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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 Prévost 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.