‘… and destroyed without hesitation. That, gentlemen, is the only course left open to us.’
The Interior Minister surveyed the meeting seated round the table of the ministry conference room to let the impact of his words sink in. There were fourteen men in the room including himself.
The Minister stood at the head of the table. To his immediate right sat his chef de cabinet, and to his left the Prefect of Police, the political head of France’s police forces.
From Sanguinetti’s right hand down the length of the oblong table sat General Guibaud, head of the SDECE, Colonel Rolland, chief of the Action Service and the author of the report of which a copy lay in front of each man. Beyond Rolland were Commissaire Ducret of the Corps de Sécurité Présidentielle, and Colonel Saint-Clair de Villauban, an air force colonel of the Elysée staff, a fanatical Gaullist but equally renowned in the entourage of the President as being equally fanatical concerning his own ambition.
To the left of M. Maurice Papon, the Prefect of Police, were M. Maurice Grimaud, the Director-General of France’s national crime force the Sûreté Nationale, and in a row the five heads of the departments that make up the Sûreté.
Although beloved of novelists as a crime-busting force, the Sûreté Nationale itself is simply the very small and meagrely staffed office that has control over the five crime branches that actually do the work. The task of the Sûreté is administrative, like that of the equally mis-described Interpol, and the Sûreté does not have a detective on its staff.
The man with the national detective force of France under his personal orders sat next to Maurice Grimaud. He was Max Fernet, Director of the Police Judiciaire. Apart from its enormous headquarters on the Quai des Orfèvres, vastly bigger than the Sûreté’s headquarters at 11 Rue des Saussaies, just round the corner from the Interior Ministry, the Police Judiciaire controls seventeen Services Regionaux headquarters, one for each of the seventeen police districts of Metropolitan France. Under these come the borough police forces, 453 in all, being comprised of seventy-four Central Commissariats, 253 Constituency Commissariats and 126 local Postes de Police. The whole network ranges through two thousand towns and villages of France. This is the crime force. In the rural areas and up and down the highways the more general task of maintaining law and order is carried out by the Gendarmerie Nationale and the traffic police, the Gendarmes Mobiles. In many areas, for reasons of efficiency, the gendarmes and the agents de police share the same accommodation and facilities. The total number of men under Max Fernet’s command in the Police Judiciaire in 1963 was just over twenty thousand.
Running down the table from Fernet’s left were the heads of the other four sections of the Sûreté: the Bureau de Sécurité Publique, the Renseignements Généraux, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, and the Corps Républicain de Sécurité.
The first of these, the BSP, was concerned mainly with protection of buildings, communications, highways and anything else belonging to the state from sabotage or damage. The second, the RG or central records office was the memory of the other four; in its Pantheon headquarters archives were four and a half million personal dossiers on individuals who had come to the notice of the police forces of France since those forces were founded. They were cross-indexed along five and a half miles of shelves in categories of the names of the persons to whom they applied, or the type of crime for which the person had been convicted or merely suspected. Names of witnesses who had appeared in cases, or those who had been acquitted, were also listed. Although the system was not at that time computerised, the archivists prided themselves that within a few minutes they could unearth the details of arson committed in a small village ten years back, or the names of witnesses in an obscure trial that had hardly made the newspapers.
Added to these dossiers were the fingerprints of everyone who had ever had his fingerprints taken in France, including many sets that had never been identified. There were also ten and a half million cards, including the disembarkation card of every tourist at every border crossing point, and the hotel cards filled in by all who stayed at French hotels outside Paris. For reasons of space alone these cards had to be cleared out at fairly short intervals to make way for the vast number of fresh ones that came in each year.
The only cards regularly filled in within the area of France that did not go to the RG were those filled in at the hotels of Paris. These went to the Préfecture de Police in the Boulevard du Palais.
The DST, whose chief sat three places down from Fernet, was and is the counter-espionage force of France, responsible also for maintaining a constant watch on France’s airports, docks and borders. Before going to the archives, the disembarkation cards of those entering France are examined by the DST officer at the point of entry, for screening to keep tabs on undesirables.
The last man in the row was the chief of the CRS, the forty-five thousand-man force of which Alexandre Sanguinetti had already made such a well publicised and heartily unpopular use over the previous two years.
For reasons of space, the head of the CRS was sitting at the foot of the table, facing down the length of the wood at the Minister. There was one last seat remaining, that between the head of the CRS and Colonel Saint-Clair, at the bottom right-hand corner. It was occupied by a large stolid man whose pipe fumes evidently annoyed the fastidious Colonel on his left. The Minister had made a point of asking Max Fernet to bring him along to the meeting. He was Commissaire Maurice Bouvier, head of the Brigade Criminelle of the PJ.
‘So that is where we stand, gentlemen,’ resumed the Minister. ‘Now you have all read the report by Colonel Rolland which lies in front of each of you. And now you have heard from me the considerable limitations which the President, in the interests of the dignity of France, has felt obliged to impose on our efforts to avert this threat to his person. I will stress again, there must be absolute secrecy in the conduct of the investigation and in any subsequent action to be taken. Needless to say, you are all sworn to total silence and will discuss the matter with no one outside this room until and unless another person has been made privy to the secret.
‘I have called you all here because it seems to me that whatever we are to do, the resources of all the departments here represented must sooner or later be called upon, and you, the departmental chiefs, should have no doubt as to the top priority that this affair demands. It must on all occasions require your immediate and personal attention. There will be no delegation to juniors, except for tasks which do not reveal the reason behind the requirement.’
He paused again. Down both sides of the table some heads nodded soberly. Others kept their eyes fixed on the speaker, or on the dossier in front of them. At the far end, Commissaire Bouvier gazed at the ceiling, emitting brief bursts of smoke from the corner of his mouth like a Red Indian sending up signals. The air force colonel next to him winced at each emission.
‘Now,’ resumed the Minister, ‘I think I may ask for your ideas on the subject. Colonel Rolland, have you had any success with your enquiries in Vienna?’
The head of the Action Service glanced up from his own report, cast a sideways look at the general who led the SDECE, but received neither encouragement nor a frown.
General Guibaud, remembering that he had spent half the day sobering down the head of R.3. Section over Rolland’s early-morning decision to use the Viennese office for his own enquiries, stared straight ahead of him.
‘Yes,’ said the Colonel. ‘Enquiries were made this morning and afternoon by operatives in Vienna at the Pension Kleist, a small private hotel in the Brucknerallee. They carried with them photographs of Marc Rodin, René Montclair and André Casson. There was no time to transmit to them photographs of Viktor Kowalski, which were not on file in Vienna.