The next morning at 7:00 A.M., I called Pascale at home and asked if she would like to take her daughter on a quick vacation to New York. Bien sûr! Of course she would. I picked her up at home, drove her to the airport and escorted her to the United departure gate. I didn’t want to leave her unprotected for a moment. When they called the flight, I gave her the sealed envelope and told her that when she arrived at Kennedy, she should take a taxi directly to the Mirror’s offices. She should give the envelope to Ed Weiss, the executive editor—delivering it personally, to him only, no matter who offered to help or demanded to see it. And then she could do whatever she liked.

The story created an uproar in France when it was published two days later, stripped across the top of our front page. Paris is a gossipy town, and many French reporters had known I was working on something hot. They knew I had been threatened, and when nothing had appeared in print, they had assumed we had caved in to the intimidation—just as the French reporters had done for so many years. When we dared to publish, despite the threats, we shamed the French press into action.

Maurice Costa issued a statement denouncing the story soon after it hit the streets in New York. He scheduled a news conference at the Ministry of Defense for that afternoon. My friend Olivier, full of congratulations that we had published despite the threats, said he’d heard that Costa intended to denounce me as a CIA spy. He would wrap himself in the tricolor, claiming that the story was part of an American plot to destabilize France.

But shortly before Costa’s press conference was scheduled to begin, official Paris began reading the first editions of France’s hyperserious afternoon paper, Le Monde. It carried a detailed, independent account of the Taillevent disaster, based on its own sources in Paris, confirming the essential details of what I had written. Costa’s briefing was delayed for an hour and then canceled outright. It was clear that the French Establishment was having second thoughts about going to the wall to defend Costa and his gang—especially when Le Monde appeared to be backing the other side. The defense minister and his murky network were relics of the past. They had suddenly become an embarrassment. With the grace and precision of a ballet dancer, France Inc. was moving in a new direction.