Jackal (The Day of the Jackal)


The Jackal is a fictional character, the villain 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, the President of France. The book was published on 7 June 1971, in the year following de Gaulle's death, and became an instant bestseller. In 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 the First Lady of the United States, Emily Cowan, as target of the assassination.

Biographical summary

Main novel plot

At the beginning of the novel, the Jackal plans to continue working as an assassin until he has enough money to retire. The money paid to the Jackal to assassinate an Egyptian target had been enough to keep him in luxury for several years, but the offer of US$500,000 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 leaders in charge of the plot must not talk to anybody about the matter, 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?".
Taking his usual elaborate precautions, the Jackal arranges a false passport and 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, as well as a special sniper rifle. He kills the forger, who attempts to request for more money. He later goes to France to reconnoitre the best location and does research about Charles de Gaulle, before concluding that the best time to kill the French President is on Liberation Day.
Unfortunately for the Jackal, the French Action Service is able to capture and interrogate Rodin's personal bodyguard, one of the few men who is broadly aware of a plot, if not the actual details.
Using OAS agent "Valmy" as a cut-out, the Jackal is kept fully informed of the French police's pursuit of him. On two occasions when the police get too close, he 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 which warns people to be careful of Martin Schulberg.
Finally, on 25 August 1963, Liberation Day, the Jackal tries to shoot de Gaulle with his rifle, which he had hidden inside a stainless steel crutch. However, the French president unexpectedly moves his head at the last moment, causing the Jackal to miss. As the Jackal prepares for a second shot, he is discovered by French police detective Claude Lebel. He uses his second shot to kill a CRS man who accompanied the detective to the room, but Lebel shoots him dead with a MAT-49 before the man can load his third 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".
Later, 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 questioning. It is subsequently established that Calthrop was indeed on a holiday. Both the movie and the novel end with the same comment by British authorities, when their suspect, Charles Calthrop, arrives home from vacation, alive: "If the Jackal wasn't Calthrop, then who the hell was he?"

Appearance

The Jackal is described as a tall, blond Englishman in his early thirties living in Mayfair, London. 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". He is described by Forsyth as six feet tall, with a muscular build and few distinguishing features, one of which are his cold grey eyes. In the novel, it is stated he likes to wear striped shirts. During the course of the novel he changes his hair colour frequently.

Abilities and skills

The Jackal uses a numbered Swiss bank account to hold the proceeds of his work. He is a careful, sophisticated, meticulous killer who plans every detail of each assassination well in advance. No police force in Europe has ever heard of him, implying that he might change his code name for each of his missions and that he carries out his "contracts" in countries outside of Europe proper. It is also revealed the Jackal is an acquaintance of a former Congo mercenary called "Louis", whom he met in Katanga. "Louis" acts as a contact 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 an false identification paper, the Jackal gives his own, real, soon-to-expire driver's license 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 work. He considers his anonymity his main weapon and prefers to carry out missions alone.
In the novel, the international police forces hunting him speculate that he may have helped assassinate Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic by shooting the driver of his armoured car, causing it to crash. The 1973 movie 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.
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 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". While his last job has made him well off, he takes the OAS contract because he wishes to "retire". Although he keeps an expansive flat in London, he knows that De Gualle's avengers will not stop until they have tracked him down; with the Money from the OAS he plans to retire to Beirut, Lebanon.

Identities

The Jackal's true name is never discovered by the authorities or revealed to the reader. He uses the following identities in the course of the novel:
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". Within the movie, 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: in this film, he is an assassin hired by an Azerbaijani mobster to assassinate the First Lady of the United States, and characterized as a sociopath who takes pleasure in killing. He is pursued by agents of the FBI and the MVD, as well as a former Irish Republican Army sharpshooter with a vendetta against him.

"Carlos The Jackal"

Real-life terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, 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.