Ike's Spies (6 page)

It being the weekend, Churchill was at his country home, Chequers. Clark got through on the phone to Churchill's personal chief of staff, General Sir Hastings Ismay. “We've got a hot message here,” Clark said.

“How hot?” Ismay asked.

“Well, it's too hot for the telephone.”

Ismay gave the phone to Churchill, who growled, “What do you have? This phone is secret.”

Clark handed the phone over to Ike, who said the message was too important to talk about over the telephone. Churchill growled again—he hated having his weekend interrupted. Would Ike come to Chequers to talk about it? There was not enough time, Eisenhower replied.

“Damn!” said Churchill. Then, formally: “Very well. Should I come back to London?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, I'll meet you at Number Ten late this afternoon.”
³
When Eisenhower and Clark arrived at the Prime Minister's residence, Clark recorded, “There was about as dazzling an array of Britain's diplomatic, military and naval brains as I had yet seen.” Clement Attlee was there, along with Lord Louis Mountbatten, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, plus Churchill. It was, in short, the British Government and its top military establishment, answering an impromptu summons from an American lieutenant general and his two-star deputy. One might have thought that such an august group would brush aside the details about a highly romantic secret rendezvous with obscure French officers off the African coast in order to concentrate on the deadly serious subject of whether or not to deal with Darlan. It was not to be.

Like Clark and Ike, Churchill was keen for high adventure. Clark said the P.M. “was as enthusiastic as a boy with a new electric train.” Consequently, the meeting concentrated on trivia,
Churchill advising Clark on what clothes to wear, how much bribe money to take, how to carry the money, and so on. Churchill got Admiral Pound to agree that the Royal Navy could have a submarine waiting that night in Gibraltar for Clark. “The entire resources of the British Commonwealth are at your disposal,” he said solemnly to Clark, shaking hands gravely.
⁴

There was one brief discussion about command problems. Ike said he proposed to have Clark tell Mast that eventually military command in North Africa could pass to a French officer, but that Ike would retain the right to decide when the switch could be made. To soften the blow to Giraud's ego at losing the top military command, Ike said he would place Giraud at the head of the government of French North Africa (Eisenhower did not need to say that his power to do so was based solely on the right of conquest). Perhaps Darlan would accept a position in a Giraud government as commander in chief of the North African armed forces. Churchill rather casually agreed to these proposals, then turned back to the more exciting subject of Clark's mission.
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For the first time, but not the last, Eisenhower learned that where the dark arts are concerned, heads of government are sometimes more interested in cloak-and-dagger covert operations than in sophisticated political and military analysis. To echo Butcher and Clark, secrecy brought out the little boy in nearly all of them.

After some weather delays, Clark got off at 6:30
A.M
. on October 19, wearing a lieutenant colonel's insignia, flying in a B-17 whose pilot, Major Paul Tibbets, was generally regarded as the best flyer in the U. S. Army Air Forces (Tibbets was Ike's personal pilot for much of the war; in 1945 he was the pilot of the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima). Eisenhower went to Scotland to inspect a field exercise, which would help pass the time as he worried about Clark.

Two days later, Ike received a message from Gibraltar. Clark's submarine had arrived too late for the rendezvous of October 20 and would have to lay offshore all through the day, submerged, and hope to spot the correct signal light that night. It put Ike in a “state of jitters.” Thinking aloud in Harry Butcher's presence, he said that if there were treachery, Clark and his party might go ashore never to return, but if the conference led to French cooperation, the whole operation was virtually assured of success. If it did not work, Ike concluded, “we will have one hell of a fight on our hands.” On
October 22, Butcher recorded in his diary, “Ike greatly concerned about Clark. A further message from ‘Colonel McGowan' [Murphy] had indicated the meeting would take place tonight.”

By October 24 there was still no word from Clark. Eisenhower kept himself as busy as he could, but it did little good. Finally he shut up the office at Grosvenor Square and announced that he was going to drive out to Telegraph Cottage that night. He was not sure of the way, had never driven in England before, and had no driver's license, but he started the car and zoomed off. “When last seen,” Butcher reported, “he was going down the middle of the road, veering a little bit to the right and a bit uncertain.”
⁶

At midnight, the phone rang. One of Eisenhower's aides reported that a message had come in from Gibraltar, from General Clark. His meeting with Mast had been broken up by French police. Clark and the American group had been forced to hide in an “empty, repeat empty, wine cellar.” There was one other misadventure. In getting into the rubber boat for his trip back to the submarine, Clark had lost his pants and the gold coins he had taken with him. He had taken off his pants and rolled them up, hoping to keep them dry. But he was safe in Gibraltar and would be in London later that day. Butcher, using the metaphor once more, said Ike was “as pleased as a boy” and eager to hear all about Clark's adventure.

Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn could not have enjoyed telling or listening to a tale more than Clark and Ike did this one. Clark described his flight to Gibraltar, the submarine trip to the rendezvous point, the long submerged wait through the day after he missed the first appointment, practice drills at dusk getting into the canvas boats that took them to shore (the British commando who showed them how to do it fell on his fanny, to everyone's vast amusement), and finally the coming of total darkness, the blinking signal light, and the trip ashore.

Mast was there, along with some of his staff officers, accompanied by Murphy. They started talking at 10
P.M
. and kept at it through the night. Shortly after dawn, the police arrived—Arabs had reported footprints in the sand. Mast and the other French officers fled through the windows and disappeared into the brush along the beach. Clark and the Americans hid in the wine cellar. Murphy, his aide, and the Frenchman who owned the house stayed to meet the police. They broke out some brandy, sang songs, and
acted very jovial, while Murphy identified himself as the American consul in Algiers and hinted that a little party was going on. The girls were upstairs, he said, and he hoped the French police would not embarrass him. Ike gave out one of his big hearty laughs when he heard that one.

Anyway, Clark went on, the police finally left and the Americans dashed pell-mell down to the beach, where they had an awful time trying to launch the flimsy canvas boat against a heavy surf. It was in this process that Clark lost his pants and his money. But he made it, got back on the submarine, returned to Gibraltar, and flew back to London with Major Tibbets that afternoon. There were many other details—Butcher, who was present when Clark reported to Ike, filled eight single-spaced typewritten pages in his diary with Clark's escapades—but the fact that mattered was that Clark had established secret contact with the French.
⁷

A great risk had been successfully run. Clark was a hero. Like Ike, Churchill had to hear the whole story, minute by minute. Later, Eisenhower took Clark to Buckingham Palace to meet King George, who said to Clark, “I know all about you. You're the one who took that fabulous trip.”
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What were the practical results? In his memoirs, Eisenhower's praise was slight at best. “This expedition was valuable in gathering more details of information,” he wrote. “These did not compel any material change in our planned operation.”
⁹
In fact, nothing new had been learned, either about French military dispositions or political possibilities. Mast's staff officers gave Clark's staff a mass of information on the placement of shore batteries around Algiers, troop locations and strength, roads, checkpoints, and so on. The information was accurate, but it was not new—Colonel Eddy's
OSS
agents had already informed Ike's headquarters on all these points. The best that could be said about Clark's information was that it confirmed earlier
OSS
intelligence.

In other areas, the Murphy-Mast meeting was even less helpful. Mast wanted to know the date of the invasion, so that he could make the necessary preparations to work together with Henri d'Astiers' young men in the Chantiers de la Jeunesse to take possession of the key points in Algiers the night of the attack. But Ike had strictly forbidden Clark to divulge the date (which had been set for November 8; indeed, on the very day of the Mast-Clark conference, General George S. Patton's combat-loaded forces had embarked
from Norfolk, Virginia, target Casablanca). Clark, therefore, was vague about dates—sometime in February, he hinted, the assault would come. He was specific about the overwhelming force involved—there would be half a million troops, plus two thousand planes and a battle fleet from the U. S. Navy. “Mast was pretty impressed,” Clark recorded, as well he might have been.

The deception did not end there. Clark said it would be entirely an American operation, when in fact more than half the total military strength of
TORCH
was British. (It was assumed, on the basis of Murphy's and Eddy's reports, that the French in North Africa were so Anglophobic that they would resist a British landing while welcoming an American force.) Finally, Clark tried to reassure Mast about the command arrangements by saying that at some point in the future Giraud could have the supreme command.

For his part, Mast was not above a little deception. He continued to insist that French officers in Algeria would rally to the name Giraud, that they were seething with desire to strike out against the hated Germans and would seize the first opportunity to do so. But what would happen, Clark asked, if for some reason it was impossible to get Giraud out of France? Mast replied, “I will assume command.” It was a preposterous claim for a one-star chief of staff to make, and Clark asked the obvious follow-up question: “But will the troops rally to you?” Mast insisted that they would. What about General Juin, head of the French Army in North Africa? Mast was emphatic—he and his friends would take care of Juin.

How? Through d'Astier's underground army of young men. This led Mast to make a request for two thousand Bren guns for the Chantiers de la Jeunesse. Clark might have picked up the hint here that Mast did not have the force he claimed to have, but instead Clark indulged in his own little deception, telling Mast that there would be no problem about getting the Brens. And so it went—bluff, subterfuge, and deception were the hallmarks of the clandestine meeting between Clark and Mast.
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How completely the potential collaborators misunderstood each other was shown immediately afterward. Murphy's first act was to provide Dubreuil with a complete briefing on the meeting. Dubreuil then flew to France to meet with Giraud. He returned to Algiers the next day with a letter from Giraud, demanding an agreement in writing that he, Giraud, would be placed in charge of the “Interallied Command” forty-eight hours after the attack
began, plus an assurance that an invasion of France proper would be launched shortly thereafter.
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Ike snorted at these obviously impossible requests.

On October 28, Mast indicated to Murphy that Giraud would not be coming out of France for a month or more. Much alarmed at the prospect of losing his chief actor, Murphy requested from Ike permission to tell Mast that the attack was imminent. Eisenhower reluctantly agreed. Murphy then told Mast that the Americans would arrive “early in November.” Mast, much agitated, charged Murphy with political blackmail, said it was simply impossible, and complained loudly about the lack of confidence. But eventually he got the word to Giraud, who responded that he could not possibly come to North Africa before November 20.

At this, Murphy went into a panic. He sent a message to Roosevelt, asking the President to postpone the expedition for two weeks. In justification, he concluded, “I am convinced that the invasion of North Africa without favorable French High Command will be a catastrophe.”

So, on the very eve of the invasion, at the first critical moment in his career as supreme commander, Eisenhower was being advised by his chief spy to call off his attack and reschedule it for two weeks later, or else face catastrophe. Ike's reaction was to laugh. The intricate movement of vast fleets, coming from both England and the United States, as Murphy himself later wrote, could not be delayed by even one day without upsetting “the meticulous plans which had been meshed into one master plan by hundreds of staff officers of all branches of the armed forces of both Allied powers.”
¹²
Ike wired Marshall, “Recent messages from McGowan indicate that he has a case of jitters.” In one message, Murphy had urged simultaneous attacks in Norway and western France. It was all ridiculous, but Ike was charitable: “I don't mean to say that I blame McGowan,” he told Marshall. “He has a most delicate position and a stupendous job and one that is well calculated to develop a bit of hysteria as the critical hour approaches.”
¹³

By this time, November 7, Ike had transferred his headquarters to Gibraltar. Arrangements had finally been made with Giraud, who was spirited out of France in a submarine, then transferred to a flying boat and taken to Gibraltar, where on the night of the invasion he met Ike. Giraud's first words were a demand for command
of the operation. He ordered a plane made ready to fly him to Algiers, enumerated the staff positions he wanted filled, and demanded that communications facilities be made available to him.