DARLAN, EMILE• 133vice, and in February 1919 he was appointed chief of security to the
Paris Peace Conference. In 1929 Dansey was appointed SIS’s station
commander in Rome and later he was to develop theZ Organisa-
tion, which operated in Western Europe in parallel with the semi-
transparent network ofpassport control officers. Always abrasive,
Dansey acquired a reputation as a ruthless professional with little
time forSpecial Operations Executiveand was promoted deputy
chief toStewart Menzies, retiring in 1944 to take a job withSir
Alexander Korda’s London Films. He died in June 1947, and his
funeral was attended by a handful of wartime colleagues, among
them Noel Coward.DARLAN, EMILE.The pro-Nazi Admiral Emile Darlan was vice pre-
mier of the Vichy French government and was subsequently put in
command of the Vichy forces by Pierre Laval. He happened to be in
Algiers when the Allied invasion of North Africa occurred and had
quickly decided to cooperate with the Allies. His previous politics,
however, made him an awkward supporter for the British and Ameri-
can governments to deal with, and he certainly complicated their re-
lations with Charles de Gaulle, who was deeply suspicious of him.
On Christmas Eve 1942, Darlan was assassinated by aSpecial Oper-
ations Executive (SOE) weapons instructor, Lieutenant Fernand
Bonnier de la Chapelle, who had been seconded to Ain Taya. De la
Chapelle and his accomplice, Captain Gilbert Sabatier, had been as-
signed tomassinghamand had been issued revolvers on the author-
ity of David Keswick. It was one of these that de la Chapelle used to
shoot the hated Admiral Darlan. A summary court-martial was held
almost immediately and a French firing squad shot de la Chapelle
two days later. Even as he was led to his execution, before dawn on
Boxing Day, the 20-year-old refused to say where he had obtained
the gun or name his coconspirators. Sabatier, who went missing after
the murder, was arrested in January 1943 and charged with supplying
de la Chapelle with his gun and plotting to overthrow the state.
Somehow the British negotiated his release and the entire matter was
discreetly dropped. For their part, the AmericanOffice of Strategic
Servicesclosed the camp at Ain Taya.
SOE’s complicity in the assassination has never been established,
but the incident certainly helped the Allies in their dealings with the