Objective: De Gaulle

Speeding through the Paris suburb of Petit-Clamart early one evening in August 1962, the French President's black Citroen ran into a barrage of submachine-gun fire. The colonel riding next to the chauffeur yelled to his father-in-law in the back seat: "Father, get down!" The tall, imperial figure budged not an inch. Again the distraught colonel pleaded: "I beg you, Father, get down." This time the President leaned slightly forward. A split second later, a stream of bullets ripped through the limousine. When the firing stopped, Charles de Gaulle flicked fragments of the broken rear window from his coat and declaimed: "What, again?"

The Petit-Clamart ambush--the factual starting point of Frederick Forsyth's otherwise fictional The Day of the Jackal--was De Gaulle's closest brush with assassins. It was, however, neither the first nor the last. According to a new book published in Paris, Objectif de Gaulle, there were at least 31 serious plots against the general's life, and dozens of others that never got beyond the talking stage. Indeed, even as the would-be killers of Petit-Clamart went on trial for their lives, police averted a sniper's attempt to shoot De Gaulle with a telescopically fitted carbine while the President was on an inspection tour of Paris' Ecole Militaire.

All the assassination attempts documented in the book--with the lone exception of one by an embittered seaman who blamed De Gaulle for the World War II destruction of the French fleet by the British--sprang from De Gaulle's decision to grant independence to Algeria. That policy led to the creation of the militant terrorist group known as the Secret Army Organization (O.A.S.), one of whose principal goals was to kill De Gaulle for having betrayed Algerie franc,aise. The authors, Pierre Demaret, 31, who once belonged to the O.A.S., and Christian Plume, 48, a journalist, interviewed former O.A.S. leaders and obtained access to the French Interior Ministry's records. The result is an extraordinary tale of mad zeal, abominable planning and incredibly bad luck by what was surely the world's most dedicated and inept gang of assassins.

The O.A.S.'s impressive record of failure was racked up with little help from le grand Charles. "You can't keep De Gaulle under glass," he would declare whenever security got too tight. Fortunately for the French President, many of the assassination attempts sound as if they were concocted by Gordon Liddy. One zany plot called for poisoning the Communion Hosts at the village church in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, where De Gaulle attended Mass. The idea was discarded after the plotters realized that the first person to receive a Host would keel over dead and give the scheme away. And there was no way to guarantee that De Gaulle would be first at the Communion rail.

Equally harebrained was a scheme for a kamikaze pilot to crash a small private plane into the French President's helicopter. While circling over Algeria's Blida Airport in anticipation of De Gaulle's departure, the pilot was dismayed to see that a swarm of helicopters had taken off at once. There was no way of knowing which one De Gaulle was in (French security forces routinely used dummy planes and juggled limousines as a precaution).

Then there was the O.A.S. agent who was sent to Athens just prior to De Gaulle's May 1963 visit. The agent's mission: to shoot the general with a special camera that fired bullets. The gunman lost his fake identity papers during a lively evening at a local taverna and refused to take the risk without getaway documents. A new set arrived a day too late, and all he got was a photograph showing how close he had been to De Gaulle.

The most determined assassin was the architect of the Petit-Clamart ambush (which the plotters called "Operation Charlotte Corday"*), an air force lieutenant colonel named Jean-Maria Bastien-Thiry. A brilliant engineer known as "the French von Braun" for his invention of the guided SSII missile, he masterminded both Petit-Clamart and an earlier attempt in which a napalm and plastique bomb was planted on the route to Colombey. De Gaulle commuted the death sentences of two other Petit-Clamart conspirators, Jacques Prevost and Alain Bougrenet de la Tocnaye. But he refused to grant clemency to Bastien-Thiry, reportedly because the attempt had been made when Mme. de Gaulle was also in the car. He was executed by a firing squad March 11, 1963.

Today the only would-be De Gaulle assassin left in jail is Jean-Jacques Susini, a cofounder of the O.A.S., who once directed its terrorist activities in Algiers.

The others convicted of participating in the plots--44 in all--were granted either clemency, commutation or amnesty by the man they had tried to kill.

* For the woman who killed French Revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub.

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