August when the OAS came closest to killing de Gaulle, and it was at a roundabout in the outer suburb of Petit-Clamart. He was heading from the Elysée Palace to an air base called Villacoublay, where a helicopter awaited him to take him and Madame Yvonne de Gaulle across France to their country home in the east: a mansion called La Boisserie in the village of Colombey-les-deux-Églises.
The couple was in the back of his speeding DS 19. Up front were gendarmerie driver Francis Marroux and the president’s son-in-law. The dozen assassins had learned his precise route and were waiting in a side street. They missed because de Gaulle was late, dusk had come early that August 22, the convoy was doing close to ninety mph, and they did not see it until too late. They were going to erupt from the side street, run the limousine off the road, and finish off the inhabitants with submachine-gun fire.
They were too late. As the two motorcyclist outriders screamed past they opened up with full-deflection shots on the speeding car, 120 shots in all. Twelve passed through the car, but failed to stop it. One passed within an inch of the famous nose.
De Gaulle rammed his wife’s head into his lap, but remained ramrod upright. Marroux nearly lost control. Swerved, recovered, and drove on. The follow-up car full of armed guards did the same. At Villacoublay, the DS 19 slewed to a halt on shredded tires beside the presidential helicopter amid a cluster of panicking air force officers—word had been radioed ahead.
A pretty shattered Madame Yvonne was helped into the ’copter. De Gaulle emerged, shook shards of glass from the lapel of his Savile Row suit (the only British thing he would have about him), and gave his verdict.
“Ils ne savent pas tirer,” he sniffed. “They can’t shoot straight.”
Word reached central Paris about midnight. I and the rest of the press horde got out there and spent the remainder of the night interviewing, observing, and filing stories from local pay phones. Europe’s newspapers had already “gone to bed,” but an agency works twenty-four hours a day, so there was no rest for AP, UPI, AFP, or Reuters.
That October saw the Cuban Missile Crisis, a hypertense four days when it really looked as if the world might come to thermonuclear war and be wiped out. To be fair to de Gaulle, rightly described as no admirer of the United States since his blazing rows in the war with General Eisenhower, he was the first in Europe to ring Washington and pledge his total support for John F. Kennedy.
I had turned twenty-four, and in January attended the now-famous press conference in the Elysée when de Gaulle vetoed the British application to join the European Economic Community. It was a huge slap in the face to British premier Harold Macmillan, who, in Algeria in the Second World War, had pushed de Gaulle’s claims to be the sole leader of the Free French.
His conferences were no press conferences at all. He simply planted five questions with five ultraloyal senior pressmen in the audience, memorized the speech he intended to make in reply, and also memorized the placements of the five so-called questioners, because he could not see them.
Harold King, in the front, was awarded a question to ask. There were, of course, no laptops or mobile phones. The Reuters chief would scribble his press story on a notepad on his knee, tear the pages off, and give them to a runner from his office. The job of the runner was to pelt to the back of the hall and give them to another colleague, who was holding a phone line open to the office.
He would dictate the story to yet another colleague, sitting with headphones in the office, typing furiously, and he would give the sheets to the telex operator, who would send them to London. I was the runner.
I recall the old buzzard peering down in curiosity at the young Englishman crouched below his podium. Because of his extreme myopia, I was about the only person in the room he could actually see, and he clearly did not know what I was doing there. In public, he was too vain to wear glasses.
His nearsightedness led to several amusing incidents, at one of which I was present. He was on a provincial tour, always against the frantic advice of his security staff, and he had another habit that drove them mad with worry. All statesmen do it nowadays, but back then I think he invented it.
He would suddenly lean forward, tap the shoulder of his driver, and order him to stop. Then he would climb out and walk straight into the crowd, shaking hands and playing the friend of the common people. Today it is called “pressing the flesh.” He called it the bain de foule, the bath in the crowd.
On one occasion, as his bodyguards sought desperately to keep up, he plunged on deeper and deeper into the mass, then saw a short, expressionless man in front of him. He seized the fellow’s hand and pumped it firmly. Then he moved on. A few yards farther, the same man. He did it again. The problem was that more than a yard away, a face became a blur. The third time he did it, the man reached up and hissed in his ear, “Monsieur le Président, will you please stop doing that? That is my f—ing gun hand.”
It was Paul Comiti, his Corsican bodyguard, who was unable to go for the shooter under his left armpit if anything happened.
The previous March had seen the execution by firing squad of Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, the leader of the Petit-Clamart attempt, but the OAS did not give up. There were at least three more attempts, and they all failed. One involved a bomb under a pile of workmen’s sand beside a country road. It failed to explode, because it had rained the previous night and the would-be killers had not thought to tarpaulin the explosives.
A second involved a sniper high above the parade ground at the École Militaire, where de Gaulle was presiding over a passing-out parade. The intelligence people were tipped off. The sniper, Georges Watin, the Limper, escaped to South America. A final one had an earthenware jar of geraniums containing a bomb next to a war memorial de Gaulle was due to unveil. In a scene straight from the Pink Panther movies, a kindly gardener, fearing they might wilt, gave them a good hosing and fused the detonator.
In the late summer of 1963, Harold King summoned me, clearly not in a good mood. What had I done wrong? Nothing.
“They want to give you East Berlin, the buggers,” he growled. He meant Head Office in London. East Berlin was a peach of an assignment: a one-man office covering East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.
Since the building of the now-infamous Berlin Wall in 1961, East Germany had become a pariah state, an outcast from the West. No embassy, consulate, or trade mission. If anything went wrong in the harshest of all the Soviet satellites, there would be no backup, no support at all.
When the Wall went up, all East German presence in the West was expelled, including the East German news agency ADN, which had an office in the Reuters building. East Berlin responded by doing the same, expelling all Western papers and agencies—except one. The Politburo might feed lying rubbish to its own people, but at the top it wanted to know what was really going on. So it retained one Reuters man, with the condition that he live in East Berlin and, if visiting West Berlin, be back through Checkpoint Charlie by midnight. No commuting to the office to work and then going west to spend the night.
“I suppose you’re going to take it,” grumbled Mr. King.
“If you had just turned twenty-five, wouldn’t you?” I asked.