Authors: Preston Paul
In late November 1940, the New York headquarters of the AERC had informed Varian Fry that a replacement was en route. At the end of the year, he received a message at the office, asking him to go to the Hotel Splendide at a certain time, ‘to meet a “friend” at the bar’. The emissary was Jay Allen, whom he found sitting with a large Scotch and soda before him. That Jay should have whisky was the first brick in the wall of Fry’s hostility (‘he must have brought the Scotch from Lisbon, for Marseille’s supply had long since run out’). If he took an instant dislike to Jay, Fry was hardly less taken by his companion: ‘an American woman of more than middle years whom he introduced as Margaret Palmer’. Fry’s hostility had little to do with anything that Margaret Palmer did or said. Henry Buckley recalled meeting her in Jay’s apartment in 1934 and described her then as ‘a charming American who has lived in Madrid for more years than she cares to recall’.
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Jay had travelled to France via Casablanca, to avoid passing through Spain. On 5 December 1940, in Marrakech, he had managed to get an interview with General Weygand, the seventy-four-year-old commander of Vichy French North Africa. Although the published article was anodyne, it clearly made the point about Weygand’s commitment to Pétain and Vichy. In a deeply perceptive unpublished account, written
shortly after, Jay wrote critically of Weygand’s defeatism in June 1940. Comparing him unfavourably with De Gaulle, he made it quite clear that Weygand was utterly unreliable as a potential ally. On the following day, Jay interviewed General Charles Auguste Paul Noguès, the Commander of French forces in Morocco. The interview as published has not survived but Jay’s own private account presented Noguès as a cunning and deceitful opportunist, if anything less trustworthy than Weygand.
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Jay was also planning to go into Vichy in order to interview Marshal Pétain. He aimed to combine his work for NANA with that of the committee and hoped that his journalist’s credentials would be a good cover for his more clandestine activities. To establish distance between himself and the committee, Jay had put Miss Palmer in charge as the filter through which he could keep in touch and also issue instructions to the staff, whom he specifically avoided meeting. After their first meeting, Jay wrote to Fry:
Following up our conversation today, let me say: First: That I assumed that you are making preparations to leave, with the clear understanding that your work here will be carried on to the best of my ability, without however doing it necessarily in your way and, if possible, expanding in other directions. Second: That, because I have a certain responsibility in all of this, you will consider me in charge as of January 1. Naturally, you will do what you think best in matters already begun, but you will inform me. I suggest a brief memo
daily
no matter how cryptic. In this way, we will be able to put Allen au courant. This memo to be left with MP.
He went on to call for a record of all expenditure to be kept and that copies of all correspondence be passed to him via Margaret Palmer.
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Fry resented the proposed arrangement, reluctant to hand over his operation, in part because of a fear that Jay, as a journalist, would be under close surveillance by the police. Accordingly, he ignored Jay’s instructions, failed to pass on correspondence in and out of the ERC office and exceeded the budget. Jay wrote sternly: ‘I must ask you to
reread your letter from the Committee which I brought you from New York. You will also reread my note of January 2, please. In the meantime, I must request you
formally
to do nothing without discussing this further with me; otherwise I shall take
effective
steps to make you realize what your present position with the ERC actually is.’
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The nervous and hypersensitive Fry could hardly have been more different from the worldly and battle-hardened Jay Allen. Fry’s resentment of Jay grew by the day. He complained to the AERC headquarters in New York about the tone of Jay’s note. He justified his opposition to Jay on the grounds that he was ‘altogether too impatient, too bossy, too unwilling to listen to others or to benefit by the experience – often painful and costly – of others’. By others, he meant himself. Fry wrote to his wife in embittered terms that make it difficult to recognize Jay Allen: ‘The Friend is dictatorial and stupid. He is incapable of listening to anyone (proverbially) and he is utterly uninformed about what we are doing and apparently quite uninterested in learning. He just keeps bullying me into going, without ever stopping to consider the consequences.’ During the transition period, Fry informed Margaret Palmer about the cases he had worked on, legally and illegally. Every night she would return to the Hotel Splendide to inform Jay about what she had learned during the day.
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Obviously Fry was too volatile to be trusted with information about Jay’s work on behalf of the British. In his ignorance and obsessed with his own status, Fry was seething about Jay’s arrival and wrote to his wife on 5 January that the New York committee ‘seem like a bunch of blithering, slobbering idiots’. Moreover, to Jay’s annoyance, he continued to act as if he were in charge of the office. It may be that Jay was not giving the organization the detailed supervision that it needed, but his behaviour was hardly that of the dictatorial ‘bullying, pig-headed’ bungler portrayed by Fry.
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Part of the problem was that Fry, apart from being egotistically protective of what he saw as his little empire, was interested only in artists and intellectuals. Jay, inevitably, was concerned with the wider anti-fascist struggle, and was keen to organize the passage into Spain of British military personnel and International Brigaders on the run from the Germans.
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When Jay Allen went into Vichy, he was surprised, having been told that Marshal Pétain was
‘ga-ga’, to find him, on 13 January 1941, in a period of considerable lucidity. The result was the first interview given to a foreign journalist since he became head of the French state. After the formal interview, Pétain, whom Jay found to be anything but senile, took him to one side. The Marshal then poured out a heartfelt, indeed venomous, critique of his Foreign Minister, Pierre Laval. He went on to recount how he had summarily dismissed Laval and subsequently suffered intense German pressure to reinstate him. The bulk of the published interview, however, consisted of Pétain justifying the French capitulation in June 1940 and praising the ‘progress’ made since. In February, Jay toured French North Africa. In Algeria, he interviewed the Governor General, Admiral Jean Marie Abrial, and produced an anodyne article merely reporting the Admiral’s words.
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In fact, such articles were a cover for his efforts to make contact with people who were helping the Rescue Committee, particularly his old friend Randolfo Pacciardi, who had commanded the Italian Garibaldi Battalion in the International Brigades. The British Special Operations Executive were keen to get him to London to take part in the creation of an Italian Legion to fight alongside the Allies and thereby help undermine the Fascist regime. Pacciardi was in a Vichy prison, and the British had hatched a scheme to get him out and across the desert to the harbour of Oran in Tunisia. Jay’s job was to buy a boat that would take Pacciardi at an appointed time out to a waiting British submarine. When Jay went to interview Marshal Pétain, whom he had met many years earlier, he asked him for help in seeing the ‘good works’ the Vichy Government had achieved in Oran. Delighted, the Marshal said he would provide him with a military police captain as his guide, a four – door open touring car, and six MPs on motorcycles to escort him. With sirens blaring, they went around the town, with the captain showing Jay all the ‘good works’ achieved by the Vichy regime. When they reached the harbour, Jay saw a cluster of fishing boats at the water’s edge and asked the captain if he might interview these simple fishermen about their good lives under Vichy. The captain, delighted that Jay was so interested, urged him on. In full view of the smiling captain and his men, Jay proceeded to buy a boat in which Pacciardi that very night would rendezvous with the British submarine. He pulled out a roll of bills and
counted out the substantial sum required for so risky a mission. He shook the fisherman’s hand, waved to the captain and returned to the touring car. And off they went, sirens blaring once more, to finish the tour of Pétain’s ‘good works’.
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Things came to a head between Jay and Fry in mid-February 1941 when Jay visited Fry’s office at the Centre Américain. Jay’s version of the confrontation is not known. According to the anything but reliable Fry, there was a shouting match in which
He [Jay] said he would like to break my neck. He promised to do the utmost against me as soon as he got back to New York...All during our conversation he boasted how important he was and how successful (‘...I’m a bit of a success...’) and promised to have me fired out on my ear the minute he got back. He said he had never hated anyone so much in his life, that I was slippery and dishonest, that I was a ‘careerist’ (what is a ‘careerist’?), that I was ‘washed up,’ that he would ‘show me’...It was a regular tornado he let loose in my office...Miss Palmer says he is a genius, but I am inclined to think he is slightly nuts.
In mid-March, to the unconcealed delight of Fry, Jay was caught by the Germans. He had crossed the demarcation line without permission and went to Paris, where he met several people under Gestapo surveillance. He was then followed as he travelled back south and arrested as he tried to cross back into Vichy France. He believed that he had been denounced by an American official with fascist sympathies who had bumped into him on the Champs-Elysées. When arrested, Jay was carrying incriminating notes with the names, ranks and serial numbers of the British troops he had located. To avoid them falling into the hands of the Gestapo, he told the border police that he was sick and needed to go to the bathroom, where he tore up the notes and flushed them down the toilet. When the Gestapo arrived, he handed over notebooks full of relatively innocuous journalistic scribblings. Nevertheless, Jay was accused of spying, sentenced to death, and imprisoned at Chalon-sur-Saône.
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When he received the news, Fry wrote to his wife with gloating
schadenfreude:
‘Suppose they torture him? Will he be able to keep his mouth shut about us and our work? Or will he break down and talk when the matches are pushed up under his fingernails and the fire bites into his flesh?’ Ten days after Jay’s arrest, an operation that he had discussed earlier with Randolfo Pacciardi had ended in catastrophe. The idea was to set up a shuttle to take Spanish and Italian anti-fascist refugees from Oran to Gibraltar, but the Vichy police had got wind of it and set a trap. Bursting with self-satisfaction, Fry wrote to his wife: ‘Naturally I was kinda pleased. It was too perfect an end for a boasting, blustering fool not to give observers the moral satisfaction of seeing someone reap his just rewards.’ With breathtaking insensitivity, he went on:
I feel sorry for him not so much because of the discomforts he must be suffering as for the ludicrousness of his career here: it was loudmouthed, spectacular, reckless and brief, and it ended suddenly and foolishly. He must be bursting with hatred for me right now and so, I suppose, are his backers at home. But the fact remains that I was right and he was terribly, incredibly and stupendously wrong.
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Admiral William D. Leahy, the American Ambassador to Vichy, and a strongly conservative admirer of Pétain, was irritated by Jay’s activities. His initial response was to leave him to rot in Gestapo custody. However, he was shaken out of his lethargy by a telegram from the State Department informing him that ‘A very great amount of anxiety has been created in various circles here because of the arrest of Jay Allen. Mrs Roosevelt is personally interested in the matter as well as many other prominent persons’, and urging him to report what the Embassy could do to expedite his release. Leahy consulted the French authorities and replied nonchalantly to Washington: ‘You will appreciate since Allen went to the occupied zone without any authorisation whatsoever and since he is in the custody of the German authorities, the French are in no position to help in obtaining his release.’ He reported that he had asked
his first secretary, Maynard B. Barnes, ‘to take every appropriate step which in his judgement will facilitate obtaining Allen’s release and he is also endeavouring to obtain permission for a member of the Embassy staff to visit Allen. Under the circumstances I can see nothing further that can be done.’ Barnes requested the American Press Association in Paris to write to the German occupation authorities requesting that ‘all consideration possible be given to the fact that Allen was merely doing what any enterprising newspaper correspondent would like to do’.
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In fact, Jay had been doing rather more than that, as was acknowledged by Lord Halifax, the British Ambassador in Washington. It was hardly surprising then that, despite the Press Association doing what Barnes suggested, Jay remained in captivity. A week later, Leahy reported complacently to the State Department that Barnes had written to the German Embassy that
it was my understanding that the general practice of the military authorities at the line of demarcation is to impose only mild penalties on those persons who clandestinely cross the demarcation line and that I also understood that of the 60 or more persons arrested in the same vicinity as Allen on the day that he was arrested nearly all have been released either upon the payment of a fine or the completion of a short prison sentence.
Leahy’s perception of Jay was that he was an irritant and he was unaware that, for the Germans, he was a prisoner of some significance – a man whose journalistic activities during the Spanish Civil War had significantly helped the Republic. Leahy was happy to accept assurances from the Germans that Allen ‘would not be subjected either to worse or better treatment because of being a newspaperman or an American’. In fact, Jay was being repeatedly interrogated by both the Gestapo and Vichy police, who wanted him to admit to being a British agent.
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