Twelve Desperate Miles (13 page)

Now the planned invasion entered a new phase. Already in Washington
and Virginia, Patton and his staff, along with the U.S. Navy, Army Supply Services, and the Army Transportation Corps, had begun the process of assembling the supplies, the troops, and the ships necessary to sail in late October to make an amphibious assault on Morocco in early November.

But what they needed at the moment was more intelligence. What would await them in Morocco? What would it take to land all those troops on that Atlantic shore? What hazards would they find on the beaches in Casablanca, Fedala, Safi, and Port Lyautey? What were surf conditions like? What fortifications awaited them? How many French troops were stationed at the various locales? Where were their reinforcements stationed, and how quickly would they be able to arrive after the invasion? Would the French fight at all?

There were Americans, Brits, and Frenchmen already in Morocco collecting answers to these questions and more. In fact, they’d been at the task for months. Now was the time to put their work to good use.

I
n early 1941, the U.S. State Department signed an economic pact with General Maxime Weygand, the military commander of Vichy forces in North Africa. The accord, negotiated by the chief American consul in North Africa, Robert Murphy, unfroze French assets in the United States and allowed the French government to buy cotton, sugar, tea, petroleum, and other essentials in the States and ship them home to North Africans. While the agreement drew criticism from American allies, it helped the Roosevelt administration maintain a continued connection with the French government in North Africa. Those ties, went the thinking of FDR and Robert Murphy, might someday serve as a means to avoid conflict between the two nations in the inevitable battle between the Axis and the United States; or to even help convince Pétain and Weygand to join forces with the Allies against Germany.

There was an ulterior motive in the agreement for the United States. French officials agreed to allow twelve American vice-consuls into the port cities in North Africa where these goods were to be unloaded. The expressed purpose of these postings was to observe the shipments and their distribution and to make sure these same goods weren’t being subsequently shipped out again to Axis powers. In fact, the twelve vice-consuls were recruited and selected by American intelligence organizations and, with the knowledge and blessing of the president himself, sent to North Africa to spy. While their cover assignments were with the Department of State, in fact they were the first wave of a group of agents who would eventually work within the newly founded OSS, whose boss was Colonel William Donovan, based in Washington. While in North Africa, they did their State Department assignments under the supervision of Murphy; the military work, which would soon be the major portion of their duties, was overseen by Colonel William Eddy, Donovan’s man in Tangier.

Franklin Roosevelt had asked Donovan, a World War I Medal of Honor winner, to form an agency that would essentially spy in foreign lands on behalf of the executive branch. Initially called the Coordinator of Information (COI), the OSS was created to gather intelligence and help coordinate the chaotic systems of spying that existed within the federal government leading into the war. At the time, each of the service branches, along with the FBI and the State Department, had its own intelligence division, and there was little cooperation or shared knowledge passed among them.

Donovan, a lawyer who’d worked as a U.S. attorney in New York and for the Justice Department in Washington, had traveled widely in Europe between the wars, meeting with a number of heads of state, including Adolf Hitler. Nicknamed “Wild Bill” from his football-playing days at Columbia University, Donovan quickly began recruiting officers to his agency, and one of his earliest choices was Eddy, another highly decorated World War I veteran, who was also a scholar and academic.

Eddy was the son of Presbyterian missionary parents. He was born in Syria and grew up speaking Arabic and English. He returned to the United States for his college education and was at Princeton when World War I began. Eddy enlisted and served in a Marine Corps intelligence unit, where he won a Navy Cross, two Silver Stars, and a Distinguished Service Cross for action at Belleau Wood and elsewhere. He was also wounded in the leg and suffered a subsequent infection to his hip that caused him to walk with a severe limp for the rest of his life.

Between the wars, Eddy took his PhD from Princeton and then returned to the Middle East as head of the English department at the American University in Cairo. In the late 1920s he took a job teaching English at Dartmouth College before assuming the post of president of Hobart College, which is where he was in December 1940 when he volunteered to return to the Marine Corps.

Despite the scholarly turn that his career had taken, Eddy maintained an affinity for the Corps and service. When he rejoined the Marines, he was posted first to Cairo to serve as the naval attaché to the U.S.
delegation there; but he was soon recruited by Donovan, who sent him to Tangier, where he assumed supervision of the twelve consuls—nicknamed the “Twelve Apostles”—who had arrived in North Africa earlier in 1941 and were already working in Oran, Casablanca, Algiers, and Tunis.

The consuls were a highly educated group, many from the privileged class, most with cosmopolitan backgrounds and a facility for foreign languages. Ridgway Knight was a Harvard Business School grad who spoke fluent French and a smattering of Italian and German. He’d run Pierre Cartier’s jewelry business on Fifth Avenue after college and was expected—by Cartier himself—to wed Cartier’s only daughter. Instead, Knight married someone else, bought ten thousand cases of Château Mouton Rothschild champagne (1929) and entered the wine business with a friend. He had his pilot’s license and tried initially to enlist in the Army Air Force but, due to poor eyesight, wound up at a naval recruitment office. There his résumé caught the attention of someone in intelligence, and soon enough he was flying off to Lisbon, then Tangier, and then a posting in Algiers.

John Crawford Knox, a graduate of Groton, Harvard, Oxford, and the French military academy at Saint-Cyr, had joined the French Foreign Legion in the 1920s and served with it during the Rif wars in Morocco. He, too, was posted to Algiers.

Carleton Coon and Gordon Browne, who both worked under Eddy in Tangier, had explored Morocco in 1939 as field scientists for Harvard University. Coon was a noted anthropologist; Browne, an archaeologist. Both spoke French and Arabic and were well versed in the history, geography, and culture of the various regions of Morocco.

Sent to Casablanca initially were a handful of spies, including W. Stafford Reid, a 1915 graduate of Yale and veteran infantryman of World War I; Kenneth Pendar, a former antiques dealer, who was soon sent on to Marrakech with Franklin Canfield; and the head of the Casablanca office, David Wooster King, a native of Connecticut who, like John Crawford Knox, was a former member of the French Foreign Legion.

King enlisted in the legion early in World War I, before the United States entered the conflict. He had left Harvard and signed on to the fighting as an infantryman in 1914 and was twice wounded fighting with the French. King suffered a serious eye injury and was almost buried alive in a trench. He wound up the war serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army but wrote an account of his experiences in the legion in the 1920s called
L.M. 4086
(the designation of his unit).

King was almost fifty years old when he arrived in Casablanca in 1941, but his feelings toward Germany continued to be governed by his experiences in World War I. Like the Free French, he referred to Germans with the pejorative term “les Boches.” He and Reid took up residence in a beautiful villa outside the city in the Casablanca suburb of Anfa and began their double duties as consuls checking on the shipments allowed by the Weygand-Murphy accord and spying on the Vichy forces and Axis influence and presence in the city.

Casablanca was a kind of model city of French colonialism in 1941. Designed and constructed by the first French governor of Morocco, Marshal Hubert Lyautey, the port of Casablanca had helped grow a small native community into the largest economic center in northwest Africa in less than thirty years. The new city that had sprung up on the shores of the ocean was modern and well planned, with European architecture and an efficient infrastructure. According to Kenneth Pendar, “
The city was neat, white and shiny under the hot blue African sky.” It reminded him of a seaside resort community in Florida. The American consulate looked like “a Federal building in Miami.”

Tidy and white though the city may have been, the war brought to Casablanca a sense of anxiety, apprehension, and outright fear that added some cloudiness to that African sky. Its proximity to Europe—less than two hundred miles from the Strait of Gibraltar—linked it so closely to the Continent that it became an entrepôt for European refugees. French, Belgian, Dutch, and Polish émigrés flooded the city, looking for avenues of escape and raising tensions all around. The sense that conflict would come to Morocco had been in the air for months, but just what form
it would take was an open question. An Allied attack on Vichy North Africa was always a possibility, but so was a German takeover of the region. The trust between Nazi Germany and Vichy France was hardly deep. And there was already a Nazi presence in the city: something called the German Armistice Commission, whose agents essentially spied on everyone from their would-be allies, the Vichyites, to the Arab and Berber natives of Morocco to the newly arrived “vice-consuls” at the American consulate.

King and Reid quickly landed their first French agent, who delivered information about the port and its naval guards. In fact, there turned out to be
no shortage of refugees and
colons
willing to volunteer their services with good and bad information.

They also began the process of striking out into the city and around its harbor to observe and collect information on their own. Pedaling around the area on bicycles during the midday lunch break, they made acquaintances with French dock workers and began mapping the geography of the port and its defenses. They also kept a close eye on the activities of the French dreadnought
Jean Bart
, a 35,000-ton battleship that was the pride of the French navy and the principal defender of the Casablanca harbor.

Late in the year, Colonel Eddy arrived in Tangier and began to oversee their work.
Eddy passed along an order from Donovan that King, Reid, and the rest of the Apostles create a clandestine string of radio stations through North Africa in order that American intelligence could continue to disseminate information throughout the region in case of a diplomatic break with Vichy or the advent of a military action. By March 1942, King and Reid had theirs up and running in Casablanca.

The vice-consuls also solidified their informant chains. They were able to find two agents who supplied them with decoded copies of German Armistice Commission and Spanish consulate cables; an agent working at the Casablanca airport gave them information on the arrivals and departures of Axis officials; another gave them airplane counts and
maps; while other agents tracked the movements of ships and cargo in a number of North African ports.

Contacts were also made with tribal leaders in the Rif Mountains and Muslim leaders in the Arab centers of Fez, Meknes, and Marrakech. Weapons were promised to these groups in the event of an Allied invasion. In turn, the Moroccans were asked to organize revolts if and when the fighting came.

In addition, resistance and sabotage plans were mapped out with would-be squads of French Resistance fighters, with goals of blowing up bridges, cutting power lines, and even kidnapping the members of the German Armistice Commission in Casablanca on the day of the invasion.

The OSS agents were not without their detractors. As newcomers to Africa and the world of espionage, Eddy, King, and the rest of the Apostles were often viewed as rank amateurs, particularly by their Continental counterparts. The British felt that these Americans were bumbling their way through systems and connections that had been established and nurtured through years of hard work by their own intelligence forces. Prior-existing U.S. intelligence agencies, most particularly the army’s G-2 unit, questioned the need for an organization like the OSS. The European command, meanwhile, was at times befuddled by an excess of information from an excess of intelligence sources.

Last, the Gestapo, experienced and brutal players at the game of espionage, had a particularly contemptuous view of the newcomers. The American agents at the consulate “
represent a perfect picture of the mixture of race and characteristics in that wild conglomeration called the United States of America,” wrote a Gestapo member in Casablanca to offices in Berlin. “We can only congratulate ourselves on the selection of this group who will give us no trouble. In view of the fact that they are totally lacking in method, organization and discipline, the danger presented by their arrival in North Africa may be considered nil. It would be merely a waste of paper to describe their personal idiosyncrasies and characteristics.”

Regardless of the assessment of OSS members’ capabilities by their European and American counterparts, both the War Department in Washington and Allied headquarters in London turned out to be intensely interested in their activities and their reports on the activities of the French in the late summer of 1942. As Operation Torch was being agreed to by the Joint Allied Command in July, Bill Eddy was in high demand.
He flew to Washington in late July and back to Tangier; to London at the very end of the month and then again back to Tangier; finally to London twice more in the month of August.

In Washington, Eddy was invited to a dinner party with General George Strong, the head of army intelligence, General Doolittle, and General George Patton just prior to Patton and Doolittle’s trip to London. Eddy was there to present a report on the situation in North Africa, and to some extent it was a tough audience. He was given a warning by Strong—no friend of the OSS—to offer straight talk with no unwarranted assessments of capabilities. “
Stretching of the facts might lead later on to huge loss of American lives,” Strong told him. For the party, Eddy donned his full dress Marine Corps blues, including his chestful of medals. His arrival in the beribboned uniform, in conjunction with the pronounced limp, prompted Patton to say in an aside, “
The sonofabitch has been shot at enough, hasn’t he?”