Fictional character
The Jackal
is a fictional character, the principal
antagonist
of the novel
The Day of the Jackal
by
Frederick Forsyth
. He is an
assassin
who is contracted by the
OAS
French
terrorist
group of the early 1960s to kill
Charles de Gaulle
, then
President of France
. The book was published on 7 June 1971, in the year following de Gaulle's death, and became an instant bestseller.
[1]
In the
1973 original film adaptation
, he is portrayed by
Edward Fox
. A revised version of the character was portrayed by
Bruce Willis
in the
1997 remake adaptation of the original film
, having a divergent storyline and set in the U.S., with a fictional
First Lady of the United States
as the target of the assassination.
Biographical summary
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Main novel plot
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As the story opens, the Jackal plans to continue working as an assassin until he has enough money to retire. The money paid him for assassinating two German engineers, thus delaying the development of
Gamal Abdel Nasser
's Al Zarifa rocket, had been enough to keep him in luxury for several years, but the offer of
US$
500,000 (about US$3.5 million in 2021 dollars) from the OAS to kill de Gaulle gives him the opportunity to retire early. Despite his concern over the "security slackness of the OAS", he finds the job too tempting to turn down. However, he insists that the OAS commanders in charge of the plot must not disclose the matter to anybody, and suggests they stay somewhere under heavy guard until the assassination is complete.
The assassin invents the codename of "
the Jackal"
after he is hired by the OAS conspirators. When asked for his choice of codename in the novel, the Jackal replies: "Since we have been speaking of hunting, what about
the Jackal
? Will that do?".
[2]
Taking elaborate precautions, the Jackal applies for a passport (based on an infant whose birthday is very close to his own but who died at a young age) and seeks out forged identity documents to get him into France to get him close to de Gaulle. He also steals two passports as contingent identities and purchases disguises to match. He kills the forger, who attempts to blackmail him for more money, and commissions a specially made sniper rifle from an expert weaponsmith. He later goes to France to reconnoitre the best location and does research about de Gaulle, before concluding that the best time to kill him is on Liberation Day.
The French Action Service is able to capture and interrogate Wolenski (in the film, Kowalski), a bodyguard for a plotter and one of the few men who has knowledge of the assassination, if not the actual details. Through Wolenski, the Action Service learns of the plot as well the Jackal's code name and a rough description. Roger Frey, the Minister of the Interior of France, convenes a meeting of all the heads of the department of state security, but all the men are at a loss as to how to proceed, until a Commissioner of the Police Judiciare suggests that the first and most important objective is to establish the
true
identity of the Jackal, which is something that only pure detective work can accomplish. When the Minister of the Interior asks him for the best detective in France, he suggests to the committee that the best detective is his own deputy, Claude Lebel.
Using OAS agent "
Valmy
" as a
cut-out
, the Jackal is kept fully informed of the French police's pursuit of him. Meanwhile, Lebel relies on his
old boy network
of police departments in several foreign countries to instigate a search for the Jackal. The
Special Branch of England
investigate and finds out there was a man named Charles Calthrop who was rumoured to have killed
Rafael Trujillo
some years ago using a precision sniper rifle. They find six men named 'Charles Calthrop', with one individual in particular raising some suspicion when it is discovered he has gone on holiday, leaving his passport in his house in the process. This passport, together with the fact that Jackal in French is 'Chacal' (the first three letters of his first name and last name respectively), causes the English to assume that this specific Charles Calthrop is the assassin.
On two occasions when the police get too close, the Jackal hides out in the home of a stranger he has seduced; once with a wealthy woman and again with a
gay
man he meets in a bar. He kills the former when she finds the components of his weapon, and the latter after the man watches a news report displaying the Jackal's photograph and describing him as a fugitive murderer.
Finally, on 25 August 1963,
Liberation Day
, the Jackal poses as a handicapped veteran and tries to shoot de Gaulle with his rifle, which he had hidden inside a
stainless steel
crutch. However, de Gaulle unexpectedly moves his head at the last moment, causing the Jackal to miss by a fraction of an inch. As the Jackal prepares for a second shot, he is discovered by French police detective Claude Lebel, who has been pursuing him since the plot was discovered. He uses his second shot to kill a
CRS
trooper who accompanied Lebel to the room, but the unarmed Lebel shoots and kills him with the security guard's
MAT-49
before the Jackal can load his third and last bullet. The Jackal is buried two days later in an unmarked grave; only Lebel attends, anonymously. The death certificate identifies him as "an unknown foreign tourist, killed in a car accident".
In the epilogue, Charles Calthrop arrives home from vacation to find British police raiding his flat. He demands to know what is happening and is brought to the police post for interrogation. It is subsequently established that Calthrop was, indeed, on a holiday and that he is completely unconnected to the killer. Both the film and the novel end with the same comment by British authorities: "If the Jackal wasn't Calthrop, then who the hell was he?"
Appearance
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The Jackal is described as a tall, blond Englishman in his early thirties living in
Mayfair
, London.
[3]
The character's real name is unknown and details of his background are sketchy. Forsyth explains in the novel, "Alexander Duggan who died at the age of two and a half years in 1931 ... would have been a few months older than the Jackal in July 1963".
[4]
He is described by Forsyth as six feet tall, with a muscular build and few distinguishing features, one of which is his cold grey eyes. In the novel, it is stated he likes to wear striped shirts.
[5]
During the course of the novel he changes his hair colour frequently.
[6]
Abilities and skills
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The Jackal uses a numbered
Swiss bank account
to hold the proceeds of his work. He is a careful, sophisticated and meticulous killer who plans every detail of each assassination well in advance. He has multiple successful contracts, but no record or file on any European police force whatsoever. During the course of the novel he contacts a
Congo
mercenary called Louis, whom he met in
Katanga
as a character reference and who puts the Jackal in touch with a skilled armourer who fabricates the assassin's rifle and a forger who provides false identification papers. In order to get a false identification paper, the Jackal gives his own
driver's licence
to the forger with the claim that the card belongs to a dead man; when the forger tries to blackmail him for more money, the Jackal kills him.
The Jackal speaks fluent
French
and is sufficiently skilled in hand-to-hand combat that he can kill with his bare hands. He is skilled with
handguns
and a marksman with a rifle. He has managed to remain anonymous except to those select few who recommend him for an assignment. He considers his anonymity his main weapon and prefers to carry out missions alone.
[7]
In the novel, the international police forces hunting him speculate that he may have helped assassinate
Rafael Leonidas Trujillo
in the
Dominican Republic
by shooting the driver of his armoured car, causing it to crash into the trap in which Trujillo was, in fact, killed.
[8]
The 1973 film version tells not only was he involved in Trujillo's death but also killed a
V.I.P.
identified only as "that fellow from the Congo" (implicitly
Patrice Lumumba
, whose murder in the novel was committed by another assassin considered by the OAS).
Before he is approached by the
OAS
, the Jackal's only known confirmed kills are of two German rocket scientists in
Egypt
, who were helping
Gamal Abdel Nasser
build rockets to attack
Israel
. He performed this task at close range using a small-calibre weapon, a crime that left the Egyptian government furious and baffled. The Jackal was paid by a
Zionist
millionaire in New York, who considered his money "well spent".
[9]
Identities
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The Jackal's true name always remains a mystery: it is never discovered by the authorities or revealed to the reader, despite the police force apprehending various characters who have a similar name. He uses the following identities in the course of the novel:
- Alexander James Quentin "Alex" Duggan
: This is the name of a boy who was born in the same year that the Jackal was born, but died aged two and a half in a car accident. The Jackal obtains Duggan's birth certificate under false pretences and applies for a passport in this name but with
his
own photograph and details.
- Per Jensen
: A pastor from
Copenhagen
who bears a reasonable resemblance to the Jackal but is older with iron grey hair and gold-rimmed spectacles. The Jackal steals Pastor Jensen's passport from his
London
hotel room and adopts the disguise after his cover as Duggan is blown by both the French police and a woman he seduces and hides out with who finds the components of his weapon.
- Martin "Marty" Schulberg
: A student from
Syracuse University
who
also
somewhat resembles the Jackal, but is younger with chestnut brown hair and heavy-rimmed executive spectacles. The Jackal steals Schulberg's handgrip containing his passport from London airport and adopts the disguise when he realises the police must be on to Jensen, enhancing his cover to avoid them by posing as a flamboyant homosexual.
- Andre Martin
: A fictitious French war veteran from
Alsace-Lorraine
, Martin is in his 50s and has only one leg, necessitating walking around with a stainless steel crutch. This particular identity is central to the assassination plot. The Jackal becomes Martin ? complete with French identity card and war wounded card courtesy of a Belgian forger ? by dyeing his hair grey and cutting it badly, swallowing a couple of pieces of
cordite
to make himself sick and take on a pale complexion, and folding his leg back and binding it with a
webbing strap
to mimic an amputated leg.
- Charles Calthrop
: Charles Calthrop is the name of a former small-arms salesman who was in the
Dominican Republic
at the time
Rafael Leonidas Trujillo
was shot. When Lebel uses his old boy network contacts to instigate a manhunt, he contacts Special Branch, and a member of SB later contacts the
SIS
. The Secret Intelligence Service, in turn, uncover a rumour that Calthrop has helped the partisans kill Trujillo by shooting the driver of his armoured car, causing it to crash and allowing his assassins to finish him off. The British police in the book surmise that Calthrop is the Jackal's real name, until the real Calthrop shows up at the end,
after
the Jackal has been killed. The authorities were misled by the fact that
chacal
(i.e.,
Cha
[rles]
Cal
[throp]) is French for "jackal". Police investigations show that the
real
Charles Calthrop went on a holiday with what looked like fishing rods in his car, which cause them to jump to the conclusion that he was armed with weapons. When the Jackal learns the French are looking for a Charles Calthrop, he does not react with any apparent concern (as might be the case if it were his real name).
In other media
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In the
1973 adaptation of the novel
, the Jackal is portrayed by
Edward Fox
. Some of the Jackal's background details are clarified: The dossier the OAS read from states that the Jackal killed Trujillo and the "fellow in the Congo" (presumably
Dag Hammarskjold
or
Patrice Lumumba
). Within the film, his alias names vary slightly from the ones he uses in the novel.
In
the 1997 remake of the original film
, the Jackal is portrayed by
Bruce Willis
. This version of the character differs substantially from the novel and original film: he is an American
special forces
mercenary and former
KGB
asset
hired by an
Azerbaijani
mobster to assassinate the
First Lady of the United States
as revenge for the death of his brother in a joint FBI-
MVD
raid, and characterized as a
sociopath
who takes pleasure in killing (although even that seems to have bored him). He is described by those who've survived an encounter with him as being; "This man was *Ice*. No feeling! Nothing!". He is pursued by agents of the FBI and the MVD, as well as Declan Mulqueen, a former
Irish Republican Army
sharpshooter who seeks revenge because the Jackal shot his former lover Isabella Zancona, causing her to miscarry their child. In the end, after Mulqueen thwarts the assassination and saves the First Lady's life, he and Zancona both gun down the Jackal. As in the novel and first film, the Jackal's real name is never revealed to both the investigators and the audience.
"Carlos the Jackal"
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Real-life terrorist
Ilich Ramirez Sanchez
, already known under the code name "Carlos", was further nicknamed "The Jackal" after a copy of
The Day of the Jackal
belonging to a friend was found in his hiding place.
[10]
References
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Bibliography
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External links
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