Ike's Spies (9 page)

At 2
P.M
., Christmas Eve, Bonnier strolled into the Summer
Palace. No one challenged him. The usual guards seemed to be missing; it was quiet in the palace. Bonnier knew his way around and placed himself in a waiting room outside Darlan's study. About 3
P.M
. Darlan returned from lunch. As the admiral approached his study, Bonnier stepped forward and fired two shots from his .25-caliber revolver at point-blank range. Darlan died almost immediately. When his aide, Commandant Hourcade, rushed forward, Bonnier shot him in the leg, but then Darlan's chauffeur managed to knock Bonnier down and disarm him. He was hustled off to police headquarters.
²⁸

AS THESE EVENTS TRANSPIRED
, Eisenhower was not even in Algeria, but at the front lines in Tunisia. For the preceding two weeks he had been trying to get an offensive started for Tunis, but heavy rains, cold weather, and poor roads had frustrated his attempts. The mud made movement impossible, and local intelligence—the Arab natives—said the rains would be worse in January and February. General Kenneth Anderson, commanding the British First Army, which was to lead the drive on Tunis, starting off on Christmas Eve, told Ike that the offensive could not begin before March. It was “a bitter disappointment” to Eisenhower.

Equally frustrating was the status of the French North African Army. As a result of the Darlan Deal, General Juin and his forces had taken their place beside the Allies on the battlefront. The British held the positions in the north, facing Tunis; the Americans were at the southern end of the line; the French held the hilly area in the center. The problem was that Juin refused to take orders from Anderson. Anderson wanted Ike to talk to Juin, which Ike agreed to do. On Christmas Eve the two men met at a farmhouse that was serving as headquarters for the British V Corps. They had just sat down for dinner when Ike was summoned to the telephone.

Clark was calling from Algiers. He told Ike there was big trouble and he should return immediately. Clark, according to Butcher, put his message “in terms so guarded that Ike suspected, but wasn't sure, that Darlan had been shot.”
²⁹
Within the hour, Eisenhower, Butcher, a staff officer, and their driver had piled into Ike's armored Cadillac and were off. They drove all through the night and most of Christmas Day, stopping only to get fuel and for breakfast at the command post in Constantine, where the news of Darlan's
assassination was confirmed. They lunched from emergency rations along the road and reached Algiers around 6
P.M
. on Christmas Day. “Ike's comment while en route home from the east,” Butcher recorded, “was that Darlan's death ended one problem, but no doubt created many more.”
³⁰

Upon arrival at the Hotel St. Georges, Eisenhower's first act was to write a sympathy note to Mrs. Darlan. Then he had his staff brief him on events. Next he sent word to the “Imperial Council” (the top Vichy officials in North Africa) that he wanted Giraud elected to replace Darlan, which was immediately done. Giraud then held a drumhead trial, found Bonnier guilty, and much to Bonnier's surprise ordered a firing squad to shoot him. No attempt had been made to force Bonnier to reveal who his fellow conspirators were. Because Bonnier had been assured that only a pretense would be made of executing him, he displayed impressive courage and calmness in front of the firing squad.
³¹
The execution was real, however; it was carried out during a German air raid on December 27, at a moment when antiaircraft fire drowned out the sound of the firing squad's guns.
³²

The reason for the lack of an investigation, according to Rosfelder, was plain. The authorities, Rosfelder noted, “showed an evident willingness to minimize the whole affair.” For this phenomenon, Rosfelder said, “there is only one explanation: five or six political or patriotic groups had Darlan in their sights and each one believed for quite some time that it was ‘his' plot that had succeeded.” Indeed, the police superintendent “had even pushed his obligingness to the point of burning all our files … still another who believed in the success of ‘his' plot!”
³³

It was indeed true that few men ever had more enemies than Darlan, which opened the way to wild speculation in the world press about who was behind Bonnier. The Germans said the British Secret Service did it in order to forestall American influence in North Africa. Nazi radio stations claimed that Darlan's last words were, “Now the British have succeeded in reaching their goal.” From Italy, Radio Rome declared that the conspirators were “French de Gaullists in the pay of the British intelligence service.”
³⁴
The Spanish press blamed Vichy. The New York
Times
said Bonnier was an Italian.
³⁵

Colonel Eddy, meanwhile, dispersed the
OSS
agents working with Corps Franc d'Afrique for fear they would be implicated.
Eddy sent Major Carleton Coon, who was in charge of the unit Bonnier belonged to, off to Tunisia before he could be accused of collusion in the murder.
³⁶

At the same time, Ike was trying to manipulate the French so that all Frenchmen outside of Vichy could join together to fight the Nazis, which meant in the first instance a rapprochement between Giraud and de Gaulle. De Gaulle wanted to come to North Africa, and Ike tried to convince Giraud to allow him to do so. But on December 27, Giraud told Ike that de Gaulle should wait until the political and military situation in North Africa had become more settled.
³⁷
Eisenhower agreed to wait, and on December 28 he wired Churchill, “I believe that Giraud will serve as the medium through which the desired rapprochement can soon be effected if the matter is not pressed too precipitately.”
³⁸

The next evening, December 29, a highly agitated
OSS
officer rushed into
PWB
headquarters to announce breathlessly, “They've arrested all our friends!”
³⁹
Algiers was in an uproar as squads of Vichy police descended on their victims at their homes, handcuffed them, and whisked them out of the city. One rumor had it that only Gaullists were being arrested; another held that it was Dubreuil and his gang. Twelve men were arrested; four were police officers, and two or three were said to have helped the Americans land.

Charles Collingwood of
CBS
interviewed Giraud, who told him that the conspirators who had murdered Darlan also intended to assassinate Giraud and Murphy. Giraud said the arrested men were being held in preventive arrest and would not be executed. “We have arrested people who helped the Americans to land and those who helped the Germans,” Giraud told Collingwood, “as well as those police who knew of the plot against Darlan but did not tell their superiors. I am following the French thesis that it is better to prevent than to punish.”

Collingwood asked about the policemen who had been arrested. “They knew that Darlan was going to be murdered and did not warn their superiors. I did not want to start that again. I only carried out the arrests when I knew beyond doubt that there were to be other assassinations.”
⁴⁰

The
OSS
had different explanations of what happened and why. One agent reported that Dubreuil and the Cagoulards had attempted a royalist coup d'etat.
⁴¹
Agent Taylor believed that all those arrested were Gaullists who had supported the American
landings. He protested through “every bureaucratic channel, political and military, formal and informal, in a vain attempt to make Eisenhower realize the catastrophic effect on world opinion if we tolerated this vindictive Vichy counteroffensive against the underground allies who had risked their lives in our common cause a few weeks earlier.”

But Ike refused to act. Taylor went to Murphy. Surely Murphy would not allow the very men he had conspired with in October to be arrested on the pretext that they had designs on his life? To Taylor's amazement, Murphy gave the same reply Ike had used: he could not interfere in an internal French matter. Taylor's bitter conclusion was, “Darlan had been our son-of-a-bitch, and Giraud was now, and whoever was against an officially approved son-of-a-bitch must ipso facto be against us.”

Taylor turned his
PWB
headquarters at the Hotel de Cornouailles into a sanctuary for Frenchmen being hunted by the Algiers police. One of the refugees was the head of that police force, but Henri d'Astier had learned that his own police agents were looking for him, supposedly with orders to shoot on sight. Taylor gave d'Astier a
PWB
jeep to take him to the cathedral for mass. Two weeks later d'Astier was arrested.
⁴²

Giraud had thrown a wide net, as he had indicated to Collingwood, arresting men of all political persuasions and backgrounds. By so doing, he implicated everybody in Darlan's murder, which may very well have been his objective, as it is probable that he himself did not know who the successful conspirators were, but assumed it could have been any one of a half-dozen groups.
⁴³

Within a year, after de Gaulle and Giraud had achieved their rapprochement, they joined hands to make Bonnier into a hero. On the first anniversary of his execution, according to the Associated Press, “a group of about 50 persons, the majority of whom fill official positions under the orders of Generals Giraud and de Gaulle, celebrated the anniversary of the death of Fernand Eugene Bonnier de la Chapelle, who assassinated Admiral Darlan, by placing a wreath on his tomb and observing a minute of silence.”

That incredible scene was followed up a week later by an incredible act—the Algerian Court of Appeals, under de Gaulle's control, annulled the sentence against Bonnier, citing as its reason “documents found which showed conclusively that Admiral Darlan had been acting against the interests of France and that Bonnier's
act had been accomplished in the interests of the liberation of France.”

Bonnier's crime disappeared from the record. As a consequence, so did that of any of his accomplices and the case was closed. Shortly thereafter, Henri d'Astier and his associates were released; the day he got out of jail, d'Astier received the Croix de Guerre with palms from Giraud, and the following day the Medal of the Resistance from de Gaulle. Two days later de Gaulle named him a member of the Consultative Assembly.
⁴⁴

Because of these actions, and because de Gaulle benefited so immediately and decisively from Darlan's removal, most commentators have pointed to him as the ultimate source of the conspiracy. But although both Giraud and de Gaulle were delighted to have Darlan out of the way and made no effort to hide their pleasure, they were not necessarily in on the plot, either together or as individuals. Rosfelder's confession, published thirty years after the event, and confirmed by much other evidence gathered in that time,
⁴⁵
raises many questions about the ultimate conspirators. Certainly Abbé Cordier was at the heart of it, and he worked for d'Astier, who worked for Dubreuil. And beyond Dubreuil? Another Frenchman? Or perhaps an American?

The ultimate source of authority in North Africa was Franklin Roosevelt. He put it bluntly when he cabled Churchill on January 2, 1943, “I feel very strongly that, in view of the fact in North Africa we have a military occupation, our commanding general has complete control of all affairs, both civil and military. Our French friends must not be permitted to forget this for a moment. If these local officials will not cooperate, they will have to be replaced.”
⁴⁶

Robert Murphy was the President's personal representative in North Africa, as well as head of an
OSS
organization that included Major Coon's Corps Franc, of which Bonnier was a member, and Taylor's
PWB
, which had close contacts with d'Astier. Further, Murphy was a close friend of Dubreuil and had made a strong commitment to Giraud, while he detested de Gaulle (as did Roosevelt). The question arises, was Murphy a part of the conspiracy? Was Darlan's murder the first assassination for the American secret service? Was Ike himself in on the plot? Does that explain the rather curious circumstance that at the moment the murder was committed the commanding general of all Allied operations in
North Africa was at a corps headquarters on a farm more than a day's drive from Algiers?

At the time, in 1942, few Americans would have believed it possible for their government to be involved in such dastardly work; a generation later, however, millions of Americans would take it for granted that if there was foul play and the predecessor of the
CIA
was in the area, and if the Americans benefited from the foul play, then the
OSS
must have been involved. These questions also persist because of Murphy's continued association with Dubreuil, whose hopes to become finance minister and the real power in a Giraud government (or prime minister under the Comte de Paris) disappeared when Giraud and de Gaulle got together in January 1943. De Gaulle despised Dubreuil as a collaborator. When de Gaulle emerged in the spring of 1943 as the head of government in Algiers, Dubreuil fled to Spain, where he joined a number of his old associates from the Cagoule.
⁴⁷
In 1944, following the liberation of France, Dubreuil slipped across the border. He was promptly arrested by French police on charges of having “negotiated with a foreign power.”
⁴⁸

Murphy used his position as Ike's chief political adviser to persuade the French to drop the charges against Dubreuil and held a party in Paris in celebration of Dubreuil's freedom.
⁴⁹
After the war, Murphy refused to discuss his loyalty to Dubreuil or events surrounding the murder of Darlan,
^*
but in his memoirs he made the astonishing statement that “the motive for the assassination of Darlan still remains a mystery.”
⁵⁰
In 1947, Dubreuil was tried for treason but acquitted; on July 12, 1955, he was shot to death by unknown assailants for unknown reasons on the doorstep of his Casablanca home.
⁵¹