Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry (19 October 1927 – 11 March 1963) was a French Air Force lieutenant colonel, military air-weaponry engineer and the creator of the Nord SS.10/SS.11 missiles.

The event is depicted in Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal and in the 1973 film adaptation of the same name, in which Bastien-Thiry is portrayed by actor Jean Sorel.

After returning to power with the stated intention of maintaining the French departments of Algeria, in September 1959 de Gaulle reversed his policy and supported Algerian independence.

According to Dr. Pérez, OAS chief of intelligence and operations section (ORO), a messenger from Vieil État Major named Jean Bichon had met Bastien-Thiry in Algiers, but no further collaboration ensued.

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.

De Gaulle was said to have credited the unusual resilience of the unarmored Citroën DS with saving his life: although the shots had punctured two of the tyres, the car escaped at full speed.

Bastien-Thiry 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,[4] Bastien-Thiry claimed that while the other conspirators might have been trying to kill the head of state, he had only been attempting to capture de Gaulle in order to deliver him to a panel of sympathetic judges.

Bastien-Thiry, who had been deemed fit to stand trial by psychiatrists despite a history of clinical depression, was convicted and sentenced to death, as were two of his accomplices, de la Tocnaye and Prevost.

The only conspirator to escape was OAS member Georges Watin (also known as "The Lame Woman"[5] or "The Limp" because of a childhood accident),[6] who died in February 1994 at age 71.