Dossier mode
Gladio, the OAS, and the War on de Gaulle
The same investigation, restaged one beat at a time. Drive it with the arrow keys, space, or autoplay. Nothing is cut from the piece — long runs are split across frames. Read the full investigation or open the The Dulles Blueprint hub.
Gladio and the War on de Gaulle.
On an August afternoon in 1962, gunmen raked the president of France with more than a hundred rounds. He survived. The far-right campaign against him is documented — the Gladio conspiracy around it is not.
A far-right underground of French officers waged a real terror campaign to kill de Gaulle over Algeria — and the deck separates that documented record from the contested claim that NATO's secret stay-behind army was behind it.
The OAS campaign is fact. The Gladio linkage is a real but disputed thread, not a proven one.
fired at de Gaulle's Citroën DS at Petit-Clamart on August 22, 1962. He and his wife were unharmed; the plot's leader was executed the following March — the last firing-squad execution in France.
Britannica; Le Monde archive
The OAS was a far-right underground of French officers and settlers who used terrorism to stop Algerian independence — and to kill de Gaulle.
Founded in early 1961 out of the generals' putsch in Algiers, the Organisation armée secrète waged a bombing and assassination campaign against de Gaulle's policy of Algerian self-determination, branding him a traitor to French Algeria. Its explicit aims included his death.
On August 22, 1962, an OAS commando under Lt. Col. Bastien-Thiry ambushed de Gaulle's motorcade at Petit-Clamart. He survived; Bastien-Thiry was executed in March 1963.
More than a hundred rounds were fired on the Citroën DS southwest of Paris; de Gaulle and his wife were unharmed. Bastien-Thiry was convicted of an attempt on the president's life and executed by firing squad on March 11, 1963 — the last person executed by that method in France.
The Petit-Clamart plot was the direct inspiration for Frederick Forsyth's 'The Day of the Jackal.'
Forsyth's 1971 thriller opens with a fictionalized retelling of the ambush and Bastien-Thiry's execution, then imagines the OAS hiring a foreign professional assassin after its own plots fail. The premise is drawn directly from the real OAS campaign.
In 1966, de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO's integrated military command and expelled NATO headquarters from French soil.
Announced March 7, 1966: France left the integrated command while remaining in the alliance; all non-French NATO forces and the political HQ had to leave (it moved from Paris to Brussels in 1967). France did not rejoin the integrated command until 2009. The rupture is in NATO's own institutional history.
NATO's clandestine 'stay-behind' networks — later known as Operation Gladio — existed across Western Europe, including France. What individual national cells actually did is far less clear.
From the late 1940s, Western intelligence services, coordinated with NATO and the CIA, built secret cells meant to activate as resistance in the event of a Soviet invasion. Their existence was publicly confirmed in November 1990 when Italian PM Andreotti disclosed Italy's network, codenamed Gladio, triggering inquiries across Europe. France ran its own stay-behind arrangements. The existence is documented; the operational record is not.
That the French stay-behind network was itself entangled in the anti-de-Gaulle terror.
The load-bearing evidence is a 1992 admission by Admiral Pierre Lacoste, former DGSE director, that 'certain elements' of the network were involved in terror against de Gaulle's Algerian policy — reaching a broad audience mainly through Daniele Ganser's 2005 book. But whether the network AS SUCH — as opposed to individual officers who also joined the OAS — was directed against de Gaulle is unproven, and Ganser's book is sharply criticized by intelligence historians. A real, sourced, actively contested thread — not established fact.
“Certain elements of the [stay-behind] network were involved in terrorist activities against de Gaulle and his Algerian policy.”
The single admission the linkage rests on — carried as attributed, and disputed by intelligence historians.
Why it matters, and where it connects.
The NATO/CIA stay-behind networks are real and belong to the Dulles Blueprint — the same doctrine of unaccountable Cold War apparatus that runs through CIA Crimes. But this piece is also a discipline exercise: a documented terror campaign against de Gaulle sits next to a conspiracy claim the record does not carry, and the deck keeps them apart. Real secret armies do not make every attached theory true.