12 Amateur Spies Paved the Way to War Against the Nazis

The Dark Path to Victory, Part 1

Shortly past midnight, November 8, 1942, the largest amphibious assault the world had ever seen struck the North African coast.

A enormous armada had steamed undetected as far as 4,000 miles to a few miles off three main landing zones scattered along 1,200 miles of North Africa’s Atlantic and Mediterranean seaboard. The nearly 900 warships and transports carried 107,000 soldiers—82,600 of them U.S. Army troops, the rest British and Commonwealth soldiers.

They came there to stage U.S. entry into World War II, create a “second” front to draw off German pressure on the Eastern Front where the Soviet Red Army was caught up in a brutal life-or-death fight with the Nazis, and drive armored German and Italian armies out of North Africa. The ports and airbases of North Africa would serve as America’s gateway and springboard to the conquest of Rome and Berlin. But the first step in defeating Hitler and Mussolini was liberating France. Except this time, nobody was proudly proclaiming, Lafayette, we are here!

Occupied France’s Nazi overlords permitted the collaborationist government in Vichy to maintain a 125,000-man defense force in North Africa. They manned coastal batteries, more than 20 advanced warships and submarines, and some 500 aircraft in colonial Morocco and Algeria. Vichy put them there to stop the Allies, but nobody was sure which way the French troops would shoot, at the Nazis and their Vichy bootlickers or at their would-be liberators.

As the first transports, attack teams, and paratroopers hit the nine landing sites in and around the major ports and cities of Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers, the man partly charged with getting those French guns aimed at the Germans hadn’t slept for two days. Across the narrow Strait of Gibraltar, within the British command center carved into the Rock, U.S. Marine Colonel William Eddy had been decoding radio reports from behind the lines. The former college president and professor of classical English literature turned spymaster headed up a team of fellow amateur espionage agents who had been operating at scattered sites within Vichy France’s North African colonies for more than a year in preparation for this moment.

Princeton-educated, the big, doughy, hard-drinking Eddy had been granted permanent disability status as a result of an infected World War I hip wound. The first time General George S. Patton Jr., who headed the invasion’s ground forces, met him at a war planning dinner in London, he took one look at his chest draped with medals and declared that “the son of a bitch’s been shot at enough, hasn’t he?”

Limping, leaving a family behind, at age 49, half a year before America officially went to war, Eddy rejoined the military. In doing so, he gave up the prestige and security of the presidency of Hobart College (today’s Hobart and William Smith College) in upstate New York. In June 1941, he went as Naval Attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt. Born of Presbyterian missionary parents in Ottoman Syria, Eddy knew the Arab world intimately and spoke several Arabic dialects fluently, as well as passing French and German. His State Department overseer, U.S. Ambassador to Vichy North Africa Robert Daniel Murphy, later wrote that “no American knew more about Arabs or about power politics in Africa. He was one of a kind, unique; we could have used a hundred like him.”

In Washington, William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, a lawyer and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s friend, had been named director of what would soon become the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the nation’s first centralized foreign intelligence agency. He took immediate notice of Eddy’s rare set of skills.

The U.S. maintained uneasy relations with the Vichy France government of Marshal Philippe Pétain and Prime Minister Pierre Laval—refusing to recognize General Charles de Gaulle’s Free France army in London exile. Aligning with the defeatist German collaborators of the Vichy regime was distasteful, but FDR hoped to prevent a Nazi takeover of France’s powerful navy, which was berthed in Toulon and in ports in French colonial Tunisia, Morocco, and Dakar, West Africa. Also, a complete German occupation of at present quasi-self-governing southern France and the colonies would give the Nazis crucial port facilities for war operations throughout the Mediterranean and South Atlantic, with the potential to choke off the vital Suez Canal as well.

Long before U.S. entry into the war, American diplomats and spies under diplomatic cover had cultivated Vichy officials who might prove willing to cooperate with the Allies in the coming war against the German occupiers of France. As the troops hit the beaches, the Americans hoped they had found the right people. However, simultaneously preparing to invade French territory and seeking an alliance with Vichy leaders would ultimately prove an unworkable strategy.

The invasion marked a historic first for America: The nation prepared the battlefield for victory in advance through systematic foreign intelligence and secret overseas black espionage operations. A month after the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, Donovan sent Eddy to Tangier, a 36-mile boat ride across the Strait from Gibraltar, where he was to set in motion “sabotage, guerrilla warfare, and organized armed resistance.” Eddy’s OSS spies teamed with Murphy’s State Department diplomatic mission to develop military intelligence, sow unrest within the French army, lay real and figurative booby-traps to blunt any resistance to an invasion through sabotage and organized guerrilla forces, and turn French officers against Germany. A new type of warrior had stepped onto the battlefield, but they fought in the shadows of the war’s gray zone.

Donovan had in North Africa what future CIA Director William J. Casey described as the OSS’s “first testing ground” in World War II and a model for all America’s wars to come. Donovan admonished Eddy, “Our whole future may depend on the outcome in [North Africa] and the accuracy of our intelligence estimates.”

***

Eddy and Murphy gathered 11 other like minded Americans in North Africa. Also denoted vice-consuls, they received diplomatic status, so they wouldn’t be thrown into Vichy jails or tortured and murdered by the Gestapo if arrested for spying. The 12 dispersed to various North African port cities, from Casablanca in Morocco to Bizerte, Tunisia, supposedly to monitor arrival and distribution of American food, fuel, and other relief supplies being shipped for civilian use in French North Africa. That cover enabled them to map the terrain, study transport networks, shipping and ports, defense installations and coastal forces. (Their work was supplemented at home by the nation’s first advance battlefield analytical team, under the direction of a Yale professor of French political history turned OSS intelligence officer, Sherman Kent.)

Eddy’s 12 agents—soon labeled by the OSS headquarters in Washington, D.C. as “the 12 Apostles”—came from similar upper crust, Ivy League backgrounds. They were all Francophiles. Their numbers included a former Cartier jewelry director and wine merchant, a Parisian playboy who ran with Hemingway, a respected international lawyer, a pair of Continental bankers, and several ex-French Foreign Legionnaires, two of them pilots in World War I, all keen for action and to defeat Germany. Nearly all of them were familiar with the French colonies to a greater or lesser extent. Among them Carlton Coon knew the Moroccan interior especially well from his work as a Harvard field anthropologist; Kenneth Pendar, a Harvard archeologist and antiquities dealer, had a flair for the high life, the exotic Oriental world, and war fighting; David Wooster King, heir to a family fortune, with three wives in his past and shrapnel chunks in his body from World War I, looked “like a diplomatic gangster,” according to a Resistance fighter who worked with him. He never slept without his .45 at hand.

Each apostle operated his own network of agents spying on Vichy military outposts, neutral but fascist Spain’s war leanings, and German and Italian agents’ doings, including Gestapo teams searching for escaped prisoners and downed pilots in North Africa under the terms of the French-German Armistice Commission. Eddy’s OSSers quickly began to feel out Vichy France’s military officers in North Africa, to see who among them could be turned to the Allied side. They also organized and supplied anti-German resistance within the French army in North Africa and civilian insurgent organizations. Drawing on Arab Maghreb tribes ready to cut their French colonial masters’ throats, they soon had eyes throughout the region.

Not unlike the dangerous, mixed clientele of Rick’s American Café in Casablanca, the Tangiers crowd as described by Eddy was all sharp elbows and strange bedfellows in a hot, dizzying world of white walls, shadowy narrow passageways, and limited electricity—in that place, he wrote, there was “no special moral superiority for the Allies … the oddity was to find a good family man.”

The spies of all the warring nations gathered in a “nest of vipers.” In a secret postwar history of the OSS North Africa operations, Eddy wrote, “I knew the German, Italian, and Spanish agents, and great many of them knew me ... I should say there was a sort of working agreement not to get in each other's hair too obviously. On the other hand, it was necessary not to tip one’s hand in front of the opposition.”

The Great Game of espionage certainly had its color and charms for these men of means. Their dollars went far. They lived in luxurious (as possible in wartime) hotels and seaside villas, drank fine wines, spent nights in clubs, and found plenty of pretty European women desperate to flee from Europe and more than happy to escort them. In some cases those women became consorts and also secret messengers. One whose Dutch resistance fighter husband had been murdered by the Nazis fell in love with and later married one of the Apostles.

All the spies were regularly being watched, wiretapped, and their rooms searched. One afternoon, King slipped the Gestapo thug tailing him in a Casablanca crowd. Noting the agent’s obvious dismay, King sidled up to him and quipped, “Here I am, you are supposed to stick with me.” However, such insouciance brought a mass roundup of nearly 300 agents Eddy and King had enlisted.

The Gestapo considered the Apostles amateurs and fools. A Gestapo report to Berlin scoffed: “The vice consuls … represent a perfect picture of the mixture of races and characteristics in that wild conglomeration called the United States of America … In view of the fact that they are naturally lacking in method, organization, and discipline, the danger presented by their arrival in North Africa may be considered as nil.”

They were in fact amateurs, but Eddy’s team of 12 Apostles also wanted the Gestapo to believe they were toothless. Their bite, in fact, was real. Eddy, Pendar, King, Coon, and the others developed “hit lists” of local Gestapo officers and agents and marked Vichy officials susceptible to bribery—and those who would hew to their Nazi overlords in a fight. They set up observation posts at airfields and ports and hid secret radio transmitters that had to be booby trapped to prevent Vichy and Gestapo agents from capturing them and their codebooks. Their work included sabotage and murder, such as blowing up a German signal station that alerted U-boats to British targets at sea. The blast, according to Eddy, killed “the Hun in charge, his concubine, and his two assistants.” In a series of risky operations, the OSSers also smuggled out local harbor pilots under the noses of Vichy police and Gestapo agents. They were transported to Allied invasion ships to guide them through the dangerous coastal shoals and tricky currents toward landing sites. Capture of these men might have blown the secrecy of the entire invasion operation.

However, the Apostles were amateurs, lamented U.S. Ambassador Murphy, who, “with luck, might be able to distinguish a battleship from a submarine on a particularly clear day.” Much of their success in generating useful information piggybacked on the real expertise of an intrepid, brilliant and too-little-known Polish general turned spymaster, Mieczysław Zygfryd Slowikowski.

Codenamed “Rygor,” Slowikowski had fled his native Poland after the Nazi conquest, then worked to develop French resistance after France’s fall in 1940, and eventually moved to Algiers. Once there, he set up an intelligence organization known as Agency Africa, which he eventually built into a 2,500-agent network. He filed thousands of detailed intelligence reports to London’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, and freely turned over those same reports to Eddy and Murphy who sent their findings on to American military officials, though never crediting their source. Rygor’s and Agency Africa’s work will be covered in the next installment of this series on the murky underworld of wartime Vichy North Africa.

***

War, espionage, and secret diplomacy went fist in glove in North Africa. In late October 1942, two weeks before D-Day for Operation Torch, codename for the invasion, Murphy and Eddy thought they had found the man who could blunt French resistance. One of the Apostles, Ridgeway Knight, along with Murphy and American General Mark Clark, traveled by submarine through the night from Gibraltar to a seaside safe house set up by Slowikowski’s team at Cherchell, outside Algiers. With armed resistance fighters surrounding the house, the Americans met with French General Charles Mast, who commanded the army’s Algiers division but had long been courted by Americans. He had agreed to serve as a go-between with General Henri Giraud, a popular anti-Nazi French army leader who had escaped a Nazi prison and was now hiding out in France. The Americans believed Giraud could turn the French guns of North Africa against the Germans. However, to get Giraud to agree to the deal, Clark and Murphy lied. With no authority at all, they told Mast that Giraud would lead the invasion by a force nearly five times larger than one approaching North Africa and receive overall command of Allied forces in North Africa. They then deceived him about the invasion’s timing, claiming Giraud had months to prepare even as the U.S. armada set sail on its transatlantic crossing.

Mast departed satisfied that he had set in motion the restoration of French prestige and authority in North Africa. As the Americans toasted their apparent success, a local police force patrol alerted to unexplained activity at the house drove up the beach road. The Americans scurried down a trap door to the basement. They held their breath, guns ready to shoot their way out, while the house’s owner duped the police with claims that he’d turned his house over to a prominent American diplomat who was trysting with his mistress upstairs. After a few drinks, they left. A disaster that might have scotched the entire Operation Torch narrowly avoided, Clark and Murphy sneaked back out through the nighttime surf to the waiting submarine.

Elsewhere, similar overtures seemed to bring in other Vichy commanders ready to join the Allies. General Antoine Béthouart, commander of army forces in Casablanca, told Eddy’s men that he would lead a mutiny against his superior, Vichy high commissioner General Charles Noguès.

The Twelve Apostles had struck the match for Operation Torch.

Then it was blown out.

***

On the night of November 7-8, with the enormous task forces lying off-shore, Giraud had been smuggled out of France to Gibraltar where he now stomped about in fury. He had been double crossed. When he finally agreed to send messages to French officers not to resist, he proved unable to bring French forces to heel. South along the Atlantic coast in Casablanca, Béthouart’s men surrounded Noguès’s private quarters in the early morning hours. However, they failed to cut his phone lines; Noguès alerted other officers who refused to follow the mutinous Béthouart. Although word trickled out slowly, defenders went on alert.

Shortly before dawn on November 8 at landing sites in and around Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers, American soldiers waded through the surf and up the sand and rock beaches. Teams of Army rangers arrived by swift boats and clambered onto seawalls in Oran and sailed up rivers to inland ports. Others parachuted onto nearby airfields. French army and navy guns opened fire. The ranger team in Oran was wiped out as ships in port raked them with heavy machine gunfire. On the beaches, howitzer shells blew up amid slow advancing troops; artillery smashed landing vessels; others broke up in the rising surf. America’s first ground combat casualties in the fight to liberate France came at French hands.

In Algiers, local insurgent groups helped by Rygor and the Apostles seized several key buildings and overwhelmed sleeping French troops long enough to open the door to the invaders, though eventually French police retook the rebel positions. As the fighting broke out, Murphy sought to turn the senior French Army officer in North Africa, General Alphonse Juin, by taking him hostage. With Juin in tow, Murphy went to meet with Admiral Jean François Darlan, the French navy’s commander in chief and a former Vichy prime minister who happened to be in Algiers. He hoped to persuade Darlan, whom he knew personally, to order his forces to cease fire. However, Juin and Darlan insisted on awaiting orders from Vichy President Marshal Philippe Pétain or Prime Minister Pierre Laval, who eventually commanded them to repel the attackers at all costs. Murphy was now the prisoner. By then, though, the invaders had taken Algiers with little resistance and Oran fell soon after.

The invaders faced their heaviest resistance in Casablanca, where monstrous naval guns lofting shells miles to sea opened up. U.S. warships responded in the largest naval battle of the entire Atlantic war. German U-boats and aircraft joined the sea combat the following day. Before it ended, the U.S. and the British lost a handful of ships and most of their landing craft.

By the end of November 9, sunken, wrecked and burning French warships filled the harbor and nearby waters. Finally, on November 11, 1942, with Patton’s troops and artillery massing on Casablanca’s outskirts and threatening to obliterate the city, the last French forces capitulated. With defeat certain, Darlan finally agreed to join the Allies, but only if he—not the resistance forces or Giraud or de Gaulle in London—took command of North Africa. The Allies danced with the devil. As Vichy prime minister, Darlan had met with Hitler, deployed Vichy police against resisters, imposed Nazi-style restrictions on Jews, and condemned de Gaulle to death as a traitor. Ambassador Murphy’s personal sympathies lay with the Vichyists, even if he wished to see the Axis defeated; he convinced the political neophyte Allied forces Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower to accept Darlan’s terms. For the French of North Africa, this meant Vichy remained in power, just with a new overlord—the Allies—replacing Germany.

Darlan had turned coat but the stench of his previous toadying to the Nazis lingered, stirring up widespread resentment of the Allies’ deal with him. He continued Vichy policy, tossing resistance leaders in jail and keeping Jews in concentration camps. He would not remain in power long. His assassination a little over a month later provided a convenient exit out of the unsavory Darlan deal for the Allies. The possibility of collusion in his murder by the 12 Apostles and MI6 remains hotly disputed. More on that in the third and final installment in this series.

***

It was the beginning of a great friendship. Like Vichy Captain Louis Renault’s turn to the resistance at the end of Casablanca, a proud French admiral told his American counterpart over dinner hours after the last shots were fired in the real Casablanca: “I had my orders and did my duty, you had yours and did your duty; now that is over, and we are ready to cooperate.” Twelve hundred miles of French North Africa’s coastline, its defenders and their arms fell to Allied control.

The butcher’s bill for the fighting, though, was considerable: Total U.S. casualties included around 526 killed; British Torch forces lost 574 men plus another 516 aboard the escort carrier HMS Avenger, sunk by a German U-boat while en route home. French losses totaled around 1,350 killed, in combat against their liberators. The combination of French resistance and the utter chaos in offloading supplies to support the coming war against German and Italian armies in Tunisia and Libya allowed the Axis enemy to bolster its forces quickly to counter the Allied drive east. Eisenhower had planned to overrun all of North Africa within a month; it would take seven.

Like the invasion itself, the 12 Apostles’ black ops and intelligence succeeded only to a degree—and in large measure thanks to the unsung “Rygor.” Gaining control of the essential ports of North Africa took just three days against a large, well-armed, and entrenched professional military. While the political situation proved treacherous, the first step for the liberation of Europe aroused the world, particularly Americans at home, who were impatient for action against Hitler’s forces. If not quite the Nazis, the French would do. Logistically far more difficult than even D-Day in Normandy, the Allied invasion of North Africa meant sailing thousands of miles in secrecy. But Torch succeeded, and after the fighting ended, the French military became American and British allies.

As far as FDR and Ike were concerned, the OSS had passed its first test with flying colors. More than 40 years later, CIA Director William J. Casey, who headed OSS European intelligence during the war, enthused that the Apostles “had successfully prepared the way and almost entirely eliminated resistance to the landing,” with far fewer troops and ships needed and many fewer casualties than originally forecast. Hyperbole but true enough. Support for Donovan’s OSS within the U.S. government redoubled. It grew and grew, reaching more than 24,000 personnel before the war ended.

The 12 Apostles dispersed after Torch. Several accompanied Allied forces through Tunisia in the fight against German armored forces. From there most continued as OSS agents operating in other occupied lands, in some cases dropping behind enemy lines where they built resistance networks and prepared the ground for American forces to arrive.

The OSS continued to draw on Eddy’s knowledge of the Middle East. He proved so effective in turning Arab sheiks and their tribes against the Nazis that some called him “the American Lawrence of Arabia.” In 1943 Eddy went to Saudi Arabia where American relationships with the oil-rich kingdom were already starting to deepen. Eddy cemented those ties. On February 14, 1945, he served as translator for the historic meeting of Saudi King Abdul-Aziz and President Roosevelt on board an American warship in the Suez Canal. Agreement between the two heads of state secured virtually permanent U.S. access to the Saudi kingdom’s vast oil reserves.

The age when the U.S. pursued its global interests without standing foreign espionage operations had ended. Today’s shadowy world, built on spies, oil, and secret wars, took root on the sunny shores of colonial Morocco and Algeria.