Word: mitterrand
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Morocco-born Pesquet, an unstable and bizarre fellow, was hardly a man whose word was to be preferred to Mitterrand's, except for one fact: nine hours before the attack, he said, he had written a letter describing exactly what was going to happen, and had posted it to himself, care of general delivery. When police collected the letter from the post office, they found that it did indeed describe the attack correctly, even pinpointed the spot at which Mitterrand had abandoned his car after the shooting...
...Matter of Teleguidance. Challenged to explain Pesquet's letter, Mitterrand began to hedge. He had, he admitted, met Pesquet twice in the days immediately preceding the attack, but the shooting itself, he insisted, was no fake. According to Mitterrand's new version, Pesquet had appeared one afternoon with the story that he had been assigned by a rightist underground organization to murder Mitterrand, but did not have the heart to do it; instead, Pesquet proposed that "for safety's sake" Mitterrand start using the roundabout route home that he had followed on the night of the shooting...
...then had Pesquet known exactly where Mitterrand would stop his car? And why had not Mitterrand, onetime Minister of Interior and known to every police prefect in France, insisted from the very beginning upon special police protection? To this, the usually incisive Mitterrand offered a variety of answers: there was not time; he did not propose to be an informer; he was afraid for the safety of his sons. "Now that I look back," he summed up cryptically, "I reckon that I must have been teleguided and intoxicated...
...Dust Gatherers. It strained credulity that Pesquet, a political nobody, had succeeded in "teleguiding" so experienced a lawyer and cold-blooded an operator as null Mitterrand. Pesquet's peculiar personal history suggested another explanation. A man who maintains two homes on no visible income, Pesquet has eight times been accused of offenses ranging from fraud to seduction, but each time the proceedings have been suspended. To practiced students of French affaires, such a record argued that Pesquet had made himself useful to the police-and thus perhaps had come to Mitterrand's notice when he was Minister...
This kind of past double relationship might explain why Leftist Mitterrand and avowed Rightist Pesquet got together again. But for what purpose? Neither man's explanation entirely satisfied. Without offering any proof, Parisian newsmen contrived a more devious explanation: that Leftist Mitterrand and Rightist Pesquet. equally eager to discredit the regime of Gaullist Premier Michel Debre, could have collaborated in the mutual hope of toppling Debre and with the common intention of doublecrossing each other after the deed was done...