GIGN

Roland Môntins, decorated with the Légion d'honneur, took part in more than two hundred operations with the GIGN (Groupe d'intervention de la gendarmerie nationale), including the famous Marignane operation. He belongs to those heroes who work in the shadows — men whose names are unknown to us and whose faces are never seen. Men who, at the risk of their own lives, fight and neutralize every form of violence. Men who perform the "finest job in the world" by saving others. This elite gendarme, who spent more than thirteen years with the GIGN, recounts the history of the unit and how Christian Prouteau, its founder, turned it into one of the finest special forces units in the world. He shares unpublished anecdotes and firsthand accounts, and lifts the veil on the behind-the-scenes details of spectacular operations that resolved several major crises. These include the 1976 kidnapping of children in the French enclave of Djibouti; and the 1988 arrest of the then "public enemy number one", recounted here for the first time. He takes us into the hostage-taking of GIGN members in Ouvéa that same year. He explains how, in 1994 at Marignane, the unit saved the passengers of the "Death Airbus" — an aircraft that was intended to crash into Paris and trigger a French 9/11. Over forty years, the GIGN has conducted more than eighteen hundred high-risk operations, neutralized two hundred and eighty armed individuals, and freed six hundred and ten hostages. This unflinching account reveals how the unit became the rampart standing between international terrorism and organized crime.