Lajos Marton

From the Hungarian Wikipedia page [1]

Vitez Lajos Marton (Born April 27, 1931, Pósfa) Hungarian soldier. For his activity in the Revolution in 1956, he was sentenced to death in Hungary. After emigrating in France, he was involved in the attempted assassination of General Charles de Gaulle. He was sentenced to death as a result, which was changed to 20 years imprisonment, but he was released in 1968 by amnesty.

He was born on April 27, 1931 in the Pósfa family of peasants in Vas county. The irredentist environment of that time had an impact on the perception of life and nationview. He had been drawn up for military career since his youth and wanted to re-occupy the areas torn off by the Trianon Peace Treaty. In 1943 he participated in a competition that was created by Miklós Horthy's wife and won the fourth prize. With this competition he won a scholarship for a degree. He studied grammar school at the Benedictine I Ferenc József High School in Kőszegen. In the Stalinist system following the Second World War, for example, he refused to condemn Cardinal József Mindszenty. Then he left school for a short time and returned, as his political views did not affect his learning outcomes, and in 1951 he achieved excellent results.

Despite the urging of by one of his teachers, he did not choose the engineering course but kept up with his earlier idea and made himself a soldier. He entered the Hungarian People's Army, where he was deputy in 1952 and he attended aeronautical training for two years in Szolnok . Even before he became a soldier he had determined that if he got in, he would provide secret information to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to support Communism fight against terrorism. This could take place in 1955, as it was appointed to the Air Force National Command. In this position, he collected dozens of secret documents, which he handed over to the US Embassy. He wrote a total of four reports, of which three were passed on. In 1956, he was actively involved in the November struggles and refused to sign the statement in which the officers condemned the Revolution and for this reason he resigned.

His emigration began on December 10, 1956. he planned to be home again in half a year, but his wish could only be fulfilled in 1987. He lived in Austria and France, where he wanted to contact the NATO authorities. He wanted to return to Hungary - he was sentenced to death as a saboteur in absentia - and wanted to search for his fourth report, which he had not yet been able to submit. However, as NATO did not recognize his activity, it stopped supporting the organization.

In 1958, General Charles de Gaulle regained power with the promise of defending French Algeria. But he could not keep this promise, and Algeria still won his independence. Lajos Marton sympathized with the far-right French circles, and he was committed to the Jeune Nation (Young Nation) fight against the dispatch of French Algeria who, after protests against Algeria's independence on November 4, 1956, organized a demonstration and captured the headquarters of the French Communist Party in Paris.

In 1962, OAS (L'Organisation armée secrète) offered to Marton to take part in an assassination against De Gaulle. Louis Marton immediately accepted the request. The assassination was among those who fired on De Gaulle's car, but none of his firing hit the president. Two other Hungarians were also present, Gyula Sári and László Varga, also using pseudonyms. The organizer of the assassination, Lieutenant Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, was sentenced to death and executed. Marton hid for a year after the assassination and was then arrested. At his trial, the death sentence at first instance was commuted to 20 years in prison. In 1968 he was released with amnesty and in 1980 he was granted French citizenship. He has been married in France and has three children.

Additional information from the French Wikipedia page [2]:

In July-August 1983, Lajos Marton is part of the Omega Commando as a "technical advisor" within the framework of the intervention of the DGSE in Chad, to prepare the operation Manta which repulsed an offensive on Chad composed of Chadian rebels led by Goukouni Oueddei and under the control of Muammar Gaddafi.

He recounts his memories in the book 'I Must Kill de Gaulle', published in 2002, including unpublished details on the Petit-Clamart attack. These memoirs were published in 2003 in Hungary under the title Meg kell ölni De Gaulle-t.

From 2004, Lajos Marton took steps in Hungary to gain access to the secret Communist archives concerning him. He gets over 1,100 pages about him. Among all the information revealed by these secret archives, we learn in particular that the Hungarian Communist secret services tried to use the Petit-Clamart attack to scramble Franco-German relations, by attempting to have the thesis that the three Hungarians from the attack had been recruited by the West German secret services.

The discovery of these secret documents as well as the wish to complete his story (partly revised by the Editions du Rocher) pushed Lajos Marton to republish his memoirs in 2011, in France as in Hungary.