Twelve Desperate Miles (20 page)

From the darkness a silhouette emerged and walked slowly and wordlessly toward and past them. They paused as the man turned around and came back in their direction. With careful deliberation, he pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket: the signal that they worked for the same cause. The gesture prompted Malevergne’s companion to speak to the man in a soft-toned Arabic. The two conversed briefly before the guide who had brought Malevergne to this rendezvous quickly and wordlessly disappeared.

With his new companion, yet another anonymous escort who didn’t bother with introductions, Malevergne crossed the road and headed toward the beach, where a boat lay at the water’s edge. They pushed it into the surf, and Malevergne was directed to stretch out in the bottom of the craft as his guide took the oars. There was nothing to look at but the cloudy sky above. He listened to the creak of the oars in their locks and felt the glide of the boat grow smoother as his guide gained a rhythm to his stroke. After a quarter of an hour of rowing, the Moroccan boatman paused and looked down at Malevergne. In Arabic, he asked Malevergne for a payment in order to continue.

Malevergne was no novice when it came to this type of character. He’d seen plenty around the docks and harbors of Casablanca and Port Lyautey. He wondered how many involved in arranging this man’s help had already been hit up for a payment.
I don’t have any money
,
Malevergne told him in Arabic,
but if you’d like me to row, I would be happy to
.

The escort was apparently a man used to being told no. He made no further mention of money and, resigned to the task at hand, started rowing once more. As appeasement, Malevergne offered him a cigarette, which was accepted, and the journey continued for another quarter of an hour.

Then, in the darkness, they heard the sound of a motorboat approaching. The Moroccan lit a lantern in the rowboat as the powered craft neared and idled its engine. There was a bump as the gunwales jounced off each other. It was indicated that Malevergne should leave one boat for the next, and so he was passed off once more, with his second guide telling this third one that Malevergne had no money. Apparently that wasn’t cause to turn around, as Malevergne was crammed into the hold of his new transport, which stank of salt and rotten fish. He listened in his cramped position—only slightly more spacious than the trailer hauled by the Chevy from Casablanca—as the motor whined and they left the rowboat behind, heading rapidly out into the strait. In half an hour’s time, he was allowed out of the hold and came up to see the lights of Tangier off the stern and the lights of Tarifa, in Spain, off the bow.

“
The boat is very small,” Malevergne later told his diary. “It is a big canoe with a motor and bit of decking fore and aft. A small roof … over the motor protected it from bad weather. The cleanliness on board was doubtful. On the port side, a man slept [in a curl]. I gathered he was the only member of the crew other than the owner at the tiller.”

A squall hit the boat as it neared the Spanish coast, and the lights of Tarifa suddenly disappeared in the storm. Unfortunately, the engine died too. The owner indicated to Malevergne that he needed to fix it, but the crew member, if that’s what he was, remained curled in sleep. For unknown reasons, the captain was loath to wake the curled man, so Malevergne volunteered to take the rudder while the helmsman ducked
beneath the covering on the motor to see what he could do. Thirty minutes later, the engine kicked in and the man emerged, indicating by gesture to Malevergne that the spark plugs had gotten wet.

Soon the storm abated. The clouds began to lift and once again Malevergne could see the lights of Tangier off in the distance. They put Tarifa on the port side of the little boat, and very soon the famous rock of Gibraltar loomed ahead of them. It was one o’clock in the morning of October 1.

A British officer named Morris welcomed Malevergne at the port and escorted him to a home in town, where Malevergne was shown to a room where he slept soundly until nine in the morning. Upon awakening, he was told that he would have to stay in the house through the day, because of “too many suspicious elements” out in the streets.

Bad weather prevented Malevergne’s immediate departure for London. He whiled away the day, “
a prisoner once again” in the house in Gibraltar. Malevergne was still in the oversized outfit that had been given to him in Tangier, and Monsieur Morris asked him if he would like a more comfortable set of clothes.
Merci
. When the British officer returned with new clothes and the news that he would be flying out to London early the next day, Malevergne asked Morris if a letter, the one from Colonel Eddy describing who he was to the proper authorities, had arrived in the diplomatic pouch from Tangier. Morris’s answer seemed evasive to the Frenchman. He hemmed and hawed before finally saying that the letter would accompany Malevergne in the plane to England and that it would be given to him when he touched down. “
I do not like this method of proceeding,” Malevergne told his diary, “but what can I do about it?”

In the middle of the night, he boarded a plane for Great Britain, and at daybreak on October 3, René Malevergne spied the southern coast of England. Maybe it was simple fatigue that dampened his excitement, maybe it was his French predisposition against the British, but he remained nervous about the letter and generally suspicious of the people in whose care he was escorted.

At the airfield in Eton, two English officers and a young French
lieutenant greeted him. As he was being whisked from the runway, Malevergne was asked if he knew a Colonel Lelong, a leader of the Resistance in Morocco. Yes, he told them, he knew Lelong. Then you will see him in two hours, he was told. But again, Malevergne was uneasy. Where were the Americans? he wondered. Where was the letter? Why was he being kept in British hands?

He was taken to lunch and then a hotel, where yet another British officer arrived, “
very tall, dry and rigid.” The officer told Malevergne that he would have to wait three or four days at the hotel, during which time “several high-ranking officers will come to talk to you.”

By this time Malevergne had had enough. His own tone turned as dry and rigid as the British officer’s. “I shall tell you nothing until I see Colonel Gruenther, adjutant to the official representative of the American Government,” he said. Eddy had given Malevergne Gruenther’s name in Tangier. Though he was incorrect about the recently promoted general’s rank, the river pilot got the essence of his point across to his British hosts. He wanted to see the brass and he wanted to see him now.

Unfortunately for him, “the brass” was far more ambivalent about greeting him.

T
he heat coming from George Marshall’s cable to Eisenhower’s command in London was almost palpable. Aside from the one Eisenhower received, copies singed the fingers of General Mark Clark and Eisenhower’s recently appointed chief of staff, General Alfred Gruenther, as well. It was dated October 2 and read:

In other words, the head of the Joint Chiefs wanted to know, whose harebrained idea was this?

The fact of the matter was that no one in London knew that René Malevergne’s extrication was in the works, nor was it sanctioned by the command. Eisenhower sent a cable back to Washington telling Marshall as much. He had not been consulted by OSS or anyone else on the matter,
despite the fact that his orders to the OSS had explicitly stated that they were to do nothing in Morocco without his approval. He would not have sanctioned the action if he’d known about it. Of course, that raised the question, Why hadn’t he known?

The problem, thought Eisenhower’s aide Harry Butcher, was that there were just too many different intelligence services at work in late September. Army G-2, naval intelligence, the British agencies, including Special Operations Executive (SOE, a spy organization formed in 1940 by Churchill)—Butcher confessed to his diary that he and others in London were still trying to differentiate between the OSS and the OWI (Office of War Information). And the man on Eisenhower’s staff who presumably should have been the first to know of a request like this, Al Gruenther, could easily be forgiven. He was new enough to the post to be just learning all the players in the operation.

Gruenther had been sent to London from Washington at about the same time as George Patton in early August, but he’d come with a steep learning curve. Gruenther had been stationed that summer in San Antonio, Texas, where he’d been decidedly out of the loop. In fact, it wasn’t until ten minutes before his flight to England that Marshall’s secretary, General Walter Bedell Smith, informed him that Operation Torch even existed.

When Gruenther landed in London, the first person he met with was Eisenhower, who asked him how much he knew about Operation Torch. Gruenther’s understated response was,
Very little
. That didn’t prevent Eisenhower from immediately thrusting his new aide into the thick of things. The next morning, Gruenther found himself sitting in a meeting with officers from the British command, who, Gruenther would later relate,
were less than impressed with his acumen.

Soon after he arrived, Gruenther met Eddy, who was in London early in September. In fact, it was to Gruenther that Eddy sent his recommendation that Carl Clopet, the hydrographer from Casablanca, be sent to London to aid in Torch planning. The mention of Clopet was contained
in a long list of recommendations from Eddy to the combined chiefs. That catalog, however, apparently did not also include mention of René Malevergne.

Clopet eventually arrived in London, but between Eddy’s last visit to London and Marshall’s cable, there was no news of Malevergne in Eisenhower’s office. And Gruenther, who was charged with coordinating the various planning details of Torch as they pertained to Eisenhower’s office, as well as making sure none of those secrets leaked out, was plenty busy with other spillage.

The Malevergne escape turned out to be only one of a number of moments when the planned invasion of North Africa might have been broadcast to the enemy. There was, for instance, the story of the officer from Eisenhower’s staff who was flying to Gibraltar from London carrying plans for Operation Torch. Anyone carrying such classified information was supposed to keep it in a weighted bag so that it would sink if the plane went down over the ocean. In fact, that was what did happen in this instance—the plane was attacked by the Luftwaffe and went down in the Mediterranean—except the officer had apparently decided a weighted bag was too cumbersome.
The officer’s body washed ashore with the plans in his pocket, where they were subsequently discovered by Spanish authorities. Apparently, however, water damage made the papers illegible.

On another, even stranger occasion, a box full of maps of the North African coast, intended for use in the invasion, fell out of a truck and tumbled onto the streets of London on a windy evening. An army detail was detached to make sure all the maps were picked up, but Gruenther was left wondering if they’d all been retrieved in the breeze and, if not, what would the person assume who found a map of the North African coast on the streets of London? And what might he or she do with such a curious item?

London soon traced the order for extricating René Malevergne back to the offices of General George Patton in the Munitions buildings in Washington. Whether Patton’s offices had received notice from the OSS
(presumably by way of Eddy and perhaps Donovan) about King’s opportunity to get Malevergne out of Casablanca via the Chevy and its trailer and so ordered the action, or whether they had given tacit approval to the extrication after it was carried out in Morocco, ultimately did not matter. Patton and his command
did
, in fact, approve of the action after the fact, if not before, and Malevergne was now in London. What’s more, there was little time to bemoan the execution of the deed. Beyond Marshall’s cable and a subsequent hubbub with Eisenhower’s staff, it was spilled milk and, on the whole, typical for such an unwieldy and hasty operation.

Since the basic idea of an invasion of North Africa had been approved at the level of the commanders in chief of the United States and Great Britain only in late July, and the outline for that invasion, including the final locations where troops would land, had been agreed to only in the first week of September; and since the date for the invasion had been set for approximately the first or second week of November; and since this was a first collaboration of the war involving two great nations, with their separate armies, separate navies, separate air forces, aimed at two separate invasion locations on the continent of Africa in two different oceans, it’s obvious that the possibilities for error were bountiful. That is to say nothing of the hundreds of ships involved and the more than one hundred thousand troops to sail in one convoy from the shores of England, and another three thousand miles across the Atlantic. In addition, one hundred thousand seamen were to man the ships in these separate convoys. The Western Task Force alone was the largest single convoy ever to embark from the United States with the intention of amphibious assault against a foreign power. And it wasn’t as if the U.S. Army was well versed in this sort of operation:
the last time it had sailed from American shores with the intention of a direct assault on an enemy had been during the Spanish-American War.