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by Erin E. Thompson, USAICoE Staff Historian
ASSISTANT ARMY ATTACHÉ MURDERED IN PARIS
On Jan. 18, 1982, assistant Army attaché Lt. Col. Charles R. Ray was shot and killed outside his apartment in Paris, France. His death marked the second in a series of attacks against American and Israeli diplomats in France.
Born in New York City in September 1938, Ray attended college at the University of Santa Clara, California, where he earned a master’s degree in history. He was commissioned into the U.S. Army in 1960 and trained as a counterintelligence agent, serving as an advisor to the South Vietnamese forces from 1962–1963. He redeployed to Saigon three years later. His activities in Vietnam earned him three Bronze Stars, two Army Commendation Medals, and the Meritorious Service Award.
Upon returning to the United States, Ray began training as a military attaché. His first assignment was as the assistant Army attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Paris. On the morning of Jan. 18, 1982, eighteen months after arriving in Paris, 43-year-old Ray was shot and killed by an unidentified man as he walked to his car. President Ronald Reagan released a statement mourning Ray’s death, adding “the wanton act of his murderers reinforces our determination to stamp out international terrorism and prevent similar tragedies in the future.” The president posthumously promoted Ray to colonel on Jun. 3, 1982.
Colonel Ray’s murder was immediately linked to an attempted assassination two months earlier. On Nov. 12, 1981, Lt. Col. Christian Chapman, the deputy chief of mission in Paris and acting embassy charge d'affaires, narrowly escaped being shot by a lone gunman. Several months later, on Mar. 31, 1982, a woman in a white beret fatally shot Israeli diplomat Yacov Barsimantov in the lobby of his Paris apartment. French police reported the gun used in Barsimantov’s murder was the same used in the killing of Colonel Ray. Later that summer, Roderick Grant, the embassy commercial counselor, discovered a magnetic bomb attached to his car. An accident during the disposal process killed a member of the French bomb squad.
Although French, U.S., and Israeli authorities initially blamed the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) for the attacks, it was the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions (LARF) that later claimed responsibility. The LARF was established in the late 1970s by Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, who was wounded during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1978 and joined the PLO-sponsored Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), before breaking off to form his own Maronite Christian group. The LARF stated in a press release that they were targeting U.S. officials for “preparing new aggression [in Lebanon], this time through the intermediary of the Zionist occupation forces.” The group also took responsibility for another attempted assassination in March 1984, when U.S. Consul General Robert Homme, who the LARF falsely claimed was working for the Central Intelligence Agency, was wounded while backing out of his driveway in Strasbourg. The gun used in the attack was the same caliber used in the 1982 assassinations.
As the leader of the LARF, Abdallah was charged with orchestrating the murders of Colonel Ray and Barsimantov and the attempted assassination of Homme. In April 1984, French police discovered the gun linked to the assassinations in Abdallah’s apartment along with a cache of other weapons. He was arrested in October after entering a police station in Lyon claiming “Mossad assassins” were stalking him. Abdallah was sentenced to life in prison in 1987. He was scheduled to be paroled on Dec. 6, 2024 but remains in prison while his release is challenged in the French courts.
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| Date Taken: | 01.10.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 01.10.2025 14:29 |
| Story ID: | 488918 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 44 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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