chief of intelligence and operations section (ORO), a messenger from Vieil État Major, named Jean Bichon, had met Bastien-Thiry in Algiers, but that was as far as it got. Bastien-Thiry never had contact with the OAS organization and he never stated that his direct chief was Jean Bichon, arrested later. Bastien-Thiry led the most prominent of several assassination attempts on de Gaulle. He and his group of three shooters (Lt. Alain de La Tocnaye, Jacques Prevost, and Georges Watin) made preparations in the Paris suburb of Petit-Clamart. On 22 August 1962, while Bastien-Thiry functioned as a lookout, de Gaulle's car (a Citroën DS) and some nearby shops were raked with machine-gun fire. De Gaulle and his wife and entourage escaped, uninjured. After the attempt, holes from fourteen bullets were found in the president's vehicle, one of which barely missed the president's head; another twenty were found to have struck the nearby Café Trianon; and an additional 187 spent shell casings were found on the pavement. De Gaulle was said to have credited the unusual resilience of the Citroën DS with saving his life: even though the shots had punctured two of the armoured tyres, the car escaped at full speed. Arrest and trial Thanks to intelligence gained by the authorities from the interrogation of Antoine Argoud, Bastien-Thiry was arrested when he came back from a mission in the United Kingdom. He was brought to trial before a military tribunal presided over by General Roger Gardet, which ran from 28 January to 4 March 1963. He was defended by a legal team consisting of attorneys Jacques Isorni, Richard Dupuy, Bernard Le Coroller, and Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour who was later a candidate for the presidency in 1965. While claiming that the death of de Gaulle would have been justified by the "genocide" of the European population of newly independent Algeria (a reference mainly to the Oran massacre of 1962) and the killing of several tens or hundreds of thousands of mostly pro-French Muslims (harkis) by the FLN, he claimed that while the other conspirators might admittedly have been trying to kill the head of state, he had only been attempting to capture de Gaulle so as to deliver him to a panel of sympathetic judges. Bastien-Thiry, who had been certified as "normal" by psychiatrists in spite of a history of clinical depression (caused by a period of overwork), was convicted and sentenced to