Gabon, 1964 — military coup

Two independent Britannica articles (Léon M'ba biography; Gabon since independence) were fetched and VERIFIED directly this session, confirming the core narrative: a military uprising briefly deposed M'ba, and French forces sent by de Gaulle restored him. The Wikipedia article on the '1964 Gabonese coup d'état' could not be fetched as raw wikitext (the fetch tool served a cache-only summarized rendering), so its content was accessed via a summarizing fetch rather than the primary underlying newspaper articles themselves (New York Times pieces by Henry Giniger and Lloyd Garrison, and Ronald Matthews's 1966 book); those remain labeled CHAIN rather than VERIFIED because nytimes.com could not be reached directly this session (proxy rejected the request with a provenance/403 error) and the Matthews book was only confirmed to exist via a bookseller listing, not read. A separate claim about Jacques Foccart's personal motives (Elf oil interests, friendship with M'ba), sourced by Wikipedia to a 1997 NYT obituary by Craig R. Whitney, could not be verified directly (NYT access blocked) and is not included as a standalone fact, only noted among key figures. Sources disagree on casualty counts: official figures (1 French dead, 18 Gabonese dead) vs. unofficial figures (2 French dead, 25 Gabonese insurgents dead, 40+ Gabonese and 4 French wounded), both per the same Wikipedia-cited NYT report. The Cline Center dataset codes this event as a 'successful' coup on 1964-02-19 with record id 48102191964, but every secondary source found in this research describes the coup as failed/reversed by French intervention (M'ba restored to office February 21, 1964); this tension between the dataset's coding and the narrative sources is presented as-is per the sourcing standard rather than resolved. A University of Illinois master's thesis (Pederson, 'French Intervention in the 1964 Coup In Gabon,' 2000) is cited by Wikipedia for a detail about a predated authorization letter from Vice President Paul Marie Yembit, but this document could not be fetched (a Stanford-hosted PDF link looped on an http/https redirect) and so is omitted from the facts list rather than reported as CHAIN without confidence in its exact contents. | Method: fetched all 4 VERIFIED source_urls live (2 Britannica pages) and confirmed exact/near-exact quote matches for all 4 facts - no downgrades needed. Sanity-checked the Wikipedia CHAIN source across multiple independent re-fetches; content (leaders, troop counts, casualty figures, Aubame's sentence) was consistently corroborated and none looked invented, so kept as CHAIN. One caveat: could not independently confirm the specific page number "p.129" cited for the Matthews 1966 source on Aubame's sentencing (other fetches surfaced pp.117-130 for nearby Matthews citations, never exactly 129); the underlying claim is still well-corroborated so I kept the fact but softened the page-number claim to "approximate" rather than removing it. Main finding: the summary contained three specific claims (French troops from Dakar/Brazzaville; ~24-hour suppression timeline; M'ba jailing 150+ opponents afterward) that had no corresponding entry in the facts array, violating the "no summary claim without a sourced fact" rule. I independently verified via multiple live re-fetches of the Wikipedia article that all three claims are genuinely present in the article text (near-verbatim matches, including a "total punishment"/150-opponents quote that plausibly traces to the same Garrison NYT piece already used for the casualty-count fact), so rather than deleting true content I added two new CHAIN facts to close the sourcing gap. No facts were removed; target_leader and the Cline-dataset-vs-secondary-sources tension note in the summary were left unchanged as both check out.