A cover story
It is not enough to kill someone, one must conceal the fact, if possible. If not possible, one must construct a narrative to lead investigators astray. An accident; an extremely difficult to trace poison; a suicide, perhaps, that will bring articles in the press about depression and news of a broken heart or of a failed enterprise. Or simply criminal, or more exotic, perhaps a foreign terrorist movement. Most elegant of all, murder by a colleague within the group of which the target individual is a member.
The Brigade criminelle
The Brigade is renowned as one of the best investigatory bodies in the world, or the best. Their investigators tend to be smart and tough, and they have heard it all before. If you are up against them, you story had better be good story.
State murder, or assassination
Of course, if the crime has been sanctioned by the state, there is no need for a false narrative to mislead the investigators or the juge d’instruction. In France, hierarchy is respected. The Préfet rules, and he or she is ruled by the Procureur de la République, Minister of the Interior, perhaps the Minister de la Défense. If the case is sensitive, important and in any way political, it goes as high as it needs, Matignon, the Elysée Palace, the President.
Two flies in the ointment
There are, however, two flies in the ointment. First, the Brigade criminelle de Paris, and their justifiably proud inspecteurs and commissaires, will solve the crime. In that regard, they have no masters. They will identify the author or authors of the crime and will prepare arrest warrants, even if they will remain unsigned by the Procureur de la République for the black Maria to go out from 36, quai d’ Orfèvres to pick up those charged.
Which raises a question; were arrest warrants issued for the killers of Mario Bachand, the young man and his blonde companion who after the killing disappeared into the void?
They were.
Identified by Pierre Barral; Françoise Laville, later his wife, perhaps others. Photos 35 and 37, names beneath, were of the two who had arrived that day, in a large album of photographs put before them at 36, Quai des Orfèvres. While I was not permitted to view the files of the Bachand case upon request by the Brigade criminelle on my behalf – the Préfet denied access – it did not prevent the giving of certain assistance…, including speaking with some of the investigators who had been on the case of Mario Bachand, and other witnesses. The warrants remain in the file, in the Archives de la Brigade, on the ground floor of 36, quai d’Orfèvres. Even if beyond the ten-year limit of the statute of limitation for homicide in France. A limit that does not apply, in Canada, for those responsible for the murder of Mario Bachand, that day in Paris.
The second fly in the ointment are the special services, which share a certain rivalry, and differences in attitude, a product of their different missions.
Apart from the intelligence and the security bodies of the military, there are two principle special services in France: DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure), which replaced SDECE, (Service de documentation extérieure et de contre espionage) in 1982, and DGSI (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieur), which replaced DST, (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire), in 2014.
DGSE (ex-SDECE), being a foreign intelligence service, performs its operations abroad. Virtually everything it does operationally is illegal in the foreign states that it targets. Institutionally, it takes a rather distant view of legality. As a result, when DGSE operations fail, they tend to fail in spectacular fashion, vis the Rainbow warrior affair.
DGSI is a security service, mandated to prevent and neutralize threats to France and to French citizens. The law is its primary tool, and DGSI, as DST before it, has an excellent reputation for probity and effectiveness.
It was partly because of differences between DGSE and DST that enabled me to speak with certain retired officers of both services, and become informed of important aspects of the Mario Bachand affair, which we shall discuss in later posts.
While in France inquiring into the assassination of Mario Bachand, I spoke with an retired Commissaire de Police who had a relative who worked at the Elysée, managing the files on certain, highly secret topics, that would go the the President and to certain, very few, officials. He would never open such a file, he said, for fear of learning something that would put his life in danger.
The affaire Bachand is one of those cases, worthy of a certain, let us say, frisson.