Departures of note

Paul Barril was a French gendarmerie captain who helped found the GIGN, the national gendarmerie's elite intervention unit, in 1974 and served as its second-in-command before taking interim command in the early 1980s. In 1979 he was part of the small GIGN team dispatched to Saudi Arabia to help end the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. After the 1982 rue Marbeuf bombing, he joined Christian Prouteau in creating the counterterrorism cell of the Élysée during François Mitterrand's presidency.

Barril was implicated in two major political affairs of the Mitterrand era: the "Irish of Vincennes" case, in which a court ruled that the operation was a setup orchestrated by him, and the Élysée wiretapping scandal. He left the gendarmerie in 1984 and built a career in private security, founding companies such as Epsylon and SECRETS and advising heads of state in Africa, notably in Rwanda before and during the 1994 genocide, activities that made him one of the most controversial figures in French security circles.

He published several books about his career, including Guerres secrètes à l'Élysée and Les archives secrètes de Mitterrand. Barril also spent time in custody in 2007 in connection with the Concorde casino case, from which he was later acquitted. He suffered from Parkinson's disease and other long-term illness for many years before his death at 80.