#'possibly of old age because we certainly aren't the one who'll kill you'

[frenchly-anxious]

If James Bond was French, she would be a 54 years old woman working as a business coach, and there would be no movie because all the villains would be insanely bad at their job

Or: if we French people can’t make good spy/mercenary movies, it’s simply because our real spies/mercenaries absolutely suck.

Story time.

A few months ago, I stumbled upon the craziest news report of my life so far. It started small: an assassination attempt last July, just outside of Paris. Like, wow, that sucks, but okay. Yet as I’m watching the news, I realized they made a full documentary on that. Weird, I thought.

Except no, it made perfect sense to make a big deal out of it because seriously, that story just keeps on giving to the point I'm still waiting to be told it was a joke. Let me share this masterpiece.

The story starts unexpectedly with... a father driving his son to daycare. And as he’s driving, he spots a car haphazardly parked, with 2 men inside. As soon as he meets their eyes, they seem to panic: one feigns to sleep, while the other ducks forward to hide his face. They’re both dressed in black and are wearing gloves in the middle of July. The father drives on, stops a few streets away and call the police.

At this point, I was like “Who are those 2 buffoon? They reacted the way a child does when he knows he stayed up past his bedtime”.

The police arrived and searched them. They found out the car had fake license plates but more than that, they found a bag containing a loaded gun and its makeshift silencer, as well as 2 army knifes. The men were obviously arrested on the spot.

The police, expecting some kind of burglars, was in for quite the ride.

Very quickly, one of them started talking. He told the police he was a member of the DGSE (= kinda the French equivalent of CIA, in less popular), and they were on an official mission. In what I can only assume was an amazing show of self-control, an officer succeeded in not laughing out loud and instead asked him to elaborate. Which he did. He calmly explained they were on a mission to assassinate a woman who was actually working as a spy for Mossad.

I imagine the officers politely nodded as they were taking notes and then after leaving the room they started laughing hysterically while filing papers for a transfer to a psychiatric ward.

Except than when they checked, the 2 men were indeed working for the DGSE.

The what the fuck intensified, but not in the expected direction.

The police obviously turned to the woman they said they were about to assassinate. The victim indeed lived right where the DGSE agents were waiting. She was a successful “business coach”, living a quiet life and was absolutely not expecting to see police show up at her doorstep saying “hey, so, you basically almost got killed by two men waiting in front of your house, who had been following you for a few days and had also put a tracker on your car, and, well, they’re saying you’re actually working for Mossad. Can we come in?”

I can’t imagine how baffling that conversation must have been.

That 54 years old woman, Marie-Hélène Dini, had obviously no link with the Mossad. At all.

In this story of ridiculously bad mercenaries, the only one who acted correctly was her: after answering to the police, who probably told her “well that was unexpected. Better be extra careful from now on. Have a great day, ma’am!”, she turned off her phone, packed a few things and left her home, not telling anyone where she was going, and kept moving from place to place every couple of days to make sure no one could find her.

She was scared and confused, because who could want her dead?

The answer to that question is as baffling as the rest of the story: it was another “business coach”, who didn’t appreciated the fact she wanted to regulate their profession and thought the appropriate solution to that what to eliminate her.

But that’s not all! How did this guy found mercenaries to begin with? Well that’s easy: he had contacts because he was part of masonic lodge, just like our two stupid mercenaries.

Yes, freemasonry has entered the chat.

The story just shifted from mercenaries to secret organization.

One of the suspect, who was seriously talkative for a secret agent from a secret organization, explained they had other contracts like that. Only one resulted in an assassination so far: Laurent Pasquali, an ex-driver of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. He had indeed suddenly disappeared in 2018, his squeleton only found a year later without much clues of what had happened. Well, he apparently scammed the wrong sponsor, who decided to engage someone to bring back their money... and that someone apparently failed spectacularly because “the contract went wrong” and they killed him. Talk about going wrong.

The police linked a few other cases to these guys and a few of their “friends”: arson, violence, assassination attempts,...

All eyes obviously turned to the DGSE. Who went: “We can’t deny a few of those lunatics were working for us, but we don’t have ANYTHING to do with their mercenary/freemason job on the side!”

And if it looks like they’re not lying, it still isn’t very reassuring to see who is working for our foreign intelligence agency (granted, they were apparently just security guards for a DGSE site, but still)

So anyway. As I was saying:

James Bond isn’t French and there is a reason for that.

(because if she was, she would be a 54 years old woman working as a business coach, and there would be no movie because all the villains would be insanely bad at their job)